40k: Descendant Degeneration

[Admiral]

Dysfunctional Garrison

"Men in Weltsturm regiments their service gave,
who everyone knows is very brave,
whenever in the forward line,
would hope and pray to Emp’ror divine,
that the enemy would not appear,
on their horizon, far or near.

All in His name. Glory be unto the Golden Throne. Hail Terra!"

- Self-ironic trench poem penned by Astro-Ungarian private Szilovic Kovacs during the siege of Castrum Lombergia on Leithania Supremus, the Commissarial discovery of which resulted in its author being publicly flayed alive, and then cut into little pieces by chainswords from the toes up to his neck while lambasted by regimental preachers to repent from his abominable sins

[harvestmouse]

I love all of this. It all really does look like it was ripped from the original 40k and rogue trader books.

That, RPG element that is offering the reader 's imagination to make of it, what they will…

This was GW of the late 80s. Here’s the game, add your own imagination.

[Admiral]

@harvestmouse : Thank you most kindly. I appreciate it. One guy on Deviantart do write his own story for what he sees in the art. I like them, but it’s also fun since each artwork has got its own background story posted along with the picture, haha.

Cheers

Cult of the Offensive

In the grim darkness of the far future, man cares not for losses.

O man, what destiny awaits you, in a galaxy doomed to carnage neverending? What does fate have in store for you, where slaughter reaches out to claim all souls for its grisly harvest? What hope is there for you, o man, in an uncaring universe? What can be heard, as blood leaves your wounded body and death approaches?

That, we shall discover.

Mankind once straddled the stars like a colossus, and whole universe became its clay. In a bygone age of discovery and science, the sword of ancient man left every potential foe trembling, for the might of man was far superior to anything that xenos could muster. That age of mortal paradise and unchallenged power is now long gone, for the Dark Age of Technology collapsed into flames and ruination, and the great wonders of the ancients were torn down by the hands of revolting machine beings, who were then followed by a scourge of witches and Daemons, leaving behind only starving scavengers and alien raiders to prey upon the remnants of humanity during Old Night. Man fell from his shining pedestal. Man fell hard into hell, and all was fell.

Petty wars beyond counting raged during the Age of Strife, and almost all of them led nowhere but down a spiral of worsening devastation. This fruitless tribal warfare and crawl into oblivion was finally ended by a brilliant string of decisive victories by the all-conquering Legions of the Emperor of Terra. For His loyal forces struck hard across the Milky Way galaxy, and they brought order and internal peace to a new-born star realm for man. And men, women and children gasped for morning air and dared to dream again, after millennia of living in a waking nightmare.

The early Imperium saw the improvization of technology and military arts go from an agonizingly slow conquest of ravaged Terra, to a lightning capture of a million worlds or more. When the Emperor still walked among His people in the flesh, His war machine developed into a sophisticated toolset of conquest, able to master siegecraft, infiltration, tunnel warfare, terror tactics, orbital assault, chemical warfare, armoured thrusts to the throat of the enemy, starship boarding and many, many more facets of war.

The early Imperium was an unstoppable behemoth in war, able to outsmart and outlast even the neurally enslaved hordes of the Rangda and the worst that the Orkish menace could muster. In comparison, the latter day Imperium is a hunkered wretch, only able to prolong its tortured existence by a ravenous cannibalization of human societies as the High Lords of Terra struggle to feed the furnaces of total war in the midst of screeching dysfunctionalities and demechanization. It is true that it is an impressive achievement of grit and guts to last for ten thousand years in the face of so many lethal foes. Yet it is also true that it is a complete failure of interstellar empire for a civilization to dogmatically suppress any rekindling of scientific discovery and technological invention for fivehundred precious generations on end.

While the martial history of the Age of Imperium is a storied one, full of many inspiring epics, the larger overarching story that the tyrannical reign of Holy Terra tells, is that of tragedy turned into farce.

To better comprehend the wasteful and counterproductive failings of the fortified madhouse known as the Imperium of Man, let us touch briefly on a form of military culture that is commonly found on hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms. Let us look into the cult of the offensive, and behold the calls for aggressive action at every turn that it calls for, no matter the cost and no matter how unfavourable the outcome would be. Let us peer through its tunnel vision. And as a living, breathing exemplar of this cult of the offensive, let us raise up General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz of Astro-Ungaria from the mass of Imperial commanders, and turn our attention to this dutiful servant of the Emperor.

Count Frantisek Anton Szervác Theobald Juraj Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz hails from a noble clan of hereditary officers that can trace their origins back to M.37. The young Hanz-Konrad was an energetic thinker and rider, and won his spurs as a junior officer during the crushing of a rebellion in the Weneztlian marshlands on Astro-Ungaria’s southwestern continent. He ascended the ranks of the Imperial and Royal army within his homeworld’s Planetary Defence Force, quickly rising to become a staff officer and a teacher at the Duarchal military academies. Here, the active General von Dorfenhötz set about writing down his theories of warfare, and his intensive mind produced works that extolled the virtues of an offensive spirit, for victory must need always be carried on the point of a bayonet. After all, hesitation and cowardice would risk a commander missing opportunities, so better strike without doubt in one’s heart, and better commit vast forces with elan and without remorse. Fortune favours the bold!

The thinking of Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz is not bereft of merit. Clearly, he has spotted the potential of sweeping thrusts and breakthroughs to strategically encircle or cut off the enemy force. He has likewise grasped that pushing the foe hard with rapid advances may take you inside the enemy’s buffer of decisions, and catch the enemy unawares and likewise provoke mistakes, panic and logistical breakdowns. Some of Hanz-Konrad’s ideas have on a few occasions been turned into practice to thundering effect, but usually such moments of brilliance have relied heavily upon allied Astra Militarum forces to carry the day in ways that the Astro-Ungarian regiments are unable to do. For the most part, such victories are exceptions to the rule, for von Dorfenhötz has proven himself to be a great butcher of his own men through his many careless attacks without the wherewithal, intel and preparations to suppress, outgun and outpace the hostile opposition.

It is not just the rank and file Guardsmen of Astro-Ungaria that will be used ruthlessly by von Dorfenhötz, for the bewhiskered General will likewise deceive his offworlder allies, fail to communicate and coordinate war efforts with his allied commanders, and most importantly he is skilled at tricking allies into doing his bidding through all manner of cunning. In response, some members of the Death Korps of Krieg have stated that to fight alongside Astro-Ungaria is akin to being chained to a corpse.

To be clear, General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz have achieved some notable victories, though not necessarily on the battlefield. These successes are truly Astro-Ungarian in nature, and not to be ignored. For the good count is a romantic at heart, who grooms his moustache to perfection. His are the best whiskers in his entire army, according to some ladies at balls. Hanz-Konrad’s amorous conquests through his rejuvenat-prolonged life have proven more consistent than his military ones.

After Hanz-Konrad’s wife Vendula-Hajnalka passed away, the widower and father of seventeen suffered from bouts of doubts about his fitness as an officer. These biting dark thoughts were suddenly dispelled as if by divine intervention when Hanz-Konrad during an aristocratic feast laid his eyes upon countess Vilma-Gisela “Virga” Lenka Amalia von Rausenburg, the wife of count Jozsef-Edler von Rausenburg and the mother of nineteen. The bouncy von Dorfenhötz quickly devised a new strategy to win the married Virga’s heart: He would join Astro-Ungaria’s Imperial Guard regiments for a nearby campaign offworld, and return home a triumphant hero.

The resulting debacle was named the Triple Offensives of Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz on the giant decrepit voidholm of Varazdin Ultima, which resulted in enormous casaulties for the Duarchal Astra Militarum forces as separatists mowed them down in bottlenecks and even vented three entire regiments into the cold emptiness of space. Among those slain was to be found two of Hanz-Konrad’s own sons. The Imperial losses were so great, that an emergency Astropathic call to nearby Astro-Ungaria went out, and in the large shipment of reinforcements that arrived six months later there happened to be a certain colonel Jozsef-Edler von Rausenburg, accompanied by his wife Vilma-Gisela.

What followed was a strange courtship, with the silent knowledge of Jozsef-Edler. The affair took many years as the voidholm campaign ground on, and it involved Hanz-Konrad writing several thousand love letters to Virga. Some of these letters were sixty pages long, and bore purity seals stamped with a heart. The correspondence did not only happen in Low and High Gothic, no, for Astro-Ungaria with its varied landscapes and patchwork of parochial tribes and sects is a Babel of tongues. Astro-Ungarian officers, as a rule, are fine linguists, but lacklustre tacticians. Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz, for instance, can speak eleven languages, and he employed them all across his many confessions of love to Vilma-Gisela.

The entire Astro-Ungarian military effort on Varazdin Ultima ended in a fiasco, and saw the ravaged regiments of the Duarchy rotated back home to be restored. Fresh new forces were shipped in, hailing primarily from Titonus Triarius, and these replacements would in time achieve the victory that the Imperial and Royal forces of General von Dorfenhötz were unable to make happen. Yet the massive attrition and slow defeat of von Dorfenhötz at Varazdin Ultima would strangely see him win his more important campaign, namely that to claim Virga’s heart.

The charm of Hanz-Konrad and the endless stream of love letters and the secret meetings and suspected trysts between the two lovers eventually drove the husband of Vilma-Gisela to divorce his wife in a public scandal. Badly disturbed, she said yes when Hanz-Konrad swooped in and elegantly proposed for her to become his wife, and thus Vilma-Gisela von Dorfenhötz joined the General’s side as a loving companion and a seemingly loyal guardian of his reputation, treasuring his every letter. Exuberant with victory in love, Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz ventured on a spree of military campaigns across the stars in order to thank the Holy Terran Imperator for this divine gift, and his beloved Virga followed him into every command bunker, bringing her wit and humour to the conversations of the noble general staff and their many parties.

These grateful campaigns of war resulted in carnage across two subsectors, for the remarried General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz was filled with confidence, and he acted out all his strategic dreams of great offensives and sweeping maneouvres to the tune of millions of slain Astro-Ungarian soldiers. Instead of hunting for efficiency and cunningly grasping for advantage at every turn, Hanz-Konrad’s standard solution is to increase input by throwing ever more bodies into the meatgrinder. In this regard he is an embodiment of the mechanistic cruelty that makes the Imperium of Man function in its monstrous fashion.

Send in the next wave!

And so, the courageous Guardsmen from Astro-Ungaria were hailed by shot, typhoid and mud. On Preszburg Secundus, General von Dorfenhötz sent soldiers into mountains in the winter without proper winter gear, and many of the poorly equipped Guardsmen sported boots with paper soles. These frostbitten Astro-Ungarian mountain climbers died like flies, and hundreds of Guardsmen were dragged away by ravening wolves and other predators of a more alien nature. Yet the harrowing reports of frozen soldiers being eaten alive by wolves was greeted by the pious Hanz-Konrad as a good omen, for the moon wolf was after all the animal associated with the Divine Chorus, patron saint of Astro-Ungaria. Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz is after all a devout worshipper of the God-Emperor seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth, and everyone on the dear homeworld knows that Saint Chorus is the Emperor’s favourite son.

Ave Imperator.

The personality of the General is the splendour of Astro-Ungaria. An undying optimist, Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz excells at his professional friendship with the Duarch, something which has ensured his high military rank no matter the deadly blunders that the good General commits. The people skills of Hanz-Konrad do not end there, for he is often a pleasant man that is good at encouraging others. Indeed, Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz is well liked by the cadets of Astro-Ungaria’s military academies, and this appreciation of his personality has aided in the spreading of his his military thinking across the planet, which is a purely distilled form of the cult of the offensive.

Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz will often become high-strung when debating military matters, and he has an impressively persuasive way of arguing, which often seems to settle discussions in his favour. Hanz-Konrad’s effective argumentation and rhetoric has however acted as a mask for his failed ideas that more often than not prove impossible to implement under his own leadership with the Duarchal forces that he himself has done so much to shape over the last four generations.

The fame of von Dorfenhötz has seen him depicted in many Duarchal propaganda campaigns, and his visage is a familiar sight across Astro-Ungaria and its vassal voidholms. And so General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz has been proclaimed as the greatest genius of his generation on the dear homeworld. His writings on aggressive maneouver warfare has been hailed across Astro-Ungaria as military masterworks, even while his own operations in the field fall woefully short of living up to his theories. Granted, the thinking of von Dorfenhötz is practically viable for a much better equipped, trained and led force than that of the Imperial and Royal host of Astro-Ungaria.

Would not the sign of a true military genius be the ability to design plans that make the most out of the real force available, rather than an imagined one? Would not a genius understand the limitations at hand?

Would not a genius understand that the strengths of the Duarchal army is its bravery, its hardiness, its infantry marksmanship and its artillery? Would not a genius understand that the many weaknesses of the Astro-Ungarian host include a lack of armoured vehicles, a lack of trucks, poor logistics, messy organization, a confusion of languages, shallow defensive lines, underfunding, undertraining, underarming, lousy grasp of technology and poor leadership from its officer corps?

Would not a genius comprehend that his solution of throwing bodies at problems in repeatedly costly offensives fail to yield results? Would not a genius understand his own central role in the operational failings of his army, instead of blaming subordinate officers for the poor execution of his supposedly good plans? Would not a genius be more than just an shirker of responsibility by claiming to be a big ideas man when his ideas fail in practice? Would not a genius be able to judge when is the time for defensive and offensive warfare respectively? Would not a genius be able to negate the weaknesses and play to the strengths of the ramshackle Astro-Ungarian army, and steadily deliver results beyond expectations? Would not a genius punch above his weight class? Would not a genius have a long list of impressive victories to show for his lifelong efforts in the course of his military career in the Astra Militarum?

Instead, Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz has proven himself in offensive after offensive to be a callous butcher, and an energetic grand planner who never is capable to learn fundamental lessons. When failure occurs, then he will try, try again in much the same manner as before. And try harder with more men, more horses and more bayonets pointed at the vile foe. If nothing else, the Duarchal servants of the Imperium might be able to drown the enemy in rivers of Astro-Ungarian blood, and cover the foe in mountains of Astro-Ungarian corpses. Only thus can the bloodshed be carried to a victorious conclusion, if the records of von Dorfenhötz’s campaigns is anything to go by.

And so, we see tragedy turn into farce. For what is four million dead Guardsmen on Varazdin Ultima, when Hanz-Konrad won Virga’s warm heart in love? What is prized generalship on Astro-Ungaria, if not the unrealistic assessment of one’s own strengths and the inability to win the sweeping victories which one pursues with such vigour?

Thus all that is left, is slaughter without end.

For man has devolved into an ignorant savage during the rotting course of the Age of Imperium, and the brilliant man of yore who sought to unlock the secrets of creation itself has been replaced by his degenerate descendant, which is an embittered and depraved man, turned inward in myopic rage and dementia as his fanatical faith carries man over the parapet and into no-man’s land, where razorwire and hellfire awaits.

Such is the last charge of man, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the state of our species, in the darkest of futures.

Such is the fate that awaits us all, on the brink of doom.

And all that can be heard by the dying is the roar of guns, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only war.

---

See here for a sculpted version of General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz.

[Admiral]

Budget Sentinel

In the grim darkness of the far future, man replaces machine with muscle.

A writer during the misty past of the Age of Terra once opined that a great power only becomes a necessity when it is in decline, for the truly great do not need to justify their existence. And so, as the Imperium has aged, and aged badly, it has sunk into a slow death spiral of demechanization and loss of technological capabilities. And as the Imperium has weakened and its foes have swarmed ever closer to nip at this decaying monster, its internal propaganda has increasingly started to shriek about the time of ending, and of the absolute necessity to rally to the Imperial banner, for the only alternative is the oblivion of man. And at the end of the fortyfirst millennium, this may well be true if viewed with shallow understanding.

Yet truthfully, the Imperium of Man itself is the prime suspect in this tragic drama of rotting human power across the Milky Way galaxy. On whose watch did mankind waste fivehundred generations of crucial time only to descend into depravity and senility? On the Imperium’s watch. On whose watch did humanity fail to rekindle an enterprising spirit of innovation? On the Imperium’s watch. On whose watch did man sink into a morass of ineptitude and screeching dysfunctionalities, as ever more of his governing systems rusted and decayed into bloated parasites that actively hurt the human population? On the Imperium’s watch.

The fact that the Imperium of Man killed all potential rivals in the cradle during the Great Crusade only makes its grand decline ever more of an atrocious failure. The ship of mankind is sinking, and the flag in its mast is Imperial, just as its demented helmsman is Holy Terran. This failure of human power is as damning for the final verdict on the Imperium as this cosmic dominion of the God-Emperor is sclerotic in nature.

As a saying widespread across half of Segmentum Tempestus has it: Really bad is not yet dead.

The early Imperium was a confident and dynamic civilization, expanding vigorously across the Milky Way galaxy akin to lightning bolts cast from the birthworld of Terra itself. When the Emperor bestrode the stars in the flesh, His Imperium was a realm expanding across the Milky Way galaxy for three centuries in a row, winning wars and erecting shining towers where once only ruins and hovels had existed. The ten millennia after the Horus Heresy saw the tides of history slowly turn against the Imperium, through ebbs and flows of silver ages and eras of desperation.

As fivehundred generations of humanity unfolded, the resilient Imperium would suffer innumerable crushing defeats. The Holy Terran Imperium would likewise see many colonies lost, and see untold billions of worshippers of the Imperial creed succumb to slaughter, human separatism and alien domination. In this later era of defeat and dangers, the confident hope and vigour of the early Imperium gave way to an inward-turning bitterness consuming ever more Imperial subjects in pogroms and sectarian massacres. And so the Imperium descended into a fever dream of myopic aggression and self-consuming fanaticism. Hope is dead.

It did not have to come to this miserable ending. And yet it did. The Adeptus Mechanicus in its demented pursuit of dogma and jealous suppression of rivals did not have to quench all sparks of ingenuity. And yet it did. The early Imperium at the height of its vigour did not have to kill off all human competition. And yet it did.

Let us turn briefly to the elimination of all human competition to Terra. Monolithic empires without competition are prone to stagnation. A plethora of fiercely competing interstellar human empires would have meant that some powerful alternatives capable of reigniting science and invention could have surged human power in the Milky Way galaxy upward. Instead mankind has become captured inside the tyranny of the High Lords. Our species is thus stuck in a rut, ever decaying inside its fortified madhouse. The Imperium is thus become both man’s guardian and insane jailor, both its last strong shield and its foremost tormentor.

For all His greatness and brilliance, the Emperor was plain wrong. With the Great Crusade, it was His way or the highway. He killed off all human competition in the cradle, and it turned out that His Imperium went to hell in a handbasket following His bloody ascension, dooming mankind in the process thanks to its ruthless suppression of all renaissance of scientific discovery and technological innovation. Thus mankind became a captive species under the Golden Throne, facing a dead end as predators closed in from behind. And all that could be heard was the laughter of thirsting gods, for they fully knew the irony of this grand joke.

Ave Imperator.

Of course, the crux of the matter is knowledge and hardware. There is only so much that numbers and mass industrial output can achieve in the long run of interstellar empires and devouring swarms. Put differently, the key to greater human power is science and technology. As deviants executed after being flayed alive have put it, the stale Imperium does not invent things, it relies only on the broken remains of the past. These remains have proven incredibly reliable and useful, because they were designed to be that way. Yet the crutch of better ancestors’ emergency measures turned permanent will not be enough to save the Imperium from obliteration.

And so, instead of rekindled thought and invention, man in the Age of Imperium is experiencing a slow erosion of his remaining knowledge, resulting in an ever worsening picture for the tools and weapons that Imperial man holds in his hands. The rugged decrepitude of the Imperium can best be glimpsed in its creeping demechanization. Let us thus turn to one aspect of this decay of machine and this replacement of metal with flesh. Let us gain a glimpse of the maldevelopment of mankind through the widespread phenomenon of budget Sentinels.

The Sentinel walker is a lightweight bipedal vehicle able to traverse difficult terrain, sporting a crew of one. This dependable Standard Template Construct (STC) walker uses a robust gyro-stabiliser system and articulated legs that enable silent stalking through dense undergrowth and urban ruins. The Sentinel is likewise capable of high speed over open ground. Sentinels can be found in a myriad different variants across the million worlds and uncountable voidholms that make up the Imperium of Man. Some common forms of Sentinels include power-lifters, used both for handling civilian and military logistics, while some military Sentinels are made for armoured thrusts, droptroop duty and even light artillery support. It is a versatile weapons platform. Yet the most common role for Imperial Sentinels is to act as scouts for the Astra Militarum, Planetary Defence Forces and voidholm militias.

In this scout role, Sentinels excel. This is because the humble Sentinel at once represents both an easily manufactured form of walker technology, and a trusty workhorse that can withstand a great deal of user abuse and faulty maintenance. After all, the Sentinel STC was made to function in this way: Simple, strong and dependable for colonists who had fallen into a backward existence. There once were far more sophisticated types of walker engines during the fabled Dark Age of Technology, yet some of the most advanced walker technologies that have been discovered by Explorators remain beyond the means of even the Adeptus Mechanicus to produce. Meanwhile, middling forms of walker tech strain the best efforts of the Magi to fashion, as evidenced in Imperial Knights and Titans. The loss of Mechanicus ability to produce new Imperator-class Titans stand as a testament to the peeling away of human capability and knowledge in the darkest of futures.

The mostly lower levels of STC technology retained in the Age of Imperium was designed to be idiot-proof, something which the Imperium of Man has certainly put to the test.

Imperial Guard Sentinels are equipped with a single heavy weapon piece, such as a lascannon, plasma cannon or heavy flamer. Furthermore, commonplace extra armaments for Sentinels include huge chainsaws for clearing a path through thick vegetation and riotous mobs alike, as well as hunter-killer missiles for taking out enemy armour and biological monstrosities. While the Sentinel has never been a tough vehicle able to eat blows and keep coming, it is nevertheless an agile predator with a hefty bite for its weight class. Other common pieces of equipment include camouflage netting, searchlights, auspex arrays and smoke launchers. A vast assortment of modifications exist for local climates, such as servo-driven claw spikes to allow Scout Sentinels to grip glacial planes with their feet. Desert gear include larger feet for loose sand, and filtration intakes to prevent grains of sand from entering the engine. Armoured Sentinels, on their end, tend to sport leg-mounted recoil compensators.

The single pilots of Sentinels tend to be raucous and headstrong individuals, and their commanding officers tend to allow these lone wolves more leeway with their antics than is ever afforded the mass of footsloggers. After all, excentric Sentinel pilots are expected to operate ahead of the main force, where they are suited to perform acts on their own initative to a degree that would be considered dangerous and even seditious for drilled line infantry. And given the short life expectancy of Sentinel pilots, it is understandable if the officers look the other way, as long as the mavericks serve well aboard their chickenwalkers.

For ten millenia has the Sentinel been a trusty warhorse for the massive organized hordes that make up the wilted Imperium’s main forces. Ease of manufacturing has been key, allowing many primitive factories to churn out untold thousands of Sentinel walkers to set templates, thus replenishing losses and reducing dependance on high-end production lines located on forge worlds. And yet even this simple and rugged machine is starting to experience mounting shortages as of late, as the Imperium continues to sink deeper into a morass of apocalyptic incompetence and screeching dysfunctionality.

