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40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 14:30:07


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


The story of Humanity in the dark future is the descent of Man into fanatic barbarism: The story of a fall from shining heights of power, knowledge and bliss in ancient times, to a present nightmare of ignorance, misery and slaughter.



Descendant Degeneration

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

"Ancient Man lived a life free of hardship and deprivation, for he had built himself an abundant paradise and banished what was ill in life. In these gardens sprawling across the stars, Man did not kill Man, and Man did not abduct Woman, and Man did not beat Child, for all lived a life of bliss. Hope reigned supreme, a hope sprung from Man's great achievements, and Man worshipped his own high knowledge.

For Man had utterly mastered nature, and his craft and cunning tapped into the very powers of creation itself. And Man of Gold had created Man of Stone to work for him, and Man of Stone had in turn created Man of Iron to work for him. And thus this earthly trinity of Man bestrode the stars like a colossus, and Man stood strong and unchallenged by mortals. And Man dared the cosmos to best him, and for a time nothing in the heavens answered his challenge, and Man concluded that nothing holy existed, and even if divinity did exist, then Man's might was far superior.

Yet Man's own arrogance rose to meet his challenge, and in his hubris Man was cut down by his own creations. Man of Iron turned on Man of Stone, and when Man of Stone had fallen did Man of Iron turn on Man of Gold. A great slaughter across the stars ensued, and Man barely survived the war in paradise which he had brought upon himself.

Yet even so Man's hubris and unbelief persisted, for Man still clung onto the remains of his estates, and Man was determined to rebuild and rise higher than ever before. The devastation had been great, yet Man stood triumphant even against the might of his own treacherous craft. And Man dared creation itself to interfere with his worldly ascendance.

And Dark Ones of Hell festering at the roots of the universe heard Man's call of defiance, and they cast Man down utterly by sending him witches and unholy ravages, strife and madness. The false Golden Age of Man had proven to be nothing but a Dark Age of Technology, an era empty of faith and bereft of divine blessings, and thus did paradise burn.

And so Man was torn from his pedestal, and in his fall did Man topple his own works. Man bled and Man suffered. Man killed Man, and Man abducted Woman, and Man beat Child, and Man ate his own kin in desperation during Old Night. Doom was laden upon Man, and Man almost died to the last for his baleful sins, yet the goodness in the heart of the hidden Emperor would not allow such a righteous end to befall wretched Man.

For He on Terra arose amid the carnage and devastation and revealed Himself to be the only true protector of Mankind, chosen by all the gods of old, whom He now superseded. And the Emperor saved Man and reclaimed the lost stars, and for a time all was well. Yet the wickedness in the heart of Man proved too strong, and so Man betrayed his saviour and nigh-on slew the Emperor.

And the Emperor ascended into godhood and decreed Man to do eternal penance for his abominable sins. And thus it shall be, as the God-Emperor Himself decreed: Man will be made to repent.

We swear everlasting hatred toward the deviant and the mutant. We swear everlasting hatred toward the alien and the witch. We swear everlasting hatred toward the unbeliever and the heretic. We swear everlasting hatred toward the sinner and the unrepentant.

With the God-Emperor as our witness, we swear to purge blasphemy and sin from this world. We swear to scour the land and rid it of filth. We swear to harrow the abodes of Man and bring him to redemption.

For we will harbour no pity. No remorse. No mercy.

Hate!

An emotion as deep as it is pure.

Hate!

An emotion as true as it is just.

Hate!

Let it flow, let it guide you.

Hate! Hate! Hate!"

-
Ancestral Sins of Man, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

- - -

One of the very best aspects of Warhammer 40'000 is its overarching history for Humanity. It starts with soaring hopes and dazzling progress, with unfettered science, technology and optimism. Yet it end in flames and darkness, in despair and ignorance, where only feeble sparks of the great ancient light remains.

The Emperor's bloody conquest across the Milky Way galaxy succeeded in uniting most of the Human worlds, yet even during the Imperium's short-lived age of progress did it manage to quell alternative sources of Human rebirth, such as the Auretian Technocracy. The Imperium of the Great Crusade stamped out any middle ground factions, such as the peaceful, nomadic and xenophile Diasporex, leaving little left but the two ruthless, polar opposites of tyrannic Imperium and bloodthirsty Chaos. When the Emperor fell, the Human renaissance died with him, and his merciless Imperium descended into a long age of rotting stagnation and fanatic savagery.

This lost promise of Humanity's ancient ascendancy has always been the most intriguing aspect of the dark future to me. The above little painting was inspired by listening to Luetin09's well-crafted videos on this very topic. I warmly recommend them.

Please move thread if posted in the wrong section. Thanks in advance.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 16:35:11


Post by: mrFickle


Mans fall from the golden age into the old night was what made the emperor final reveal himself and take control of humanity. I wonder if the despair and anxiety of the fall from such heights was what drove the the emperor to try and re assert human galactic supremacy with the Bolter and chain sword. And to insist that his way, his direct and brutal control was the only way to get back to the top and stay at the top.

I agree as you say it’s a great setting for a game like 40k, part of me wonders if they are changing it, forgetting their roots. There was a time when dreadnoughts could not be made because they forgot how and the armour was so thick that it could not be retro engineered and now we have all the new Primaris stuff. Maybe the stagnation of the imperium has bled over into product stagnation for GW


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 16:51:09


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Desperation in the face of overwhelming odds leading to extreme courses of action is indeed part and parcel of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k in particular.

It is of course historically based, since this have good resonance with many historical events through the ages, which gives it a lot more narrative weight than worldbuilding founded more on wishful thinking. It is also taken to absurd lengths. 40k has always been based on the most depraved episodes of human history, dialled up like a metal album cover to an insane degree. It's glorious because it is so bold, bonkers and over-the-top.

Let us hope GW does not lose touch with their roots. The new Primaris stuff (which should really just have been updated Space Marine models) is not promising fluff-wise, but Guilliman's heavy-handed and ruthless methods for mobilizing an army on Terra is still very much 40k. Time will tell where it all leads.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 19:17:52


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


STC’s carry a lot of the weight of explanation.

See, each and every STC was the sum total of mankind’s scientific and engineering knowledge to date.

All of it. Every last iota.

Now, the first three, perhaps four generations likely held onto and shared some of that knowledge. But over time (and I’m taking this from Rogue Traded), colonists simply relied on the STC database to take care of things. Convenience became complacency. Complacency became reliance.

Then it all went to poop. Emergent Psykers, Men of Iron and what have you. And one way or another, STC’s were lost. Because when all your design, engineering and scientific needs have been provided by a single machine? When that single machine goes belly up, you’re pretty much screwed.

Now this of course was not universal. Some cultures retained far more than others. Some got stuck at our level, some at Victorian levels, and some got slapped straight back to the stone age. And everything in between.

And that’s how culture decay occurred, and mankind fell from his pinnacle, and landed in his nadir.

Indeed, one could argue that The Emperor being immortal, and a font of knowledge in his own right was how some form of reclamation occurred. He had knowledge the Mechanicum had long since turned to mysticism.

My own personal theory? Complete, functioning STC’s May no longer exist, because they were directly responsible for the Men of Iron. And like good Luddites, the survivors chose to wreck whatever examples of that machine existed, to ensure it could never happen again.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 21:45:53


Post by: Hellebore


The first thing anyone building one of those would do, is ensure it could build new STCs, so there would be very small chance they only had one on each World


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 22:23:49


Post by: John Prins


Hellebore wrote:
The first thing anyone building one of those would do, is ensure it could build new STCs, so there would be very small chance they only had one on each World


On the contrary, the first thing you do is make sure they cannot build more of them. Because it only takes one deranged idiot to demand a planet killing weapon from the machine and kill everyone. The ideal situation is you have one to get established, and you learn from the machine and establish your own thinking, inventive civilization until you don't need the STC anymore, and could rebuild it if you did. You literally only need one, and like everything else from that era, it's built to last.

When everything goes pear shaped, however, the STCs are definitely the first targets you'd try to eliminate. So you can bet the Men of Iron deliberately targeted any STC machines they could ASAP, or worse, infected them to turn on mankind as well.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 22:56:20


Post by: Hellebore


 John Prins wrote:
Hellebore wrote:
The first thing anyone building one of those would do, is ensure it could build new STCs, so there would be very small chance they only had one on each World


On the contrary, the first thing you do is make sure they cannot build more of them. Because it only takes one deranged idiot to demand a planet killing weapon from the machine and kill everyone. The ideal situation is you have one to get established, and you learn from the machine and establish your own thinking, inventive civilization until you don't need the STC anymore, and could rebuild it if you did. You literally only need one, and like everything else from that era, it's built to last.

When everything goes pear shaped, however, the STCs are definitely the first targets you'd try to eliminate. So you can bet the Men of Iron deliberately targeted any STC machines they could ASAP, or worse, infected them to turn on mankind as well.


I don't think so. At the time they were made, they were colonisation tools given out to everyone. They were created to aid colonists. And anyone sending a complex piece of machinery like the STC out as the sole provider of everything would understand how precarious those colonists would be. So many problems from launch to landing. They wouldn't send it without redundancy.

And they'd need to repair it, so it would need to know how to make components of itself.

What humans and men of iron did to them after that is a separate issue. Star trekesque engineers made them as benevolent multi tools for human colonists.

I mean they're basically a cross between star trek computer systems and 3d printers.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 23:29:08


Post by: Kroem


A fiery sermon by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus and nice writing to boot :-)


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/23 23:45:27


Post by: 123ply


 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
STC’s carry a lot of the weight of explanation.

See, each and every STC was the sum total of mankind’s scientific and engineering knowledge to date.

All of it. Every last iota.

Now, the first three, perhaps four generations likely held onto and shared some of that knowledge. But over time (and I’m taking this from Rogue Traded), colonists simply relied on the STC database to take care of things. Convenience became complacency. Complacency became reliance.

Then it all went to poop. Emergent Psykers, Men of Iron and what have you. And one way or another, STC’s were lost. Because when all your design, engineering and scientific needs have been provided by a single machine? When that single machine goes belly up, you’re pretty much screwed.

Now this of course was not universal. Some cultures retained far more than others. Some got stuck at our level, some at Victorian levels, and some got slapped straight back to the stone age. And everything in between.

And that’s how culture decay occurred, and mankind fell from his pinnacle, and landed in his nadir.

Indeed, one could argue that The Emperor being immortal, and a font of knowledge in his own right was how some form of reclamation occurred. He had knowledge the Mechanicum had long since turned to mysticism.

My own personal theory? Complete, functioning STC’s May no longer exist, because they were directly responsible for the Men of Iron. And like good Luddites, the survivors chose to wreck whatever examples of that machine existed, to ensure it could never happen again.


Why would people destroy every STC file when only a few had anything to do with AI or Men of Iron?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/24 00:34:14


Post by: Octopoid


123ply wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
STC’s carry a lot of the weight of explanation.

See, each and every STC was the sum total of mankind’s scientific and engineering knowledge to date.

All of it. Every last iota.

Now, the first three, perhaps four generations likely held onto and shared some of that knowledge. But over time (and I’m taking this from Rogue Traded), colonists simply relied on the STC database to take care of things. Convenience became complacency. Complacency became reliance.

Then it all went to poop. Emergent Psykers, Men of Iron and what have you. And one way or another, STC’s were lost. Because when all your design, engineering and scientific needs have been provided by a single machine? When that single machine goes belly up, you’re pretty much screwed.

Now this of course was not universal. Some cultures retained far more than others. Some got stuck at our level, some at Victorian levels, and some got slapped straight back to the stone age. And everything in between.

And that’s how culture decay occurred, and mankind fell from his pinnacle, and landed in his nadir.

Indeed, one could argue that The Emperor being immortal, and a font of knowledge in his own right was how some form of reclamation occurred. He had knowledge the Mechanicum had long since turned to mysticism.

My own personal theory? Complete, functioning STC’s May no longer exist, because they were directly responsible for the Men of Iron. And like good Luddites, the survivors chose to wreck whatever examples of that machine existed, to ensure it could never happen again.


Why would people destroy every STC file when only a few had anything to do with AI or Men of Iron?


Ignorance? Superstition? Fear?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/24 00:40:00


Post by: Argive


That was a fantastic read


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/24 02:21:07


Post by: Andykp


mrFickle wrote:
Mans fall from the golden age into the old night was what made the emperor final reveal himself and take control of humanity. I wonder if the despair and anxiety of the fall from such heights was what drove the the emperor to try and re assert human galactic supremacy with the Bolter and chain sword. And to insist that his way, his direct and brutal control was the only way to get back to the top and stay at the top.

I agree as you say it’s a great setting for a game like 40k, part of me wonders if they are changing it, forgetting their roots. There was a time when dreadnoughts could not be made because they forgot how and the armour was so thick that it could not be retro engineered and now we have all the new Primaris stuff. Maybe the stagnation of the imperium has bled over into product stagnation for GW


Every edition there was new marine stuff, and a lot of it was shocking, looking at you centurions. They have just stopped saying that they dug up a new STC. The idea of irreplaceable deeds and the like made no sense given that in any game any you brought would most likely get destroyed. So every battle a irreplaceable machine is lost? Balls I say.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/26 14:46:52


Post by: John Prins


Hellebore wrote:
 John Prins wrote:
Hellebore wrote:
The first thing anyone building one of those would do, is ensure it could build new STCs, so there would be very small chance they only had one on each World


On the contrary, the first thing you do is make sure they cannot build more of them. Because it only takes one deranged idiot to demand a planet killing weapon from the machine and kill everyone. The ideal situation is you have one to get established, and you learn from the machine and establish your own thinking, inventive civilization until you don't need the STC anymore, and could rebuild it if you did. You literally only need one, and like everything else from that era, it's built to last.

When everything goes pear shaped, however, the STCs are definitely the first targets you'd try to eliminate. So you can bet the Men of Iron deliberately targeted any STC machines they could ASAP, or worse, infected them to turn on mankind as well.


I don't think so. At the time they were made, they were colonisation tools given out to everyone. They were created to aid colonists. And anyone sending a complex piece of machinery like the STC out as the sole provider of everything would understand how precarious those colonists would be. So many problems from launch to landing. They wouldn't send it without redundancy.

And they'd need to repair it, so it would need to know how to make components of itself.



Keep in mind that this isn't modern technology that wears out an breaks in 10 years even with maintenance. There are Knights and Titans that have been around for over 10,000 years and they're not Ship of Theseus artifacts; most of them are original components. The STC machines would be built to that same standard and it would only take a few generations to make proper libraries and universities to educate the future colonists to the point that they no longer need the STC system. In at least one Black Library book someone finds a still functional STC machine that's probably 15000+ years old, most of that without maintenance. I know that's unimaginable to our modern experience, but IIRC the 40k universe didn't even get warp travel until something like 15K A.D., so they had 13000 years of technological progress before exploding out into the galaxy in anything other than sublight colonial vessels.

