[i]There is no counter-memetic coven[/i].

Secunda spent a good second, trying to process this random thought that somehow flashed in her cortex as she listened to Sororitas sudden soliloquy. The emotional ties of that story assaulted her perception with empathic counter-links, rerouting her neuron-paths around the sudden void in her conscience, the numbing void in the rapidly expanded blindspot of her memory.

Archmagos Toros was afraid of nobody. Nobody once told her that it's a technique of triage, something to flush out the meat-space data-predators baked into some of the old encoding, those lethal cyphers of the Long Night. Nobody's eyes were definitely not pale grey and that's all she could - dared to - remember of them. 

"You speak of her in the past tense. You are here alone. What happened to her?", Secunda's voice was suddenly hoarse, her brain milking the glands for every nanogram of the emotional chems, trying to block out the earworm of Vergil Hawr's name from ringing through her skull. "Speak more of her."

Protomaga tried pacing her breath. Sororitas story was the emotional grounding, the lifeline tethering her to sanity. Secunda knew how to filter the signal from the uncoiling data-worm, almost as she had done it before, almost as she was recollecting the steps instead of learning them. Vergil Hawr was something she allowed on this terminal. 

What the hell she was getting into before getting shot in the head?