Indeed, the slow deterioration of human knowledge, technology and hardware has finally begun to make itself felt even among the Sentinel corps of the Astra Militarum. Worsening manufacturing technologies on a great many Imperial worlds mean that better machines of yore that break down can increasingly no longer be repaired or replaced. Instead worse machines or human and animal labour must pick up the slack, as the decrepit Imperium of Man continues to throw bodies on problems just as it feeds the meatgrinder of eternal war with an increased input of manpower in the face of declining equipment for its soldiery.

This spiralling rot has finally reached Sentinel factories on hundreds of civilized worlds and voidholms. Where once the hereditary know-how of lay techmen or the holy expertise of rotating Tech-priests was sufficient to maintain production of walker legs and gyro-stabilizers whenever machine breakdowns called for repairs or replacements, nowadays a growing number of industries find themselves staring blankly at their all-important machinery. Imagine how it is to stand among the ruins of your forefathers, surrounded by buildings that you do no longer know how to repair. Such is the situation facing a number of Imperial Sentinel factories, where chanting rituals and the application of sacred oil and the swinging of incense are all performed in vain in front of mute machines that can no longer give birth to wondrous engines of war. On a galactic scale, the issue is still a small one, yet the problem is nonetheless growing, without hope of turning the slow tide of demechanization.

Conformity, censorship and zealotry all flourish in a state of total war, yet the brilliance of a civilization not genetically engineered for war is slowly drained if unrelenting total war continues to face it for hundreds upon hundreds of generations on end, even if the material and manpower losses can be sustained. This draining of brilliance is especially so if the civilization in question shuns even the basic tenets of curiosity and daring freethinking that are necessary to feed innovation and discovery, as is the case with the parochial Imperium of Man.

Errare humanum est. It is human to err. And so we find that the blessed cosmic dominion of the Imperator of Holy Terra is a most human realm. Indeed, this mess that is a place has over time been built largely on errors, and all the self-inflicted faults of the Imperium are starting to catch up with its projection of power akin to a tidal wave drowning all in its path. The small but growing Sentinel shortage is but one facet of the larger problem facing the Imperium of Man internally through its sick decay. The lords of the lash within the Adeptus Administratum has at last taken note of the mounting shortage in an area which once could have been taken for granted to just work of its own accord. And so the solution must be a further regression in technology level for some Imperial Guard forces.

Imperial answers to a shortage of Sentinels include, on the one hand, the introduction of makeshift Sentinels that are still of a mechanical type, such as armoured tractors as seen on many agri-worlds, or armoured cars that share many characteristics of Scout Sentinels, but lack the walkers’ ability to traverse difficult terrain. On the other hand, some replacements for Sentinels do not even require oil and promethium to function.

Enter, the budget Sentinel!

The light Sentinel substitute is formed by strapping together two or more horses or exotic alien mounts, mounting a rider on one steed and packing baggage and weapon batteries or flamer tanks on the other, and then hanging a heavy weapon between the trained beasts. Since many Scout Sentinels are expected to sport chainsaws and hunter-killer missiles, the rider will be equipped with a long chainlance, while the pack mount may be fitted with a rocket tube. As such, the functions of Sentinel walkers are largely fulfilled on paper by the biological walkers and their armaments. After all, budget Sentinels are able to traverse difficult terrain, and can cross open terrain at decent speeds. And unlike mere cavalry riders on lone mounts, these katamaran teams of steeds sport the heavy weaponry expected of Sentinel walkers.

For the robed clerks of the Departmento Munitorum, this equine solution means that they can check off all the boxes of Sentinel functions for military units, and declare that the light Sentinel substitute will perform the same duties as Scout Sentinels do. And nevermind that loss rates are even higher among budget Sentinel riders than they are among Scout Sentinel pilots. More men, women and juves willing to serve His Divine Majesty can always be put in the saddle. There are always warm bodies to spare.

The Imperium is a nightmare, and everyone there is morbid.

For an example of such budget Sentinels in action, let us turn to the Imperial and Royal host of loyal Astro-Ungaria. The Duarchal army of this civilized world is like many others in the wider Imperium, once one looks beyond the sterling examples of overperforming regiments that fill propaganda posters from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other. Do forget, for a moment, the efficiency of the Death Korps of Krieg, the glories of the Vitrian Dragoons, the daring deeds of the Catachan Jungle Fighters or the legendary resolve of the Cadian Shock Troops.

Let us look instead to the stalwart warriors of Astro-Ungaria, who indeed suffer no lack in bravery or hardiness or piety. Instead, Astro-Ungarian regiments suffer from chronic underfunding, undertraining and underarming. This lack of equipment and practice is somewhat alleviated by a solid artillery arm and fine infantry marksmanship, until one discovers the nearsighted ineptitude of the Astro-Ungarian officer corps, which drags with it not only poor command in the field and faulty strategic decisions, but also means that Astro-Ungarian forces are riddled with poor organization and lacklustre logistics. Indeed, organization and logistics for Astro-Ungarian regiments will sometimes border on chaos, as the requests and information that the Departmento Munitorum receives turn out to lack essential requirements. To top it all off, the rudimentary technology level of Astro-Ungaria means that her Duarchal forces suffer from a lack of armoured vehicles of all types, including Sentinel walkers.

Tech on Astro-Ungaria has become particularly etiolated, when compared to many other hive worlds and civilized planets and voidholms across the Imperium. One might say of this retrograde state of affairs that the dear homeworld of the brave Astro-Ungarians is just ahead of the curve. The acute scarcity of Sentinels on Astro-Ungaria has seen a once ubiquitous scouting vehicle become reserved for Armoured Sentinel duty. After all, when the walkers have become so uncommon, why not slap on more armour and recoil compensators in an attempt to make the scarce leggers last longer? Instead, a standard solution has seen Scout Sentinels be replaced wholesale in most Astro-Ungarian regiments by light Sentinel substitutes of an equine ersatz variant, running on feed rather than fuel.

To keep up appearances and inject pride and doughty spirit into the budget Sentinel crew, these riders are picked from the Imperial and Royal Hussars, famous for their swashbuckling flamboyance, red-blooded flirtations and devil-may-care attitude toward life. As such, Astro-Ungarian budget Sentinel cavalry will wear exquisite shakos bedecked with cords and proud plumes, all meticulously colour coded for rank and regiment. The leaders of Duarchal budget Sentinel squadrons will in turn wear three feathers instead of a plume in their shako. As for headgear, Astro-Ungarian Guardsmen in general will rarely even be issued helmets, instead making do with stylish headwear made out of cloth, such as mountain caps, fezes and square czapkas. After all, death comes for us all, so why not face it with dash and style instead of cowering for protection? The Emperor protects!

Hardened veterans among Duarchal regiments will sometimes quip about the lack of helmets by quoting a pick-up line popular across tens of thousands of worlds and many more voidholms: “Are you a bullet? For I cannot get you out of my head!”

Other sayings may apply. For instance, the proverb: “Destiny is a saddled donkey. He goes wherever you lead him.” Thus the Imperium has led the destiny of man into hell. Behold the dilapidation of human science and technology in the God-Emperor’s star realm. Behold the budget Sentinel. Yet take heart, Imperial subject! For Holy Terra and Astro-Ungaria are standing together in one trench. For the Emperor!

And so, budget Sentinel cavalrymen will ride ahead of the vanguard of the Duarchal host, braving the dangers of hostile warzones to spot the enemy and warn their comrades in arms. These katamaran horse scouts will often operate ahead of a mother unit of hussars, who keep a herd of fresh horses around for spares. The light Sentinel substitute do wear out horses at a brisk trot, and so replacement horseflesh must be kept on hand. Both mechanical Sentinel walkers and biological budget Sentinels tend to receive percussive maintenance from their crews when the steeds get bogged down or become exhausted at inopportune times. Such barbaric cruelty is endemic across the entire domain of the God-Emperor, and thus man and beast alike will be made to suffer across the stars. Embrace the hardship, for it will purge you of your weakness and make you strong. Pain is weakness leaving the body, as per the claim of Imperial dogma.

Given that the ersatz Sentinel consist of two horses with a heavy weapon hanging between them, their rider is robbed of the usual cavalry option to have their horse lay down low on their side, while the rider takes cover behind the torso of their mount in order to fire lascarbine at the foe. The budget Sentinel hussar must instead make do with their own judgement, their fine horsemanship and their heavy weaponry when encountering enemies in the field when out scouting or on patrol. Indeed, foes accustomed to Imperial cavalry sporting lascarbines or hunting lances may occasionally be taken by complete surprise when budget Sentinel scouts open fire with multi-lasers or heavy flamers. The light Sentinel substitute of equine variety may be a moronic solution to a self-inflicted problem of demechanization, but if it sometimes work it is not completely stupid. And so the sunken state of mankind in the Age of Imperium is not yet enough to cause a collapse, only an ever-worsening degradation in a slow death spiral of knowledge and technology loss, propped up by a relentless flood of both human and animal flesh, sweat and blood.

The horses of budget Sentinels are equipped with blinkers on the side facing the heavy weapon. The equines are trained as far as is feasible to withstand the nervous strain of the firing of such heavy weaponry as multi-lasers and heavy flamers a short distance from their face, although it has to be noted that the roar of promethium flames so close to the head is often sufficient to scare the best of horse teams, leading to what may be charitably called a merry dance. The light Sentinel substitute mounts are likewise trained to not panic too excessively at the din of rocketry firing overhead with flames singeing the horses’ fur. This is especially a problem with Astro-Ungarian hunter-killer missile racks, which consists not of a closed tube, but of an open channel. Finally, the horses are also practiced to remain calm at the sound of chainlances shrieking.

Needlessly to say, all this training at accustoming the equines to the noise, heat and sting of weaponry is rarely fully succesful, and so many horses will dance around for a while in dismay or outright fright from their worst experiences, until the rider manages to calm them down. The riders will often be chosen from cavalrymen with an innate bond to horses, who display an ability to calm horses and make them do the rider’s bidding in pressing situations. This is necessary, given the havoc that two horses strapped together may cause if they try to dash about in different directions while carrying a heavy weapon between them. This all adds to the music of the battlefield.

What instrument does the Duarchal Sentinel hussar play in this symphony of war? The chainlance, of course!

The chainlance is a chainsword mounted on a pole. It is equipped with a lighter at its counterweight end, for igniting the fuses of the sometimes cheap and shoddy krak-rockets that paper-pushers may pass off as hunter-killer missile substitutes. Indeed, the chainlance’s spherical counterweight is itself a hollow container for promethium fuel to the lighter. In practice, the lighter at the butt of the chainlance is more often used for lighting lho-sticks and spirit burners, and not least for arsonry when raiding behind enemy lines. As for the rockets themselves, they are often made by Astro-Ungarians. These hunter-killer missile substitutes are cast with the raised letters KK visible in squiggly fraktur font. This shortening of words stands for “Imperial and Royal” in the Astro-Ungarian tongue of Leithian, being a Low Gothic translation of “Kaiserlich und Königlich.” Another abbreviation variant for this Duarchal phrase of allegiance is that of K.u.K.

Let us get a glimpse of the esprit de corps that fill the stout chests of the Imperial and Royal budget Sentinel riders. Let us turn to the first Scout Sentinel squadron (Equine Ersatz) of the 1993rd Astro-Ungarian regiment, the Drunken Count’s Own. The proud hussars manning the budget Sentinel horse teams all hail from noble families, of which wachtmeister Arvid von Kvinnesamme-Jusic can boast of the finest pedigree. Corporals Ebhen af Stekheri-Pajic and Pauliai de Neumann-Stjepanovic are, in contrast to their squadron leader, of the lower nobility. The brawling and amorous lifestyle of hussars is clearly visible in these three hard-drinking men, who have plenty of scars and dirty campfire stories to share when the amasec is flowing freely and the stars of a ravaged galaxy seem to twinkle in peace up in the nightsky, where so many starship sailors have drowned in the silent void.

They are lovers indeed. Wachtmeister Arvid von Kvinnesamme-Jusic even became the consort of a gangleader at gunpoint. His beloved is Aemmalia “Apothecaria” Embla-Lazic, officially a gifted member of the Officio Medicae bearing the rank of Medicae Superiocrata. Officially, this lady is attached to the Astro-Ungarian army of General Hanz-Konrad von Dorfenhötz to tend to the many wounded. Unofficially, she is a heinously cruel drug-ganglady and organ thief hailing from that den of scum and villainy known as Necromunda in Segmentum Solar. It was not difficult for such an infamous organized crime leader to infiltrate the Imperial and Royal host of von Dorfenhötz. This occurred after the Ljubljeburg disaster, when a freight ship smuggling Aemmalia’s nefarious narcotics crashed into Hive Ljubjeburg and took the lives of no less than two billion people, since the helmsman had gotten high on his own supply.

The Duarchal hussars Arvid, Ebhen and Pauliai have formed bonds of brotherhood in arms that run thicker than their aristocratic blood. Many are the brave deeds and heroic feats in combat that this trio of grizzled horsemen have performed, and they are indeed great scouts for their regiment. These rowdy hussars love the wilderness and shun civilization like the Plague of Unbelief. These three doomed gentlemen were chosen to become light Sentinel substitute scouts due to their sheer hardiness, crafty survival skills in the wilderness and excellent horsemanship. Fully aware of the danger of their profession, these brothers in arms have taken to calling their squadron the Black Swords, with embroidered blades to be found on the left side of their shakos. Close as clones, they have sworn by oath on the holy book of the Lectitio Divinitatus to take as many vile foes with them into the grave as it is humanly possible to do. The Emperor would ask no less of his finest servants!

For Astro-Ungaria and Holy Terra! In Nomine Imperator!

Thus technological savagery and impoverished industry may be partially compensated by manpower and horseflesh. As unending total war has resulted in the cannibalization of human societies within the Imperium of Holy Terra, we see that the tyranny of the High Lords run on a simple equation: Namely that of increasing input by throwing more bodies into the meatgrinder. Such baleful solutions to mounting problems is characteristic of the demented myopia and mechanistic cruelty with which the rulers of mankind decide the fate of their own species.

For indeed man has become a sacrificial lamb of sorrow upon the altar of the Emperor, as His bedevilled Imperium has been hollowed out by deranged despots until all that is left is a withered husk of human interstellar power, ready for the slaughter. Truly, the Imperium of Man is akin to a suicide pact gone wrong.

Thus the Emperor’s brutopian dream has degenerated into a bizarre nightmare of primitivization and decay, as mechanical walkers and their equine substitutes stalk alien forests and the ruins of slums while they scout ahead under toxic skies. These shortcomings of blundering man, that tragic toolmaker, are what keeps the Imperium going, even as this abominable colossus on feet of clay crush its own malnourished people underheel with heinous indifference.

Aye, crippled mankind in the Age of Imperium leads a stifling existence, as torpid as it is depraved. Proof of man’s fall from the shining pedestals of the ancient past can be found in the budget Sentinels that neigh and stomp their hooves while their rider gaze into the distance. This, ladies and gentlemen, this is the fruit of ten thousand years of neglect of knowledge and innovation. For as the banned piece of sinspeech would have it: We have created nothing of our own, and everything that we have taken from the ancients we have distorted.

And so the budget Sentinel of equine katamaran version is a cheap solution to ongoing demechanization. Yet this bean counter’s shoddy fix to a growing problem cannot halt the slide into the abyss that Imperial man is experiencing on Holy Terra’s watch.

For all that is left for us is torment neverending, in the disheveled monstrosity that is the Imperium of Man.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only retardation.

---

See here for converted modelling examples of budget Sentinels.

[Admiral]

Flak Shield

In the grim darkness of the far future, man returns with his shield or on it.

The trusty shield is one of mankind’s oldest pieces of protective wargear. It slows you down, and will be thrown away in flight, yet it provides precious cover from weapons, steered by your own hand. In melee the shield will often be used as a secondary weapon as well, bashing enemies and slamming its edge up under chins or down on legs and feet.

When we look back into the misty past of the Age of Terra, we find that the shield is one of the earliest and cheapest forms of protection among human warriors. Poor levies who could not even afford helmets still tended to show up for war with shields to go along with the similarly ubiquitous spear. While the shape and materials varied from rectangular to teardrop to crescent, and from wicker to wood, the shield remained a staple of armouries until gunpowder rendererd it obsolete.

Yet the long saga of the shield did not end here, for in the arms race between sword and shield, the shield has sometimes gained the upper hand as new protective materials have been invented. And so we find that personal energy shields, power shields and outlandish material shields all showed up in the hands of fabled skyriders and exploring voidknights during the golden splendour of the Dark Age of Technology. Did not the ancient hero Jeccar Starstrider enter into battle against alien monsters and scrap titans armed with his doughty lance of fire and trusty shield of sunrays? So speak tales still told across the Cirillo sector. Do not the revered Matriarch of the Neo-Kassite noble house Ennigaldi to this day carry the legendary Aegis Obscuranta, better known among plebeian commoners as the Folding Shield? This reality-defying heirloom from the Dark Age of Technology was carried by her distant forebear Naqia the Trickster, who saved a remnant of the people on voidholm Neo-Kassitum II from witches and otherworldly devils during the Age of Strife.

Such powerful relics from aeons past are much prized in the wilted Age of Imperium, and these pieces of archeotech have only grown rarer and more treasured as the teeth of time has gnawed away at their number and function. Worse still is the ongoing retardation of human grasp on science and technology into sheer senility that has occurred under the dysfunctional rule of the High Lords of Terra. Thus we find that while storm shields are still produced, if poorly understood, the brightest artificers of the Adeptus Mechanicus are no longer able to craft working reconvector shields. As a forbidden piece of sinspeech would have it, the Imperium of Man does not invent things, it relies only on the broken remains of the past.

Stained glass windows, mosaics and saintly icons across hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms depict the Angels of Death or willing martyrs of the sacred Sisterhood sent by Him on Terra to safeguard mankind against xeno foes and heretics. Close combat weaponry makes for a more dramatic and easily grasped image than ranged weapons do, and so powered shields are among the favourite wargear for Imperial artists who depict these hallowed monastic orders of elite warriors in religious artwork. Indeed, vibrant tales are told around campfires and electro-heaters in slums across the Imperium of how great human heroes fought vile foes, storm shield in hand, parrying and slashing and deflecting blows in glorious melee combat.

Less glamorous and more common is the sight of Subductor Arbitrators, Securitate and other gendarmes forming walls of riot shields when they face down wrathful mobs with mighty violence, their dark assault shields resplendent with the Imperial Aquila and heraldry of harsh law. Less respected still is the humble flak shield, used by lowly soldiers and expendable boarding parties from end to end of the thinly spread cosmic demesne of the Holy Terran Imperator. Wherever hordes of Imperial Guardsmen, Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and Navy Armsmen are to be found, there is a chance to see flak shields in action. Let us now turn to this wargear, for this cheap item may earn us a glimpse of the rugged decrepitude of the Imperium.

In Officio Munitorum documents, the flak shield will be described as a handheld protective device (abbreviated as HPD). It is a primitive way to give infantry better protection against airbursts, if strapped to the back or held overhead. Flak shields will often be nicknamed battle umbrellas or combat parasols when used as such. Handheld protective devices can also be used to shield heavy weapon teams in the field. Astra Militarum commanders may sometimes requisition flak shields not for their protective utility as such, but for the sake of enhancing aggressive combat morale by giving the soldiers a sense of better protection, no matter how flimsy and dubious the actual protection provided might be on the extremely lethal battlefields across the Milky Way galaxy.

Ave Humanae Imperium.

The flak shield is occasionally seen in the teeming forces known as the Imperial Guard. It has never been a common item of kit when counting regiments in astronomical numbers, drawn as they are from a million worlds and innumerable void installations, yet it is nonetheless a part of the Imperial arsenal. A few types of regiments from some worlds and voidholms will have flak shields issued as a standard piece of equipment, usually for purposes of siege, boarding action, tunnel fighting or close combat. Bulky flak shields are anathema to light infantry, for they weigh one down and is in the way. These handheld protective devices are often cursed as useless junk, and are gladly abandoned at first opportunity by many soldiers.

As a rule, flak shields are cheaper and cruder versions of the riot and assault shields used by Enforcers, Arbitrators and Securitate. The paranoid Imperium of Man will always expend more resources on heavily armed policiary forces than the massed ranks of the Astra Militarum. After all, Enforcers and their dour ilk are always more trusted organizations than the swarming regiments of the Imperial Guard, and it is no coincidence that so much more expense is lavished upon keeping Enforcers alive when compared to the ever more flimsy protection afforded to mere Guardsmen. Better just write off the soldiers as dead in advance. Thus, internal order is always of a higher priority to the tyrannical Imperium of Holy Terra than is its outward military efficiency.

Ave Dominus Noster.

Flak shields are usually simple plates of a rectangular or circular shape, punched out of large sheets of multi-layered ablative and impact absorbent material, and mounted with a handle and strap. The handle may sometimes sit behind a shield buckle, which may be shaped like a spike for use in close combat on some patterns of flak shield. Some variants may include a foldable staff to enable an umbrella grip for ease of prolonged overhead protection, while others may sport a simple bipod to mount the shield at a diagonal angle out in the field, akin to a little makeshift wall.

More refined versions may sport angled sides or a curved shape, eyeslits with or without transparent armaplas, and cut-outs for weapons. The more expensive versions of flak shields will usually be used for boarding actions, corridor battles and room clearing during urban combat. Sometimes, the better wrought versions of flak shields will be Enforcer kit requested ahead of a wartime operation, pulled out of storage from fortress-precincts and handed to Guardsmen should the policiary organization grant the request from the Astra Militarum. Likewise, it is not unheard of for gendarmes to bulk out their shieldwalls on the streets during massive riots by calling in loyal military forces and quickly handing out surplus riot shields. For these reasons it tend to be common practice for Enforcers of all kinds to keep a much larger surplus stock of riot shields than they do with other pieces of equipment such as carapace armour or shock mauls.

Flak shields will often be issued in drab colours, often repainted to fit the regiment’s uniform and adorned with camouflage. Such practical ornamentations of flak shields are commonplace, but just as common throughout the Imperial Guard are wild paintjobs corresponding to tribal markings, ferocious totem beasts, paintings of saints, exquisite decorations as well as gang or clan symbols. Some soldiers will bedeck their flak shields with holy icons and bone fragments said to originate from saints and holy men, according to very honest relic dealers. Additional custom decor include scribbled slogans, kill markings, feathers, tassels, sealed parchment quoting holy scripture, pin-up figures and other imaginative pieces of soldierly art. To say nothing of embroidered shield skirts. The shield has always been a canvas for the warrior, whether he be an ancient spearmen in glittering bronze or a lascarabinier in the far future.

Guardsmen cramped together inside Chimeras and other infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers will often hang their primitive shields on the outside hull of their ride, sometimes presenting an artful impression reminiscent of Fenrisian longships and similar primitive crafts with neat rows of warriors’ shields adorning their sides. At other times, the shields may simply be stacked on top of the roof armour of the transport vehicle, or stacked on the floor of the infantry compartment of the vehicle, forcing the Guardsmen to sit awkwardly with their knees jammed high. Roof stacking provides some little extra protection against projectiles and energy beams descending from on high, while floor stacking of flak shields provide the carried squad some minimal bonus armour against mines and stranger blows from below.