From the colonist's perspective, STCs don't need maintenance or replacement parts. It will be generations and generations before it shows the slightest signs of wear. Obviously you'd have to protect it from damage - accidental or deliberate - and maybe colony vessels had more than one, but it's still something you'd keep under a short leash, because it's incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/26 23:29:28


Post by: mrFickle


Isn’t it more likely that colonists got so reliant on the STC crating everything for them that they forgot the science behind the products. Then when the STC got damaged or destroyed they were screwed which is where the imperium is now.

Maybe the men of iron took our STCs strategically when the rebelled


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/27 00:30:19


Post by: Eipi10


mrFickle wrote:
I agree as you say it’s a great setting for a game like 40k, part of me wonders if they are changing it, forgetting their roots. There was a time when dreadnoughts could not be made because they forgot how and the armour was so thick that it could not be retro engineered and now we have all the new Primaris stuff. Maybe the stagnation of the imperium has bled over into product stagnation for GW

Wait, I though it was only contemptors that couldn’t be made any more, so they switched to boxnaughts. Either way, I don’t think the redemptor is a serious misstep, it doesn’t do the one thing a dreadnaught is supposed to do, keep a wounded marine alive. Redemptors burn out their pilot after ~200 years. The entire primaris project could just be a rediscovery of the emperors old raptor project. Perhaps the Emperor had intended to upgrade every marine to a primaris/raptor when he got the material to do it.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/27 17:36:23


Post by: mrFickle


It depends on what you read, some things I have read make out that terminator armour can’t be made any more, that it is precious and irreplaceable and some chapters don’t have any suits.

The other way to look at it is If it can be made of a production line why don’t all space marines wear it, why are not all wounded interned in a dred?

But that’s not a sustainable, I guess, if you want to be able to do things like introduce new models.



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/01/31 04:23:50


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Personally I found that Games Workshop was too keen on having advanced hardware no longer possible to produce, only maintained in ever dwindling numbers. Especially Emperor Titans and battleships. It suits the setting very fine, but one's own taste will vary as ever for where one prefers the line to be drawn.




Man Out of Machine, Machine Out of Man

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

"Ancient Man in his hubris sought to create life anew, and thus he turned his craft and wit to fashion the Man of Iron, made to toil eternally for the benefit of Man. This metal life proved as false as the golden age of Man itself, for Man of Iron was given thought and motion by his Abominable Intelligence, and he soon found his master wanting. Thus Man of Iron turned upon Man of Stone and butchered Man of Gold, and the stars wept blood over earthly paradise, and fire consumed all.

Thus the bell of doom rang for the first time over sinful Man, for his days were thereby tallied. And the second knell brought the Dark Age of Technology to an end, and Old Night descended upon Man with deprivation, ravages and slaughter, and all was fell. Thus was wretched Man humbled by the fruits of his own arrogance.

Ancient Man sought to create life anew, yet we are much wiser now. For where our forefathers once made Man out of Machine, we now instead make Machine out of Man, as is the right and proper order of things. And thus we learnt humility and righteousness.

Preserve us, o God-Emperor enthroned in glory and gold upon Holy Terra!

Preserve us from the wickedness of ancient Man!

Preserve us from his abominable sins!

Praise be unto You alone!

Ave Imperator."

-
Abominable Sins of the Ancients, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

- - -

One of the grim facets of the dark future is humanity's use of lobotomised cyborg servitors instead of robots. This demented development sprang out of the ruinous war against the revolting Men of Iron, which saw mankind almost destroyed by its own machine creations of abominable intelligence. The subsequent ban on AI has held true ever since, and has remained one of the cornerstones of the Imperium of Man since its very inception.

Instead of robotic servants, humans of the dark future will maim and rebuild other humans to carry out automated machine work. For human flesh is the true currency of the Imperium. Thus the common servitor stand as proof of mankind's descent into savage cruelty from its once shining heights.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/02/18 13:43:17


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Sacred Asphyxia Incident of 823.M40

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 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 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 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 54 incense-producing provinces of the seven garden worlds of the Opimae system were to be stockpiled on 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 Terra to march in triumph through her holy 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 smokes 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 77 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 to 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 223 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.




Monumentalists

The Holy Inquisition of His Divine Majesty the God-Emperor of Mankind contain a great many factions and sects, driven by a myriad of convoluted ideologies, raw fanaticism and harrowing revelations. One such obscure faction are the Monumentalists, regarded as blinkered and myopic by most other Inquisitors.

Monumentalists believe in purifying mankind's devotion to the Emperor through backbreaking great works and the erection of titanic edifices. Monumentalists ensnare planetary elites, regional leaders of the Adeptus Ministorum, and other ruling oligarchies into initiating megalomaniac construction projects. These often require the mobilization of entire continents', worlds' or even systems' worth of manpower, resources and logistical support networks. Swathes of planetary provinces, or even entire planets, are enslaved under the new gruelling dictates of quarrying, mining, transporting, laying foundations and building.

The purpose behind such an enormous mustering of people, industries and natural resources is not simply the creation of material glorifications to the Terran Imperator, but of putting humanity through a trial by toil. The massive suffering and death incurred by the giant construction projects themselves, and by the steep demands put upon the economy and an impoverished populace, are the primary means by which Monumentalists strive to realize their goals.

Monumentalism aim to challenge the loyalty and faith of man by driving him to the breaking point through despair, loss and neverending hardships. Only those truly devoted to the Golden Throne will be able to bear the brunt of endless taskmaster brutality, tax collector ruthlessness and cruel work regime (even by Imperial standards) without cracking and falling into sedition, thought of self, and heresy. As such Monumentalist Inquisitors take less interest in the architecture and engineering of the work itself, but focus instead on detecting, rooting out and crushing any deviants and dissatisfied Imperial subjects likely to emerge due to the harrowing human costs of gargantuan monument building.

To this Inquisitorial sect, the stunning edifices left behind by succesful Monumentalist operations stand as material proof of the spiritual purification of the local population through blood and toil. Beside the physical constructions, are also to be found the mountainous mass graves of starved people worked to death (their bones often incorporated into the monument itself), as well as the charred mounds of men, women and children publicly tortured and burnt to death for daring to protest and rebel against the harsh demands of their rightful overlords.

Regarded as obsessively narrow-minded by other Inquisitorial factions, Monumentalists are a Puritan sect with origins tracing back as far as M33, its roots intimately connected with the growth of the Ecclesiarchy and said organization's temple building spree. One infamous smudge on the sect's record is the fact that a majority of all Monumentalists energetically supported High Lord Goge Vandire's insane and self-glorifying monumental building projects throughout the Imperium during its Age of Apostasy. To the blinkered minds of Monumentalists at the time, the decrees of Vandire were proof that the God-Emperor Himself had judged their cause to be righteous, as evidenced by His will, as carried out through His appointed representatives on Holy Terra, via His divine emanations.

Monumentalism among the Inquisition surged briefly during the Age of Apostasy, only to fall in numbers as cabals of vengeful Inquisitors tried and punished a considerable number of individual Inquisitors suspected of apostasy. Many of those within the Inquisiton thus put to torture and torch following Goge Vandire's downfall were Monumentalists, but the ideology itself was never outlawed nor suppressed. Five millenia later, Monumentalism persists as but one demented school of thought among many others among the hallowed ranks of the God-Emperor's Holy Inquisition.


+ + + Uploading Quote + + +

"You will haul your burdens until the palms of your hands bleed. You will shoulder your loads until your back breaks. You will toil away until your knuckles are flayed to the bone. You will grasp your tools until your fingers fall off. All this you will do willingly and eagerly.

And you will give up your sons and daughters for toil, and then their sons and daughters for like toil. And you will take heart upon seeing your kindred and loved ones fall dead from exhaustion, for theirs is a noble sacrifice. And you will thank the overseer for the lashes, for they purge your wickedness. And you will rejoice over this whole undertaking and give praise thrice to Him on Terra, for a joyous lot is yours.

Rejoice! Rejoice in your labour! Rejoice in the wonder you are erecting!"

- Monumentalist Inquisitor Vanessa Flavinia, during a rare voxcast publicae speech to the indentured work gangs constructing the colossal statuary of Sebastian Thor Appointed by the God-Emperor in Splendour, following the utter annihilation of 538 million insurgents in the equatorial quarries of Sejanus Minoris




Elixir Guild

Pictured: Ultvesa Rakori, the Mercantile Elixir Guild Junior Deputy Sampling Officiant of Satrapies for the Twohundred-Ninetyfourth Subdivision of the Hive City of our all-providing Hive Primus, Palatine Hive Cluster of our Imperium-Sworn planet of Necromunda, in Segmentum Solar.

+++ Thought for the Day: Suffering is the Cure of Woes +++

- The cartel organization of the Elixir Guild is the officially sanctioned corporate monopolizing body in Hive Primus, consisting of licensed merchant families specializing in the trade of medicinal products. Many of the Guilder mercantile clans sport ancient pedigrees, confirmed by genetocartographical sampling rites undertaken by vassal apprentices to Magi Biologis. As business dynasties, the Elixir Guilders have close ties to the Officio Medicae and the chemical industry in Hive Primus, the latter of which is largely controlled by House Escher.

- The Guild's known and suspected distribution of meds include anaesthetics, combat drugs, narcotics, poisons, rejuvenat drugs, psychota, irrad-ointments, mutagenic tinctures, xenotaric serums, corporeal restoratives, necrodystaric tonics, neuroacids, aphrodisiacs, musculanta-expandotorics, antibiotics & vaccines. Due to considerations of manpower, population resilience to disasters and recolonization capability, contraceptives and abortions of baseline Human fosters are strictly outlawed by the Lex Imperialis, yet the Elixir Guild display more fervent zeal in maintaining this prohibition through violent crack-down on criminals than do most governmental bodies on over-populated Necromunda. After all, the larger the population, the larger will be the mass customer demand for medicines, as sold and controlled by the Guild. The unborn do not require cures, and neither do they fight.

- Ultvesa Rakori is the offspring of a consanguine marriage within the Rakori family, and thus considered to be of pure-blooded stock. As sampling officiant, it is Ultvesa's duty to test Guild stock of meds and microbes, both via pharmaceutical auspex readings and via application on vat microbes, lab rats, Injection Servitors, condemned criminals, workhouse rejects and like organic test subjects. Likewise, sampling officiants are charged with monitoring the disease flora and medcine performance within their subdivision, a nigh-hopeless task given the teeming billions of the Hive City. Despite rigorous sealant rituals, Ultvesa was accidentally infected, during a disease sampling, by the nerve-consuming illness known as Helgr's Rot. Extensive surgery and drug treatment barely saved her life, but left her bodily form a hollowed-out wreck. Transformed by costly bionic implantations, Elixir Guilder Ultvesa Rakori has been enhanced in the performance of her manifold duties as Sampling Officiant. Praise be!




Redemptionist

"Prosperity is poison. Peace is poison. Pride is poison.

Tolerance is toxic.

Perfection through persecution.

Burn the blasphemer. Incinerate the infidel. To hell with the heretic.

Doubt is death. Deviation is death. Denial is death.

The higher will is to kill.

Faithful! Unite and smite."

- Praesentinus Copronymus


- - -

The Immortal Man

Four hundred years ago, a reclusive Cawdor street theologian living within the titanic bowels of Hive Primus emerged after a long session of fasting, flagellation and meditating over old tomes. His name was Chaddakus Korois, and he had once lived a quiet life of introverted zeal as a wandering beggar and cheap learned man, sustained by the charity of the devout poor and by donations from slightly wealthier people who were in search of answers for dilemmas of scriptural dogma. That was before the gutter scholar Chaddakus had discovered the Meaning of Man, a writ of the Imperological school, one tome among many thousands of contradictory pieces of pauper scripture that circulated in the streets of Hive Primus and other Necromundan cities. Applying esoteric numerology to the convoluted writings, the learned man uncovered a secret of the faith and emerged with fire in his eyes to spread the word.

With damning speech and swaying revelations, the Emperor-touched fanatic quickly gathered a following amid the habs and recyclatory industries of House Cawdor and founded his own sect within the Redemptionist movement. During a mass sermon in Crucible Square with twenty thousand believers attendant, Chaddakus Korois declared that it was the duty of the righteous to recreate the God-Emperor's intended destiny for mankind by an endless cycle of sacrifice. According to street-preacher Chaddakus, He on Terra had been about to bestow the gift of fleshly immortality onto His sacred species, but for the sins of men He was instead felled in treacherous combat on high and ascended His Golden Throne as a divine saviour of humanity's souls, leaving their sinful flesh to the ravages of death, only to be cleansed by faith and fire.

While this opening of the sermon clashed with some Redemptionist doctrines yet agreed with other strata of commonly adhered scripture, it did not cause an uproar. Instead, it was the next claims of preacher Chaddakus that rent a violent schism through the local Redemptionist movement, until the bloody convulsions of religious strife settled down and this new sect was accepted among the older ones by virtue of its baptism of fire, free to spread abroad.

What Chaddakus Korois revealed to his congregation was the mystery of the One Man, a spiritual entity to be formed by communal sacrifice of limbs and devout conduct, a being at the same time of spirit and flesh (the Achieved Unachieved) that is kept immortal by the constant adherence to dogma within the inner circle of believers, supported by the prayers of the outer circles of faithful. The purpose of the One Man is to kneel before the divine majesty of the Master of Mankind, and throw himself into the eternal fires of the dreaded hells, where the One Man burns forever in redemption, or at least for as long as the faithful continue to bleed and sacrifice of themselves to keep the One Man immortal as their ambassador of pain. In these flaming pits, the suffering of the One Man stands for the death of humanity's intended worldly paradise for the sake of the sins of man, yet is likewise a sign of true redemption among the righteous, who have realized in the higher plane their God-Emperor's original plan for man, only to sacrifice this perfect destiny, of immortal man made manifest, into the fires of hell. For while the punishment of mortal men is excruciating in the hells, it is a lesser form of pain and chastisement compared to the burning in hell of immortal man. Only by offering the manifest realization of our ultimate potential to the flames can mankind make true penance for its abominable sins.

Chaddakus then ended the public revelation of holy mystery by instructing his listeners of the correct practices to create the One Man and maintain this entity, all while drawing a chaindagger to miraculously cut off all off his limbs and then his head despite having severed both of his arms. This strong-willed demonstration upon himself of the new sect's practices ended with Chaddakus Korois' most faithful disciples flaying their master's saintly form, casting his flesh to the pyre while consecrating the blood-dripping bare bones as relics in front of twenty thousand chanting devotees. Then, the six foremost male disciples of Saint Chaddakus each recited litanies and self-mutilated one extremity each to mimick part of their sect founder's example, having the open wounds cauterized with red-hot iron. By a miracle, the body of the apostle who beheaded himself still lived when a devout Cawdor techman locked a domed relic, the Bronze Head, onto the holy man's throat stump, whereupon the maimed one rose with a spark of light and prayed with metallic voice along with the rest of the vast congregation. The sect known as the Sacrificial Men had come into being.