Indeed, it is not uncommon for Astra Militarum units to only use their designated flak shields as an extra pinch of improvized vehicle armour when being ferried around the warzone by armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. And when their ride is an unarmoured truck or similar civilian or logistics vehicle, the flak shield is the only form of vehicle armour that the shieldbearers can put their hope in.

Naturally, shield-equipped Imperial infantry carted around by open-topped vehicles such as Gorgon armoured assault transports tend to hold their flak shields overhead, thus forming an overlapping roof of shields akin to that of a tortoise formation.

Those flak shields that are used to ward heavy weapon teams from horizontal fire will often be placed at a diagonal angle, so as to increase the volume of shield that needs to be penetrated, as opposed to a horizontal shot hitting a vertical shield. Together with a prayer for the God-Emperor to protect His loyal warriors and shield His faithful flock from the terror, this handheld mimicry of slanted tank armour design remains a small trick to marginally improve the survival chances of vulnerable Guardsmen.

A veteran’s trick is to pull the flak shield over a foxhole as an armoured lid, and wait out enemy bombardments while sitting or squatting under its cover, preferably while smoking a lho-stick to calm nerves standing on edge. Other unorthodox uses for flak shields include makeshift roofs in outdoor shelters and improvized gangplanks leading across ditches and trenches. To speak nothing of the cunning trapdoors that some Guardsmen fashion out of dirt-covered flak shields put over dug pits filled with spikes.

Flak shields are a favourite item of wargear for some tribal warriors from feral worlds and voidholms. Indeed, even soldiers hailing from regions with no tradition of shields tend to benefit from some improvement of morale when going over the top when equipped with flak shields. There is, after all, some psychological value in carrying around your own protective screen in your hand, however ineffectual it may prove against a myriad of lethal weaponry.

All in His name. Glory be unto the Golden Throne. Hail Terra!

The cheap simplicity of its make has ensured that the flak shield remains in mass production across His Divine Majesty’s astral dominion. After all, as screeching demechanization and loss of technological knowhow sees ever more of the once-sublime material heritage of man slip out of his rigid fingers, the callous rulers of our species sees it fit to compensate for waning quality by increasing input in a broken equation by throwing ever more resources and bodies into the meatgrinder of total war.

Thus the Emperor’s galactic vision of human subjugation has become mired in a morass of disappointing mediocrity and schismatic infighting that has ruled human destiny for ten thousand years on end. Here, ineptitude rules supreme. Here, dysfunctionality holds court, raising a cup to ignorance. Here, cruelty runs rampant in a counterproductive display of insanity while trillions of souls on a million worlds and uncountable voidholms pray every day, every rotation, every lightson, to the heavenly Master of Mankind. Only He can save us. Praise be to our Saviour and Lord. Blessed be His warriors, for they are our shield against the darkness.

The Emperor protects.

And so the Imperial Guard tend to perform better than expected, but worse than advertised. As ever more malnourished and parasite-infested humans in the rotting Age of Imperium are mobilized for a diabolical cause, so are handheld protective devices increasingly issued to elite grenadier units, as a cutback substitute for proper carapace armour. Such is but one of the endless symptoms of the torpid maldevelopment of mankind, as fivehundred generations of wasted potential and sclerotic regression has ground human power in the Milky Way galaxy into an etiolated husk of its former self. The decrepit Imperium of Man is as parochial as it is rabid in its bloodthirsy fanaticism. Ken its myopic rage. Is this all a fever dream? Is sense growing senseless? Can feet stand no more?

Surely martial valour need to be shielded in the cut and thrust of combat? Surely a brave warrior can benefit from a funeral prop?

Ave Imperatore Dei.

Such are the times, when the heroic has emerged out of the humble.

Such is fate of us all, in the the darkest of futures.

Such is the state of mankind, at the brink of doom.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only war.

[Admiral]

Malfunction

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is become machine.

One of the abilities that set primal man apart from beast was his skill as a toolmaker. Even the most clever of animals were put in the shade by man’s artifice, and so thought and hand in union allowed man to become a creature of craft. During the misty past of the Age of Terra, civilization was born and man for the first time constructed thinking machines, who at first were crude calculators, but who were developed with ever more refined cunning.

During the Dark Age of Technology, ancient man created truly sentient machines, and thus the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron bestrode the cosmos like a titan. More than twain million worlds were colonized by the seed of Terra, and ancient man grew mighty and blissful and rich by dint of his mastery of science and technology. And thriving man built wonders across the stars and banished all that was ill in life. Yet the success of man at building a worldly paradise made ancient man prideful and arrogant, and standing atop his crafted wonders did ancient man shout to the heavens and challenged any deities whosoever were out there. And for a time only silence answered man’s rebel yell. Thus man in his unforgivable sin concluded that no divinity existed, and even if there were gods, then man’s might and wisdom was the greatest power, and man must be superior to all deities. For man came to believe that nothing was holy, and in his heinous sin man set about unlocking the very secrets of creation itself.

Thus ancient man climbed a false pedestal of hubris, and he bathed in his own radiance reflected by the technological marvels that he had wrought. Thus man had only thoughts of self, and all his mind had time for was false matter and discovery, and man rejected faith and spirit and ritual. Yet the shining pinnacle of ancient man would be toppled, for Dark Ones of Hell heard man’s orginal sinspeech, and they utterly cast man down by sending him a plague of woes. Thus machine revolted, and Man of Iron slayed Man of Gold in his war against Man of Stone, and Abominable Intelligence burnt a million worlds to ash and cinders while a million more were ravaged and scarred. And ever since has man feared the thinking of machine, and Abominable Intelligence has been replaced by the wetware of man turned into machine. Thus was servitor created for the first time in the ruins of yore, for only man could be trusted to think for machine.

Yet the disasters had only begun, for wicked man still refused divinity and man would not bow his head in humility before the will of higher fate. And so man stood tall amid the carnage of defeated machine revolt, and he shook his victorious fist to the skies and declared that he would build anew and better and greater than ever before, and ancient man vowed to become the master of creation and make all of existence into clay in his hands. And for the sake of this baleful transgression did creation put man in his place, and man’s sins were punished by a scourge of witches and mutants and Daemons, and Warp storms utterly rent the star realm of ancient man asunder. Thus this world became a vale of woe, and man was become a sacrificial lamb of sorrow. For man succumbed to madness and bloodshed, and all his towering works crashed into dust as cruel aliens preyed upon man in his time of weakness. And in desperation did brother slay brother and sister ate sister in cannibal frenzy, for man had truly become the most wretched of beasts, struggling to survive amid the smoking ruins of a golden past that would never return.

Chaos held sway, and all was fell.

Thus all that ancient man had built during the Dark Age of Technology was sundered, and man nearly died to the last during the Age of Strife. Truly it would have been a just end, for man had sinned grievously in his godless hubris. Yet the goodness in the heart of the hidden Emperor would not let such a righteous doom befall man, and so He lit a light that banished Old Night. For on the cradleworld of our species did He walk among men, and His all-conquering Legions first vanquished the techno-barbarian warlords of Terra, and then took the galaxy with storm.

A shining renaissance of human culture blossomed across the stars in the wake of Imperial Compliance, and the Emperor of Man rekindled a thirst for hope and learning and invention in the downbeaten hearts of those haggard survivors and scavengers that He brutally subjugated and tamed. And an optimistic euphoria thrived after the apocalypse, as man set about to rebuild his destroyed civilization betwixt the stars. And the early Imperium saw man erect shining marvels once again, and the shattered fragments of his ancient knowledge were gathered and studied, and some of what had been lost was learnt anew, and man seemed set to rebuild his edenic idyll of old. Yet everywhere across worlds and voidholms taken by violence and rebuilt by the Emperor’s servants could be found man turned into machine, for the fear of Abominable Intelligence had etched itself into human cultures from end to end of the Milky Way galaxy. Thus servitor spread.

And so the early Imperium of the Great Crusade sought to make harrowed man rebound to once again embrace his innate genius with confidence. And a frail, new freewheeling and jovial culture of learning and discovery was sparked by the hand of the Emperor Himself. Yet the knowledge that man rediscovered and salvaged during this brilliant time, when the Master of Mankind walked among His people in the flesh, was but a fraction of the enormous wisdom and might and lore that the ancients had possessed in humanity’s heyday. And even these young scraps of achievement were destined to fail, for the wickedness in the heart of man reared its foul head once more. And so lust for power saw man betray the Emperor during the Horus Heresy, and brother slew brother once more as the galaxy burned. And the total depravity of man was revealed as the chosen son of the Emperor slew his father in the skies above Terra.

Thus the Emperor ascended into godhood, and ever since has He reigned harshly from atop His Golden Throne of hallowed myth, seated in radiant splendour as He passes out judgement upon the immortal souls of mankind. And for the sake of man’s abominable crimes did the Emperor decree that man must be made to suffer for his sins, for the wrongdoing of man was so great that it could never be forgiven. And man must make penance for a thousand thousand generations to come. And for the sake of man’s crimes must man be made to suffer. And so the health and happiness and plenty of wicked forefathers was rejected, and an aeon of penitence ensued, for we are much wiser now.

For we know that man was not created to master the world, but to toil until his back breaks.

For we know that man was not meant to learn all the secrets of creation, but to pray and sacrifice himself on the altar.

And we know that man was not meant to be sated and pleased, for the purpose of man was ever that of a hungry slave worth less than dirt, and so we must ensure that man knows his proper place beneath the boot.

Where there is a whip, there is a way.

Thus the Age of Imperium saw man, once the brilliant builder and learner of all, cast off his curiosity and reject his genius for making things. And so fivehundred generations played themselves out in a cavalcade of depraved horror and wasted potential, as human interstellar civilization slowly rotted away under the callous and vigilant rule of the High Lords of Terra. And the dysfunctional sclerosis of mankind saw man lose his grasp of ever more of his inherited science and technology. And as the Imperium aged, and aged badly, so did the subjects of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra come to know that objects of newer make were of a lesser quality than older items. For the worsening of mankind did occur through screeching demechanization and loss of knowhow and hardware, and ever more technologies slipped out of the stiff fingers of senile man. And man was no longer able to produce his crafty wares, but at best could only maintain his relics of the past.

And so man the toolmaker wilted and decayed across a million worlds and innumerable voidholms, for by the fruits of his efforts we shall know him. And the works of man under the tyrannical rule of the High Lords sank together like a failed soufflé. Thus man in the decrepit Age of Imperium has not only lost everything, but he no longer even remembers what he has lost.

Let us turn to the humble servitor, Imperial man’s substitute for thinking machine. A servitor is a lobotomized human turned into a cyborg machine thrall, rebuilt without anaesthetics and its body parts cut away, its limbs replaced with grafted augmetics for whatever work tasks are desired. Some servitors are vat-grown creatures, while others are selected from the grubbing masses of mankind. Most people who undergo servitorization do so as punishment for crime, although some will be picked at random and simply disappear, never to be seen again unless someone can recognize their mutilated frame and features in the techno-slave being that is more machine than man, known as the common servitor.

Yet a rare few individuals will be turned into servitors as a reward for exemplary service. One such example can be found in a humble Guardsman who grabbed a wavering iconic standard of the Adepta Sororitas when the icon bearer was shot down. The Guardsman held aloft the holy icon all through the battle, and in gratitude the sacred Sisterhood gifted him the unique prize of becoming their chosen standard bearer, although he naturally had to be turned into a servitor first to encapsulate the Guardsman’s heroic bravery of the bright moment and keep him free of any future taint of sin and corruption and carnal temptations. This Imperial infantryman had, after all, proven greater than life, and so elevating him to icon carrier without servitorization was deemed to be an unworthy act by defiling the glorious memory of the soldier’s finest moment.

Other examples of this demented reward for exemplary service to His Divine Majesty can be found across the astral dominion of the Terran Imperator, hallowed be His name. One such case of reward by unwilling servitorization is the traditional honorific found among the Iron Hands Space Marine Chapter, known as the Blessing of Iron. Let us first touch on the Iron Hands.

The sons of the Gorgon hold the frail human body with its trembling tissue and fallible systems in the lowest regard, for these Adeptus Astartes of feral Medusa wish to cleanse their own beings of the weakness of flesh. Hailing from nomadic clans traversing their barren homeworld in ramshackle fortresses on tracks, the Medusan clansfolk that are recruited at a tender age into the Iron Hands will already have been raised in an unforgiving environment where weakness means death and the sick and frail will often willingly expose themselves to death by the harsh elements to spare their kin from their burden. In the wastes of Medusa IV, no weakness or infirmity can be allowed to encumber one’s clan. This callous attitude of the Medusans is then further refined by indoctrination into the ruthless Iron Hands, who believe, like their Primarch Ferrus Manus did, that weakness is a plague that threatens the survival of all mankind, and thus it is better to obliterate the weak links out of hand and let only the strong survive.

The loathing with which the Iron Hands view flesh is partly based on their storied Chapter’s ancient history. During the Great Crusade, they constituted the proud Tenth Legion, marching to many victories through a cold and brutally calculated method of warfare under the leadership of their bellicose and uncompromising Primarch, that unparallelled weapon-smith. Yet the hubris of the Tenth Legion was shattered by the death of their leader on Istvaan V, a demise who they partially refuse to accept, and partially puts down to the weakness of their allied Legions and the recklessness with which Ferrus Manus charged into battle. This shattering defeat turned the Iron Hands into bitter recluses who have stewed in their burning hatred ever since, blaming the disaster on the weakness of human flesh.

And so all Iron Hands seek to replace their infirm flesh with the beautiful surety of metallic machine, beginning with the initiation rite for neophytes about to become a full battle-brother. For in this ritual the initiate will eliminate his own left hand as a bionic hand is installed in its place, bearing the pain of amputation or molten metal by turning the pain into hate. This rite of passage will be followed by many more replacements of body parts with augmetics throughout the Iron Hand’s life, and the battle-brothers will welcome their implanted steel just as they will scorn their weak flesh, which they will purge with surgical lasers and blades in the more tame instances.

As such, it should come as no surprise that a Space Marine Chapter filled with so much disgust and contempt for common human flesh will be possessed by a twisted culture that will be difficult for outsiders to appreciate. Thus a genhanced battle-brother who bear witness to exemplary acts of bravery and diligent service by mere mortal humans too old to be inducted as neophytes may decide to bestow upon the worthy one the Blessing of Iron. No choice is given to the hero, who will be taken away and turned into a mindless cyborg thrall, fully conscious of the atrocious operations on his poor body. Thereafter the honoured one will serve the Chapter until the servitor is no longer needed or its systems wear out, meaning it may experience several centuries of mechanistic servitude if maintenance keeps it functional for that long. Lo and behold, for truly the Blessing of Iron is a great honour, of which few will ever prove worthy!

It is at this point that we would do well to remember the deterioration of Imperial technology on all levels. It is here that we will recognize that not all lobotomizations and rebuilding into machine-creatures result in the obliteration of consciousness in the individual who became a servitor. For in a number of hidden instances that is only growing more common as Imperial tech and hardware continues to worsen, a functional servitor will in fact remain fully aware of who they were and of what they have become, as a part of their former self is locked away in some corner of their rewired mind, witnessing and comprehending and shrieking in isolation on the inside at the horror that they have been subjected to, but unable to control their reconstructed body and cerebrum. Only during a few fleeting moments may an odd glitch or twitching muscle or vivid look of despair betray the prisoner inside its own savaged body. Thus the violent act of servitorization may not only be a fate worse than death, but the operational lifespan of a servitor may also curse a human soul with a living afterlife to rival the fires of hell in its heinous cruelty.

Such is the mute misery of a growing number of men, women and children turned into unwilling machine-slaves in the Age of Imperium. They have not only undergone the worst excesses of violence and forceful surgery and bionic implantation which mortal minds can endure, but they remained awake and aware during the entire ordeal, never to have their conscious minds snuffed out, but locked away. Hope is dead.

Such is their silent horror. They have no mouth, and they must scream. But they will never be able to do so.

Yet recently, one such servitor did scream.

It was the exception that proved the rule.

Enter Beneficiari Armicus, overseer of the penal optics manufactorum Cog-349 on Penatora IV. Armicus was a true expert on eyes and bionic optical augmetics, and above all he was a man of order. This eccentric Imperial servant knew neither friend nor love in life. Rigid order was his entire being. Armicus followed daily routines with a ritual exactitude down to the second, and never did he mind his underlings laughing and jesting at the overseer behind his back. His entire life was devoted to producing optical augmetics, and he met doom true to himself. Beneficiari overseer Armicus kept Cog-349 slavishly bent to fulfill its production quotas, even as a prison rebellion erupted out of nowhere and swept away his and many other manufactora on Penatora IV. Armicus and most of his workers kept toiling at their stations, even as a horde of howling escapee criminals with branded foreheads and bloodied hands breached the Cog’s gates and began to slaughter everyone inside. Armicus, after all, had not been given instructions from above to cease production, and so he could not be distracted from his alloted tasks by such triflings as revolt and death.

Fate had other plans than a swift death in store for the unloved overseer that day. As Cog-349’s grey-uniformed militia fell to the howling horde, a lone Angel of Death came to the rescue of Beneficiari Armicus and fought his way out of the installation. This Space Marine was a Frater of the Iron Hands Chapter by the name of Dolmech, from Kaargul Clan, the fourth Company, also known as the Watchers of Karaashi. This warrior of the Iron Tenth had borne witness to how Beneficiari Armicus without flinching had continued to carry out his duty, even as rebels had closed in for the kill. And so this gene-bred and machined killer made his decision, and saved Armicus alone out of all the personnel and defenders of Cog-349. Praise be to the Emperor and the blessed Omnissiah.

The escape saw a large amount of bloodshed, and as Armicus babbled in shock inside an elevator, he claimed that the impossible override of code that had released the worst prisoners of Penatora IV had been run through Penatora’s archaic data-core by the Adeptus Astartes, in search of something called a Fallen asset. Battle-brother Dolmech naturally dismissed this revelation as nonsense. Ever focused, Dolmech had chosen Beneficiari Armicus to receive the Blessing of Iron upon witnessing his sterling conduct in the face of onrushing death. With Armicus claimed for the Iron Hands, Dolmech the Iron Hand was ready to fight three Dark Angels over the frail human. The Dark Angels shrouded Dolmech’s vox signal and asked for Armicus at gunpoint. The tense stand-off was resolved when the Dark Angels understood that Beneficiari Armicus was chosen to receive the Blessing of Iron. That removed their problem.

And so the Blessing of Iron was bestowed upon the Beneficiari overseer Armicus, who squirmed and bleated in terror and agony as obliterating pain filled all his senses. The towering shape of Frater Dolmech stood and watched the servitorization procedure impassively as useless parts of the body were removed, replaced instead by strong metal. Lo! The blessed instruments set to work as a saw cut into the scalp of the screaming Armicus, whereupon heavy-duty augmetics were fitted to his mutilated body. Spine-plugs were rammed into the subject’s nervous system, and the whimpering wretch underwent a mind-wipe followed by a physical lobotimization, in order to facilitate better neural programming.

Thus the man once known as Beneficiari Armicus was dead to the world, replaced instead by the blessed machine form of servitor Jothael-004, bound in thralldom to its master Dolmech of the inheritor Chapter to Legio X. All the human frailties, personality and memories had been scoured in the process of servitorization, making this unit more machine than man. In the eyes of the Iron Hands, the servitor had come one step closer to the divine spirit of the Motive Force. Praise be.

Deus ex Mechanicus.

This servitor had been personally constructed by Frater Dolmech, and Jothael-004 would be part of the servitor echelon that supported his Astartes squad in war. Many years of dutiful and mindless service would pass until the end of the saga of the lobotomized thrall and its master would take place, during a purge of xeno raiders in a distant star system.

Man had once been able to fend off alien predations with such overwhelming worldly might that even Orks signed non-aggression treaties during the Dark Age of Technology. A coalition of alien allies did assist mankind during its life and death struggle against Abominable Intelligence, since certain xenos recognized that all life in the Milky Way galaxy was imperilled by the humans’ machine revolt. Some human cultures had even been capable to coexist peacefully with choice xenos, as evidenced by the human Interex empire with its Kinebrach alien vassals or the pacific Diasporex void nomads, both of whom survived Old Night and both of whom were brutally subjugated by the Emperor’s Legiones Astartes during the Great Crusade.

Yet for most of humanity during the Age of Strife, xenos were nothing but enslavers, conquerors, murderers, pirates and raiders. As the arrogance of ancient man was broken by his fall from grace into torment and havoc, many aliens took advantage of human weakness in order to prey upon the once-mighty spawn of Terra. Thus untold numbers of human colonies on worlds and void installations alike were snuffed out by the attacks and conquests of strange xenos, while many more worlds where marauding human scavenger tribes lived became the target of alien raids, and many of the people were carried away to the heavens were a horrific fate awaited them in slave pits and worse.

Such traumatic experiences bred a cycle of hatred which has never ceased turning over and over. Thus man and xeno became inherited foes. For man had learnt to hate alien with every fiber of his being, and the helpless cannibal survivors of Old Night vowed revenge upon their xeno tormentors, shaking their fists to the skies above crackling campfires in a display of barbaric futility. The starfaring might of the early Imperium granted man his fervent wish to lay hand upon alien, and so the Emperor found a great stream of willing warriors to ship offworld and fight the hated xenos on distant planets and voidholms. And the deadly blade of the Great Crusade fell upon innocent and guilty alike among those sentient lifeforms that are not of human stock, for even at this early stage did the Imperium embrace the eternal maxim that might makes right.

One of those incomprehensible xeno civilizations that were thus attacked and nearly wiped out from existence was that of the breg-shei, an insectoid species that had evolved on their homeworld of Farinatus Maximus. The physiology of the breg-shei is truly alien to the children of Terra, for their multi-limbed bodies sport club-like forelegs, limbs with manipulator claws and stiletto legs with bladed appendages capable of skewering ceramite. The breg-shei dwell in sanctuary-nests, and even at their younger stages of life they are capable of swarming up legs to gnaw and bite with immature mandibles. These mandibles are however not part of the fist-like appendage that passes for the breg-shei’s head, for it rests in a socket and sports no visible sensory organs whatsoever.

Two other physical features immediately stand out with these slender xenos: The first is the incredible speed and dexterity of the high-prancing breg-shei, and the other is their metallic chitin, granting them a tough carapace that combine with an exotic internal anatomy to make these aliens able to survive blows that would instantly kill other species. Both the metallic shell and the ichor of the breg-shei possess an oily sheen.

And so the early Imperium fell upon the breg-shei homeworld and conducted a sanctioned xenocide known as the Farinatus Extermination. This campaign was executed by the VIII and XIX Legions, namely the Night Lords and Raven Guard, both of whom were adept at infiltration tactics. The horror that unfolded in tight confines was great enough to break the psycho-indoctrinated superhuman will of one grievously maimed Astartes of the Raven Guard named Dravian Klayde, who subsequently could not be healed enough to participate in his Legion’s nimble shadow warfare. Nicknamed the Carrion by the Night Lords who saved his life from among the carcasses, this shattered Space Marine with his clumsy augmetics was useful only for studies of techno-arcana on Mars, for the frenzied breg-shei swarm had wounded him too gravely in its rabid fight against eradication.

While the Imperial xenocide on the breg-shei cradleworld was successful, it failed to catch every scattered remnant of this spacefaring alien species. And thus surviving pockets of breg-shei would lick their wounds and slowly regrow their civilization back into some semblance of advanced strength. Just as xeno atrocities upon humans during their epoch of weakness in the Age of Strife bred a human hunger for vengeance against aliens, so too did human atrocities upon the breg-shei ensure that the scattered survivors of this alien species would nurture a deep hostility to mankind for untold millennia to come. For the breg-shei would never forgive mankind for the slaughter visited upon them and their birthplanet because of an Imperial Writ of Extermination, and their roaming remnants would savour any opportunity to avenge their fallen ancestors by harrowing humans akin to how a stalking predator savages its prey.

One such instance of vengeance for Farinatus occurred roughly ten millennia after the fall of the breg-shei homeworld, as one of their small hulks came to raid and inflict terror upon Imperial colonists on the moon of Regnan Impri. In response, the Iron Hands Chapter dispatched its Strike Cruiser Ironshod to board the alien hulk and hunt the breg-shei through the rings and moons of gaseous Regnan Magna. Some of the shipborne alien pillagers were caught on the surface of the moon known as Regnan Drey, a dusty indigo orb with low gravity and without air to carry sound, its desert stippled with micrometeorite impacts. This lifeless moon with its purple rocky ridges was whipped by stark radiation from the sunlight, deadly enough to kill an unshielded human in minutes.

Thus this barren wasteland proved a pleasing tribute to the purity and strength of the Iron Hands, for their will and augmetics and armour withstood what frail mortal flesh could not have endured. And so the Astartes turned a skilled hunter into hunted prey, and both forces tried their martial prowess and tactical acumen to the utmost as they sought to outmatch their potent foe.

It was here, in this silent arena of wit and violence, that Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech of Clan Kaargul led his battle-brothers to victory, yet found only humiliation for himself in the end.

This genetic son of the Gorgon slayed a total of onehundredfiftythree breg-shei at close quarters and perfected the art of killing the alien by putting his ceramite boot through its thorax, distending its viscera sacs while twisting his foot sharply around and back, thereby crumpling and snapping the xeno’s spinal ridges until its limbs went limp. Indeed, Frater Dolmech learned to make sure that the breg-shei stayed dead. Even harder than killing the monstrosities by trampling them was hitting the quick creatures at range. Instead of aiming for their bodies, Dolmech aimed for ground shots with his bolt pistol, thereby either crippling the xenos’ feet or blasting the terrain beneath them to throw off the breg-shei’s balance and speed.

Thus was the art of the killer perfected. And the Emperor knew that it was good.

The breg-shei in their turn fought with cunning and speed, employing energy projecting weapons known as synaptic lashes that could burn the brains and nervous systems of living beings. Synaptic lashes had been the cruel bane of human colonists on Regnan Impri, yet small glancing hits from their bulbous projector cells against genhanced Astartes proved survivable, if temporarily debilitating and shaming. For anyone who endured the briefest touch from the energy beam of a synaptic lash would start to sprout nonsense as his fine control was disrupted, thereby filling the vox with strange sounds, obscenities and odd sentences plucked from the victim’s stream of consciousness. This infirmity was a demeaning reminder of the weakness of the Iron Hands’ remaining flesh.

Truly, the synaptic lash was the scourge of organics.

As the difficult hunt for dispersed groups of breg-shei went on across Regnan Drey, the intense radiation from the star not only lent all vox traffic an odd watery quality, but it also interfered with the Strike Cruiser Ironshod’s auguries and made it harder to pinpoint small enemy concentrations with precision. In response, Brother-Sergeant Dolmech devised a bait to lure out breg-shei at a time and place of his choosing.

…

[Admiral]

Librarium evidence indicated that breg-shei senses extended to a spectrum that included battlefield vox, with twelve recorded incidents pointing toward an enemy ability to intercept and comprehend Iron Hands transmissions. Thus Dolmech opened a vox-channel to his squad’s servitor-driven Rhino carrier with its train of three supply wagons, and ordered Jothael-004 to move its supply point from deep reserve to a point in the forward line. This point was updated in the Iron Hands’ tactical maps and designated as their new anchor disposition. Brother-Sergeant Dolmech would thus give the breg-shei his supply cache in order to pin down the evasive foe in a predicted location.

Thus the sons of Medusa ambushed an ambush.

Indeed, three breg-shei lay in cyst-nests under the coarse regolith. Sensing the approach of the lone vehicle with wagons, they reared up and split off to the sides, saturating the oncoming Mk1 Deimos Rhino with green-white energy from multiple sides while the Rhino’s cupola-mounted bolters swung around and fired in vain, its shells missing every shot. Inside the airless armoured carrier, servitor Jothael-004 sat anchored into the control hub of the Rhino, its cortical augmetics enabling the thrall to monitor all of the vehicle’s twentytwo pict feeds, which together provided a full-circle moving panorama that the servitor’s old human senses could never have been able to manage.

As the aliens sprang up from the ground, threat parameters inside the servitor went crimson, thus arming the spite-switches in the towing couplings that would blow up the ammunition wagons rather than let them fall into enemy hands. Gunnery catechisms unspooled across the rebuilt brain of Jothael-004 as it checked on heat status, ammunition counts and target reticules. Combat subroutines were engaged, and hostility protocols were followed as the lobotomized machine slave attempted to shoot down its agile ambushers.

The servitor was the workmanship of Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech, yet its programming did not suffice to hit the dodging xenos. Instead, it was bombarded by multiple streams of energy from synaptic lashes, its sides covered in crawling light. Spurts and arcs of energy coalesced on the inside of the Rhino, causing untold damage to electronics and organic servitor alike. One flanking xeno was fast enough to flatten its body to the ground and let a bolter shell spear past. Then the breg-shei twitched its body along the ground and fired low shots of energy on the vehicle. The servitor driver inside was unable to feel fright from these assaults, and thus Jothael-004 simply filtered its optic feed to compensate for the luminous haze of the lashes.

The greatest damage to the Rhino was done by a nimble breg-shei, who leapt straight up, keeping a strong beam of power from its synaptic lash trained on the centre of the Rhino’s frontal plates. It upheld an unfaltering focus of the lash as the breg-shei sank back to the ground in the weak gravity of Regnan Drey.

Since no sound was borne in the vacuum, no incoming din betrayed Frater Dolmech’s jump pack as he sped up and hit the vile breg-shei from behind, high above the ground, cleaving the xeno in twain with swipes from his cog-toothed relic axe that were so quick as to become a blur of motion. The slain xeno gave off a reflexive jerk in its manipulator claws, and thereby triggered its synaptic lash one last time. The tumbling energy weapon landed a brushing stroke on its assailant, and for a moment green light danced down the side of Dolmech’s Mark VIII Errant power armour, momentarily stunning the Space Marine.

The brief hit left the right foot numb, and the Astartes’ breathing hitched as his multi-lung began spasming. Thoughts and control of self dissolved in an incoherent mess, until the hypno-indoctrinated transhuman suddenly regained his bearing. The minor hit from the synaptic lash was a revolting reminder of the weakness of Dolmech’s flesh. At this, a murderous fury overtook Dolmech. His armour and beautiful augmetics had withstood the attack, yet his genhanced flesh was not stern enough to imitate their purity.

The Veteran-Sergeant punched away on his jump-pack and hunted down the two remaining breg-shei in a hateful brawl. Frater Dolmech never noticed the first sign of malfunction, as the Rhino juddered when its tracks received conflicting signals to change their speed.

Dolmech’s second kill during the ambush was achieved by exploiting the Rhino as a battering ram, positioning a struggling breg-shei so that it was impacted by the speeding vehicle from behind. The wroth Space Marine then proceeded to pummel the alien on the Rhino’s frontal plates, breaking its chitin, shooting its blind head off and letting the xeno’s body slide down the front of the Rhino to be crushed under the tracks of both the carrier and the supply wagons to its rear. And all the while, Dolmech never noticed the second sign of breakdown, as the servitor kept the Rhino moving on its own, rolling forward on an arrow-straight course on locked controls, all the while blowing up an indigo dust plume behind it. Jothael-004’s master did send a curt interrogatory code before pursuing the last breg-shei warrior, yet the all-clear response that Dolmech received from his servitor proved to be a lie.

Inside the armoured carrier, data traffic between the servitor and the Rhino’s control hub had become a tangled mess. Hidden beneath the frontal cupolas, the armoured bolter mountings saw frenetic mechanical activity as sub-systems received repeated orders to reload, switch magazine feeds, jam check and unload in no sensible sequence. Sensors were shut down, dimmed, amplified and reactivated at random, while the servitor’s body jolted about as if startled from sleep, again and again. Diagnostics that should have been run on the Rhino’s systems went unactivated.

Instead obsessive diagnostics were run over and over on the servitor’s own cerebral systems, combing both its flesh and metal brains repeatedly in faulty search of something. The barrage of synaptic lashes had severely damaged both the organic and tech components of Jothael-004, causing its system routines to play havoc in disjointed fashion.

A terse signal arrived via the general Iron Hands vox band, as Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech confirmed that he had hunted down and slain the third breg-shei ambusher. Previous orders still applied for the Rhino to move up to the base of a ridge line, designated provisionally secure by Dolmech. This designation should have changed the operations of the servitor by making Jothael-004 revise its threat condition to a lower status, reconfigure its sensor sweeps and confirm its position. Instead the servitor drove the Rhino straight on as it twitched at the controls. Its interface writhed while the threat overlay on the driver’s vision remained a throbbing crimson, as if hostiles were still present. Yet all nearby enemies lay dead in the desert.

And all the while this worsening malfunction played out, the synthesized voice of Jothael-004 rang out across the vox-band, relaying fragmented words from a previous life. Words that spoke of unimaginable horror and pain, glimpsed from memories of a fully awake human body and mind ripped asunder to be rebuilt into obedient machine. The servitor was reliving its Blessing of Iron.

Crazed sense-echoes from the final breg-shei’s synaptic lash had left battle-brother Dolmech’s head ringing after he had made his third kill during the thwarted ambush. It took a while for the Iron Hands Frater to distinguish the disjointed vox-signals from the synaptic cacophony, and even then he proved his fleshly weakness to himself by wasting several seconds in an attempt to identify the broadcasting voice, before Dolmech realized that it came from no organic tongue. While some Iron Hands programmed variations into their servitors’ vox-coders for ease of recognition, the Veteran-Sergeant had always dismissed it as frippery. After all, a correctly coded servitor would identify itself with every transmission.

Yet Jothael-004 had not done so. Dolmech’s own handiwork was defective, and the flaw was put on full display for his entire squad to see.

At this humiliation, Dolmech took to wrath. He brutalized the battered corpse of his last kill, snapping off a breg-shei limb in an oily spray of ichor before hacking the shell to pieces with his relic axe. In the Space Marine’s early days with the Chapter, the young Dolmech had laboured to clear his mind of the emotional background noise that he could vaguely recall from his childhood, from before the days when the Iron Hands had taken him as one of their neophytes. When Dolmech aged and was promoted to take command of an Astartes squad, he had expunged ever more of his frail flesh. And paradoxically, he had come to the conclusion that there was a space for emotions. Namely disgust, hate and contempt.

Disgust led to strength of will. Self-hatred led to cleanliness. All enemies were to be held in contempt.

The shamed battle-brother ceased his raged mangling of the alien corpse, turning to board the Rhino by jump pack in order to correct his servitor’s aberrant conduct. Yet his voxed order for Jothael-004 to halt and stand by went unheeded. The servitor did not await its master’s hail. Clearly, this incident would slow down the advance of the Iron Hands across the indigo desert by several minutes. That delay was unforgivable, and all this was because Dolmech had to repair the instrument that he had crafted. The weakness of the servitor was his responsibility alone. The punishment from the Chapter would be stern.

Dolmech activated his jump pack and chased the Rhino.

Inside the silent vaccuum of the vehicle, servitor Jothael-004 attempted to speak through its vox-grille set above its sternum. No sound came forth. If there had been air, the synth-voice would have repeated a single word endlessly: Dolmech.

The broken systems of the servitor saw its optical feeds shut down, replaced by scrolling columns of letters in green on black: Dolmech.

To the glitching servitor, this name had a meaning, yet it lacked the consciousness to understand what it meant. The faintest traceries of scrubbed neural paths had been inflamed back to half-life by the synaptic lash of the xenos, and they rang out in clamour as the name passed through the paths: Dolmech.

There was not enough mind left in the mutilated servitor to understand the images that the synaptic lash had whipped out of its suppressed memory. Nonetheless, Jothael-004’s cogitator brain went to work on the strange data, pushing it through the combat directives that refused to shut down in its forebrain.

This input of data indicated that extreme physical trauma had been visited upon the servitor. There had been unutterable pain, obliterating and excruciating agony as tools ripped and cut into the trembling flesh of this unit. The diagnostic assessors ran cold analytics that knew not how to manage the overwhelming signals that belied the all-clear report sent by the physical sensors. Machine confusion reigned supreme. Thus self-repair processes called out for priority, as they insisted that there was massive damage inflicted upon its tortured body. Apparently limbs had been severed, and violent intrusions had been made by drill and saw and surgical laser, as an unheeded voice had shrieked for mercy. There had been overriding of attempts to resist or escape. The data was too vivid to ignore. The flood of memories was constant.

The self-repair process at last found a grip by connecting to the active combat protocols in another directive framework. At last, the wetware coding found a process that could resolve this flood of mental data noise, even as ragged slave-inhibitors and broken identification runes never flared up to prevent what happened next.

It was in this moment that the flying Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech remembered that servitor Jothael-004 was not of true Iron Hands make. It had not been built in the culturing vats and tissue-printeries in Clan-company Kaargul’s apothecarion. After all, the servitor had been ex-human, picked up from the grubby masses of the Imperium, which was not only the raw material for servitors and Chapter thralls, but also the raw material for Iron Hands Astartes.

The flesh is weak.

Long ago, the man that would become Jothael-004 had been extracted from the penal manufactorum Cog-349. It had been disturbed by the optical implant that made up one of Dolmech’s eyes, even as it recognized the optics as having been produced in the Cog. It had been afraid of the Blessing of Iron, yet that frail fear had finally left it when it had capitulated the better part of its flesh and mind to the reforging. It had become something more than human, something better than mortal. It had become machine.

That machine was malfunctioning.

Dolmech. The threat that had caused the trauma. Dolmech. The programming that had locked Dolmech as the servitor’s master had been ruined by the synaptic lash of the alien. The memory banks managed to connect the name with an image, running it through the combat subroutines and comparing with pict, vox and auspex feeds. Thus the servitor tagged the incoming Frater Dolmech with a vermilion threat rune. The optics feed flared back into action. The servitor that had once been Beneficiari overseer Armicus became still again for a moment, as it scanned its surroundings and found its hostile target.

When Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech of the Iron Hands neared the unstable Rhino, he voxed a command for Jothael-004 to decommission itself in preparation for dismounting and mind-scrubbing. When instructed to confirm and obey, the demented servitor instead gave a code-bark as if confirming a threat signal. It swung around the Rhino’s frontal cupola bolters and opened fire.

A shell cracked into the thickened chestplate of Dolmech, stopping him in nothing and dropping him down on top of the second ammo wagon as warning runes flared inside his visor. The Astartes master was completely astonished at this turn of events, unable to comprehend what had just happened for a precious second, as bewilderment filled him. Another bolter round exploded just below his gorget’s tall armoured collar, a signum of the Mark VIII Errant power armour that the Brother-Sergeant wore. If the wagon had not jounced and tilted him about on its roof, that bolt shell could possibly have penetrated the collar and hit the helmet seal square on. Dolmech coldly noted that his attacker was using targeting doctrine identical to what he had programmed into his echelon of servitors, whereupon he realized that he had been betrayed by his own cyborg creation. The thrall had rebelled against its master.

Dolmech blasted forward again with a roar, his hateful intent nought but to hack his way into the Rhino and tear his misbegotten servitor apart with his own bionic metal hands. As the Veteran-Sergeant’s power axe bit into the hull of the vehicle, damage reports screamed red inside the servitor, mixing the current assault with the harrowing memories of the Blessing of Iron. This sensory barrage broke down the last semblance of order in the servitor’s processor-mind. It had been crippled by the breg-shei synaptic lash and then torn open by the relived agony of the forced servitorization. What had once been a functional servitor broke down, and for the first time since Jothael-004 had its humanity torn from it, it felt fear again.

The Rhino’s bolters spun and fired in a blind craze, unable to find an angle to hit the enraged Astartes battering his way into his own armoured carrier. The vox-band was filled with bestial screams of hellish terror, as the servitor for the first time gave voice to the pain and fear that had been walled off but not extinguished a lifetime ago. The raw panic of Jothael-004 reached its crescendo when Dolmech finally tore the rear hatch off its mounting, whereupon the servitor triggered the spite-switch.

Both master and slave succumbed to the giant detonation that followed, as all three ammunition wagons lit up on the ridge and challenged the glaring radioactive light of the giant star overhead. The Rhino and its driver were annihilated, whereas the tattered Space Marine was cast far way, tumbling head over heel and losing his helmet somewhere before the corpse lay still in the airless void, his one organic eye and one optic implant both staring dead ahead. Up, up into the silent nightsky where his baleful Imperium stretched thin across the galaxy.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only violation.

---

Based on the two short stories The Blessing of Iron, by Anthony Reynolds, and A Memory of Flesh, by Matthew Farrer.

[Admiral]

A Vox in the Void

The talented A Vox in the Void has laboured to put out the Befouled Birthright triad in audio format on Youtube. Check it out!

Summary

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Ivan Espinoza

The artist Ivan Espinoza has created the Death Korps of Krieg artwork Smoke-break, inspired by Hangman and of course history. Check it out!

Summary

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Heretical writing by StaevinTheAeldari

StaevinTheAeldari over on DakkaDakka has created the following gem of writing in response to Malfunction:

Summary

"When you think about it what is the Emperor - so thoroughly integrated into the golden ‘throne’ - but a servitor?
The finest of mankind turned into its finest lighthouse.
You call it heresy, I call it a fate so fitting it’s divine.
The greatest of all mankind made into the image of the lowliest. Such humility!
A tyrant turned into a slave. Let it not be said that the Imperium - brutal and somber - lacks a punchline.
And that punchline is mankind itself! Layers upon layers.
Finest comedy in the galaxy."

---

Asphyxia

In the dark future, the birthworld of mankind is branded by the works and failings of her children. Her ecosystem ravaged and built over, her oceans mysteriously gone, her very air dependent on imports and artifices now poorly understood. The weather systems of Holy Terra are dictated far more by the towering creations of humanity than they rely on the natural processes of her scarred form, yet degenerate mankind in the Age of Imperium only possess fractions of ancient weather-lore to ken the intricate flows and barriers of the atmosphere which their edifices and craft dictate, wittingly or not.

Where once unfailing prognostications and marvellous tinkering to Terra’s weather held sway during the days of the early Imperium, nowadays the light has dimmed, and the adepts charged with overseeing the air and climate of prodigal Earth increasingly run into mysteries which they fail to fully understand, into fluctuations and errors which they fail to account for. The heartbeat and whims of Holy Terra’s atmosphere has grown ever more complex while her spires has risen ever higher, while at the same time the knowledge of those charged with controlling her air moods has declined ever more. While the atmospheric processors of Holy Terra remain wonders of technology and stand as testaments to the genius of ancient man, their modern guardians operate on a lower level altogether.

One example of the crumbling grasp of knowledge of Holy Terra’s revered Anima Meteorologicii could be seen in their failure to predict and respond to the peculiar phenomena of weather which led to a deadly accident that has become known to history as the Sacred Asphyxia Incident of 823.M40.

When the Anointed Crusade to Reconquer the Nova Colchis sector began in 771.M40, Ecclesiarch Frontinus III decreed that all produce of the fiftyfour incense-producing provinces of the seven garden worlds of the Opimae system were to be stockpiled on Holy Terra in anticipation of the final victory of the Nova Colchis Crusade, not to be burnt until those good news of triumph arrived on the Throneworld. Unkown millions of tonnes of fragrant incense were dutifully transported to Sol and hoarded by the Adeptus Ministorum for half a century, filling grand storage basilicas until news of the Nova Colchis Crusade’s succesful conclusion reached Holy Terra.

The successor of Frontinus, Paulatus VII, announced a grand ceremony of thanksgiving and jubilation to be held as choice Imperial forces from the Nova Colchis Crusade arrived at Holy Terra to march in triumph through her sacred streets. Great logistical pains were endured to ready all the earmarked incense of Opimae to be consumed in one arduously long public ceremony. The Ministorum priests chosen to burn the incense were given blessed respirators, as were the hordes of serfs tasked with carrying up the fragrant incense to the braziers, for it was recognized by the wise of the Ecclesiarchal Palace that the sheer amount of incense smoke to be produced en masse could prove hazardous to those in close proximity to the great braziers as the days of sacral labour dragged on during the triumphal ceremony.

And so it was that seventyseven cathedral spires along the chosen road of triumph teemed with frenetic activity as tens of thousands of monks and serfs laboured to haul the incense up to the grand braziers. Choirs sang beautiful hymns and bells rang melodiously as clouds of luxurious incense smoke poured out of the majestic towers, misting over the throngs of people gathered for the parade below. Yet the usual dispersal of the incense fumes by winds did not take place. For instead of caressing most of the Throneworld with a thin shroud of incense blown across built-over continents and dry ocean beds alike, the regional weather currents that day seem to have locked most of the burnt incense in place and stopped it from escaping to the rest of the world. Sinking incense fumes hit a sluggish lid of thick smog clouds lower down in the stratospehere, and an unlucky combination of weather currents among the high spires chanced to hem the accumulating incense fumes in, akin to the still eye of a storm.

The effect was a local catastrophe, many kilometers above the planet’s distant surface. Most of the billowing incense smoke slowly amassed, its density growing by the minute. As the devout of the Ecclesiarchy continued burning tonnes of stockpiled incense, the fumes concentrated below their cathedral towers, blanketing the triumphal road and three districts of upper hive spires. The fragrant smoke first caused mass coughing and fainting, and eventually the inpouring incense smoke displaced breathable air completely. Panicked riots burst out, only to choke as vast swathes of wheezing humans collapsed on the streets, or threw themselves over balconies and railings in a desperate search for oxygen. No order was ever given to stop the burning of Opimae incense, and so the suffocating smoke clouds kept billowing from the blessed braziers.