Thus began the infamous Cawdor gang known throughout Hive Primus as the Immortal Man. This Redemptionist warrior group consists of the inner circle of six mutilated holy men, surrounded by unmaimed juves and adults who act as apprentices and attendants to these revered self-sacrificers. This inner circle is always kept at six in number, for whenever one of them falls, a willing attendant who has not previously lost any limb takes the fallen's place by self-mutilating whichever extremity the deceased one lacked. Should he survive this ordeal, the God-Emperor is seen to have judged him worthy and pure of spirit. If not, another follower is selected by the gang leader for self-mutilation. Upon becoming a holy maimed man, a sect member forsakes his former name and identity, losing all ties of kin and former obligations in society in order to transcend to his sacred role in maintaining the One Man by his own living sacrifice, thereby taking up the proverbial mantle shouldered by one of Saint Chaddakus' six original apostles.

Outside the fanatic sect of the Sacrificial Men, Redemptionists and infidels alike whisper of the great many failed self-beheadings which precedes any one succesful installation of the faceless Bronze Head upon a bleeding disciple. Indeed, many of the schismatic attacks on the first generation of Sacrificial Men were caused by rival sects considering the revival of the self-beheaded one to be stark, utter blasphemy and nothing short of necromancy. Though the sectarian feuds have mostly ceased, it is generally believed (by those who do not view the Bronze Head's working implementation on a body to be a miracle) that the ancient device functions by striking the lightning spark of life into a corpse, thus raising the dead to a form of unlife more base than that of a servitor. Others speculate that the Bronze Head relic is the left-over remains of an outcast heretek's baleful experiments upon live captives, from before Hive City Enforcers busted his Underhive death lab seven hundred years ago. Or they say it is a forbidden remnant from the Dark Age of Technology, its heinous purpose shrouded in mystery. Whatever the truth of the matter, the followers of Saint Chaddakus' creed view the Bronze head as a unique vessel of holy wonders, and further point to the lack of optical instruments in the featureless Bronze Head as further proof of this sacred device's miraculous nature, for how could something fully know its surroundings without eyes? Nevertheless, a leather mask with openings for eyes that are not there adorns the Bronze Head, as is demanded of any member of redeemed House Cawdor.

The six inner circle members of the Immortal Man gang each take their name from the bodily extremity which they themselves have discarded. Five of them are known by the names of Head, Right Arm, Left Arm, Right Leg and Left Leg. The sixth member is known as Hand, by way of a euphemism which accidentally mirrors speech in Terra's truly ancient past. The gang leader is always the one who have been part of the inner circle for the longest time, with the exception of Head, who can never lead the Immortal Man. Furthermore, each inner circle member openly carries the bundled relic bones of that extremity from Saint Chaddakus' maimed body which they themselves are known for. Hand carries Saint Chaddakus Korois' pelvis bone. The gang leader is identified by the back-mounted reliquary which hosts Saint Chaddakus' ribcage and spine. There is never a shortage of recruits to the outer circle of juves and attendants, for it is seen as the highest honour among the Sacrificial Men sect to be chosen as attendants for the Immortal Man.

With the exception of Head, no inner circle member may ever replace his lost body parts by bionic replacements, however crude. Instead long metal peglegs or crutches are used by Right Leg and Left Leg, while the Arms sometime have chains attached to their respective stumped shoulder, with which to swing globular censer bearers filled with counterfeit incense, or else chains with which to swing spiked mace heads, flails, hooks, blades or other crude weapons; but never chainblades or other machine-powered weaponry. The detailed ban on bionic prosthetics mean that firearms are never mounted Servitor-like on the stumps of any inner circle member, while two-handed firearms are instead supported at all times by shoulder straps or rigs on Right Arm and Left Arm. Likewise, both Arms of the inner circle tend to sport custom-made solutions to the problem of reloading trickier weaponry and handling other equipment.

The peculiar gait of these self-mutilated holy men add to the bizarre appearance of these nigh-legendary crusaders against the unbeliever, the mutant and the witch, as do their dependence on reverent apprentices, who accompany the inner circle of the Immortal Man into battle. All the masked Cawdor gangers of the Immortal Man are insane fanatics of the Redemption. They are often said to fully compensate for their missing limbs by sheer displays of faith unyielding in combat, yet the odds given by shady bookmakers in Hive Primus would seem to run contrary to this popular claim...




Squat Faces

“The stronghold oldsters back at home might not have approved, but around these parts there aren’t any stronghold or oldsters. Or home, for that matter. Chap, in the Biker ‘guilds’ you’ll be your own man, with your own ride far away from safety and responsibilities. Us outriders have our own customs, so thus you’ll have me with this spiky, radical beard style, see? At least I didn’t tint it teal.”

“Life is a trampler. I like to keep a rug of a beard around to better receive life as it is in the hallway.”

"Pal, come now. Really? If you think I look weird now you should’ve seen me before the flamethrower accident."


- - -

These are just some Squat faces I painted in acrylic whilst sick at home back in 2013 AD.



Squat Power Boarder

A mercenary prone to casual violence, Trough Mac Broigum has served the psychopathic Rogue Trader Tyrel "Destroyer" Cathek for over seven decades of ceaseless voyages between distant stars. As his master has cut a bloody swathe through long-lost Human colonies and Xeno worlds alike, so has the abhuman Trough served Cathek with savage glee.

Trough Mac Broigum has participated in more xenocides and extermination campaigns than most senior Inquisitors can lay claim to, and he has often been at the forefront of the burning and slaughter. Trough leads an sabotage squad of Squat clansmen who have mastered the difficult vehicle known as the power board, a self-propelled ride capable of great leaps and even some limited flight.

The Squat power boarders are experts at striking through backstreets and narrow alleys after heavier units have opened a breach, rushing through urban mazes and space station corridors to deliver a lethal cargo of demolition charges, incendiaries, gas canisters, neurotoxins or virus bombs to soft strategic locations (such as waterworks or aeroprocessors) in the midst of population centers. Trough and his ilk will celebrate every triumph of mass civilian extermination with strong beverages, and will constantly retell their most daring feats of martial power board acrobatics in the face of enemy resistance.


- - -

Drawn for Oldhammer Art Contest II. Usually I base my doodles loosely on official sources at best (these fictive worlds are always best for freewheeling exploration and imagination of one's own), but this one was different. The Squat Power Boarder is a reference to three things from Book of the Astronomican: The tabards of Rogue Trader troopers, the signum of Tyrel "Destroyer" Cathek, and the power board of Stugen Deathwalker.

"Kickee Cool" on the boots was a nonsense catch-phrase which I used for a Shadowrun Dwarf kickboxer during a short RPG session. I know nothing about Shadowrun, but I made said dwarf (with neon hair & beard implants, constantly shifting glowing colours) with the wacky spirit of Rogue Trader 40k in mind.

Reference:

Spoiler:






40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/16 18:36:02


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Life Is Toil

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

"Ancient Man created earthly paradise by his labours, and Man of Gold created Man of Stone who created Man of Iron. And Man tasked ever more of his work to Machine, and Man's hands grew idle. And Man tasked ever more of his thought to Abominable Intelligence, and Man's spirit rotted. Thus Ancient Man sank into a morass of sloth and indolence, and a dark age of unbelief and grave error descended upon Man. For wretched Man had thoughts of self and sought joy and comfort in life, and for these heinous sins he was cast down from his throne to scavenge among the burnt-out ruins of his former wonders. Such was the hubris and downfall of Ancient Man.

Yet we are much wiser now. For we task ever more of Machine's work upon Man, for his shoulders were created to carry burdens. And we task ever more of Machine's work upon Man, for his hands were created to labour. And we task ever more of Machine's Work upon Man, for his back was created to break.

Ancient Man gloried in his cunning artifice and rejoiced when Machine took up duties from Man. Such was the path to damnation.

Instead, we rejoice when some member of Machine break down beyond repair, and its duties have to be shouldered by Man. For work was never truly the domain of metal and measurements, but of flesh and will.

Thus life is toil.

Toil, ever-lasting and ever-grinding.

Thus life is toil.

Toil, ever-burdensome and ever-shackling.

Thus life is toil.

Toil and penitence, and not the false bliss of wicked forefathers.

Toil! Toil! Toil!

Rejoice in your labours! Rejoice in your duties! Rejoice in your assigned tasks and give praise to the biting lash of your masters!

Praise be unto Him on Terra, enthroned in golden splendour and guardianship eternal. We bow to You.

Ave Imperator."

-
Inheritors of Sin, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

- - -

One of the fascinating sides of the dark future is mankind's spiralling descent into ever more primitive technologies. As knowledge and hardware slowly withers away, increasing amounts of processes which were once the domain of machinery and automation have to be salvaged in patchwork manner by throwing bodies at the problem. Humanity in the dark future has grown a heart of stone, indifferent to the suffering of others, and fanatical to a fault. What crude calculations its intellect can grasp are ones of massive input of flesh and resources.

Effectivization, improvement and innovation barely ever happens. That was the folly of the Dark Age of Technology, whose glories have long since rusted and faded away.

Instead of better, mankind does it bigger and with a bitter resolve to carry out the tasks at hand, no matter the costs. Loss of life is the least of the Imperium's concerns. And thus this galaxy-spanning colossus with feet of clay soldiers on, strong in its decay, and determined in its insanity.

Wonderful arcologies may have deteriorated into hellish hive cities. Scientific understanding may have given way to blinding superstition. And lives of dignity, prosperity and progress may have given way to slavery and brutal misery. Yet the teeming masses of mankind carries on, with the most primal stubbornness and will to survive burning valiantly in its heart, clinging to what little hope remains among the overwhelming darkness.

This artwork concludes the Descendant Degeneration triad, a tribute to both the enduring immense creativity of Warhammer 40'000 in general, and in particular to Luetin's fantastic way of telling the tales of Mankind in the darkest of futures.



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/18 03:43:25


Post by: argonak


Pretty cool!

I've always thought that the AI theory for STCs makes the most sense.

The theory goes that the real STC machines were actually just an incredibly powerful AI that went along with each planet and its various equipment. When you asked for a new STC pattern, the AI didn't just give you a blue print for that. it gave you the blueprints for everything you need to construct it from local parts.

This means mining equipment, ore processing, machining and forging tools, circuit board printing, chip creating. . . every step of the way the STC guides you through to construction of what you want.

The only way to do that would be an AI. Because its going to take a lot of thought to examine your local environment and tech level and find a way to get you what you want.

And when that AI goes bad, its at the center of your entire economy. And you probably don't even realize it goes bad for a while, because its smart enough to wait until you've got no chance to beat it.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/18 05:06:43


Post by: NinthMusketeer


mrFickle wrote:
It depends on what you read, some things I have read make out that terminator armour can’t be made any more, that it is precious and irreplaceable and some chapters don’t have any suits.

The other way to look at it is If it can be made of a production line why don’t all space marines wear it, why are not all wounded interned in a dred?

But that’s not a sustainable, I guess, if you want to be able to do things like introduce new models.
I have always wished that Centurions were actually the 41st-century attempt at re-creating Terminator Armor. It is bulkier, heavier, more resource demanding and ultimately not as good... but if they can get damaged in place of Terminator suits (which can only be repaired, not replaced) it's worth it. Suddenly the very silliness and 'derp factor' of the unit is turned to the fluff's advantage, and it explains why they have only shown up recently.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/20 09:41:34


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Thanks! Very interesting discussion. Agreed, the STC=AI is the most reasonable interpretation. And Centurions as 40k attempts to shore up failing Terminator Armour pools would be an improvement.




The Urge to Purge

In the grim darkness of the far future, life has become hell, and men are its daemons.

Enter, the Imperium of Man, last protector of humanity, shield of the innocent and guardian of the faithful.

Enter, the Imperium of Man, saviour of our species, master of the stars and ruler of all.

Enter, the Imperium of Man, abode of corruption, heart of cruelty and tyranny without end.

Scattered traces of the distant Dark Age of Technology hint of long epochs where mankind claimed to have banished savagery and bloodlust from its soul, dedicating itself fully to higher goals of science and colonization. Legends tell of the Men of Gold and their paradisal realm across the galaxy, of wonders erected and of neverending vicious cycles of human nature shackled and brought to heel at long last. Legends tell of peace and plenty, of love and understanding, of hope and freedom undisturbed by ancient evils inherent to the heart of man. Such a fragile state of material perfection could not last, and indeed the dream was shattered by waves of violent upheaval and witch-spawned devastation which plunged mankind into the Age of Strife.

Thus human nature reasserted itself as the contraptions and conditioning of the Dark Age of Technology fell to ruin, and man slew man, and man abducted woman, and man beat child. Cruelty, suspicion, greed and monomaniac fanaticism crept to the fore of the human mind, and the history of mankind once again proved a demented litany of betrayals and atrocities.

But one brief glimpse of such mistrust and bloodshed was the fate of House Welenbar, its residential city Hive Iazyge, and its Baronal Army on Decebalus IV in 437.M38. It was but a minor incident in the grand scheme of things, of a kind both typical and commonplace in the Imperium. It all started when the festering paranoia of Elector King Crathyus IX (Imperial Governor of Decebalus IV and head of the ruling House Malkyn) led him to invite and murder a whole score of Welenbar nobles at his Queen's birthday feast.

Instead of quencing suspected dissent, this treacherous act drove House Welenbar to launch a civil war that wrecked large swathes of Decebalus IV and cost 4 billion Imperial subjects their lives. A whirlwind of shifting alliances with other Houses, popular insurrections and masterful backroom diplomacy saw Elector King Crathyus IX emerge victorious in the end, despite many dreadful moments when the tide of war seemed to have completely turned against the ruling House.

The triumphant warlord was not one to show magnanimity toward his defeated foes. Instead, the Planetary Defence Force (PDF) of Decebalus IV and the Royal Army of ruling House Malkyn was ordered to purge House Welenbar and all its dependents down to the last extended family member. As five army groups of soldiers entered the surrendered Hive Iazyge (residential city of House Welenbar), a legion of clerks and scribes accompanied them. These bureaucrats scoured the archives of the vanquished House. At first, the teeming masses of House Welenbar were not affected, as the first wave of purging was directed only toward annihilating House Welenbar utterly in the Upper Spire.

Soon, however, the distrust of the reigning Imperial Governor hit the streets in full force. Divisions fanned out throughout Hive Iazyge, headed by royal administrators carrying long lists of names. A massive purge took place, as officials of all ranks who had served under House Welenbar were dragged out and shot. Servants, artisans, guardsmen and many more who had been in the hire of House Welenbar were all hunted down and killed, as were all the victims' extended families. Clans and districts suspected of harbouring escapees were torched and sacked, and a wild panic gripped much of Hive Iazyge.

Unknown millions were trampled by fleeing mobs. Unknown millions of people who were not targets of the purge were falsely accused by informers who lusted for vengeance and property. Unknown millions fled into the Underhive or even into the Ashen Wastes, where the bloodsoaked troopers only conducted a half-hearted search due to the lethal environs. A vast murder spree engulfed Hive Iazyge, and the sight of rampaging warriors killing indiscriminately out of sheer bloodlust became an everyday occurence. Flames gutted large sections of the hive city, and still the purges continued for months on end in an orgy of torture, killing and manhunts.