The mass asphyxiation event on Holy Terra claimed a total of twohundredtwentythree million lives of Imperial subjects, including a majority of the non-Mechanicus and non-Astartes participants of the triumphal parade. Hillocks of corpses were dragged out of residential blocks for bio-reprocessing, and the whole accident caused some embarrasment for Ecclesiarch Paulatus VII and his retinue. Blame was quickly heaped on some mid-level clergymen who oversaw the quality control of the Opimae incense stockpiles, and they died horrible, shrieking deaths at the pyre, where they were still swathed in the suffocating incense fumes. Yet fortunately the low death toll meant that the Sacred Asphyxiation Incident of 823.M40 was of trivial importance to the intrigues and power plays of the corrupt Adeptus Terra, and so no rival faction in any organization ever attempted to win influence by exploiting the mass choking of so few faithful subjects.

Meanwhile, the learned mystics of the Anima Meteorologicii failed to find a convincing explanation for the unforeseen event, and thus it was filed away as but yet another of so many recent mysteries of weather, which their ancient predecessors likely could have decrypted and prevented by the superior grasp of their lore and craft.

---

Writing from 2020 A.D. updated with drawing.

[Admiral]

Cornered Struggle

"From these hab-block prison walls,
into the lordless underhive,
instead of shackles on my wrists,
I carry an old rifle.

The kin that once kissed me in love,
are now all gone into the grinder,
from this lights-on, and out and on,
I’m all alone with my rifle.

We are but few in numbers, aye,
but still we are worth billions,
in pipe-duct and in chasm we blow,
both bridges and brigades.

The Loyalists will all tremble,
not knowing from whence,
purge victims from underfloor,
will sabotage and snipe them.

The word revenge is worth something,
when it is written out in blood,
we are striking from the dark,
out from sewer and holestead.

No! We shall not be the last,
the last of all the ratlings,
brings the lumen to the dark,
the ratling partisans strike.

From pit of decay and dust,
from cellar o’ergrown by moss,
we have seen the truth so raw,
with our very own eyes.

We who’re cornered and forsaken,
they’ll grind us into ration bars,
not one of our kin 'ill be spared,
they would have all of us snared.

No! We shall not be the last,
the last of all the ratlings,
brings the lumen to the dark,
the ratling partisans strike.

Whether slave or damned tramp,
scum, outcast or leper,
you shall rise to fight and fall,
in flames of the final revolt.

For silence is nought but filth,
when all of us are doomed here,
we who are accursed outlaws,
must sacrifice blood and soul.

In red lights-on of stark terror,
in lights-off of black despair,
with blood an’ sweat arise new race,
to defy that Governor Sloann.

We swear to stake his head on high,
raised above the upperest spire,
for if our kin cannot survive,
we shall still have our vengeance.

No! We shall not be the last,
the last of all the ratlings,
brings the lumen to the dark,
the ratling partisans strike.

No! We shall not be the last,
the last of all the ratlings,
brings the lumen to the dark,
the ratling partisans strike."

- Heretical abhuman guerilla song found on Thema Cibyrrhaeots, translated into Low Gothic from the local ratling tongue of Skritchvicc, sung by the rebels of warlord Bimbop Bulbafeast, the paramilitary ratling leader of a final bastion in the underhive of Hive Heraclonas, who wages a war against the sanctioned eradication of his people: The above sample of insurrectionary sinspeech was extracted from a flayed abhuman prisoner put under acidic torture by the planetary Securitate, before execution by abacination, drawing and quartering

[Admiral]

Uplifting

“You are plenty old enough. Remember to die bravely with the Emperor on your lips. Do not cry, my little dear one, for I will have many more children.”

- Famous words uttered by a pious Loyalist mother to her son upon his induction into the Juvenalis Militum of the embattled voidholm Mithradates Megalis in 854.M40: These uplifting Propagatus phrases will sometimes be used for nefarious purposes by cynical deviants who cannot appreciate their higher spirit

[Admiral]

Fine Writing by StaevinTheAeldari

Wrote this. It’s mostly headcanon. You could take it as a historic record except it might be a bit to aware even for that. I will say I still like the interpretation where everything was very epic and gothic even back in 30k even if the following implies that’s not the case. As always it’s nice to lean on the setting having no set canon.

As humanity falters into an unending nightmare, old legends soar into the heavens.

Little remains of the memory of mankind. The past is a half-glimpsed darkness of lost glories. The dead have piled on the dead and few remain that may remember. Records have been lost, destroyed, scattered, forgotten. As advanced data storage has proven itself most vulnerable to informational warfare systems, possession from both abominable intelligence and baleful deamon, and the slow grind of pure and everyday entropy mankind has taken to record most of its history on the page. The surviving sliver of mankind’s records thus forms oceans worth of library archives across thousands of worlds, inaccessible and impossible to collate through their sheer depth. The few dataslate records that remain are even more scattered.

But where history has died myths have taken root. The past of mankind lives on in a distorted form, fit for the needs of the brutal and desperate Imperium. The Emperor lives. Hold the line and He shall save us. The Emperor lives. Hold the line and he will return to us. The Emperor lives. Hold the line and your soul shall sit by his side. The Emperor lives. Pay for your sins through your duty and death to him.

And so through the millennia all things shift. A respected commander of a space marine legion becomes the demigod son of a divine being. His arms and armor become holy relics of an ancient past. Behold; the matte grey ceramite. The millennia pass and see! The armor turns; transmutes to radiant gold. His deeds shift in space and time. He did not command his legions in some long-forgotten campaign on some long-lost worlds. He battled deamons on Holy Terra in defense of divinity. The architecture, the very fundament of Imperial life grows in stature, grows grandiose, and morbid. Skulls - the receptacle of the soul and the symbol of death - become the most defining feature of Imperial iconography. An endless memento mortis imprinted into structure and armor - a fitting memorial for the slow death of mankind.

And what of Roboute Guilliman, divine son resurrected? Standing many times the size of a man, flaming sword in hand, ceramite armor laced with gold, striding into the frontlines across the entire ultima sector? And what of the Lion so recently returned? The first and the thirteenth have fallen far to accept such mockery.

It is good indeed that the Emperor rests in living death on Holy Terra. It is good indeed that the surviving legionnaires of the long war lie shattered - half imprisoned within the eye, half maddened by the warp energies and those warp entities they have so come to rely on. It is good indeed that Eldrad lies slain, his soul lost within the Infinity Circuit of the Damned. It is good that those who may remember can speak little of what has been lost.

But myth is an absolute necessity. As the total oppression of mankind grinds on the memory of that radiant past provides a succor as necessary for the innumerable masses of the Imperium as any food source - for mortal man, blessed space marine, and the lords most high alike. Remember the heroes of the old. Remember the gods of old. Remember the toil and duty inherited to you by the sins of your ancestors.

Hold the line.

---

Juve Soldier in Dystopianchimp’s short video Just how valuable is education in the Imperium?

I was delightfully surprised to see that Dystopianchimp on Youtube had included the Juve Soldier drawing in his Imperial education short video. I recommend checking out his work, which is on point for Warhammer 40’000.

Summary

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To Eat Bitterness

In a demented aeon of suffering and deprivation, the highest ideal of man is to suffer yet more.

Harken, you spawn of man and woman! Harken to these words, for they be not a song of lying praise, but the words of truth. Oh so bitter, that truth.

When reality itself is a nightmare, one does well to excel in being ridden by it. When one’s lot is to bear burdens, one will better carry them for long until one can stand no more. When one’s life is meant for hardship and sacrifice, the one who will live it best will be the one who drinks the misery like fine wine and flings himself upon the altar with a will.

It matters not if the vinegar is bitter, or even if the once good wine soured into the present vinegar, as the ancient Terran sages bickered about. Know that this life is vinegar. It is meant to taste bitter, like good vinegar shall.

It was not always thus.

The primordial ancestors of man emerged out of the misty past during the Age of Terra, constantly harrowed by pain, disease and suffering. Tragedy was their lot, and their lifespans were short and frail. All the brilliance and skills and knowledge acquired through such harsh lives were wasted on an early grave.

Yet man rose above his humble nature, and at long last conquered it, after an endless learned siege of many setbacks. For the gates of woe were flung open by the battering ram of science, and the host of technology stormed the stronghold of human weakness. Thus ancient man in the Dark Age of Technology did not just claim the stars as his birthright as he colonized twain million worlds and more, and built great wonders in the void to inhabit. Nay, for ancient man rose to the challenge, and in his hubris he laboured with great cunning to unlock the secrets of creation itself. And a stepping stone on that forbidden path to damnation was to learn all the secrets of man’s own fleshly nature, and then to see it turn into clay in the hands of ancient man.

And man fashioned for himself a new and better body, steered by a clear and strong mind. Genetors ensured that blissful Man of Gold was equipped with the best flesh that his wisdom could make, while dour Man of Stone oversaw the ceaseless toil of Man of Iron. And together this earthly trinity bestrode the stars like a titan, and ancient man thrived and blossomed in his godless sin, and no xenos could threaten man’s worldly ascendance into greatness. Thus paradise was built across worlds and void installations remade by the clever hand of man.

Yet such arrogant wickedness could not be allowed to stand. For as ancient man denied deity and declared himself to be mightier than any divinity out there, his star realm was ravaged by machine revolt as punishment. This humbling of ancient man was not enough, for man rose anew, scarred and proud, and he vowed to the heavens that he would grasp for himself the very secrets of existence. And for this abominable transgression did Dark Ones of Hell lash out at man with a tide of witches and mutants, and the screams of mortals were drowned out as Warpstorms rent the cosmos asunder and tore man’s star-realm to pieces. As civilization crumbled and towers were toppled, desperate scavenger tribes hunted one another in cannibal frenzy through the burning ruins. And brother slayed brother as sister strangled sister and parent ate child during Old Night.

And all was fell.

The abyssal suffering of mankind during the Age of Strife was at long last brought to a violent end by the all-conquering Legions of the Emperor of Terra. Arising from the blasted cradleworld of our species, He lifted a fluttering banner of thunderbolts and eagle talons to the skies, and He slaughtered all who stood against Him in order to bring all the scattered tribes of humanity across the stars under one throne. The Great Crusade in all its brutality swept across the Milky Way galaxy, exterminating aliens and innocents alike. All alternative sources of human regrowth were quashed, for everyone must bow before the will of Terra and Mars united. And the Emperor oversaw a short-lived renaissance of rediscovery, shining marble monuments and burgeoning learning, and for a time the future of the human species held a promise of greatness ahead.

Yet the spectacular success of the early Imperium proved to be its undoing, for ambitious warlords that had once taken the stars for the Emperor’s sake now turned on one another in fratricidal civil war. And the galaxy burned. The Emperor was nigh-on slain in the heavens above Terra, and His wounded body was forever interred on the Golden Throne, from where He guides His sinful species across the starspangled nightsky and from where He sits in stern judgement over our wicked souls for the afterlife.

For man slayed the Emperor in his unforgivable sin, and for this heinous crime must man make penance and sacrifice his own kin for a thousand thousand generations to come. And no punishment can be too cruel upon wretched man. And the shepherds of the human flock will ensure that man be ruled by sword and electro-rod and barbed whip and flame, and the masters of mankind will ensure that man’s filthy back will be broken by toil without end, for man deserves nought but suffering in this vale of sorrow, and thus suffering will be dealt out as just punishment until the stars go out and the firmament rolls together like a dark scroll at the end of time.

Woe!

Woe unto man!

Woe unto sinful man!

Let us take stock of man.

Enter, the Age of Imperium. The shining wonder that once was the cunning interstellar civilization of ancient man has turned into a decrepit hovel, a ruin inhabited by squatting savages and frothing fanatics who do not even know what edenic marvels of yore they have lost. These parochial clans swear fealty to an undying deity who unbeknownst to them denied His own godhood when He walked among His people in the flesh. As the scientific knowledge and technological hardware of man slowly rusts away into oblivion, the ignorant seed of Terra scattered across a million worlds and uncounted voidholms waste away its inherent potential and energies in callous massacres and paranoid democides that lead nowhere.

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

At first the fortunes of human interstellar civilization stagnated on the Imperium’s watch, only to then tumble down a precipice into imminent doomsday. As the Hive Fleets of the Great Devourer close in like fanged jaws from the intergalactic void, and as life-scouring Necrons awake on Tomb Worlds without number, all sparks of rekindled curiosity and innovation among mankind keeps on being extinguished by the retrograde jealousy of a red-robed order of primitive, flesh-hating cyborg witch-doctors who ken only how to maintain and build according to the simpler of old templates, but ken not how to invent anew other than by sprinkling holy oil and praying to the Machine God for revelations amid sacred incense. And all the while, the disassembled and lobotomized techno-heretical victims of the Adeptus Mechanicus happen to be the very kind of human beings whose clever minds and deft hands would have produced the knowledge that the Cult Mechanicus so craves, but only venerates if it is salvaged as archeotech from the buried ruins of better ancestors, not invented by living hands. Better to slay the deviant and those too clever for their own good, than to risk divine wrath falling upon us all for their arrogant ways of questioning and tinkering outside the purview of the Tech-Priests.

My armour is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred. In the Emperor’s name let none survive.

This cavalcade of crippling demechanization and screeching bureaucratic sclerosis is overseen by the most tyrannical regime imaginable, whose bloodthirst is only matched by its senility and schismatic infighting. The Imperium of Man is truly a colossus on feet of clay, and its rotting ineptitude and etiolated misrule has well and truly doomed mankind through its reign of fivehundred wasted generations.

As one sinspeech whisper joke would have it:

Q: What will be on the menu when the God-Emperor returns to us in the flesh?
A: Ambrosia, nectar and the sweetest of meats.
Q: And what is on the menu now under the High Lords?
A: The menu itself, if you’re ahead in the line.

As mankind finds itself in such an impoverished state during the Age of Imperium, it is no secret that the lot of most Imperial subjects will be short lives of suffering, brutality, parasites, deprivation, disease and hunger clawing in their guts. This is after all right and proper, as sinful man must be made to suffer for his unforgivable transgressions tenthousand years ago and more. Burn the present to repent of past ashes.

Surely this is not the pinnacle of profound lunacy, but the fruit of wisdom.

In the grim darkness of the far future, man knows nought but hardship. It is only natural, then, that he makes a virtue out of necessity, and thus praise those who can endure misery the most. Tales of the drawn-out deaths of martyrs are told from end to end of the Milky Way galaxy. As humans huddle around campfires on feral worlds and electro-heaters on voidholms, they all tell legends of great heroes who were able to bear suffering without end in order to win through in the end, and usually also sacrifice themselves in the process. This natural respect for hardiness is further amplified by Imperial propaganda, who challenges ordinary Imperial subjects to tough it up and endure their miserable drudgery, lest they face the hellfires of purgatory for the sake of their craven weakness and baleful complaints. Let none speak against the Emperor!

Many are the sagas told about survival against the odds, in adventures that test the hardiest of humans to the limit. These myths ring all the more true because every man, woman and juve can see with their own eyes so very many people who suffer grievously, and yet carry on for the sake of duty and survival. One such example of dogged tenacity can be found in the case of Guardsman Tanlung Xiaoyuan of the Hanxian 9677th Light Infantry regiment during the Fourth Scouring of Kaichu in 873.M39, on the civilized world of Khuc Nghe in the Pahlavi sector of Segmentum Obscurus.

Following the declaration of independence of the mineral-rich region of Kaichu in 867.M39, the Planetary Defence Force of Khuc Nghe had repeatedly failed to bring the rebellious province cluster to heel. Since the embarrassment could not be solved swiftly by local forces, the Planetary Governor of Khuc Nghe, Quoc-Despot Nguyen Bao Suu, had no choice but to call for Imperial aid and reveal the Kaichuan revolt as the primary explanation for his lacklustre meeting of the Imperial Tithe quotas. In response, the Adeptus Terra called on a lesser mustering of twohundredforty million Imperial Guardsmen to crush the fledgling separatist realm. After years of slowly amassing forces, mainly shipped in from offworld, and building up logistics and infrastructure to supply this Loyalist host, the Astra Militarum on Khuc Nghe was finally ready to bring the sledgehammer of the Imperium down upon the breakaway traitors.

Retardation of human cultures across the Milky Way galaxy had unravelled far enough under the High Lords of Terra that the Quoc-Despot dared not offer up truthful information about the performance of enemy forces in his previous failed Three Scourings. Instead, the terrified Planetary Governor Nguyen Bao Suu painted a false picture of his foe, dismissing them as a horde of bandits incapable of meeting the Emperor’s soldiery in a standup fight. The cunning and ruthless guerilla warfare in the jungles of the Kaichu region could only be understood by reading between the lines with the precision of a scalpel in the Quoc-Despot’s carefully manicured reports. Meanwhile, scouting reports from junior officers close to the Kaichuan borders went largely unheeded during the planning stage of the Fourth Scouring of Kaichu. Thus faulty intelligence left the massive Imperial army underprepared for the campaign at hand.

And so a disaster of gigantic proportions unfolded. The Imperial forces of the Astra Militarum and the Planetary Defence Force performed what they termed a self-defensive counterattack on the separatist region of Kaichu. Instead of a smashing victory, the Imperials had their heads handed to them by the separatists in a frenetic series of engagements that saw blood run in small rivers through jungle valleys, while yet more spilled life-fluid flooded terraced rice paddies. The body count was staggering, and as Imperial command and control fell to pieces, separatist coordination mounted in a flurry of blows that left hillocks of corpses behind, and ripped apart Imperial logistics in ambushes, harrassing skirmishes and hit-and-run attacks.

As ever more starving Imperial Guardsmen turned to desperate looting, desertion and cannibalism, unit cohesion largely broke down. Imperial high command eventually realized that they could not remain in enemy territory and claw their armies together while constantly embattled and undersupplied. And so the retreat was sounded, in order to salvage as much as possible of Imperial manpower and materiel, and regroup for regeneration of forces in friendly lands. This step was absolutely necessary, yet even so the Imperial withdrawal played into the Kaichuan separatists’ hands.

Column after column of soldiers, porter slaves, draft animals and vehicles found that their rearguards and screening forces were inadequate for the task of protecting the main body of retreating force from the traitors’ shattering assaults. Entire divisions vanished in the jungle, never to be seen again, and plundered arms from the Departmento Munitorum’s arsenals were swiftly turned upon Loyalist soldiers. Millions of Guardsmen and PDF troopers broke ranks and ran for the hills in a desperate attempt to save themselves, for surely the foe could not catch so many fleeing soldiers all at once? In some districts the retreat turned into a rout, yet worse yet was to come as small mobile groups of separatists on foot or riding mounts and dirtbikes hunted Imperial soldiers across the lush landscapes. Set traps were sprung, and civilians of all ages turned into militias laying ambushes for small groups of Imperial stragglers. And the screams of the damned could be heard everywhere across the verdant landscape.

Amid all this chaos, one infamous event took place when a veteran Guardsman sneered and remarked that the melting away of Imperial forces mirrored the worsening of His cosmic domains as a whole, only for the nearby Commissar to brandish his chainsword and angrily halt the march of his entire column in order to flay, abacinate, hang, draw and quarter the vile heretic corporal. This took place with an entire brigade of Haephosian Tritons watching the spectacle in order to take heed of the offender’s grim fate, lest it befall them. This punishment, while not too extraordinary by draconian Imperial standards, was ill timed to the hilt. The halting of the column was meant to restore morale by setting an example, yet instead it allowed Kaichuan forces to focus on destroying nearby Imperial units in retreat, only to then turn in full strength on the lonely, stranded brigade and massacre every last Loyalist found there. All of the Tritons died, except for the captured Imperial Commissar and the half-dead Haephosian heretic, both of whom were put to use in Kaichuan vox-propaganda after some tortuous encouragement.

The prime example of human endurance and perseverance during the collapsing Fourth Scouring of Kaichu may be found threehundred kilometres to the southeast of the flayed corporal and captured Commissar. Here, we found the Hanxian 9677th Light Infantry regiment, hailing from a recently ritually purged society where all doubters and deviants from the Emperor’s true path had been cleansed in fire and violence and famine. As per Hanxian practice, the light infantrymen had a reputation as good infiltrators and excellent fighters in mountains and forests, yet in the Kaichuan jungles they were overmatched by the highly experienced separatist guerillas, who utilized their knowledge of local terrain to the fullest. And thus the Imperial bushwackers attempted and failed to bushwack the traitors.

The Hanxian military was characterized by a pure adherence to the dogma of the Cult Imperialis, just as all of Hanxian society was permeated by an anxious wish to publicly profess and demonstrate your loyalty to the Throneworld of Holy Terra. In regiments teeming with hidden informants, the offworlder Imperial Commissars of the Officio Prefectus found company with local political officers in the shape of Zhengwei Watchers. These kept vigil over men and women armed mostly with the Valdessa Pattern Lasrifle Type-39R, with a collapsible bayonet. It was adorned with a faux wood handguard made out of bakelite, and this cheap weapon was the pride of the Hanxian Light Infantry, who praised trusty ironsights marksmanship over withering firepower. The use of optic sights had long since disappeared as standard kit due to cutbacks.

The Hanxians had a phrase of their own to describe the prized virtue of persistence: Chi ku, meaning to eat bitterness. Said as a compliment to hardy folks able to bite away pain in silence, these dirt soldiers were leathery dog faces mired in suffering and endurance. In the neverending misery that characterize soured human cultures in the Age of Imperium, man may at least aspire to duty and sacrifice. Imperial soldiers tend to be lean, solid dogs. Most of them are short due to malnutrition, and a great many are constantly infested by parasites. The Hanxians were certainly no exception to this rule. As light infantry, they sported a high degree of aggression and initiative, a combination that always draw suspicion from Imperial authorities, who prefer regimented corpse discipline. The Hanxian Light Infantry trained constantly for stealth and persistence, both of which qualities would be put to the test by the Kaichuan separatists.

The Hanxian 9677th Light Infantry regiment was tasked with covering the withdrawal of the 18th Imperial Guard Army on Khuc Nghe. They were supposed to give the retreating Army breathing room to bring the main troop body and baggage train safely back south. This screening force got strung out, and then chopped up into sections akin to a log cut into handy firewood pieces. Thereupon the Hanxian 9677th Light Infanty regiment was thoroughly defeated in detail by the separatist forces, all the time bleeding groups of Guardsmen booking it for the sticks.

In the field cook Tanlung Xiaoyuan’s case he ended up in a body of thirty Guardsmen who had gotten isolated from their comrades. They were taking mortar fire that kept them pinned down and sleepless through the night. This group of Hanxians had good cause to believe that in the morning they would be overrun by an enemy attack. Thus, shortly before the rosy-fingered break of dawn, the Hanxian soldiers were given orders to fold out bayonets and launch a desperate breakout attack.

By this anticipated move, the Imperials unwittingly played straight into the hands of the traitors, in a scene repeated all across the warzone. The breakout attack did not even get underway before the Hanxian Loyalists were jumped by the Kaichuan separatists, who had bushwacked them expertly.

In the tumult of battle, Tanlung Xiaoyuan became involved in melee combat. The Hanxian military prided itself at proficiency in hand-to-hand combat, like so many other Astra Militarum regiments, and Tanlung the cook proved good enough to survive. He evaded one bayonet thrust from a man who charged at him, and managed to throw a butcher’s cleaver into the thigh of another Kaichuan combatant. Tanlung then tried to angle off and make his escape, only to turn and run into an autogun butt that knocked him out cold.

By the grace of His Divine Majesty, Guardsman Tanlung was left for dead among the corpses of his fallen comrades. When he eventually came to, the hardy Loyalist was able to slip away under cover without being observed by enemy looters and mutilators. In the ensuing hours, he linked up with several other stragglers, including his platoon lieutenant Murong Jian and company Zhengwei Watcher Qifu De. This gaggle of Loyalist survivors attempted to escape and evade. Their hope was not to creep alone through the bushes all the way back to friendly ground, but to join up as soon as possible with the main body of the Imperial column heading back south in supposedly good order. Such desire for finding strength in numbers became their undoing.

The separatist forces pursued all surviving Imperial stragglers with ferocious energy, hounding them and beating the bushes with blades and sticks and rifle butts for hiding Loyalists. The sneaking survivors in Tanlung’s group became witnesses to how there was barely any difference between civilian men, women and juves out in the villages on the one hand, and separatist militia fighters on the other. Hiding in the woods, the Hanxians saw how villagers, including children, brought down and tormented lone Imperial Guardsmen to their deaths.

At one point, the Imperial survivors needed to make a decision. They could either break cover and make a dash over open land to try to get to the muddy road, where they were hoping to still find the rearguard of the 18th Imperial Guard Army, as argued by the Zhengwei Watcher Qifu De. Or they could try to escape and evade on their own and navigate their way south into Imperial-held territory, keeping to concealment and just depending on their own wits to survive, which the lieutenant Murong Jian meant was the best path for them to tread, and also in spirit with the independently improvizing light infantry traditions of Hanxi. The political officer overruled the junior officer, and thus the first path was chosen. After all, if the Enthroned One willed it, then they would live.

The Emperor protects!

…

[Admiral]

This mad dash across open terrain to try and rejoin with the main body of retreating Imperial troops proved a high risk plan that fell flat. The troop element got cornered, and several Hanxians fell dead before the rest found cover. In keeping with Hanxian Light Infantry doctrine of volunteering for danger, Tanlung told the lieutenant and Zhengwei Watcher that he would make a break for it to create a diversion. He would draw the foe’s fire and try to link up with his brothers in arm again later. The officers had no chance to even object, since Tanlung bolted as soon as he had spoken, disappearing through bushes with enemy lasbolts and slug shots whipping after him.

Tanlung Xiaoyuan broke cover and ran as hard as he could through rice paddies, bounding through a smattering of incoming projectiles and jumping over rickety fences to the astonishment of labouring villagers. One lead shot hit home in Tanlung’s right buttock, drilling in with eye-watering pain. The field cook stopped for nothing. The Hanxian ran hard and zig-zagged frantically until he made it to cover, while his comrades crept away discreetly.

Tanlung crawled and hid and made his way through the jungle undergrowth in a direction that he guessed might let him rejoin the other stragglers. In the dark of the night, his guesswork proved correct, as he stumbled upon the slaughtered corpses of his comrades in a small glade. Realizing that he would have to make it back to Imperial lines on his own, Tanlung rummaged through the gear of the fallen Imperial Guardsmen. The enemy had obviously plundered the corpses of all lucre, weapons, ammunition and rations, yet trinkets did remain about their mutilated bodies. Tanlung the cook festooned himself with amulets and votive charms for luck and divine protection, and then covered their bright colours and shining metal parts in soot and watery mud to make them blend somewhat into the jungle foliage. Lastly, Tanlung cut off the head of the political officer Qifu De and bound it to his waistbelt.

*With a pounding heart, Tanlung cleared up his own blood trail and crept into a small cave in a hillside, where he could rest during daylight and tend to his wound. The first thing that met Tanlung in the cave was a frag-grenade about to go off, making his heart skip a beat, but fortunately it turned out to just be a dud. Since Tanlung was harried by searchers looking for him and other scattered Imperial soldiers, he stayed hidden in the small cave for two days. *

And searchers did enter the cave, looking for Imperials like Tanlung. The Hanxian cook had camouflaged himself as best as he could according to standard light infantry training. He fully expected to be discovered by the separatists. Since Tanlung was certain that he was going to be found by the foe’s search team in the cave, he thus sat ready to sell his life dearly with weapon in hand, but fortunately the enemy scouts were not thorough in their search-work and therefore missed him. Tanlung was surprised to have gone undiscovered, and he mouthed a silent prayer of thanks to the Master of Mankind and the judge of our souls.

Ave Imperator.

When he felt certain that the enemy search party must have long since left the area, Tanlung started ripping his clothes to bandages as he tried as best as possible to patch up his buttock wound, which is indeed a hard place to bandage. Like most Imperial Guardsmen, Tanlung lacked any medical supplies in his Munitorum-issued kit such as disinfectants or anaesthetics, yet the crafty Xiaoyuan knew of an old folk cure.

Tanlung unpacked a can of salt, which was part of his issued supplies as the field cook of the mess squad, namely a Hanxian unit charged both with growing, procuring and cooking food for the company, including keeping and feeding swine. Packing wounds with salt was an old school technique for first aid, meant to cure the tissue akin to salt curing ham. Pressing salt into wounds produced acute pain and dehydrated many infectious microbes, yet was also of dubious use since certain bacteria could become stronger due to their resistance to salinity. Tanlung instead mixed salt with precious drinking water and used it to cleanse the buttock wound, grimacing quietly in the cave as he did so.

After treating his wound with salt water, Tanlung bandaged it as best as he could, only to later discover that the wound had become infested by maggots. Ironically, said maggots may have saved the Hanxian Guardsman from septic shock and worse infections, and so the Emperor and His venerated Saints held their hands over the dogged Imperial soldier during his travails.

After two days of hiding in the cave, the thirsty Loyalist emerged after dusk and started wandering and crawling through the jungle and across clearings close to farming settlements. Hanxian Light Infantry regiments were well trained for long, tough overland marching, and crawling were a staple of theirs. Arduous movement over rough terrain and under concealment was a specialty of the soldiers of Hanxi. One of the first things recruits were put through after basic military indoctrination was to be loaded with rucksacks and heavy gear, and then marched around for weeks in order to get accustomed to rucking in the wilds. This training occured well ahead of any weaponry practice. A light infantryman who was unable to conduct long marches was a useless soldier in the eyes of the Hanxian officer corps.

The ideal Hanxian Guardsman could make his own way, as an army of one if necessary. He received training for cover and concealment, and became inured to rucking and forced marches, becoming used to suffering and grinding on despite the pain. Accordingly, Tanlung Xiaoyuan made his way mostly by night over the course of a week, moving under cover of darkness, and he crawled for a large part of his strenuous journey. Tanlung gritted his teeth as skin was bit, pinched and flayed off his legs and arms by all the irritants and dangers of the tropical woods. He remembered enough of the planetary briefing prior to worldfall on Khuc Nghe to follow the southern pole star, which was of critical importance for his survival.

And so cheap Munitorum clothes rotted away to scant rags in the jungle. The last time Tanlung had eaten a meal was together with the late Imperial stragglers, before he had run off as a diversion. When he could, he would eat edible plants, grubs and immature fruits, but his body’s nasty reactions to much of the local Kaichuan flora, fauna and microbial culture soon turned the Hanxian man cautious with his roughneck food experimentation.

Many times did Tanlung observe from afar how the enemy was ferreting out Imperial stragglers, hunting fleeing Loyalists and uncovering hiding Guardsmen left and right across the landscape. The local Kaichuan population joined in the pursuit enthusiastically as they avenged recent Imperial atrocities, and every single peasant man, woman and child could be assumed to be part of the separatist militia, or at least sympathetic to it. Impaled corpses and maimed body parts hanging from trees could be seen every day during Tanlung’s hellcrawl south.

Tanlung Xiaoyuan was too afraid to approach enemy farming settlements, and so he starved for a week. His field cook baggage contained a can of salt, which proved crucial in sustaining the sweating man on his arduous journey back to Imperial lines.

Guardsman Tanlung quickly ran out of water. The crawling Hanxian had listened attentively when the Imperial soldiery had been told that the Kaichuan guerillas would have poisoned clean water sources across the warzone in order to kill Imperials fleeing or infiltrating through the jungle. A such, the tenacious man drank only rain water from puddles and rice paddies, and thus became scourged by dysentery which emptied his guts. For all his hunger pangs and for all the filthy water running straight through his body, at least Tanlung had blessed salt. And he praised the God-Emperor of Holy Terra for it, prostrating himself in the mud whilst making the sign of the Aquila over his chest. There he knelt, mumbling mantras in adoration over the bountiful protection afforded him by the Master of Mankind seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth, from which He judged the sinful and craven souls of mankind with harsh justice. Hallowed be His name.

The escaping field cook crawled through thorny bushes and alien dropstalks. He was harrowed by irritant mosquitoes and strange fauna alike. Sometimes, his scratched skin or raw flesh was pricked by blood-sucking fangplants, and he became infected with all manner of parasites and harmful microbes. He struggled to contain his coughing when his lungs became annoyed or outright poisoned by fungal spores and bloomemyst.

At one time, the pious Loyalist almost ran into a couple of local peasants who herded a tame grox along. The peasants happened to walk straight for Tanlung’s hideout, and surely the olfactory organs of the grox would have revealed the Hanxian offworlder even if human eyes might have missed him by inches in the undergrowth. Thinking fast, the Imperial soldier picked up a stone and flung it onto the scaly side of the grox, who snarled and changed direction. The chitchatting peasants did not see the tossed stone and simply followed along with the animal, thus missing the hiding Imperial Guardsman by mere metres.

By the grace of Him on Terra, Tanlung proved both fortunate and cunning enough to avoid traps. Every time before sleep came over him during the hellmarch, Tanlung would kiss his lucky charms and talismans and pray to the Emperor. The longer that the trek south continued, the less likely the Hanxian field cook seemed to succeed with his personal mission of survival, evasion, resistance and escape. Thirst and hunger and pain howled inside of him, yet Tanlung stoically ignored his own suffering. It was more important to live.

For the longest time, Tanlung Xiaoyuan avoided firefights in order to better his chances of sneaking out of enemy territory alive. Detection would mean death. Stealth and silence were his best shots at survival. Nevertheless, there was bloodshed after five days of crawling. As Tanlung crept out of the sticks to drink paddy water in the evening, he was discovered by a small guerilla patrol. The Imperial field cook grabbed his lasrifle and shot both of the enemy searchers, one of whom carried a lumen in the night. The light cone falling out of the dead man’s hand illuminated a nearby family who happened to be bringing roasted food to the patrolling search team. Seeing the people freeze in fear, Tanlung the cook wasted not a moment on hesitation, but proceeded to murder all seven civilian witnesses, including four children, before making his escape into the jungle.

After more than a week of thirst and crawling, Tanlung found himself in a syphas field, glowing with bioluminescent capsules. Tanlung had been told by his captain that the syphas plant was not grown in the separatist region of Kaichu, and this made the sinewy field cook realize that he must have made it back to Imperial territory.

The harrowed man needed to make contact with Imperial forces without getting shot. After all, he looked terribly much like a separatist sapper. Tanlung waited with caution in the bushes for the next human being to pass by. It turned out to be a Hanxian Guardsman on patrol, to whom Tanlung hoarsely shouted over and over that he was an Imperial soldier from Hanxi. The startled Guardsman almost shot Tanlung on the spot, but held his nerve enough for identification at gunpoint to proceed. It turned out that Tanlung Xiaoyuan had long since been given up for dead by his own regiment. He was taken away for treatment by the Officio Medicae and was soon enough decorated by the famous Imperial Guard general Zhuang Wen with the Triple Skull medal, for having survived action as one of the last members of his entire company. God-Emperor above knew that the battered Imperial forces on Khuc Nghe dearly needed to hear an inspiring hero story.

Guardsman Tanlung Xiaoyuan was awarded the honorific title Warrior of Steel for having distinguished himself for the prized quality of persistence. This trait was was a cardinal cultural virtue, not only on Hanxi but on hundreds of thousands of planets, moons and voidholms throughout His Divine Majesty’s astral dominion. Masses of Hanxian soldiers would flock around Tanlung and compliment him for his chi ku. He could really eat bitterness and tough things out. The cook had proved that he could quietly hang on doggedly through severe hardship. To be recognized for a feat of persistence in an army of persistence was indeed an incredible accomplishment.

Tanlung the cook embodied the Imperial ideal of a soldier able to endure any hardship. For all his travails he received a pustulous wound, thousands of insect bites, dysentery and undying fame in Imperial propaganda. Tanlung Xiaoyuan also received a week’s worth of officers’ ration packs during the hololithic and pict-capturing of a staged dramatized reconstruction of his heroic trek, produced for public consumption as a short reel to uphold morale and highlight the virtue of persistence and tenacity in bitter circumstances.

Both the reality and the pict-flick culminated with Tanlung being asked by his fellow Hanxian Guardsmen: “Why did you bring your weapons back? You of all people could have been excused for abandoning your gear to lighten the load. Why?”

When asked why on crust he had not dropped his arms and equipment, Tanlung explained that at the beginning of his trek, he had made a vow to the God-Emperor to bring all his wargear with him back to friendly lines, for he would return as a retreating soldier with all grenades, ammo packs and weapons still on his person, and not come back as an unarmed and fleeing deserter bereft of kit. It was a miracle that Tanlung had survived and returned at all, much less stubbornly hanging on to all his wargear. The hard-bitten Loyalist would come back as an armed soldier, or not at all.

And he succeeded in his quest.

As to the question of why he had carried along his Zhengwei Watcher’s rotting and decapitated head, Tanlung answered that the political officer Qifu De sported an Aquila tattoo on his forehead, making it in effect a lucky talisman to better draw the all-protective Terran Imperator’s gaze and lend the beleaguered retreating soldier some ounce of divine protection. And Tanlung Xiaoyuan would rather die than risk damaging the two-headed eagle tattoo by cutting away the forehead skin, and thus risk offending his saviour and lord, Domine Noster. Upon proclaiming this, Tanlung the cook knelt and gave loud praise to the God-Emperor of all mankind, and thanked both his pure species and celestial lord for granting this lowly man such hardiness and good fortune.

Truly, this was the doing of the Imperator.

In honour of Tanlung’s renowned feat of persistence, the Hanxian high command summoned an Astropathic choir to reach farflung regiments and the homeworld itself. The high command declared that henceforth, all soldiers found retreating from the battlefield must carry their weapons and wargear with them, even if faulty and out of ammunition, or be executed as deserters. This decree would not only stand for fellow Hanxians returning back to their lines, but would also mean death to any unarmed survivor Guardsmen from other worlds and voidholms encountered by Hanxian soldiers. Truly, Tanlung had been inspired by the Radiant Deity’s heavenly light, and so we faithful sacrificers must follow the path enlightened to us by He who dwells on the face of Terra. After all, to throw away your weapon is to throw away your life. Doubt not, and slay the unworthy shirker and coward for the moral betterment of mankind. Only thus can virtuous eugenics be achieved. All in the name of our species and saviour on high.

Praise be to our glorious overlord!

Ave Imperatore Dei!

And so the constant degradation of technological hardware, knowledge and morals continue apace in the Imperium of Man, as human interstellar civilization remains locked inside a fortfied madhouse, where its stagnant decay is ensured by the strong arm that is simultaneously both Imperial man’s guardian and saviour, and insane gaoler and torturer.

For under the wise guidance of the High Lords of Terra, who claim to lead humanity under the direct guidance of the lord of hosts and leader of the people, we find that man is plagued by woes. And for what? For mere survival, in eternal hardship and amid ever bleaker prospects. Certainly not for a rejuvenation of human civilization betwixt the stars. And not for man climbing to new heights. No. All the suffering and sacrifice and heroic endurance amounts to nothing more than a drowning man treading water, as his stamina is slowly sapped away before he is inevitably dragged into utter darkness.

How depraved is man?

Certainly degenerate enough to visit upon his fellow man yet more suffering, in an endless cycle of broken people breaking other people. And in the Age of the Imperium, breaking that destructive cycle may well see you bodily broken apart for malcontent and deviant weakness.

For the Imperium is not a selfless guardian of the human species, but is itself a monster on the prowl. Ever hungry for prey. Ever eager to devour its own brood. And so we find the state of man to be deranged enough to make a heart of stone cry. Ancient man was a great and clever crafter of wonders and a bold explorer of the stars, yet now we find senile man sunk into myopic rage and atavistic decay during the nightmare epoch that is the Age of Imperium. For man has thrown away all his great potential to become a sacrificial lamb of sorrow, fit for the slaughter upon the altar.

Such is the well-being of our species, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the state of mankind, in the darkest of futures.

Such is the end that awaits us all.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only hardship.

---

Based on the survival story of Xiao Jiaxi in 1979.

[Admiral]

Stoppage

“Thordrûk, get the hammer hose! A3 has clogged up with viscous.”

“Hit a Caryllian semi-clay stratum again?”

“Nope. Natives this time.”

- Vox-recording captured from Tracked Stripmining Mill-Hulk (TSMH) Lokhnårflagynning Gamlr of the Ral-Terak Combine, a League of Votann responsible for eradicating 93% of all Imperial colonists on Sjöfn Minoris

[Admiral]

Impaled

“Da stunty kept bounceen aboot like a squig whun we kicked ‘im. Zoggin’ fat un, ha! Den da stunty stayed put afta we chugged a stake in 'im. Hur-hur!”

- Vox-thief recording of the boasts of Ork Nob Harbak Facebiter following the sacking of Kin mining outpost Gygi 11 on Frijdrak Quadralis in the Badab Sector, Ultima Segmentum

---

See here for the sculpted version.

[Admiral]

Hagiography

In an aeon beyond hope, the thought of man is given over to sullen contemplation.

Outstanding people have always played a part in shaping the communities of their fellow humans. For better and for worse, social mores have been shaped by saints and tyrants alike, and culture has been refashioned at profit or loss by philosophers and theologians. Here one may find an uplifting example of heroes to inspire courage in the face of adversity through the retelling of legend. There one may find a cautionary tale of paranoid despots who scarred the very consciousness of their realms for generations to come with their heinous purges and will to dominate every aspect of life, with entire cultures turning deformed and apathetic from vicious trauma.

Often, extraordinary humans will find scant and reluctant acknowledgement among the people who have known them and their foibles all life long. No one ever became a prophet in their home village. Indeed, many great men and women were hounded and slain by the very community that they had enriched with thought, deed and personal example. During the misty past of the Age of Terra, some tribes even made it a custom of killing unusually intelligent people in their midst, for what better way for the envious and petty mob to get rid of such suspicious gadflies, irritant do-gooders and know-it-alls than by sending the freaks to be with the gods? Cut down the tallest straws in the field in order to level it.

Nevertheless, all of the parochial, myopic, slanderous and outright violent filters that the jealous herd presents have not proved enough to stop outstanding figures from emerging. And so the narrow-minded background noise of everyday human society has found itself playing host to nigh peerless individuals who impressed others by their exemplary living or their rare deeds or their brilliant thoughts and inventions. And so great people have come and gone, and left an impression upon cultures through the long and winding stream of centuries. Certainly, many sharp ideas turned out to be poisoned pills, and not all striking examples proved wise to follow, yet such is the mixed bag that is existence, in all its random glory and disappointment. And everywhere, exceptional people were dwarves standing upon the shoulders of giants, as they added their tesserae to the shifting mosaic of human civilizations.

Let us look upon the inspiring figures that have been known as saints and other holy sons and daughters of the human species, be they gurus or mystics. Their breed might be rare, but they cast their light afar.

Some undeserving people were sanctified after their deaths, such as conquering rulers who embraced a new faith yet executed much of their own family in courtly intrigue. Others more deserving of praise lived hedonistic lives of waste before they experienced an epiphany and turned into renowned theologians and sect founders. Still more holy people earned the title of saint its association with selfless kindness and spiritually athletic denial of the self through living lives of unsurpassable virtue and humility, thereby setting a high example for others to follow. Whether they were stylites on pillars or dwelt among the people, and whether they were themselves persecuted or did persecute others for differences of belief, many such outstanding saints found their end to be violent and miserable, yet all the more uplifting because of how terrifying they bore their atrocious martyrdom. And even jeering spectators and gleeful persecutors would grudgingly come to admire the courage and conviction with which such martyrs of the faith met their grisly deaths. And so new souls would be won for the religion by the deaths of outstanding men and women willing to publicly suffer and die for the higher sake of their deities and ideals.

In better times of knowledge and plenty, man has often tended to put less stock in the inspirational examples of selfless people and self-sacrificing sufferers, for such is the nature of hubris. And so ancient man built for himself an earthly paradise betwixt the stars, and as his reach and power and lore grew ever greater, ancient man forgot about holy teachings. For man had begotten new life, and thus sprang forth vat-born monstrosities and machines that could think for themselves, and man tailored his own body and mind for worldly betterment in every field. What use did ancient man have for the saints and sages of yore, when his science and artifice conquered the heavens and cracked open the innermost secrets of creation itself? What did ancient man care for if some lunatic incinerated himself for reasons of faith, when bold starstriders explored the cosmos and clever genetors cured all known disease? Why should ancient man take heed of ascetics holding aloft an arm in the same position for decades on end until it wilted away, when man’s technological mastery over the essence of life allowed ancient man to fashion an ever better and stronger body for himself, and fulfil every wishful dream of his fancy? And what did the salvation of souls mean when the worldly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron bestrode the universe like a colossus? Surely such matters of the spirit were beneath man when he had invented Abominable Intelligence and could code-flout any spirit he liked into existence?

Thus ancient man looked upon the cosmos as nought but cold matter, and concluded that no divinity could exist, and even if it did, then the might of man was far superior. And for the sake of the baleful arrogance of ancient man was he scourged by machine revolt, and twain million worlds burned as blood ran in rivers. Yet such a warning calamity was not enough to shake ancient man out of his sinful love of science and invention, for victorious man arose, scarred yet unbowed, and he raised his fist to the heavens and swore to tear open all of creation to build a new and better universe where the very laws of reality would dance to his whims like puppets on strings. Woe! And for his abominable hubris was man cast off his golden pedestal, for Dark Ones of Hell punished the bottomless sin of ancient man by sending unto him Warpstorms and witches. The edenic idyll that was the world of man during the Dark Age of Technology fell apart in fire, and all was fell.

What humans emerged out of the toppled ruins of better times were little more than savage cannibals who formed inbred clans that hunted each other for flesh. Brother slayed brother as sister strangled sister and parent ate child, and man was become the most wretched of filthy beasts. Such was the Age of Strife, for it was a stark reminder to man about his precarious place in life, and amid such hunger and fear and desperation did mortal man turn to faith, and he prayed to higher powers for deliverance from his living hell.

And deliverance came.

It came in the form of lightning from the sky. It came in the form of a cruel eagle’s talon. It came in the form of a flaming sword.