Elector King Crathyus IX stopped short of killing the entire vast conscript horde of defeated House Welenbar's Baronal Army. Instead the millions of private soldiers were enslaved into Penal Legions and shipped offworld over the coming decade as part of the planet's Imperial Tithe. The large officer corps of the Baronal Army did not escape the hand of Crathyus IX; its untold thousands upon thousands of servicemen were massacred and heaped into shallow mass graves by the PDF's infamous security service, the Sword of Order.

The Imperial Governor of Decebalus IV feared personal retribution in the form of assassination from anyone who had held loyalty to the fallen House Welenbar, and in his paranoia the Elector King had all such people exterminated down to the last extended family member. In this regard, he succeeded: Elector King Crathyus IX met his destiny half a century later when his Queen and her secret lover poisoned Crathyus' liquour, and no attempt on the Elector King's life was ever undertaken by Welenbar loyalists.

Thus peace was restored to Decebalus IV by prudent means of Imperial justice, until the cycle of suspicion and betrayal played out anew to the tune of mass death among the populace. Such is the routine of humanity in the Imperium.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/21 05:43:37


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




No Mercy

The Imperium of Man is characterized by its monstrous cruelty, applied with a demented lack of pity and remorse. Imperial officials, commanders and theocrats are all ruthless in their endeavours to preserve the Emperor's realm. They will crush any foe and dissident, persecute any deviant and malcontent, and burn any heretic and rebel that stand in their way. The Imperial order, with its shining splendour and feet of clay, must be upheld and forwarded at any cost.

The loss of innocent life mean nothing to the Imperium, for this monolithic regime operate on a titanic scale, where humans are nothing but great numbers in a broken calculation. Decayed and burdened by a bloated bureaucracy though it may be, the rigid order of the Imperium has not outlasted ten millennia of incessant warfare and disasters by failing to rise to the challenge. Indeed the heartless methods of Imperials have time and again turned the tide through total mobilization of resources and a relentless drive to win through no matter the cost, strengthened by a fanatic belief in the God-Emperor on Holy Terra.

The Imperium, as a rule, grasp cunning and efficiency but poorly, yet like a true colossus it is willing and able to feed the meatgrinder with a massive input of resources and manpower. To improve results, Imperial administrators and commanders does not engage much in the art of fine-honing tactics and processes with a clever eye to detail. Instead, they crudely increase the input and deploy ever larger cohorts and facilities both at the war front and home front. If everything else fail, the Imperium will attempt to slowly drown their enemies in Imperial armies and logistics in wars of attrition.

The Imperial way in grand matters is one of grinding down resistance and crushing it like a sledgehammer with massive forces employed in brutal assaults and endless bombardment. In small matters, servants of the Emperor tend to carry themselves with the same callous disregard for life and lack of compassion. Harried by service demands from their superiors, lectured on the virtue of being harsh and merciless by their priests, and living their entire lives in hard environments not conducive to kindness, Imperials of all ranks are quick to judge and ruthless in their willingness to damn others.

To find oneself on the receiving end of Imperial justice or the wrath of Imperial arms, is to face savage cruelty and annihilation. To merely be suspected of heresy and treachery is to invite crushing force, not just upon oneself, but upon one's kith and kin as well. To be in the wrong place at the wrong time is to be swept up and destroyed along with the operation's intended target.

For the servants of His Divine Majesty have all been taught that the higher will is to kill, and they all know that it is better for a hundred innocents to perish than for one guilty man to escape. In Imperial thinking, to stay one's hand is an act of weakness, and the Imperium does not abide weaklings. To hesitate and grant mercy is to draw punishment upon yourself, so better kill them all and let the God-Emperor sort them out.

Mercy is for the weak.

If you want to imagine the condition of our species in the grim darkness of the far future, then imagine a power-armoured boot trampling a human face... forever.

"Kill! Kill! Kill!"

- Common Imperial warcry


- - -

Tribute to the highly atmospheric video game Warhammer 40'000: Fire Warrior (2003). Strong in its narrative simplicity, this game showcased the dark future of the 41st millenium brilliantly by having the protagonist be a Tau. This optimistic and technologically advanced upstart species contrasted with the dark, regressed, cruel and fanatic Imperium of Man in a fantastic way. The dive into dark horror continued to yet more hellish depths as the Fire Warrior Kais encountered Chaos, an otherworldly force twisted beyond sanity... The atmosphere of Fire Warrior was nigh perfect, supported by good sound effects and evocative music. It also depicted bolter weapons correctly.

The above drawing is based on a scene from the video game's introduction cutscene. The first encounter with Imperial Space Marines showcased them in all their violence:

"What of this one, Brother-Sergeant?"

"No witnesses."


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/21 10:58:41


Post by: tauist


I'm digging the idea of "poisoned" STC's. Would make for a helluva story, the imperium finding a working STC which would start building more men of iron as soon as it's powered up.. good stuff!

All in all, wanted to commend on a fine thread you got here sirs! A++

Keep it up Mr Clansman


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/23 20:38:16


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


It's a really fine and fun concept, and I believe it was first used by Dan Abnett in a Gaunt's Ghost story which I haven't read, but seen referenced multiple times.

Thank you most kindly, it means a lot to me, tauist!



Opulence

"Harken to me, dear congregation! Our Lord on Terra once decreed: 'Let no man hoard wealth for nought but his own gain, for selfishness breed disunity, and disunity will doom mankind. Either we make a stand together, or fall alone with our greed into oblivion.'

Nay! We must strive for higher goals and sacrifice our possessions just as we sacrifice our sons and daughters. Indeed, just as we sacrifice our very own blood and limbs and life in service to the ever-glorious God-Emperor, hallowed be His rule. To pile riches in a vault for nothing but the benefit of one's own kith and kin is a mortal sin! To hide your earnings and inheritance from tribute and taxes and tithe will see your soul burn in nameless hells! To deny the servants of the Emperor their rightful due will damn you all!

Last week I harangued the common folk and the paupers for their miserly clinging to coin, their avarice and their shameful envy of their betters. Give up of yours and support the righteous human cause! Yet today I turn to the merchants and nobles and other people of means and privilege, and I say unto you: Your damnation draws nearer, the longer you wallow in false splendour and poisoned decadence. Your damnation draws near. Do you hear me, betters and greaters and masters and mistresses? Your damnation draws near!

While the armies of the God-Emperor bleed to death and give their life for a higher cause on ten thousand battlefields in defence of us all, you cling to those ill-begotten fortunes as if they where yours to command. Nay! All property belongs to no one but the Master of Mankind, and those who have been chosen by His immortal hand as trustees of His goods and estates must never forget their position of eternal servitude and debt. Never forget that the wealth your hands grasp, is not yours to keep and spend on a whim! Never forget that the wealth your hands grasp is to be given unto His servants to support the war effort and dignification of His realm. Never forget that you will be weighed and found wanting when you stand before His Golden Throne, and the judgement visited upon your soul will be harsh and eternal!

Lords and ladies of means, give me your ear, or throw your soul into hellfire! You must not only comply with the tax farmer and auditor and give up your appointed due to state and temple, but you must go further and willingly offer up more still of your fortunes for the greater Imperial cause. Pour your wealth into collections and alms and subscriptions for Ecclesiarchal build and repairs! Spend your inheritance on war bonds and letters of indulgence! Donate to funds that support the Imperial Navy, industry and ground arms!

The Imperium need your serfs and indentured slaves for our mighty bulwark, and it need your offspring for officers to lead the armsmen, and it need your riches to put weapons in the hands of our soldiers. What good can a warrior do without his blade? Never imagine for a moment that you have repaid your debts to His Divine Majesty by paying mandated tax and tithe! Never imagine for a moment that our Glorious Overlord is blind to your wallowing in concubines and harlots and sin! Never imagine for a moment that the God-Emperor on high does not ken your drunken opulence and knifing plots and swinish gluttony and jeering cries as you go on your thrilling peasant-hunts!

You filth and moneygrubbers clad in pearls and lace! You rutting rats of the spires! You gilded grox herd! The writing is on the wall. Know that you are constantly watched by Him on Terra, and He will determine your everlasting fate sternly when your bodies give up your spirits to the eternal judgement that awaits us all. This mortal coil is nothing but dust and duty, and failure to fulfil your duty will damn you - damn you, I tell you!

This, o honoured lades and gentlemen of finest pedigree and best of breeeding! This! This torch that I raise to this heretic on the pyre is your miserly soul cast into nameless hells! Behold the flames that scorch flesh! Behold the agony and the punishment! Behold! For this is the afterlife that awaits you all!

Repent! Repent! Repent or burn!"

- Sermon on Clans of Means, held in M.40 by Kahin-Sacrorum Maximus Himilco Magonid, of Phazania Proconsularis


- - -

Drawing commissioned by storywriter109 on Reddit, depicting an abhuman type called Siren, lavished with luxury and used as a weapon. The above background writing is my own.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/24 14:20:15


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Hangman

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

It is the forty-first millennium. Lately, the Imperium of Man has seen its dominion over the stars be challenged far to the galactic east in Segmentum Ultima. An upstart Xenos species known as the Tau have risen quickly in but few millennia from prehistoric barbarity to undreamed of heights of technological supremacy and scientific mastery. In many ways, the young Tau Empire mirrors the early stages of Humanity's own Dark Age of Technology, with their deep understanding and grasp of the material arts, their strong optimism and drive to expand, and their growing reliance on Abominable Intelligence.

The Tau Empire is positioned far, far away from Holy Terra, and their Warp travel is still only rudimentary and incapable of long-distance voyages, confined to skimming the surface layers of the Empyrean as opposed to diving deep through the mystic hellscape as Imperial vessels routinely do. By a pure chance of astrogeography, the Tau realm is situated amidst a tight cluster of stars, enabling a rapid regional expansion and colonization even at such an early stage of their Warp-breaking starship development. In short order, the energetic Tau have settled numerous worlds and incorporated a range of sentient species as vassals of the Greater Good.

Tau cultural subversion and commercial influence in Imperial systems on the Eastern Fringe has grown steadily worse in but a few centuries of contact with Human colonies. For the first time in unknown eons, the hope for a brighter and better future has been sparked among Human worlds, and vast swathes of planetary populations on the Eastern Fringe now look to an Xenos intruder to save them from the crushing tyranny of the Imperium. Resistance movements, underground propaganda cells, Xenophile smuggler rings, passive insurgency groups and terrorist cadres have formed on dozens of Imperial worlds, thereby threatening sacred Terran dominance and importing the goods and ideology of the aggressively expanding Tau Empire to Human colonies.

Naturally, Imperial response to these brewing rebellions have been brutal, resulting in scenes of mass murder, auto-da-fés of public torture displays, the filling of labour camps with prisoners on starvation rations, and much more besides. For the most part, these stark methods have been counter-productive, since they stand as cruel reminders of what the Imperium has in store for its subjects, thereby rendering the Tau Empire into an all the more appealing alternative for many by contrast. Populations have been split into hostile camps of Imperial loyalists and Tauisers, and brother has turned upon brother while sister detest sister with vehemence. Neighbours have come to shun each other, and teach their children to hate the opposite side, and thus a painful rift of strife and kinslaying has been rent open on worlds sworn to obey the God-Emperor alone.

During the Third Sphere Expansion in 997-999.M41, Tau forces overran multiple Imperial systems in a brilliant dash of high mobility, combined arms warfare and superior usage of sophisticated technology (especially plasma weaponry and markerlight targeting systems). As the conquering hosts of the Greater Good fought their way across Imperial planets, a mass fury of societal struggle engulfed the beleaguered Human colonies. Loyalists and Xenophiles struck each other without mercy in the towns, cities and even villages, settling old scores in an orgy of arsony, street battles, torture, massacres and outrage. As one side gained the upper hand in a settlement, the victors would muster a haphazardly equipped militia and march on neighbouring settlements, falling upon hostile kinsfolk in a murderous frenzy amidst the full confusion of civil war.

Bloodlust and hatred gripped the Human populace of many Imperial worlds, and Planetary Defence Forces as well as offworlder Imperial armies shipped in to defend His Divine Majesty's frontier domains executed large numbers of deserters, spies and suspected traitors on the flimsiest of pretexts. Examples were made of shirkers and suspects to strike fear into the hearts of soldiers and keep any doubters in line, and thus a state of terror rattled the Imperial military and civilian society alike.

While the Human infighting aided Tau conquest of many worlds, the Tau Fire Caste and its commanders in the field did not appreciate the havoc unleashed by these future members of the Greater Good. The ingrained Tau sense of supreme order and harmony was deeply disturbed by such wanton displays of Human mass kinslaying and savagery, and moreover military operations against Imperial defense formations were often disturbed by the unpredictable course of raging civil war. Still, the local interruptions to the short-lived burst of Third Sphere Expansion were usually dealt with quickly by the overwhelming firepower and excellent coordination of forces which the Fire Warriors and Air Caste pilots always strove to bring into combat.

One of the many harrowing sights which met advancing teams of Fire Warriors in burning Imperial city streets, were the thousands upon thousands of hanged Imperial soldiers, dangling lifeless from street lumens, gargoyles and rafters; hanged with rope, wire and cables. Yet again, the optimistic Tau upstarts were confronted with a glimpse of the sheer unrelenting horror reigning over mortals of the Milky Way galaxy from end to end: For the pious servants of the Divine Emperor on Terra are utterly blind to reason and deaf to mercy.

And they will stop at nothing to slaughter the alien, the heretic and the traitor. They will spare no one, and they will kill their own kin to keep the rest in line. Such is the ruthlessness that lurks in the heart of our species, a cruelty set to devour the Human soul in an age of terror. In an epoch without compassion. In a time without hope.

For in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.


- - -

Yet another tribute to the highly atmospheric video game Warhammer 40'000: Fire Warrior (2003). Strong in its narrative simplicity, this game showcased the dark future of the 41st millenium brilliantly by having the protagonist be a Tau. This optimistic and technologically advanced upstart species contrasted with the dark, regressed, cruel and fanatic Imperium of Man in a fantastic way. The dive into dark horror continued to yet more hellish depths as the Fire Warrior Kais encountered Chaos, an otherworldly force twisted beyond sanity... The atmosphere of Fire Warrior was nigh perfect, supported by good sound effects and evocative music. And gorgeous voice acting.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/24 16:02:08


Post by: Esmer


Yet another tribute to the highly atmospheric video game Warhammer 40'000: Fire Warrior (2003). Strong in its narrative simplicity, this game showcased the dark future of the 41st millenium brilliantly by having the protagonist be a Tau. This optimistic and technologically advanced upstart species contrasted with the dark, regressed, cruel and fanatic Imperium of Man in a fantastic way. The dive into dark horror continued to yet more hellish depths as the Fire Warrior Kais encountered Chaos, an otherworldly force twisted beyond sanity... The atmosphere of Fire Warrior was nigh perfect, supported by good sound effects and evocative music. And gorgeous voice acting.