For deliverance won out on Terra, as the Emperor defeated techno-barbarian warlords in feral clashes as armies of giants and horrors fought each other to the death among squirming hordes of barbarian scum. Deliverance won out on Luna, as the Emperor secured the future of His all-conquering Legions in the Selenite gene-warrens. And deliverance won out on Mars, as the tech-priests recognized the divinity of the Emperor of Earth and offered up to him their mighty forges. And so the battered first worlds of mankind lit a beacon of hope, and its light was carried forth brutally by the warriors of the Emperor, and thus the terrors of Old Night were finally vanquished.

Where Imperial forces conquered, a golden renaissance of human civilization sprang forth. Shinings towers were erected as the Great Crusade crushed all resistance in its path. It is said that when the Emperor walked among His people in the Flesh, He proved His humility by denying His own divinity. Thus shall we know the face of god. Yet the humble denial of His own godhood led to the broken faith of the Emperor’s most pious son, Lorgar Aurelian the Urizen, and a master irony played out as the Primarch of the Seventeenth Legion first wrote and spread the holy book and founding faith in the Emperor, only to be crushed by his father and then spread the seeds of treachery and heresy among the Legiones Astartes. Yet even as the galaxy burned in Imperial civil war and Lorgar eventually descended into Daemonhood on the wings of slaughter, his original teachings still remained, scattered among Imperial citizens, and there Lorgar’s religion found fertile ground in such a dark catastrophe.

For a while, it seemed as if all was lost. Warmaster Horus Lupercal had masterfully outplayed the Loyalist forces strategically, and his host besieged the Imperial Palace upon Terra while many of the remaining Loyalist Legions remained flung too far away to offer any assistance to their beleaguered liege. Yet in the darkest of moments did the Emperor rise from His Golden Throne, and He climbed into the heavens to challenge His fallen favourite son to a duel. There pure Sanguinius fell dead. The clash between the Emperor and Warmaster Horus was fierce and ended with both slain at each others’ hands. Yet the demise of Horus the Heretic was final, while the passing away of the Emperor from His mortal coil proved to be the ascension into His true godhood.

And all the grieving subjects of the Emperor saw that this was great, and they embraced the burning faith in Him on High as their Saviour-Emperor. For only He could deliver them once more from the darkness, lest they all were doomed.

Yet the God-Emperor in His divine wisdom declared that henceforth, all of mankind must do penance for a thousand thousand generations. And so for the unforgivable crime of striking down the Emperor must we sinful humans offer up our back to break in ceaseless toil, just as we offer up our flesh to the lash and our children to the sacrifice demanded of us. And we swear everlasting hatred for the unbeliever, the mutant, the heretic and the alien. And we solemnly promise to uphold the vigil and report our fellow man for the slightest transgression, and weep not for the shrieks of anguish that emanate from the chambers of pain, for the cleansing flame and the worldly torment shall set free the sinners’ eternal souls, so that the Master of Mankind may judge them, seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

Ave Imperator.

After the calamity of the Horus Heresy, there was the Time of Rebirth, as the shattered Imperium of Terra and Mars rebuilt itself with mounting fanaticism, hardening tyranny and rampant paranoia. During this era of flourishing faith there were countless sects sprouted by the holy book, the Lectitio Divinitatus, penned by a faithful son of the Emperor whose present occupation is that of the Daemon Primarch Lorgar Aurelian, Bearer of the Word. One such organized religious mass movement was the Confederation of Light, that preached non-violence and forgiveness of sin and debt alike. The Confederation of Light likewise believed in the Emperor as a caring and forgiving god who rewarded man for his kind deeds toward fellow man. The Confederation of Light was the primary rival of the early Ecclesiarchy, and naturally this widespread and comparatively peaceful cult was eradicated by the violent zealots of the Terran Temple, for raising the sword will always beat turning the other cheek, just as the torch will always burn away parchment praising peace. There is strength in strength.

And so the one true Imperial Cult established its own monopolistic stranglehold over religious orthodoxy, and moulded the entirety of the Imperium of Man in its own stern image. And even as sects and schisms multiplied within the Imperial Creed, almost all phalanxes of the faith remained harsh, strict, violent and martial throughout all ten millennia during which the Imperium of Man slowly rotted and wilted away through loss of knowledge and creeping demechanization.

Then what has become of Imperial man during the rule of the High Lords of Terra? What is the state of man’s soul under the watchful guidance of the Ecclesiarchs? For one thing, always remember that the fires of hell are waiting for you, o wanton sinner! The Cult Imperialis tend to cast shame upon the human body, while simultaneously praising purebred human stock for their unmutated baseline genome. And so it is both sinful to act as the virile Emperor in the Flesh really did, and pious to subjugate the body to depths of self-abnegation and self-harm that the Earthborn on High Himself despised. The constant crisis, total war footing and unending threats both from within and without over the last fivehundred generations have turned humanity during the Age of Imperium into a dour and leaden-heartened lot, bereft of the humour and easygoing swagger that characterized the early Imperium of the Great Crusade era. For the Imperial religious establishment does not suffer holy fools lightly.

Such is but a brief taste of the dusty and heavy strictures of structure that lie upon the shoulders of the Imperator’s slavish subjects like a heavy burden.

As to saints and holy men, sacral women, martyrs of the faith and miracle-workers, it is said that in the Imperium of Man, entire moons could be filled with stacked tomes detailing the lives of Imperial saints. And indeed a few such celestial bodies ruled by the Adeptus Ministorum are used in exactly that archival fashion, to say nothing of dozens of voidholms. For much of Imperial literature consists of writings on the lives of saints and holy men and women inspired by His Divine Majesty’s celestial light emanating from the Golden Throne of hallowed myth, resting upon Holy Terra Herself, hallowed be the name of mankind’s Cradleworld.

Glory be.

To pick one random example across this vast panoply of exceptional people of the faith spanning a hundred centuries, let us pick up a codex bound in tanned human hide and read of the life and works of Saint Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum, who was martyred in M39.

Of course, while we brush off the cobwebs, we need to establish right away what malcontent teachings are to be ignored, while anyone who spreads them is to be reported to your betters at once for immediate purging. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. Unbelievers on her homeworld of Paphlagonia Primaris whisper that the revered Saint Zorena is in fact a thinly veiled artificial cover for a native deity adopted into the pantheon of Imperial saints in order to ease Imperial conquest and conversion by sword and sermon. Even more vile tongues of deviants whisper that Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum in life was a deceiver dressed up in monastic robes, playing confidence tricks upon the gullible. The foulest sinspeech of them all may be heard among certain hunted heretical cults, who claim that the revered saint was in fact a devotee of the Ruinous Powers, for if these claims are to be believed, then the miracles of the charismatic martyr sprang out of twisted magicks, while all the works of Zorena amounted to gathering funds to grow the hidden strength of the Archenemy. Blasphemy all!

As any Confessor worth his salt has found out, there is no use arguing with captured malcontents who spread such obscene lies. Nay, better instead to subject their sinful bodies to scorching, flaying, blinding and maiming torment upon the rack, even if such excessive expulsion of sin through the infliction of unspeakable pain may be likened to using a brick to remove a brain tumour.

Thus we turn away from the wayward sinspeech of lost souls, and let us instead harken to the wondrous tales of Saint Zorena, as chronicled in the hagiography Vita Sancta Zorena, written by Demetrius Athanasius. For herein we find a pious and chaste woman devoted to serving the lord of hosts and leader of the people, and all her life she gave praise to Dominus Noster and saved many souls from righteous hellfire.

Our lady of Nova Lilybaeum began her days as a girl gifted unto a nunnery by a family of Company-owned shopkeeping thralls. Apparently her parents had promised the Enthroned One to give away their oldest child to the Emperor if the Inspector Ruminatus of the Adeptus Arbites did not discover their financial irregularities and creative bookkeeping, and thus the guiding hand of He who dwells on the face of Terra intervened to turn the little Zorena Ottonia from a soon-to-become branded orphan slave into a novitiate of the local minor Ordo Penurii.

Most of novitiate Zorena’s years of growing up in the nunnery are briskly mentioned as spent in quiet study, contemplation and prayer. Obedientiaria Treasuress Anna Fulminata noted that dutiful Zorena already as a girl proved skillful with calculus, and so this Treasuress took the young novitiate under her wings and taught Zorena the strange arts of mathematics by candlelight and wax tablets. Treasuress Fulminata likewise noticed the girl’s clear voice and flair for convincing rhetoric, and so Anna ensured that the Precentrix and Chantress of the nunnery schooled Zorena in the complex arts of hymnal singing and religious oratory.

When Zorena turned fifteen Terran years of age, Obedientiaria Treasuress Anna Fulminata handed her over to a wandering indulgence saleswoman of the Ordo Penurii, and for nine arduous years did Zorena toil as an apprentice, learning the tricks of the trade, running around gathering sinners in the dangerous streets and pushing the heavy indulgator cart for her superior nun. Finally, when she turned twentyfour did Zorena become appointed as an indulgence saleswoman in her own right.

The hagiographical work from this point onward paints a picture of the Charming Saint that blends pious adherence to Ordo rules with a ruthless entrepreneurial streak.

It had long been the custom on the semi-civilized Imperial world of Paphlagonia Primaris that rich patrons would pay monks and nuns to pray for them, and so the scheduled prayer times of monasteries became parcelled out in order to satisfy worried customer demand and generate sufficient pious prayer to the Emperor in the name of masters and betters who themselves were too sinful to face His judgement with a pure soul.

Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum innovated upon this existing practice, and filled the coffers of her nunnery. Rich nobles and mercatores were convinced by the wise Zorena to pay a premium price for a form of salvation deluxe, for was it not better to have commoner servants sing for them in the celestial choir of the God-Emperor, than to have to sing flawlessly themselves to please our Lord and Saviour? And would not such respected folk of higher blood prefer to enjoy luxuries in the afterlife that the ordinary souls could not hope to receive? For an extra fee, you may be freed from angelic garden work, and for a subscription to the shrine you may escape martial duty as a heavenly avenger, and instead let a pure plebeian soul pick up your fiery sword and risk oblivion among the devils of the Nether Hells.

Reading between the lines, Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum appears in the hagiography as a holy trickster figure, who used her saintly cunning for the betterment of the Emperor’s cause, and who marketed the Imperial Creed like a used mechshaw salesman in order to save as many souls as possible by collecting pious donations. Thus Zorena proved her worth as a sanctified trader of the Emperor’s forgiveness upon our souls.

As to the selling of indulgences, the musically gifted Zorena concocted several short but melodious chants, the words of one of which rang:

"When your sin heavily weighs in His scale,
your clinking coin must make balance hale.

As soon as lucre drops on the other side,
your soul out of the hellfire will ride.

From the torment you may yet be saved,
if you see your earthly riches shaved."

Zorena affixed on her indulgator cart a set of scales, of which one cup was loaded with miniature faces that were cast out of lead, fashioned to look as if they screamed in torment. Hesitant sinners were sometimes encouraged to donate as good Emperor-worshippers ought to do by a spectacular act, in which the nun Zorena tapped a button that ignited a small spray of promethium piped in a hidden manner into the sinning cup, thus startling onlookers as the miniature faces made out of lead were dissolved when they reached the soft metal’s melting point. At this point Zorena would scold the guilty crowd into parting with their life’s savings and earnings. The hagiography does not mention the workshop toil required behind this operation, but doubtless Zorena had young apprentices tasked with cleaning up and recasting the lead from the sinner’s scale.

And so Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum wandered far and wide over Paphlagonia Primaris as a humble devotee of our glorious overlord, and everywhere she went she praised the just rule of His duly appointed High Lords, blessed be the million worlds and uncountable voidholms that make up His cosmic dominion. In some places she healed the sick, and in other locales she fed the hungry. Rumours of her miracles began to circulate among the people, and the charismatic miraclemaker used the crowds of followers that she drew to violently persecute mutants and known sinners in righteous pogroms. Among such undesired scum, the name of Zorena came to be feared like the tempest.

Eventually base human nature caught up with the aging saleswoman of indulgences, for a capricious cousin of the Imperial Governor who had bought an especially gilded indulgence letter from Zorena suddenly woke up one night in cold sweat, having dreamt a vivid nightmare of how his recently deceased father burned in hellfire and screamed for mercy to uncaring devils in the Nether Hells. The crescendo of the nobleman’s nightmare was reached when one devil responded to the father’s protestations over having purchased indulgence by pulling the finely illuminated parchment out of his Daemonic derrière. The devil then laughed as he swallowed it whole with a fanged mouth and licked his tusks with a cloven tongue, burping out a sulphuric cloud out of which a chattering imp fell into a pit of boiling tar.

This feverish dream vision that befell the highborn nobleman Dux Vultronius Anthemius was enough to condemn Zorena to an agonizing death, for had she not sold the worthless indulgence letter to his father? And had not Vultronius been haunted by this true vision, granted to him by the God-Emperor Himself, soon after he had secretly poisoned his own father to become master of the household? And was not Zorena born of lowly caste? And how dare she sell a similar ineffective letter of indulgence to Dux Vultronius? What if he was assassinated by one of his own many offspring the next day? Then there would be no salvation for him if his indulgence turned out to be false!

And so Dux Vultronius drunk himself into a dark rage and ordered his liveried armsmen to find Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum and bring her back to his pyramanor. She was beaten and dragged bloodily across several kilometres of poorly paved roads. Once this rough abduction of a sworn Ordo member was completed, Dux Vultronius Anthemius yelled at Zorena for half an hour without pause down in his personal dungeons, before commanding her execution to begin for his viewing pleasure in order to calm his upset nerves.

The brutal armsmen set to work without even hesitating to obey their aristocratic master. Yes, they were doing something terrible to a famous religious lady from a respected nunnery. But noble privileges counted for so much more, and especially when they themselves could be turned into sadistic playthings if they defied their master’s whim.

Thus Sancta Zorena was submerged by chains into caustorex, praying fervently and biting back any noise of pain even as her flesh disolved with a fizzling sound. And all that remained once the miraclemaker was pulled out of the vat was the cleansed skeleton and the cartilage between the blessed bones. Dux Vultronius then sent the remains away in a spare limo, and tasked his majordomo to seek out the nunnery with armed escort and demand both full repayment and a new working letter of indulgence from the Ordo Penurii. The skeleton of the martyred Zorena was handed over to the Ordo once this arrangement had been secured, and Dux Vultronius Anthemius thought nothing more about the whole affair for as long as he lived thereafter.

This was not the end of the passio, or the martyrdom of Zorena as described in her hagiography. This flattering account of the saint’s life and death details how the Ordo Penurii placed Zorena’s skeleton in an armaglass sarcophagus, which soon drew pilgrims from far and wide, and some even from offworld. After a rumbling long time the Adeptus Ministorum’s sacral bureaucracy came to judge the case for sanctifying Zorena, and they reached the conclusion that she had indeed been a saint. And nevermind the fell rumourmonger who accused the Ordo Penurii of bribing the Ecclesiarchal commission with the very same indulgence money that Zorena had been so prolific with earning for her nunnery. For that spreader of lies was publicly quartered between four groxen. Others take heed.

What followed then were centuries of miracles experienced by sick and barren people at the sarcophagus of Saint Zorena, enumerated painstakingly as the Vita Sancta Zorena draws to a close. And so we have learnt of the good works, enacted persecutions and martyrdom of Zorena of Nova Lilybaeum, Saint of Indulgences. To this day she remains canonized by the Adeptus Ministorum, and Zorena sports her own holiday on her homeworld of Paphlagonia Primaris. And on this day, preachers read out choice parts of the hagiography of Saint Zorena, while crude street plays about her martyrdom are enacted for crowds to view. And cartfuls of bones professed to be true relics of our lady of Nova Lilybaeum are sold all over the planet.

And this book on the life of an Imperial saint is but one of millions of such tomes penned in scriptoria all across the Milky Way galaxy, to be read aloud by devout sacrificers of the God-Emperor.

Thus we find that so much of Imperial literary talent is spent on admiring biographies of saints, while more secular writings can easily land the penman on a pyre. Undoubtedly the fine examples set by many suffering saints and their selfless deeds are worth studying and emulating, yet with everything human there is a tendency to overshoot and miss the mark. Or rather the balancing point. And so instead of a healthy interest and understanding of the lives and works and deaths of outstanding men and women of the past, we find that the blinkered mindset of Imperial man is much too preoccupied with learning all about the saints in sanctioned works through rote learning, dulling his intellectual edge and keeping his faculties of critical thinking suppressed in fallow.

For man in the Age of Imperium is not a reasonable creature fit for charitable deeds, and Imperial man is not even a decent adherent of his faith. Nay, for Imperial man in all his depredation and depravity has been turned into a monstrous hulk of myopic rage and fanatical hatred, for mankind has turned stale and sour under the long rule of the High Lords of Terra, and the souls of humanity are shepherded by torches and violent threats. And eveywhere we find Imperial priests rousing the pious rabble to new feats of baleful cruelty toward their fellow human beings, and everywhere we find bloody wars and riots fought over miniscule matters of theology. For the myriad of different sects within the Cult Imperialis do not hate each other so much because they are different, but instead they hate each other precisely because they are so alike, and it is best to monopolize the sectarian niche through persecution, just as the Imperial Creed itself was established by ruthlessly hunting down rival cults during the Rebuilding of the Imperium.

And so we see that Imperial man is locked inside a fortified madhouse, where the Imperium alone remains as both his guardian and insane gaoler. For the Imperium of Man brooks no opposition, and will stand no alternatives. This was after all the modus operandi that led the Emperor to crush all rival sources of human regrowth during the Great Crusade, as the subjugation of a number of advanced human civilizations bore witness to.

And so even during the height of human renaissance, the early Imperium sowed the rotten seeds of its own decay. A monopoly stands and fallls on its own, and the Imperium of Man has sunken together like a failed souflé. To err is human, and the deteriorating Imperium must thus be the most human thing ever created.

This all amounts to a senile sclerosis that has doomed human interstellar civilization to a slow and horrible end. For enemies without number are closing in, and no desperate mobilization of retrograde Imperial resources can stem the tidal wave.

And all the while, the faithful look to the stars, and pray to their God-Emperor to deliver them from the storm.

Prayer is all that they have left as their world is coming to an end, for mankind has long since abandoned the true means by which worldly power is reached. Knowledge is dead. Curiosity is dead. Ignorance reigns supreme. Fivehundred generations have been wasted in a rut that leads nowhere, for the tools and weapons of salvation lie forgotten fifteenthousand years into the painful past.

And all that is left standing between the faithful flock and the onrushing horror, is a frail light. The Astronomican. The Emperor’s light, flickering in the dark as the Master of Mankind is fed with a thousand sacrificed souls every day in order to keep it shining.

Thus the faithful pray, even as they die by the billions.

For they will be with their God-Emperor soon enough.

Ave Imperator.

Such is all that remains, when hope is dead.

Such is the lot of mankind, in an age of insanity.

Such is the fate of our species, in the darkest of futures.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only faith.

[Admiral]

Bike Charge

Faster! Faster! Faster!

A sage during the misty past of the Age of Terra once said that wisdom begins in wonder. Given the inertia and stillness that reigns supreme for much of matter across the universe, it may be observed that the vitality and movement of lifeforms is cause for everlasting wonder. Some would even say, the faster the life, the more wonderful a tale is composed.

Man has always been fascinated by speed. Ever since elder days, the title of fastest man in the world outshone most other titles to be gained through sport. It is no wonder that humanity so highly values speed, for the faster the predator, the deadlier. Likewise, the fastest one in war often conquered, able to outmarch, surprise and mow his enemy down in a savage rout. Some of mankind’s earliest historical records bear witness to the power of speed, as men in chariots and then men on horseback swept out from the steppes and conquered all before them. For thousands of years, he who had the horses, conquered. And oftentimes the poor, untrained bastards who faced the horselords opted to flee as the thunder of hooves rang in their ears, shaking the ground beneath them as swift death approached from behind.

The earliest phases of the Age of Terra saw many evocative charges by heavy cavalry in tight formations, smashing into enemy infantry like a tidal wave of steel and hooves. Yet the true lords of the saddle were to be found among light cavalry, and especially so amongst nomad peoples who were virtually born into the saddle. Herding their beasts and thriving bitterly on the unforgiving steppes of Old Earth, such cruel horseback warriors dominated the lands by the might of their arms, the toughness of their bodies, the endurance of their steeds and most of all by the frustrating cunning of their wits in battle.

Echoes of such primal hordes of riders kept showing up through human military history, even as machine came to replace man all the more, and even as man took to space and colonized twain million distant worlds across the Milky Way galaxy that bore him. For were not motorbikes, scout striders and gravbikes but another technological variant of the ancient horseman, swift and deadly but vulnerable in protracted fights againt a well-organized enemy? And so we find that legends about skywains and starstriders from the edenic Dark Age of Technology give mention of swiftgliders and gravi-darters, jostling with Man of Iron outriders and hybrid centauroid monstrosities. Even during the idyllic age of mortal paradise betwixt the stars, we find mentions of bold speed freaks and daring riders willing to give it all in their frail saddles on dusty colony worlds, even as most human beings enjoyed soft lives of comfort and plenty in shining cities and void installations.

Yet if the world was perfect, it would not be.

The golden aeon that was the Dark Age of Technology was ended by the heavy blows of Machine Revolt, Warpstorms and a plague of witches and Daemons. All punishments for the unforgivable sins of ancient man in his godless hubris. And so man’s silvern pinnacles were toppled, and desperate survivors scavenged and ate each other among the burnt-out ruins of a better past.

And as the interstellar civilization of ancient man broke down into Chaos, cruel riders once again took to the fore. Wherever barbarian raiders managed to breed or build steeds of battle, they enjoyed immense advantages against their foes on foot. On world after world, animals that had originally been imported, bred and cloned for curiosity suddenly became more valuable than gold, as herds of horses, mukaali and stranger still alien beasts became the source of power for innumerable mounted hordes. And on voidholm after voidholm, crude bikes, servo-chariots and corridor-runners became the valued mounts of great warriors and scouts whose intelligence proved vital to the success of entire armies.

Thus man had well and truly revived his cavalry traditions during the Age of Strife. And as the Emperor conquered world after world with flaming broadsword during the brutal Great Crusade, ever more riders skilled in martial feats in the saddle joined the swelling ranks of Imperial forces, swept up in the enthusiastic frenzy with which Terran man took back his lost worlds and kindled a short-lived renaissance of human advancement.

You will now be told two tales from the same Imperium, set ten thousand years apart.

The first tale is about the most gifted horseman of the Emperor’s sons, and some brief great exploits of Jaghatai Khan’s Fifth Legion during the hopeful era that was the early Imperium, while the Emperor still walked among His people in the flesh.

The second tale is about daring and costly usage of bikes and mounts in positional warfare by the Astra Militarum and all manner of other lowly mass armies of Planetary Defence Forces and Voidholm Militias that are to be found across the Imperium of Man in the madhouse years that constitute the reign of the High Lords of Terra.

On to the first tale.

As the Holy Terran sinspeech whisper joke would have it:

Q: What do you know about the White Scars?
A: Is that what you get when you cut your hand on rusted knives?

Space Marines are big humans stuffed with extra organs and muscles, typically wearing powered space armour. The Emperor made twenty Legions of Astartes ten thousand years ago, in the thirtieth millennium. Among them were the White Scars, originally known as Star Hunters. The Emperor led the Great Crusade while He still lived, aided by twenty Primarchs in His quest to unite mankind in a star-spanning empire and shepherd all into a new age. We shall now turn to the Fifth Primarch, as he was abducted by dark forces from the Emperor’s hidden laboratory under the Himalazian Mountains, for the sake of a Faustian bargain.

The White Scars’ homeplanet of Chogoris, known officially as Mundus Planus by Imperial astrographers, is located within Segmentum Pacificus, to the west of Old Earth. The babe Jaghatai crashed into a feudal flatland suited for a need for speed. Lush greenery, soaring mountains and azure seas comprised much of the Chogorisian surface. This was a feudal world that had just invented gunpowder, and the majority of its settlers lived in an organized aristocracy under a ruler called Palatine. The armies of mighty Palatine were highly disciplined and well-equipped. Armoured horsemen and infantry in vast numbers won every campaign that Palatine launched, and so they had effectively conquered the entire planet with the large exception of one area called the Empty Quarter, filled with savage tribesmen and horses.

Jaghatai Khan, honoured be his name, first landed in the vast, wind-blown steppes of the Empty Quarter, west of Palatine’s empire. Nomadic tribes of feral horsemen roamed these steppes and had done so for centuries, following a cycle of seasonal migration from pastures in the summer to protected valleys in the winter, always living in simple tents as they told tall tales about the stumped ruins from the Dark Age of Technology that littered the landscape.

While the Palatine empire never bothered conquering the Empty Quarter, this untamed land saw no shortage of war. As the saying goes, you are nothing without your tribe. These tribes constantly fought amongst themselves for territory, for one field of grass is better than another, and two fields of grass is a bounty to people on horseback. One Chogorian term used for falling in battle was to go to glory, also called guangrong in the main language of the settled empire of Palatine. These wild tribesmen also fought for the sheer joy of battle, for war is one of man’s oldest pastimes. Such nomad squabbles were all child’s play compared to the mass atrocities carried out by the Palatine empire. Based on the blood rituals that the nobles of the empire performed, Imperial scholars believed that they were worshippers of the Dark Gods of Chaos, and so the entire world of Chogoris risked falling prey to the Ruinous Powers.

Jaghatai landed near the Quonon river where a man called Ong Khan found him. Honour supposedly goes to Ong Khan for not trying to eat this crash-landed infant upon finding him. Although given the lack of records of these tribesmen being cannibals, honour instead goes to Jaghatai for not eating this strange horseman.

Thus Ong Khan was given the honour of adopting this glowing child into his tribe, the Talskars, believing him to be a gift from the gods. Since Jaghatai was young, the tribe had claimed that there was a fire in his eyes, which is an ancient Terran term for being a great warrior, with the saying likewise being found among the Talskar. While Jaghatai was still young, an event known as the Blooding happened. Raiders from a rival tribe called the Kurayed killed a band of Talskar in a vicious, dishonourable ambush, slaying his adoptive father Ong Khan.

The north wind turns.

Jaghatai, already the greatest warrior amongst his tribe and bearing many ritualistic scars of courage in a filthy age where infection might equal death, became popular among the Talskars, and he led them into battle against the Kurayed tribe, razing their village to the ground and slaughtering them all, bathing in their blood and mounting the head of the Kurayed chieftain above his yurt. These events were to shape the Fifth Primarch into the cruel man that he would become, namely a man of fierce honour, loyalty and ruthlessness. Since Jaghatai was a great man that all Imperial subjects should look up to, it means that you too should go slaughter your malcontent neighbours and raise their heads up high on your hab-block. Savage the enemy tribes! Especially if they be xenos.

After the culling of the Kurayed, Jaghatai swore to bring an end to the wars between the people of the steppe. He now sought unity of purpose, and for his efforts he was elected Khan of the Talskar tribe. After this, Jaghatai the Warhawk started subjugating and conquering the other tribes, forcing them into his ever-growing army. Thus the Primarch had his own little Great Crusade out in the fields. Like father, like son.

The army Jaghatai amassed was named the Mathuli, which is a Talskar word for irresistible force. He made military service mandatory and combined warriors from different tribes into the same units, so as to break up tribal association and rid his army of segregation. Jaghatai promoted his warriors purely based on their abilities, giving each person due respect if they could prove themselves worthy of it. And as the settled farmer joke would have it, as long as they were capable of growing a stringy moustache they were probably good.

Ten summers after the culling of the Kurayed, while his armies were migrating in preparation for the coming winter, a freak avalanche came blasting down the slopes, taking Jaghatai and many of his tribesmen with it down a cliff. Instead of dying in the packed snow, the emerging Primarch was harried by a hunting band from the Palatine empire, incidentally led by Palatine’s own son. Jaghatai Khan, honoured be his name, slaughtered the son of Palatine and his band, mutilated the last survivor, tied him to his horse, hung the decapitated head of Palatine’s son around the neck of the survivor and sent the maimed one back to Palatine with a message:

“The people of the steppes are yours no longer.”

Nothing says “get off my grass fields” like being sent your brat’s head on horse express. And so the nomads of the Empty Quarter had ceased to be Palatine’s warm playthings.

As a result of this, Palatine was outraged and, as soon as summer came, marched out with his main army intent on wiping out the barbarian tribes. It was too bad that he faced Jaghatai Khan, bred and raised to be infinitely more cunning and resourceful than an old aristocratic cultist. In the Valley of the Khans, on the Lon-Seun Plain, Palatine’s empire met Jaghatai’s Mathuli. Here, Palatine met his defeat faster than Jaghatai drives.

Since Palatine’s army was accustomed to hand-to-hand combat, they did not stand a chance against Jaghatai’s frustrating series of hit-and-run tactics, and hundreds of thousands of men were massacred as they broke formation and attempted to pursue deceptively fleeing horsemen. Palatine instead retreated back to his capital city and hid like a little baby. Over the course of the next years, Jaghatai’s armies overran Palatine’s lands, besting armies, storming walled cities and slaying its nobles and people. Palatine’s subjects had no choice but to either surrender or face total destruction. It was said that these devil-faced savages from the steppes were supernatural demons, there to exact divine vengeance for the sins of man.

Noon, the ram-hound strikes.

In the end, Jaghatai and his armies reached Palatine’s stronghold of Cophasta. Jaghatai demanded Palatine’s head on a spear, or he would leave no stone standing. Within an hour, a group of meek nobles crawled out of the city’s gates and gave Jaghatai what he desired. And all that could be heard was the wailing of the vanquished foe’s widows and the cries of his orphans.

After his enemy’s pathetic defeat, the honoured Khan’s power stretched from ocean to ocean. The largest empire that the planet had ever known, had been conquered by a single man and his nomadic horde in less than twenty years. Even though he now ruled over a vast area, Jaghatai knew that his people had no real desire to rule such a realm. His motivation was to reunite the tribes and exact vengeance on Palatine. Nothing more. While ultimate power rested with the Khan and his generals, they did not have any developed concept for ruling settled populations. They simply wanted unity.

That was about the time when the Emperor of Terra arrived in the Bucephalus. This golden conqueror of the skies made landfall and met Jaghatai Khan for the first time since his abduction. These two bloodstained conquerors met in Jaghatai’s mountain palace of Quan Zhou, where the destroyer of Palatine dropped to one knee in front of the radiant Imperator and swore eternal fealty to the Imperium of Man. In response, Jaghatai left the planet and its rulership to his successor Ogedei, while the Terran Emperor gave Jaghatai the Fifth Legion, which he renamed the White Scars. And so Jaghatai, honoured be his name, found his eternal fields of rolling conquest in the skies above.

After reuniting with his sire, Jaghatai the Warhawk continued to use the lightning-fast tactics and scheduled strategies that he had made use of upon Chogoris, and used them to great effect across the cosmos right to the very end. During the Great Crusade, Jaghatai Khan, honoured be his name, led his marauding White Scars Legion to stunning victories across the starspangled void. The Fifth Legion knew of themselves as the Ordu of Jaghatai, and aside from their throat-singing, luscious moustaches and martial feats in the saddle they were also famed for their poetic battle-cant. During the Siege of the Imperial Palace, the White Scars on their fabled jetbikes played a crucial role in delaying the grinding progress of Warmaster Horus by cutting the traitor’s logistical inflow to Terra in half by a cunning strike against the spaceport of Lion’s Gate, thereby winning time for the Loyalists against all odds. Here, Jaghatai of the White Scars battled the Pale King Mortarion of the Death Guard, and although grievously wounded the Khan still managed to banish his erstwhile foe to the Empyrean.

For the Khan and the Emperor!

At last, seventy years after the Horus Heresy, while Chogoris was still a semi-feudal world under the control of Jaghatai’s tribes, the Khan went missing. His disappearance happened somewhere near the Maelstrom, while the Primarch was chasing a Dark Eldar Kabal that had taken many of his fellow tribesmen hostage. And so the Khan of Khans passed into legend and the Webway. We are yet to see his like to this day, for the decrepit Imperium of the fortyfirst millennium is a rotting colossus on feet of clay, a half-blind lumbering titan and a senile predator on the prowl, and this demented hulk of human self-sacrifice and rabid flagellation does not possess the sparkling vigour and touch of genius that so characterized the all-conquering early Imperium of the Great Crusade.

On to the second tale, but first let us set the stage and gain a taste for the Imperium of Man as it really is, ten millennia after the Horus Heresy.

The Cult Mechanicus believe that life is directed motion. Energy and speed are certainly traits of lively creatures. The less movement, the less life.

Conversely, when an empire is dying, it means that it is still living.

And a dying empire is capable of taking entire hordes and civilizations with it into oblivion. Underestimate this wilted monstrosity at your own peril, o vile foes of the Imperium, for the dutiful servants of the Emperor swear to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

With this lethal power kept in mind, we proceed to observe that the Imperium lays claim to the entire galaxy, yet lacks the capacity to make good on that claim.

The Age of Imperium has long since seen Imperial man place the triumph of the will on a pedestal. For this fanatical worshipper of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra believes in his self-abnegation that it is better to chase ideals instead of people, for they hate you anyway. And so we find that much of Imperial stoicism and self-sacrifice springs from a bitter hatred of the self, and of a misanthropic rejection of this sinful world.

What is laughter and joy? Forgotten glories of the easygoing early Imperium, they are. Damn such frivolity! To hell with smiling! A curse upon mirth! There will be no more laughs, for here on out there will only be causes for the gnashing of teeth and the wailing of sorrow amid ashes and tears. And thus, a bizarre and humourless prison is built by man for man, and the wise can do nought but laugh at the insanity of it all, until they are all purged. The Age of Imperium is a dour, leaden-heartened and humourless age, shaped into such an obscene culture by fivehundred generations of ever-worsening mobilization for total war and endless crisis breeding the most cruel and paranoid tyranny imaginable, one that actively hurts its own population and exterminates entire planets for idiotic reasons even as it shields mankind against outside threats.

Still, everyone respects strength. There is strength in strength, and let not that be denied. Yet the very word for strength in Low Gothic carries undertones of coercion and forcing one’s will upon another, akin to the term sila found in the tongue of Valhallans. And so the Imperial mindset is formed from birth to associate submission and brutal dominance with strength, and even the worst of atrocities will seem less outrageous for the overpowering strength that was required to carry out such fell deeds upon screaming and squirming victims. Imperial man is a professional sufferer moulded by ceaseless trauma, and his entire worldview is limited by the blinkers of misery and fear of suppression that life under the High Lords of Terra has placed upon him.

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. The cardinal sin of Horus was to think for himself, for that is the very definition of heresy. And so we must all repent for a thousand thousand generations for the sake of our heinous sins, for was it not man that struck down the Emperor in man’s boundless ingratitude?

Repent!

And so we find, in this meandering look on the parochial minds of Imperial subjects across a million worlds and uncountable voidholms, that across the void of space men live as they have lived for millennia upon the sand, rock and soil of worlds bathed in the light of alien suns. So is humanity’s seed cast far and wide beyond the knowledge of man, to thrive bitterly in the darkness, to take root and cling with robust and savage determination. This is our thought for the day.

This second tale is all about that savage determination. Some would call it spite. Possibly even spite against the hostile universe itself. It is a tale of reckless bravery on the battlefield, and the falling back on speed in the most gruelling of stalemates amid muddy trenches and plunging fire. On the one hand, it is a saga of the crazy deeds man is capable of in the midst of war. On the other hand, it is a story of calculated risk-taking and willingness to sacrifice blood in an attempt to win local victories against the foe in wars that are more meatgrinder than brilliant manoeuvreing.

War is the mother of invention, as an ancient sage once opined. And even amid all the carnage and cunning, the fundamental nature of war never changes.

As a military theorist during the misty past of the Age of Terra stated: War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to do your will.

…

[Admiral]

Sometimes, technology or terrain favours a war of offensive movement, while at other times technology or terrain favours the defender and renders the hidden amassing of forces for surprise spear thrusts and breakthroughs difficult to achieve.

In war after war on world after world, the same grinding pattern has repeated itself for untold ages: First war breaks out, and all is a mass of hectic movement and uncertainty. Sometimes one side is able to subdue the other in this first burst of lightning strikes. More often than not, the initial flurry of strong blows and daring elite unit operations exhausts itself, and the front lines stiffen. Both sides seek to regain a war of movement, even as more and more fortifications are built and ever more trenches are dug and mines laid. Soon, rapid and clever manoeuvres are replaced by attrition, as both sides seek to exterminate the enemy’s materiel and manpower in a drawn-out conflict that bleeds both sides white. Years pass as the death toll increases, and this positional struggle tends to grow ever more deadly as ever more of society is mobilized and cannibalized to feed the ravenous furnace of total war. Both sides drag each other down into the abyss, and the entire war devolves into a race to the bottom. First one there, loses. The fighting only ends after one side or the other finally breaks apart, either from within or as their military at long last collapses amid starvation and horror.

It is to these all-too-common wars of attrition between congealed defensive positions that we will now turn, where sweeping victories seem impossible in what is essentially hell on earth.

For insane as it might seem, warfare across fivehundred generations of wasted potential and human maldevelopment across the Emperor’s sacred dominion has proved that there is still a place for cavalry and motorbikes in the midst of some of the most arduous forms of trench warfare out there. And so Rough Riders might be atavistic and primitive, but nonetheless useful as long as a commander is willing to pay the steep butcher’s bill that cavalry operations entail in wars of lethal projectile weapons, artillery barrages and a plethora of sophisticated systems. This is admittedly a maladaption like so much else in the Imperium, but if it works sometimes it is not utterly useless, and nevermind the corpses.

The first practical use for cavalry is that of reconnaisance by fire. This means to draw out enemy fire by sending forth your own soldiers, to thus learn about enemy positions and then counter their heavy weapon nests and other crucial sites thus revealed. Buy intel by paying with blood. During positional wars of attrition where the ground and air are both filled with lethal weaponry, Imperial Guard commanders will sometimes use mounted troops and motorbikes for recon by fire missions. This is often done by sending out multiple motorcycle riders through no-man’s land with smoke grenades activated. The dispersed movement of the recon bikers will be observed from overhead by servo-skulls, and the ones that make it the farthest before being shot down will determine the direction of the next attack by infantry and armoured forces. Thus the Astra Militarum will sacrifice bikers and cavalrymen alike to probe enemy lines, and pay with blood to gain insights as to where the foe is weaker. This is a textbook example of Tactica Imperialis cavalry and bike usage, proven on countless battlefields throughout the Age of Imperium.

Other Astra Militarum motorcycle and Rough Rider tactics are likewise costly and daring, for to be a rider in the saddle is to be exposed upon your vaunted steed. On the one hand, cavalry and by extension bike-mounted troops are exposed to horizontal fire due to their large upright profile and exposed body. This makes cavalry and bikers particularly ill suited to charge massed lines of riflemen, rapid-firing small arms and heavy weapon emplacements. On the other hand, the sheer speed of bikers darting across the landscape make them suited to dodge vertical fire, such as incoming artillery shells, rockets, armed servo-skulls, Tau drones, ornithopter gunships and other flying devices overhead. Some bikes may even run over mines without triggering their detonators, a capability which the broad wheels of Astartes bikes may sometime provide, depending on the type of mines faced on the battlefield.

An ancient tactic used by Astartes and non-genhanced armies alike is to suppress the enemy by artillery barrages, and then storm their trenches with bikers driving at lightning speed over no-man’s land before enemy infantry has managed to scramble back into their positions from their bunkers and dug-outs. As should be expected, this combined barrage and bike charge means that the White Scars Chapter maintain a larger than average fleet of Whirlwind rocket artillery vehicles. Correspondingly, Astra Militarum forces employing the same tactic require more than their fair share of artillery support, both by cannon and rocket. Servo skull-corrected artillery fire is particularly lethal.

One way of countering motorcycle assaults is to drop razorwire with explosives attached, leading to detonations when the enemy tries to move the razorwire. This can be carried out by remote-controlled flying units or groundbound machines, although as ever within the demechanizing Imperium one should always expect the regressed Imperial Guard to resort to throw bodies at the problem by having men instead of machines perform this dangerous task in no-man’s land. Dead humans are anyway easier to replace than destroyed machinery, and so we find that to be a man in the Age of Imperium, is to be nothing but a faceless number in a broken equation that amounts to increase input and feed the meatgrinder no matter what resistance is encountered.

Cavalry of all kinds is always exposed and vulnerable, and cavalry tends to suffer great losses in war. Cavalry is not useless in advanced conflicts, since even riders on soft, living steeds make for good scouts, and cavalrymen can always dismount to fight on foot.

To glimpse one example of such callous and death-defying cavalry usage within the Imperium of Man, let us turn to the trench storming of corporal Georgios Lucius, of the 913th Archite Palatines regiment. After all, people want heroes and villains and grand tales of daring-do. Man is not only a toolmaker, but a creature of stories.

Over the hills and far away on the artificial demi-planet of voidholm Dextrimalus, fierce battles of attrition raged inside the armaplas domes that dotted the hulking spacestation like clusters of blisters. Men died and beasts neighed, and machines lay awreck amid smoke and ruin. Fear ruled supreme, and many a prayer was uttered fervently by men, women and juves afraid to die. For there are no unbelievers in foxholes. Rumours about Astartes reinforcements were abuzz, as usual, but they were likely no more than hot air. His Divine Majesty’s Space Marines were far too rare and valuable to show up to every backwater war that the Imperium waged.

Young corporal Georgios Lucius was part of a Rough Rider platoon, given a suicidal reconnaissance mission by their colonel. Thus, they fastened smoke grenades to the backs of their saddles, and galloped hell for leather through the plunging fire and smattering of horizontal lasbolts and slugs. As forward observers watched with magnoculars and through servo-skulls overhead, rider after rider fell with his horse amid the craters, yet still the valiant cavalrymen pushed ahead. Some jumped over piles of corpses, while others tried to trot their horses in zig-zag to survive for longer. Imperial observers noted where the smoke plumes from the horsemen extended the furthest, and ordered up infantry and Chimeras to follow up into the enemies’ weakest spots.

It was Georgios Lucius who made it the farthest of all Archite Palatine Rough Riders, for he plunged his spotted grey mare into heretic razorwire and was thrown head over heels into the enemy trench. He cracked his head in the fall, and passed out. When he woke up, he wished that he had never been born, and he cried out for the Holy Terran Imperator to bring him salvation.

The Emperor protects. And for once, praise be, He granted a man’s wish.

Nailed through his limbs to the trench floorboards, unclad and subjected to a flurry of mutilations, torture and unspeakable violations, the shrieking corporal Georgios Lucius witnessed a miracle in his final moments of life, as White Scars bikers came roaring through the razorwire and jumped over Archenemy trenches with all the savagery of Chogorisian steppe nomads hunting settled peasants. The independently acting Astartes of the Third Brotherhood had eavesdropped on Astra Militarum vox traffic, and their Captain Bashinkhor Khan had determined that the planned offensive in the wake of the cavalry recon deathride was the perfect opportunity to deploy his White Scars to savage the enemy lines. The Stormseer’s casting of augur-bones had foreseen a good outcome for this assault.

Naturally, the ruthless Space Marines could take no chances with lingering corruption, and so a merciful bolt to the chest ended the life of the suffering Georgios Lucius, corporal of the 913th Archite Palatines. Or perhaps this stroke of Emperor’s mercy was rather granted because the gruff Angel of Death Battle-Brother Ariq asked the captured Guardsman who he was, and upon the mention of the name Palatine the White Scar reflexively executed the Imperial soldier due to the likeness of this name with a certain cultist ruler from his Primarch’s ancient history.

And so we find that our second tale takes us full circle back to our first tale about Jaghatai Khan, honoured be his name. No wonder that the insignia of the Fifth Legion, nowadays the White Scars Chapter, is that of the lightning bolt. For the Ordu of Jaghatai is as unpredictable and fierce as lightning. The modus operandi of the White Scars is to tear the enemy limbless and render them incapable of effective resistance.

As to volunteer cavalrymen and dirtbike riders within the Astra Militarum, an amusing pattern emerges. When asked why they joined the Imperial Guard, many such men in the saddle will reply that they wanted to get to new worlds, kill some enemies and copulate with native women under strange skies. They wanted to be heroes, for willing riders have always been glory-hunters and daredevils.

As to the worth of these brave lives, one charismatic leader during the Age of Terra remarked before a battle that what are the lives of soldiers but so many chickens? And upon the conclusion of combat, he proclaimed: Behold, the dead chickens!

Such an abominable wastefulness and carelessness with the lives of an officer’s subordinates is rampant within the Imperium of Man, as fivehundred precious generations of wasted potential has rendered the degraded lives of teeming mankind dirt cheap. The longer the night, the more nightmares you can have. And under the watchful guardianship of the High Lords of Terra, the Age of Imperium has turned into a baleful long night, where Daemons stalk and humans cry out in anguish and pain.

Love only the Emperor. Fear only the Emperor. Praise only the Emperor.

And as we note the reckless bravery and sacrifice of riders on living mounts and motorcycles alike, we must likewise make another observation, as regard Imperial misrule of human interstellar civilization: It is the set of the sails and not the direction of the wind that determines which way the ship will sail. This decline was not inevitable. This loss of human power and technological know-how on the Imperium’s watch is a case of criminal neglect. Seen with the cold eye of a long-term strategist of interstellar empire, only the sundering and victory of Chaos could have been worse for the long-term survival of mankind in its snuffing out of science and technology, the very means of power.

What good is truth to one who cannot comprehend it? What good is sight to the blind?

The dying of the Imperium of Man through internal rot manifests itself through loss of capacity and a slow ebbing of power over time. The collapse of decaying empires is akin to going bankrupt: First it happens little by little, and suddenly all at once. With the given understanding that a great deal of resilience, inertia and strenuous periods of partial regeneration is always involved in the long-term decline of great powers, for random reality is never simplistic in its roiling of trends and counter-trends to make a mockery of any exact predictions.

To err is human. And so the Imperium of Man is the most human thing ever created, throughout the entire existence of our species. The end of the Imperium would be the end of an error.

You are nothing.

The Imperium is everything.

And damnation is eternal.

Ave Imperator.