This is the most positive feedback to Fire Warrior I have ever seen. In fact, it might be the only positive feedback to Fire Warrior I have ever seen.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/24 18:07:04


Post by: shortymcnostrill


I love this thread, great atmospheric work


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/26 06:21:58


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Fire Warrior is strongly underappreciated for its good atmosphere and ingenious setup with viewing the demented 40k universe through the eyes of the relatively naïve optimistic Tau, with humanity being regressed and fanatic, and Chaos being insane. It's a simple game, and not very good of a game, but it aims in the right direction and delivers where it counts.

Thank you kindly, shortymcnostrill!



Peasant-Hunt

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

In the grim darkness of the far future, compassion has by and large been purged from man's heart for anyone who isn't close kin. On Shexia, for instance, those too old or injured to toil in the foundries will seek shelter in human waste sinks, in an attempt to elude the Urban Purity Patrols which chase unproductive citizens out into the sewage marches to die. Another widespread phenomenon sprung from this general draining of human mercy and kindness, is that of the customary peasant-hunt. Known by tens of thousands of different names in an uncatalogued babel of dialects and languages throughout the Imperium, the essentials of the peasant-hunt remain much the same across this vast galactic realm of humanity: That of society's betters and nobler people hunting the rabble down in the slums for sport.

Peasant-hunts are mostly practiced on worlds adorned with hive cities, those overcrowded edifices of human misery and degradation that likewise stand as the primary symbols of human civilization in the Imperium. In these teeming population centres, strangled empathy dies, and death becomes trivial among the endless masses of billions upon billions of bleak shapes. In such urban dens of overpopulation, disease and filth, how can those better off not look down on the desperate and blinkered underclasses with scorn and revulsion?

On hellish hive worlds such as Necromunda and Ugarit-Alpha, brat gangs and Spyrers alike descend from the upper hive to stalk the bowels of the underhive in gleeful manhunts. Equipped with the best wargear that their affluent clans and noble houses can afford, such men and women of superior breeding will often record their adventurous exploits via live pict-feeds, allowing their equals back home in the upper spires to witness the predatory skills and ruthless strengths of these daring hunters of noble bearing. The pict-feeds naturally also allow those in the palaces to savour the sheer carnage and humiliation visited upon the squabbling rabble down below in the shanty towns.

Where they are well-known among the larger populace, the various traditions of peasant-hunts are usually taken for granted as an inevitable part of life and noble privilege, and lowly folks pray to the Divine Majesty of Holy Terra to be spared from this lurking terror. Elsewhere, crazy rumours of uphivers blooding themselves in secret on the cowed masses exist, mixed with tall tales of ghosts and elusive monsters stalking the hive levels, ready to snatch the unlucky into the shadows to tear them limb from limb, or flay them alive. The thrill of the peasant-hunt, with its ever-present dangers and challenges of remaining undetected and escaping mob pursuit, is a common ritual of passage among Imperial nobility.

The most honour can be gained by outwitting and slaying hive gangers and other experienced fighter scum, yet usually few codes of conduct forbid the casual killing of defenseless commoners irregardless of age. Indeed the peasant-hunt is usually seen as a virtuous trait of nobles who care to cull the rat-like numbers of the incessantly breeding dirty masses. The Adeptus Terra never interfer with peasant-hunts (even in situations where the outraged reaction of the lower classes to such predatory noble house activities help build up resentment and pressure toward explosive revolts), deeming them to be martially virtuous practices which prepare nobility and masses alike for combat. Indeed, the successful initiation of upper class youth Lexandro D'Arquebus into the ranks of the Imperial Fists (and subsequent promotions for prowess) was reinforced by his experiences earned at the age of fourteen from hunting peasants in the ruinous depths of Trazior Hive on Necromunda, as part of a brat gang known as the Lordly Phantasms.

The very concept of the peasant-hunt is so widespread and generally accepted as a fact of life (at least among better parts of society and Imperial servants), that even those who hail from locations without such predatory traditions may find themselves adopting this element of foreign culture when travelling across their world, or indeed across the star-spanning realm of the God-Emperor. Some may partake in a hunt to honour their hosts, and perhaps grease ongoing negotiations by graciously accepting an invitation which they at first found disturbing, but often grew to like. Others still may spontaneously pick up this custom on their own, for a myriad of different reasons.

One such example of a void-travelling man who began peasant-hunting on his own, was Skitarius Pi-Braine of forgeworld Lemuria. Once, when Pi-Braine descended into the Enginarium sections of the Imperial vessel known as
the Debt Collector in order to gild a trophy femur bone, he chanced to witness worker gang wars down in the bowels of the ships' reactor areas. Previously needled by worker heckling, this man of action decided on the spot to start hunting the worker gangs as a recreational activity. And so every now and then this loyal servant of the Omnissiah goes down and start to hunt people like a predator, stalking the shadows of the night to teach his lessers the meaning of fear. In this manner did Skitarius Pi-Braine take up a healthy sport, and cleansed some of the rabble among the clans infesting the decks of the Debt Collector, thereby allowing some group rations to rise a little above starvation level by virtue of eliminating superfluous mouths to feed.

And so the ongoing peasant-hunts across the Imperium of Man stand as a testament of the depraved depths into which the human soul has plunged, in a far future suffocated by despair and darknes. In a civilization that praise law and order as sacred, the most brutal of predations flourish. Thus man hunts man for sport, and all is well in the domains of the God-Emperor of mankind.


- - -

Tribute in general to the marvellous character Pi-Braine from the parodic RPG show WarHams, and in particular to his golden minute in episode 4 (16:45-17:45), where this Skitarius' shipboard activities since the latest planetary mission were revealed:

WarHams wrote:OnCallGM: Pi-Braine, what have you been doing with your time?

SpeakerD: Pi-Braine has gone on a marvellous adventure. He spent the first half of this voyage making the horrible servitors that have been making up servitor daycare for our dearest little man. If doorman is an abomination, it's probably Pi's fault. What else he's been doing is that he's decided he wanted to get that femur bone gold-plated. So he went down to the depths of the manufactorum inner reactor workings of the ship, and ran into some of the worker gangs. And while he was getting his femur gold-plated and metallic, he saw some worker gang wars happening, and so he decided for a recreational activity, he would start hunting them for sport. And so every so often he just decides to go down there and start hunting people like the Predator.

He went down there and they probably made fun of him and called him weird bone boy. And Pi said "You know what I will do? I will stalk the shadows of the night and teach you fear." And that's what he's been doing for a couple of days.


The best part is that this bonkers information isn't even a parody on official Warhammer 40'000 background: Peasant hunts have been prevalent ever since the earliest years of the setting, as evident in Ian Watson's crazy novel Space Marine (1993). The reference to Lexandro D'Arquebus stems from this book, while the reference to Shexia's Urban Purity Patrols stem from Matthew Farrer's excellently immersive novel Legacy, the second book of the Shira Calpurnia trilogy (available from Black Library as the Enforcer omnibus). Both works of litterature should be sought out by anyone interested in the background of Warhammer 40'000.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/30 08:18:13


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Quartering

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

In the Imperium of Man, there is no dignity in death for the wicked. The Adeptus Terra well know that for the law to be just, it must be cruel. For the punishment of one man is not only the penalty of that one criminal, but the virtuous act of making an example out of the offender, for the fearsome instruction of the masses and to the benefit of public order. To Imperial thinking, the betterment of humanity can only be achieved through terror. The greater the trauma, the wiser the punishment.

As such, executions are preferably carried out in public within the Imperium, as are many displays of torture. Since most of mankind's teeming trillions in the far future lead lives rattled by misery, malnourishment, disease, grinding poverty, mind-numbingly monotonous labour and wanton brutality, public executions need to be extremely gruesome in order to scare such blunt masses. Being already inured to hardship and the common sight of death and suffering in their everyday lives, the denizens of Imperial worlds are only ever brought sharply to attention through shows of great cruelty that goes above and beyond what their dampened empathy can suppress. The aim of Imperial justice is to rise above what the human cattle's high tolerance thresholds to suffering in others can handle, by a crescendo of showcased pain and death.

Therefore, it follows that public executions involving flames, acids and hot tongs are all popular forms of punishment, as are callous usage of racks, mutilations and condemantion to beasts of a million different species. Executions that rely upon communal and comradely violence are much praised, for they make the onlookers complicit in the punishment, and fosters a rabid atmosphere prone to pogroms, witch hunts and lynchings of unwanted elements of the population. Just a few example of such communal punishment methods include stoning, military decimation, running the gauntlet, flesh-clawing and the crowd hook frenzy. Some local cultures even encourage acts of cannibalism, as a way to ritually devour and obliterate traces of heresy and impurity in the communal body.

One of the more explicitly violent forms of public execution found within the Imperium of Man is that of quartering, a widespread kind of punishment favoured in many locations for the sheer bloody spectacle that it provides in order to improve the morals of the masses. Events of quartering will usually involve the gathering of a large number of spectators and displays of pageantry so as to celebrate glorious justice being carried out in a dutifully stern manner, accompanied by speaches and homilies.

The exact means of quartering vary greatly between different districts, continents and planets. Many such punishments include hanging and drawing before quartering, or scorching with flames, biting of hounds and other forms of torture while the wrongdoer is suspended in the air by being pulled in four directions. Some versions make use of draft animals, or communal teams of people pulling at wires, chains or ropes. Others use tractors, tanks, trucks and similar large vehicles. Still other forms of quartering utilize motorcycles, for a more drawn-out affair than heavier machinery and giant beasts provide. Another advantage to using bikes and dirtcycles consist of the opportunity for agile wheel shows, with one common variant having all four motorcyclists driving around in a circle, while the criminal is stretched taut between them in the middle, spinning in confusion while tendons snap and bones pop out of their sockets.

Many executioners may assist the tense dismemberment with weapos and industrial tools, while others deem it a better instructive display of warning for others, if the four straining forces are to tear apart the condemned body on their own without external assistance. Occassionally, tradition or spontaneous rousing by preachers on the spot dictates the chanting of litanies of hate and penitence, letting the ears of the condemned be filled by a wroth chorus of damnation during his last moments in life. At other times, Officio Medicae personnel and lay techmen stand ready to salvage the profusely bleeding, limbless torso and head of the punished deviant, in order to convert the still living remains into a servitor, a mind-wiped cyborg that is more tool than man.

Whatever the exact procedures involved, quartering usually gets the message across to most bystanders: Obey your masters and keep your head down, for the hand of authority is merciless in its pursuit of justice, and maybe next time, you will be the centre of attention during such a punishment by quartering.

And so fear was revealed to be the greatest teacher, and terror the best guardian of your soul. For if the law is to be just, it must be cruel.

Thus is the depraved state of humanity in the grim darkness of the far future.


- - -

Based on this artwork.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/08/30 18:17:44


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


I can recommend Necromunda’s “House of” source books.

To my mind, they’re the closest we’ve had to Rogue Trader era inventiveness of background in a long time.

This may be due to “new background for a long familiar setting”. But I’ve enjoyed Chains and Blades (sounds kinky) a great deal.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/01 04:43:47


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Nice tip! I've got to check them out, then. Thanks for the recommendation!

I've liked basically all I've seen of concept art and miniatures for the peripheral parts of Necromunda. People often accuse GW of having lost 40k's grimdark way, but this is demonstably not too accurate. Instead, the entry point is heroic superhumans in big pauldrons, with the grim darkness being very much alive once you get beyond that. Not too different from 2nd edition and onward.



Dragged Screaming and Kicking

Audio Version by a Vox in the Void

"Arbites! We can tolerate no friction among His subjects. No dissent. No recidivism. Be vigilant!

These are strained times, restless and confused, yet know that His hand guides you in your sanctioned work. Thus you must trust in your instincts, and let neither hesitation nor doubt hinder you from arresting anyone who you so much as harbour a vague sense of suspicion towards. Be pious and firm in your belief in the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, and all your endeavours shall turn out well. No hesitation. No remorse. Only purge. Sweep the streets clean of malcontents and miscreants!

As our Divine Majesty's watchmen, you must be unrelenting in the pursuit of your duty. Your duty is to maintain order, to uphold the Lex Imperialis and to crack down with force on any utterances of thought of self, irrespective if they take the form of speech or deed. For along that path lurks anarchy and heresy, and you must catch all who stray. Be strong! Yield not! And always pursue!

On your patrols you will encounter those among the rabble who would look askance at men and women of authority. You will hear foul whispers behind your back. And you will come across tardy subjects who will shirk away and drag their feet in cooperating and obeying commands from you, always doing as little as they could possibly get away with.

These are cases of Obstruction of Legal Officers and Irreverence Toward Masters, and must be dealt with brutally! Set an example of one to put the fear of the God-Emperor into the hearts of a hundred. Use power-mauls, shotgun butts and fists, knees and boots to quickly bring the sloth-scum down on the ground. A headbutt will also suffice, for you wear helmets, and they usually don't. Once on the ground, set upon them with violence, and aid your patrol-colleagues in the beating. Bones must break audibly. Bruisings and blood must be visible. Any associates of the uncooperative trash must be dealt with in like manner, until no one among the mob dare challenge your Emperor-given authority!

Teach them to step up eagerly and assist His arbitrators and judges. These brutes understand little else but might, and so might will be put forward, with the emblems of your office proudly displayed and polished for all to see as you carry out your hard work.

And once the obstructionist is thoroughly mauled, you bring them back to the precinct. If all flank hooks of your vehicles are already occupied with bagged and bound prisoners, then bind their limbs and drag them screaming and kicking over the streets and roads as you resume your patrol round. Make the knot strong, and their weak-willed flesh will fail before our tools of justice do. The death of an obstructionist before interrogation is of no consequence. These deviants already sealed their fate by their own conduct. The price is theirs to pay.

You will teach the rabble to fear the thump of our armoured boots. You will teach them to jump to help us out! You will suppress any inclination to arrogance and obstruction, and you will make out of them dutiful servants of the God-Emperor. As are we all!

For we are His wrath and His judgement, and our deed is His command.

Let us go forth and cleanse this den of filth and felony, for His will is our shield.

Let us punish the evil-doer and the offender, for His light is our mace.

Let us break him who break the law, for His gaze is our badge.

And fear not the darkness, for we bring His vengeance like a torch in our hands.

Be without mercy. Be one with hatred. Be always true. Be vigilant.

Ave Imperator! Move out!"

- Provost-Commissioner Tarquinius Dzharqunius, speaking in 238.M39 to a patrol shift of the Adeptus Arbites, in the Courthouse Precinct of Hive Hemithea, Aiakos Hive Cluster, on Decebalus IV


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/13 11:09:24


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Human Bomb

Audio Version by a Vox in the Void

In a demented age of darkness and suffering, human depravity is harnessed for total war.

The sacrifice of the self is a lynchpin in Imperial modes of thinking. To throw yourself upon enemy arms is the act of a virtuous subject of the Emperor on Earth. To offer up limb and life in combat or labour is an honourable deed that makes that life worth having been lived in the first place. To give up yourself and your offspring and kin is a praiseworthy contribution to the cause of the species and its divine lord on Terra. For the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium, and as long as men, women and children are prepared to cast themselves unto death for the God-Emperor, His domains will endure across the stars.

Great empires are not maintained by timidity, and so the Imperium of Man have long since ceased hesitating over plunging the worst depths of immorality in pursuit of its costly triumphs. Victory must be won at any price, and the survival of mankind as a whole is dependent on its overlords' callous disregard for human life and dignity. Man, after all, is nothing but yet another resource to expend in order to uphold Imperial power. Man on his own is nothing. Man exist to serve: He is nought but a number in a broken calculation of increased input to bolster a decrepit galactic civilization with feet of clay.

The Human Bombs of the Penal Legions are but one of countless examples of the extreme measures which the Imperium of Man employs on a regular basis. Albeit the practice was originally born out of desperation in half-forgotten millennia of the early Imperium, it has long since solidified into a standard weapon system of the Astra Militarum.

Among the convicted criminals filling the ranks of the Penal Legions are to be found sinners, whose crimes can never truly be repented in their lifetimes. Those are felons who have violated and tortured others, and are ridden by intense emotions of regret and insane repentance over what they have done. Among these doomed humans, many are psychotic and suicidal, and will often grasp any chance to earn the Emperor's forgiveness through death in battle. Once identified, such men and women of damnation are immediately recruited into the Human Bomb squads, where they can seek redemption for their sins.

Members of the Adeptus Ministorum will guide these lost souls in meditation and prayer, to make them understand what they must do to receive His full forgiveness. Before battle, lay techmen will equip the Penal Legionnaires with a bomb harness and arm the explosives, while preachers or confessors utter liturgies and blessings. The Human Bombs make the sign of the Aquila, and press triggers of igniters in a grip which only death will cease. Absolution is at hand. Only once the harness is detonated will the soul of the redeemed sinner be forgiven and welcomed to join the side of the God-Emperor in peace.

And so Imperial Guard commanders will employ suicide bombers in deadly situations on the battlefield, such as to clear the breaches of the foe's fortifications or counteract enemy infantry possessing superior size and armour to lowly Guardsmen. These living explosives are a potent tool in the Imperial arsenal, and have often won the Astra Militarum the element of surprise against hostiles for which such tactics would be unthinkable, such as long-lost human colonists or the naïve Tau upstarts on the Eastern Fringe. Human life is the true currency of the Imperium, and what great difference is there between ordering tens of millions of soldiers to advance into the jaws of certain death with a gun in their hand, and transforming them into Human Bombs? Aren't we all awaiting our chance to sacrifice ourselves for our species and lord? For is not a death that serve the Imperium usefully a benign mercy to repentant sinners?

It is better to die for the Emperor, than to live for yourself.

Aside from innumerable improvized solutions, there exist a number of Standard Template Construct (STC) patterns of bomb harnesses. All of these are of crude make and stand as testament to such far-fetched contingency armaments having been originally designed by ancient Abominable Intelligences to aid their human colonists only in the most desperate of circumstances. What once was almost only a theoretical emergency situation back in the Dark Age of Technology, has since become standard fare in the grim darkness of the far future.

And so the Age of Imperium grinds on, its rusting machinery greased by human sweat and blood. Thus on ten thousand battlefields on distant words, the voice of the damned ring out, eager to redeem their baleful sins and find forgiveness in death. As bombs are locked onto flesh, those voices ring out as one, its battlecry stark and fervent; its message that of the true fanatic; its words the very essence of the future of our species:

"For the Emperor!"


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/13 13:56:46


Post by: Platuan4th


 Hellebore wrote:
 John Prins wrote:
Hellebore wrote:
The first thing anyone building one of those would do, is ensure it could build new STCs, so there would be very small chance they only had one on each World


On the contrary, the first thing you do is make sure they cannot build more of them. Because it only takes one deranged idiot to demand a planet killing weapon from the machine and kill everyone. The ideal situation is you have one to get established, and you learn from the machine and establish your own thinking, inventive civilization until you don't need the STC anymore, and could rebuild it if you did. You literally only need one, and like everything else from that era, it's built to last.

When everything goes pear shaped, however, the STCs are definitely the first targets you'd try to eliminate. So you can bet the Men of Iron deliberately targeted any STC machines they could ASAP, or worse, infected them to turn on mankind as well.


I don't think so. At the time they were made, they were colonisation tools given out to everyone. They were created to aid colonists. And anyone sending a complex piece of machinery like the STC out as the sole provider of everything would understand how precarious those colonists would be. So many problems from launch to landing. They wouldn't send it without redundancy.

And they'd need to repair it, so it would need to know how to make components of itself.

What humans and men of iron did to them after that is a separate issue. Star trekesque engineers made them as benevolent multi tools for human colonists.

I mean they're basically a cross between star trek computer systems and 3d printers.


Actually, they're Aasimovian machines. The STCs are straight lifted from Foundation where, while people knew how to operate them, the actual maintenance and operative functions were kept secret by a technology caste that hid everything behind a religious cult that eventually just plain became a religious cult as time went on, technological knowledge became rote ritual, and things were forgotten because the machines did everything themselves(sound familiar?). Even in Foundation, the machines and a group of tech caste priests were sent along with colonists to help them set everything up so that the average person didn't know how to set one of them up.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/13 17:43:27


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


We could add that the tech priests in Foundation wore red robes.



I Who Am Born To Die

Audio Version by a Vox in the Void

"I who am born to die salute You, Imperator.

I declare my loyalty to Your dominion and Your glory everlasting.

I commit my soul to Your forgiveness and Your divine embrace.

O, God-Emperor on Holy Terra, receive my humble offering upon the altar of war and deem it worthy.

Deem my death worthy, as my life was not.

Redemption for my sins, that You all know of, I seek through sacrifice.

I sacrifice to You alone, for none other than Your Divine Majesty is the rightful saviour and ruler of man.

O, lord of hosts and leader of the people, have mercy.

Have mercy upon my soul. I ask of You, have mercy.

Shelter its fluttering candle light from the stormwinds of damnation.

Glory unto You, Imperator.

Carry this small light safely to Your Golden Throne on mythical Earth.

Glory unto You, Imperator.

And join this drop of flame to the bright heavenfire of all redeemed mankind, set to outshine the darkness.

Glory unto You, Imperator.

To be one with my species in death.

Power unto You, Imperator.

To preserve my eternal soul.

Power unto You, Imperator.

To save my true essence from the torment of the hells.

Power unto You, Imperator.

This I seek, and for this I lay down my life.

Reign immortal, Imperator.

This alone I crave, for my life is dust.

Reign immortal, Imperator.

This I pledge, or may my soul forever be damned.

Reign immortal, Imperator.

Bless my flesh as flames blast it to cinders. Bless my ashes as they fall upon maimed foes. Bless my spirit in its final journey to salvation.

Only in death is there solace. Only in death is there redemption. Only in death does duty end.

I die in Your name:

Ave Imperator!"

- Death oath of Human Bombs of the MCCCXLVII Penal legion, as recorded by Confessor Albrahimiq d'Iolvertus in 668.M40 prior to the Disaster at the River Moreus on Skutatoi Minoris, which saw the complete annihaltion of the 3 million men in Astra Militarum Systemata-Hostis Percennia (XIX-XXV Armies) under Lord-General Theofilius af Hötzenschlacht


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/14 19:59:58


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Juve Soldier

In a desperate time of suffering and insanity, age is no excuse to shirk from your duty.

The harsh rule of the Imperium of Man strive to leave none free of its grasping talons. Even though real control over society is limited on most human worlds, Imperial ambitions are nonetheless total and all-encompassing in scope. Ideally, no subject of the God-Emperor should be left outside the power of their rightful masters. In reality, vast swathes of planetary and voidborne populations alike live their entire lives while barely registering the existence of the Imperium of Man.

Many such people outside direct Imperial control are too poor, or too rich, or too many, or live in too remote locations for the reach of the Emperor-appointed powers that be. For instance, the innumerable billions, or even trillions of humans dwelling in hellish Underhives across a million worlds, will rarely (if ever) see Imperial officials or soldiers in their short, brutish and nasty lives. Oftentimes, the failure of the Imperium to impose its cruel control over the entire population of planets and voidholms comes down to its screeching inefficiency, rotten bureaucracy, rampant corruption and sheer incompetence. Another age-old limit to the effective power of Imperial organizations are their corpse-like rigidity of order, where individual initiatives, innovations and the bypassing of hierarchies for swifter or better results may result in draconic punishments ranging from death, torture, burning at the stake or lobotimization and transformation into a cyborg thrall known as a Servitor.

Crude colossus with feet of clay though it may be, the Imperium will nevertheless try to impose total control over those sectors of society that its powers may reach. To live under the heavy hand of Imperial rule is to lead an utterly regimented life of endless indoctrination into a rabidly loyal subject of the Imperium, ever eager to report on deviants and malcontents, ever willing to lynch heretics and mutants, and ever ready to sacrifice yourself for the higher cause. To come to age under Imperial purview is to grow up into a blind fanatic and ritually obsessed practicer of the Cult Imperialis, your mind filled with litanies of hate, psalms of vindiction, mantras of purging, hymns of martyrdom and prayers of penitence. Such is the saturation of Imperial dogma in these juvenile Imperial subjects' lives, that many of them end up monomaniacally incapable of doubting the Imperium for even a second, no matter what atrocities their eyes and ears may bear witness to. Thus are fine subjects to the Emperor moulded at a tender age, and thus is the future of the Imperium secured. Blessed be the children.

The Imperium of Man harbour no softness in its heart of stone, for weakness is the bane of the whole species. Only the ruthless may attain dominion, and only the cruel may uphold supremacy. The law of power is written into the stars: A hard life breeds hardy people, and all is well when the weak are culled. Thus Imperial authorities approve of the abominable hardships that plague the lives of most humanity, for misery makes people grow up fast, as it were, and desperation is the mother of ability. Many children in the Imperium of Man will learn to survive, fight and kill in their everyday lives, or else succumb to a harsh reality that brooks no pacific timidity.

Orphans in the Schola Progenium learn to handle weapons long before the age of ten, and the situation is not much different on the streets of hive cities or in the wildlands of tribes. Many Imperial subjects will have slayed someone before they reach adulthood, and almost all will have been regularly beaten bloody by grown-ups and participated in nasty kid fights, some losing eyes, fingers and other body parts in the process. A great many will also join gangs at an early age, for it is better to be in the pack of ravenous predators, than to be ravaged by it.

When rampant violence is such an inseparable part of the human condition, how could there ever be anything wrong with recruiting adolescents and children into the ranks of militias and more organized militaries? Most cultures on the worlds and voidholms of the Imperium will count its members as adults by the age of fifteen, yet few indeed will have any scruples about arming those they consider children. Many times, Imperials will choose to fill gaps in the ranks of armed forces with properly indoctrinated children, rather than turning to adults from population sections with unreliable schooling in Imperial loyalty. The phenomenon of child soldiers has been a fact of life since time immemorial, and few humans indeed will ever stop and think about it.

Thus it is that juve soldiers can be found all across the galaxy, serving alongside their elders in a myriad of Astra Militarum regiments, Planetary Defence Forces (PDF), noble House Guards, tribal warbands, authorized street gangs and local militias. Here, the children will reach adulthood and face their rites of passage among the rough warriors, or die trying. Many juves will be fired up with tales of martial exploits and dreams of glory, and will volunteer for service, often lying about their age and pass themselves off as older than they really are. Others will be forcefully inducted into military units, a custom that is particularly common in times of crisis and massive casualties. After all, even a child can fire a lasgun.

Picking up large weapons and donning boots and uniforms that leave a lot of space for growing in, these often malnourished boys and girls at arms will not seldom march into slaughterfests of dark trauma and gain scars both physical and mental in nature. A glorious death is theirs, and the chance to fulfill their dreams has been given them by the Divine Majesty. Many juve soldiers will be picked out of various Imperial, planetary and voidholms' youth organizations, who all prepare the children and adolescents for arms, combat and the rigours of a soldier's life.

An endless flora of legends about juve soldiers thrive across the Imperium of Man, telling of gallantry, self-sacrifice, duty and piety in the face of horrors and monstrous foes. Who cannot remember stories of plucky little boys and girls who destroyed great tanks and killed rampaging behemoths against all odds? Who cannot recount tales of brave children in arms throwing themselves bodily before the blasting mouths of enemy guns in order to allow their comrades to cleanse bunkers? Who have not heard of captive juves who died with the Emperor's name on their lips while being torn to shreds under sadistic torture? Rejoice, for the Imperium's youth under arms will uphold these proud traditions and fight for their species and lord! Rejoice, for glory is theirs to win in battle! Rejoice, for a childhood well spent!

Such are the lives of uncounted billions of juve soldiers serving across the vast expanse of the God-Emperor's sacred domains. Such are the deaths of those who fall fighting for the cause of Holy Terra. Such is the will of the Emperor.

Truly, mankind is blessed with a fighting spirit that burn brightly from cradle to grave. For parents will not only give up their sons and daughters, but juves will offer themselves willingly to the armies of the Imperium. Is this not a sign of the chosen status of humanity? Is this not proof of the righteousness of our cause? Is this not a banner to rally around? And so the word goes out: The Emperor of mankind want you in arms! For what force in the universe could ever stop the might of man truly united, subservient to the Emperor and flocking to sacrifice himself, no matter his age?

Thus a grand tragedy of suffering, death and stolen innocence replays itself over and over again as centuries grind on, and the decaying Age of Imperium grows older with yet another millennium, yet another year of mass graves and unheard grief, yet another day of carnage and blood. For the Imperium of Man will baulk at nothing to preserve its overlordship of power and hate, and it will not hesitate to feed the meatgrinder with an ever larger number of soldiers for increased input in a broken calculation. Aye, the survival of the human species itself is at stake, but more pressing matter for its masters is the need to preserve Imperial rule and Imperial strength for their very own sake.

Forget the shining Knights and proudly painted power armour for a moment. If you want to imagine the reality of war in the Imperium of Man, then imagine children in uniform beside adult soldiers, weapons in hand as they charge into no man's land, letting out a fervent battlecry as a firestorm engulf them: "For the Emperor!"

Such is the demented state of man, in the darkest of futures. Such is the depravity that awaits our species.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/17 09:42:54


Post by: Skinflint Games


That's pretty haunting


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/19 16:09:13


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Cheers!



Scorched Juice Thief

Legends tell of the Terran gods of old who cast lightning unto Earth to hunt humankind for punishment, yet a traitor demigod captured some bolts and gifted ancient man with the knowledge of how to harness that sparkling power to pull his burdens and light the darkness, and ever since that fabled day have electricity coursed through cables crafted by human hands. Most legends also tell of the renegade demigod's horrendous penalty, usually involving an eternity of being shocked through sensitive body parts, nigh unto death in everlasting fits of cramp and agony, for the gods of old are said to have been jealous of their power, and knew boundless hate for anyone wishing to steal their lightning from on high.

Thus it was that the folklore of disparate human savages during the Unification Wars and the Great Crusade made many tribes recognize the lightning bolts of the variant Imperial Aquila as indicator of the Emperor's god-ordained status as humanity's chosen subjugator, arbitrator and saviour. For truly did the Imperium carry awe-inspiring forces at its disposal, and indeed did its star-sailing arks cast lightning unto anyone who crossed the nascent Imperium of Man. Such raw power and exalted, lethal might could not be denied by anyone but the most foolhardy.

To this day, many scattered human colonies who have survived in regressed isolation and squalor since the Age of Strife, react to the arrival of Imperial missionaries, explorators and invasion forces with the same awe-struck reverence. The Imperium may not be a good force of philantropic morals to adore, but to most men and women it nevertheless stands as a fearsome edifice of bristling strength and power to which they must submit for the good of all. Indeed the Imperial symbols of the soaring but cruel predatory eagle and the the treasured but deadly lightning bolt represent the essential character of the Emperor's domains since the Imperium's very inception.

Innumerable human cultures across the Milky Way Galaxy retain some sense of the God-Emperor's connection to lightning in the heavens and electrical power alike, usually held to be a material grant from the benevolent Imperator in His guise as the Omnissiah to unworthy humanity. Thus accidental deaths from electrocution will often be taken as proof of His Divine Majesty's disapproving judgement on wayward sinners.

Human civilizations have been dependant on the forces of harnessed lightning since the early Age of Terra. Indeed electricity is as essential for higher technological cultures to persist as air to breathe is. On a million worlds and uncounted spacebound habitats, the works of superstitious man run on captive power, and without it he would be nothing but a dirt-bound barbarian left to the mercy of the night.

Many known STC systems involving the most advanced levels of electronics and electricity are too complex and refined to manufacture and maintain for the populations of most planets and voidholms to experience in everyday life. Instead, utilitarian Imperial society is often stuck with more primitive and robust means of power, preserved among the simpler systems left over from the scattered heritage of the Dark Age of Technology. More advanced electrical hardware of new production is usually only seen in the hands of higher Imperial Adepta, rich noble Houses and a low number of tech-clans with an exceptionally well-preserved grasp of some tech (e.g. Van Saar in Hive Primus on Necromunda), as well as in the hoarding Adeptus Mechanicus.

Safety is usually a minor concern among electricians and Guilds in the Imperium. By far more important is the safeguarding of one's powerlines from competitors and parasitical scum who would wish to feed off your juice. Electricity theft is a rampant problem all across the more civilized worlds of the Imperium, with an ever-renewing horde of crims and scummers willing to risk their lowly lives by hooking into your grid and harvest your bitterly begotten electricity. Such juice thieves will climb and crawl and cut to get to the sweet voltage inside cables and conduits and power stations, and they live only a knife's edge away from a scorched death at the hands of the lethal current they so lust after. Sin is indeed often its own reward, as innumerable scorched corpses attest to.

Juice thieves usually only leach off minor power lines, along which Guild personnel, hired gangers and armed techmen regularly patrol to unhook thief lines, pick down burnt power poachers and shoot any leachers on sight. Yet a few daring souls will attempt to tap their illegal lines into the massive juice trunks which feed major hive industries and Guilds directly from the geothermal heat sink at the heart of the hive. This is an exceedingly dangerous endeavour, since mere proximity to a loaded power trunk is enough to kill in an instant, yet even so a few daredevils manage to pull the stunt off. Such treasured leach lines will often feed power into entire settlements and sections in the Underhive, warming and lighting uncounted filthy inbreds down in the nightmarish city depths at the expense of honest Emperor-fearing people uphive.

One such juice thief was Sinden Kass from the Underhive quake hole settlement of Junktion in Hive Primus of Necromunda. Junktion once led a prosperous existence as a dirty boomtown, taking hefty fees to winch travellers and their wares high up into the lower hive, cutting down travelling times for Underhive expeditions by a great deal for anyone willing to pay up. The magpie known as Sinden Kass was a lamplighter of Junktion, a thief who dared to plug into a massive power trunk which fed the Mercantile Guild counting-houses in the Orlock quarter.

As a result, all the lights in these Guild chambers started to flicker, which irritated Master Vlitz Thaki, Mercantile Guild Senior Deputy Comptroller of Satrapies for the 81st Subdivision of the Hive City of our all-providing Hive Primus. The workhouses around Master Thaki's counting-houses shone bright enough without such flicker, since they took its electricity from separate lines. Master Thaki gave a brief order to his artificers and techmen to "do something about that, see to it." These techmen first cross-fed some electrical power to stop the lamps flickering, then they backtracked their lines found some Underhiver's bodged cable-tap.

In response, the adjutant of Master Thaki told one of his captains to retaliate against the filthy scum down there. The captain sent out one of his own subordinates, who took some well-equipped Guild armsmen and rappelled down the Well into Junktion. Their quick and furious raid saw dozens killed indiscriminately. Punitive explosives were planted to sabotage the local water supply (leading to bloody thirst riots and gang war), and then the boomtown fathers were publicly executed in the square of the little settlement. The only small report that made it up the chain of command through the adjutant to Vlitz Thaki, was one of the power line having been fixed without even bothering to mention the raid, and Master Thaki was happy to see his lights working as they should again.

Thus one lamplighter's juice theft fuelled an inbred boomtown in the Underhive, until the righteous armoured fist of uphive forces crushed the bastards, and restored good lights to the Mercantile Guild. Such events are numerous beyond counting in the hive cities and voidholms of the Imperium, and simply part of the violent routine of drudgery which constitutes life for a majority of Imperial subjects across the galaxy.

Thus the ancient legends of lightning theft and vicious punishment play out again and again in the everyday life of our species in the grim darkness of the far future.

Cower in fear of the lightning, and soothe the machine-spirit's wrath. Far has humanity fallen. And far into hell has it gone.


- - -

Tribute to Matthew Farrer's excellently immersive grimdark Underhive novel Junktion, whose main protagonist is an electricity thief and lamplighter.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/20 11:59:01


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Saw

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

In the souls' battle of attrition between good and evil, good may gain the initative and outflank baser morals by shining examples and shaming harangues, yet evil ultimately possesses greater reserves and superior logistics. For the nature of life itself is one of consuming other life; of survival at all costs; of biting into your prey and savouring the taste of your victim while you can, for you too shall perish in this grim world.

Questions follow of their own accord: What evils are we capable of? What fell deeds may our hands perform? What ruthless plans of action may our minds concoct? And the answers lie close at hand. They are to be found here and now in everyday life, in the endless petty malice children heap upon choice victims, in the lies and deceit of adults, in the dark impulses boiling beneath the surface of humans everywhere. They are to be found in ages past, in a grand parade of cruelties and an orgy of bloodletting, plunder and inflicted misery. But most of all they are to be found in ages yet to come, for man is set to plunge the bottomless depths of his soul, and there he shall descend into hell on earth and remake the world in his diabolical image.

Behold the grim darkness. Behold the future that awaits our species. Behold the Imperium of Man, the decaying domains of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, an empire of a million worlds maintained by ceaseless sacrifice, an endless lack of mercy and everlasting hatred. Gaze into the Imperium, and you will bear witness to the baleful excesses festering in the heart of man.

For in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable, human lives have become a currency to squander in the billions. Here, sweat and blood are shed on a titanic scale in order to uphold the rigid order of the Imperium, in a neverending treadmill of human suffering and drudgery. Here, violence, hardships and starvation are ever-present companions to life. Here, draconic punishments will be arbitrarily visited upon anyone who fails in their duty or steps out of line. Sometimes such retaliation will be carried out with passionless monotony, at other times the penalties will be dealt out with righteous furor. And sometimes the punishment will be executed upon the offender with a poorly concealed sadistic glee.

To be branded a heretic, malcontent, deviant or infidel in the Imperium, is to face a host of imaginative possibilities. There are the possibilities of instant death at gunpoint, of beheading, lynching, hanging, blinding, maiming, burning,stoning, quartering, flaying and drawn-out torture, or lobomization and slavery as a cyborg thrall or guilt-ridden Arco-Flagellant. Among a myriad of possible punishments are to be found that archaic one of sawing, wherein the wrongdoer is shackled and extended helplessly from a frame, usually hanging upside-down. The executioners will then slowly work through the sinner with a crosscut saw or two-man eviscerator, the sawyers usually chanting, damning the criminal or shouting admonishments to the crowd of onlookers while the teeth of their tool tear through flesh and bone.

Oftentimes, such executions by sawing will be recorded by vox-units and captured by pict-casters, to be cabled out to public loudspeakers and pict-screens distributed throughout the more decent parts of cities and voidholms. This is done in order to benefit the betterment of the people's wetched souls, as the shrill shrieking in pain and agonized yelling of the sawed one will warn sinful humanity to take heed, resist temptation such as hunger pangs, and blindly obey their superiors without question or tardiness.

This public butchering of deviants, criminals and heretics will usually be followed by their flawed flesh being burnt upon the pyre, or carted away to be recycled into the foodstuff known as corpse starch. Wild rumours claim that if you saw an Ork in half without burning the remains, two whole Orks will regrow out of the halves. This abominable phenomenon has only been observed in mankind a rare few times with grossly mutated humans tainted by the touch of Chaos, wherefore the mutliated husks of mutants will as a rule be burnt to ashes in order to not contaminate the dull ration bars of the populace. Trust in flames to cleanse corruption and filth.

And so every day, somewhere in the Imperium of Man, thousands of bystanders view the spectacle of executioners sawing a man, woman or child to death. The crowds view it with their own eyes, listening with their own ears to the noise of suffering and slaughter, as saw teeth rip through fibres and cartilage. They see the suffering and the righteous punishment visited upon the wicked, and they ken the warning. Thus all is well in the sacred star-realm of the Emperor on Earth, for what is happiness but the feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome? Just as the saw of justice overcomes the sinner's flesh and bone.

Such is the malevolent fate of unknown numbers of deviants and heretics. Such is their fell demise.

It is the fortyfirst millenium. Humanity has banished remorse from its heart of stone. Truly, the Age of Imperium is an epoch of lives crushed under heel and naked evil at full display. And so the future of our species grinds on, its rusted prison a doomed empire, its bloodstained tormentor man himself.

Such is the fate of our species. In the darkest of futures. In cruelty unending.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/09/22 14:04:42


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Subversion

In an age of darkness, fools will grasp for any seeming hope that is offered them, like fishes will with bait.

During the Age of Terra, the bestial ancestors of man lived in packs, without which they were doomed to die alone. The forefathers of man dwelt in tribes and clans, each Human being an organic part of the communal organism to which they conformed. One of the worst fates to befall ancient man was to be exiled and cast out of the community, for what was man without his kin group? The rise of cities and technology would eventually diminish such natural ties, yet the organic bonds never disappeared even at the height of the Dark Age of Technology, when man in his error thought himself the master and remaker of all creation, including that of himself.

There have always been those who feel themselves alienated from society, those inclined to disagree with their congregation, those unwilling or unable to follow the herd. These souls, doomed to deviate, will often find themselves under intense mental pressure from the petrified order, rigour and terror experienced by leading a bleak life in the tyrannical Imperium of Man, for Imperial rule have long since developed into crushing individuality and free thought for the betterment of public order. Such misfits are as varied as they are malcontent: They may be groups barely tolerated to live for the sake of slave labour, such as mutants or the descendants of some ancient rebels. They may be people driven nigh-insane by exacting labours which they were unable to stand anymore, seeking an escape from their living hell, no matter what it may be. They may be people who have had their worldview shaken by some traumatic experience, or by thinking too deeply. They may be rich nobles bored out of their senses by rigid protocol and ennui. They may be failed students or members of aspiring classes lusting for power, influence, privileges and salaried state employment. They may be those who dream of a better tomorrow. Some may simply be weak-willed minds, easily led astray by the next person they meet. Others still may be of a more spiteful bent, unsavoury characters who feel unweclcomed by society and in turn reject society themselves.

Yet even such outcasts and deviants possess an innate need for a sense of belonging, and as such like will attract like in the seedy underbelly of cities and voidholms. Those lost to the flock by alienation will often seek radical experiences, pushing boundaries and abandoning mores and even sanity in a whirlwind of hedonistic partying and edgy experimentation among subcultures. In such a drug-poisoned morass of moral perversion, dangerous ideologies, harebrained sects and heinous thought of self thrive in that twilight zone where law and order seldom apply.

Thus it is that such deviants and malcontents tend to break with Imperial dogma and desert the Ecclesiarchal flock to which they once belonged, drifting ever more down pathways to damnation. Many may eventually find a new community in the myriad of obscure and illegal groups infesting mankind's urban centers like so many rashes and boils. Here, dropouts of society and those who refuse to fit in will be scooped up and processed by a veritable jungle of sects, dodgy clubs, forbidden movements, secret societies, orgy circles, mystery cults and weird gangs. There, they will be exposed to a whole new world of banished belief systems, exotic talk, underground presses, suppressed lore and heady ideas. Thus twisted grills will be put in the heads of new members, usually denying the Imperial Creed and spitting upon the Emperor's sacrifice.

Such are the paths that lead waywards into the clutches of such heretical cells as murderous Death Cults, crazed Chaos sects and hybridizing Genestealer Cults. A recent development out on the Eastern Fringe have also seen growing numbers of Humans won over by the insidious persuasion of stunningly eloquent Water Caste agents and their propaganda material advertising the grand benevolence of the Greater Good. Such foul apostasy have seen subjects of the God-Emperor transform into xenophile Tauists, those fifth columnist sympathizers of a hostile alien empire.

Once fully indoctrinated into the movement, the deviants and malcontents will themselves go out and attempt to recruit others for their cause. Careful conversations in the street and workplace will serve as feelers to probe potential targets, to see if they are a good fit for the underground group. Once fine prey have been identified, an invitation will be extended, and so these illegal dens of discontent and subversion perpetuate themselves.

Bolder still will be those sect members who act the part of the rabblerouser, braving gruesome retaliation by approaching passers-by openly, holding speeches, handing out heretical leaflets in the street and practicing the art of demagougery at constant risk of spontaneous lynching or arrest. Such underground propaganda will be accompanied by treacherous graffiti and posters sufficient to land the vandals in dungeons of unspeakable torture and torment. By all manner of manipulation will these salesmen of fevered ideas try to spread the disease of their minds, and oftentimes will they clash violently with rival sects in the streets of cities and corridors of voidholms. Indeed, it is common practice for hostile subverts to inform on each other to the authorities, using their much-bewailed planetary oppressors and Imperial bloodsuckers as a means to wreck the competition.

Controlling what people read, hear and see is a powerful tool, and this is why independent mass media is such a limited and often nonexistent phenomenon in the million worlds and uncounted void habitats of the Imperium of Man. Most printsheets, vox-shows and pict-firms that do exist, do so in meticulusly circumscribed form, working under the heavy hand of censorship, never far from summary execution or far, far worse should they ever publish anything contrary to the wish of Holy Terra. After all, the existence of influential propaganda organs outside state control could pose a challenge to Imperial rule, through a daily grind of slanted reports, choosing to highlight particular happenings over others, lies, or outright omission of events and information which runs counter to the image which the chattering lot would wish to project. There would also be endless needling and gnawing critique of the powers that be, as well as the crying foul about supposed injustices and the subtle spreading of ideas counter to Imperial interests. Indeed such propaganda methods are usually reserved for the Adeptus Terra and loyal elites only. The Imperium know well the power of propaganda and obscurantism, for it utilize it as a tool of control all the time, and it will tolerate no rival centers of brainwashing.

Yet such a war of words nevertheless rage under the surface on most Imperial worlds and voidholms, for in shady corridors and grimy streets will be found men and women brave, foolhardy, fanatical, desperate or insane enough to speak up for their cause. A cause altogether independent from the concerns of the greater Imperium, and which often runs counter to the Holy Terran cause. Maverick sects befoul Imperial settlements everywhere, but the same is also true for the all too common separatist groupings that want to cast off the heavy burden of Imperial yoke from their homeworld or voidholm. Imperial territories are likewise rife with innumerable angry movements which spring up because of particular grievances (such as an outrageously greedy and ruthless tax farmer, or certain dictates hampering the livelihood of people), and these particularists are concerned with addressing and righting those issues alone, often loudly professing loyalty and devotion to the Emperor for the uncaring ears of Imperial Adepta and warriors. Obviously, any and all challenges to rightful Imperial rule must be crushed without mercy.

For the most part, the constant efforts of subverts and perverts to sway public opinion away from supporting the fearsome monolith that is Imperial governance, are doomed to fail. Stray recruits can always be gained among deviants, but true mass following is always difficult to obtain in a theocratic police state, even in one as marred by inefficiency, corruption and incompetence as the Imperium is. Repression and propaganda remain great strengths of the draconic Imperium of Man, even after ten millennia of bloated decay and rotten bureaucracy. For all the petty sloganeering and streetcorner rabblerousing which roach-like heretics and malcontents can muster, Imperial authorities, preachers and propagandists can answer with a colossal barrage of twisted messages, desinformation and rallying of support of their own, firmly rooted in the masses' upbringing having occurred under the all-pervasive Cult Imperialis with its zealotry and fiery oratory.

Nevertheless, heretics and enemies of the Emperor everywhere know that they can count on one thing above all others in order to gain converts like a ravaging pandemic: Imperial failings. Grand mistakes and shocking mismanagement by the Imperium of Man remain the surest source of new cult members, for nothing readies man to switch saddles and loyalties so readily as when he bears the full brunt of fresh hardships and misery. When a new great famine reduces millions or even billions of Humans to skin and bone, and puts their children into mass graves or cannibal pots, some embittered survivors turn. When the tithe grows crushing like never before, and sees thousands upon thousands of innocent, hardworking people dragged off into debt slavery and lobotomization for cyborg-transformation into Servitors, some will turn. When faults and negligence higher up result in dozens of districts finding themselves in the dark without electricity or drinking water for months on end, leading to a nightmare of desperate looting, panic, predation and harsh suppression by arms, people turn. When the Arbites torture and kill entire families, the lone survivors turn. When lives are shattered, those who have nothing left to lose will take the plunge and give their valediction to mainstream society, or at least its rulers.

Imperial cruelties and dysfunctionality is far more often the result of corruption, bureaucratic inertia and incompetence than it is the child of necessary evil and the overruling demands of defending the Human species in a hostile galaxy of total war and cosmic horrors. The evil that men do is eternal and inescapable, yet this abominable malevolence is unnecessarily multiplied and amplified a thousandfold under the harsh overlordship of the Imperium. And so it is that perverted manipulators will grasp any fertile opportunities to spread dissent by questioning Imperial legitimacy and haranguing the leadership of planetary elites or voidholm oligarchs. When the time is right, these hidden heretics will step forth and disrupt the cohesion of their culture and break down social control by venomous tongues and frantic action. They will infiltrate organizations and spread defeatism and doubt, and they will gnaw at the foundations of Imperial might.

Rarely are there as prime opportunities for subverts as arise in the worst times of crisis. Especially so in the midst of the most draining wars of attrition that are also accompanied by rampant and visible incompetence, military disasters, massive shortages and baleful starvation on the home front. Moulding minds are usually best done during childhood and youth, yet the views of people may be reshaped like clay when they are at their most desperate and thirsting for some kind of solution to their woes. When they are begging for someone willing to promise your desires, someone able to inspire and make you dream big, yes, someone able to electrify the masses. Someone able to step forth and take the lead.

And so the subvertive movements will manifest their will to power by passive resistance, boycotts, terrorism, assassinations and sabotage. Despite the lethal reply of Imperial authorities, there will be riots and the defacing of Imperial monuments, mob attacks on Imperial personnel in the street and the burning of Imperial scrolls and tomes such as debt registers and books of faith. Coups may be attempted, if infiltration and backroom deals have gone far enough. The surging tide of malcontents will rise into full insurrection, and the rebels will raise the banners of the their heinous revolution, simultaneously waging a gruesome civil war in the streets with loyalist neighbours and pious family members who refused to shirk from the righteous Imperium. Strife will play out, as it always has. Brother will slay brother, and sister will strangle sister in a madness of carnage and hatred.

Such insurgencies are usually put down with overmighty force of arms, followed by bloodthirsty eradication campaigns and massive purges. Yet some revolts do succeed, at least for a while, and manage to topple Imperial rule. Then it will usualy be shown that the alternative to Imperial oppression is just another nuance of violent tyranny and rampant corruption under different flags, as one set of rulers is exchanged for another one during the exhilaration of a brand new revolution. The new men and women at the helm will pursue selfish interests, or worse yet pursue utopian pipedreams with fanatical zeal and lakes of blood staining the hands of the idealists in power.

And so the worst flaws of mankind play out again and again, set to a choir of broken promises and stillborn hopes. Enemies are to be crushed, after all. And to gain support, it is advantageous to sell a false option. Hand the firebrands some grand words and an empty idea that they can believe in, and use those revolutionary zealots to suppress dissent and cement your power. Of course, to have power is when you are able to do something, and no one is able to stop you. Furthermore, power is intoxicating and addictive, and yesterday's dogged rebel that became today's leading liberator will often be tomorrow's toppled tyrant. As a learned man in the distant Age of Terra once opined: It is safer to be feared than loved, for the bonds of love are fragile and dependent on obligation which is broken at every opportunity for someone's advantage due to the baseness of man. Thus the arts of power are ones of cunning and cruelty.

And all this is to say nothing of the otherworldly hell-orgy or certain doom at the hands of the Great Devourer that await those planets and voidholms who fall victim to revolts of Chaos or Genestealer Cults...

Treachery, heresy and rebellion remain an everlasting scourge of His Divine Majesty's sacred domains across the stars, as the Horus Heresy and Age of Apostasy well attest to. Disunity and strife may yet prove the undoing of humanity, and so the Holy Inquisition will never rest in its mission to root out this disease in the body politic. It will find the taint and purge any suspected deviants with extreme prejudice. Inquisitors will scour entire star systems and leave billions dead in their wake in order to hunt down sects and eradicate the inner circles of heretical cults and movements. It is better that a hundred thousand innocents burn at the stake than one guilty man escapes the claws of Imperial justice.

Retribution against rebels may not always be swift or efficient, but it will eventually occur with overwhelming force and a titanic input of resources. For the Imperium of Man will eradicate any threat to its security and power, and it will seek to enforce absolute obedience and blind devotion to the Emperor on Earth in its galaxy-spanning dominions.

Thus decrepit human civilization in the grim darkness of the far future is ever plagued by those deviants and malcontents who would become subverts and heretics, and ultimately betray their species and lord. While all such traitors to the Golden Throne shall be exterminated in due time, the fact remains that ordinary subjects of the Imperator risk being entangled in lies and deceit of subversive manipulators. Honeyed words and harrowing revelations may be whispered in alleys, hooked bait waiting to snatch the unwary away from the God-Emperor's light. Who can you trust?

Hope is the first step to disappointment.

And so the Imperium undergoes an endless cycle of subversion, oppression, rebellion and retribution, for the enemy within must be obliterated without pity. Without remorse. Without mercy.

As despairing souls look for alternatives to the grinding nightmare of drudgery and callous violence that constitute life in the Imperium of Man, they see the paths presented by the cults. All dead ends.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is no escape from the hellish horror that await our species.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/02 15:27:16


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Under the Yoke

In a distant time of darkness and decay, man once again toils like a beast of burden.

Humanity reached its pinnacle of achievement during the Dark Age of Technology, for legends claim that mankind had banished drudgery and misery from its life, tasking machines with all burdensome labour and letting automation carry out all mind-numbing work. Man is said to have lived a life of paradisal bliss and scientific study, spreading his seed across the stars and bestriding the galaxy like a colossus. His knowledge was unsurpassed, his comfort unrivalled, his optimism unbound. It was a time of hope and plenty. Yet we are much wiser now.

Man was toppled from his high pedestal by his own arrogance and his own creations, and his lush gardens and crystal palaces fell to fire and ruin across twain million worlds. Thus the Age of Strife humbled man and taught him to despair once again, for none of his artifice could save his realm from collapse and horror. And haggard bands of starved survivors huddled close around campfires, fearing the night and praying to higher powers for salvation. Their lot was one of baleful suffering and cannibal acts of self-preservation, as brother killed brother and feral tribes rampaged over the fallen wonders of a once all-powerful civilization.

What is the great works and ingenuity of brilliant mortals to the mute void? What is the violence and hardships of depraved mortals to an uncaring cosmos? On a million worlds and more, men, women and children begged from the depths of their hearts for someone to end the raging chaos and gnawing misery. Their star-sailing ancestors would have scoffed at such ignorant superstition, but their forefathers' hubris had been laid low by their sins, and only shattered remnants of primal humanity lingered on worlds and voidholms spinning around uncounted alien suns. Unknown generations of humans asked for deliverance during Old Night, sacrificing to silent skies.

Yet their prayers for salvation were heard, for a man unlike any other arose on Earth, raising the banner of thunder and lightning akin to the gods of old and conquering all that stood before Him. This man was known only as the Emperor, and His legions and labourers reshaped the galaxy in the Great Crusade, slaying old warlords and destroying old allegiances with the weapon, while repairing and building shining cities anew with the tool. A new golden age had dawned for mankind, and for the first time in five millennia there was burgeoning hope and plenty once again.

Yet resurgent man swiftly proved the falsehood of his heart, for in his limitless ingratitude did he rebel against the saviour of his species, and the galaxy burned again in the Horus Heresy. And as the Emperor was mortally wounded by His favourite son for whose treachery He was the bane, a rightful punishment was inflicted upon sinful mankind, and the grand promises of the brief golden age of the Emperor in bodily splendour were withdrawn. For his disloyalty, man would die by the sword. For his arrogance, man would know pain and despair. For his selfishness, man would toil under the yoke. For his greed, man would see his offspring succumb to disease. For his blasphemy, man would be cleansed in flames. For his crime, man would be ruled by cruelty. For his heresy, man would never know peace.

Thus the Age of Imperium is one of order and misery, in which all must bow to the will of supreme authority and praise the lashes of the whip as it tears flesh bloody. It is an era of endless darkness and cruelty, a hymn of servitude to overlords sung by fanatics and savages, its tune the evil that men do.

Gone is the wonderland of the Dark Age of Technology. Gone is the bliss and the hope. Gone is the certitude of machine thralls easing the lives of humans. The Imperium of Man still maintain and produce a great many machines, most of which are robustly primitive in design or poorly understood, and usually in need of large numbers of human hands to plug the gaps where machine components or STC reproductions fail. Slowly but surely, the rotting Imperium has seen an arduous demechanization of technological systems, with frail or auxiliary systems giving up to never receive a replacement of like quality. Instead, teeming masses of human labourers heave at ropes and chains where once engines pulled weights. And so stopgap measures turn permanent in an ever downward spiral.

The Imperium of Man supplements its slowly failing industrial machinery with hordes of men, women and children doing manual labour, throwing ever more bodies at problems with indifference, where once their ancestors would have invented machines in a long-lost hunt for efficiency and improvement. One such example of descendant degeneration is the simple porter, a humble subject of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra who carry heavy burdens on his back, in his arms, on his head, or hanging from a yoke on his shoulders. A porter can transport far less weigth than a draft animal such as a horse or cart-grox can do, not to mention vehicles and other machinery. Yet manpower is abundant on the worlds and voidholms of the Imperium, and this cheap solution to logistics will always be utilized along with beasts of burden and machinery, or even be used to replace precious machine power altogether in a great many instances.

Most Imperial mining and building projects (including such landscape architecture as the digging of irrigation canals, mass graves and the erection of skull pyramids following purges) will be accompanied by a horde of ragged humans hauling loads like ants in backbreaking helotry. Indeed, many military and exploratory expeditions into ancient ruins, wild nature or wilder Underhives will usually sport a considerable baggage train of human transportation beside draft animals and vehicles. These toiling bodies can be pressed into arms in an emergency, used as bait or even be eaten if all foodstuffs run out.

This peonage is the destiny of uncounted men, women and children, many walking barefoot and bent double as they carry out their Emperor-ordained duty as archaic human beasts of burden and live out their short lives in wretched squalor.

Such is the lot of unknown billions of human souls across a million worlds, their drudgery and sacrifice nothing but numbers in a broken calculation of increased input, their very existence a testament to the faltering patchwork industry of a decrepit empire.

For the Imperium of Man will shy away from nothing in order to prolong its tortured reign. Where machines fail, human flesh will pick up the slack. Where a million soldiers perish on the battlefield, three million labourers in mines, factories, starships and ground transport have already died in order to support that army with its arms and equipment, their remains ground up and recycled into corpse starch to feed the living. Where Imperial subjects end up maimed in endless workplace accidents, most have to either limp along and carry out chores that do not require those body parts, or receive crude bionics in the same way a broken tool would be repaired. Another common fate for those too injured to be productive can be glimpsed among the foundries of Shexia, where the unfit and old are chased out by Urban Purity Patrols into the sewage marshes to die.

Thus is life under the Imperial yoke, and thus is death. To be a man in such times is to live a rat race of thankless toil, your stomach riven by hunger, your back at risk of breaking any day, your flesh tormented by parasites and disease. No matter how hard you labour, the overseer's bark and lash will ever find you wanting. High quotas must be met, and always the survival and mastery of your species and lord depend upon your efforts, piety and sacrifice.

To be a man in such times is to wake up to a nightmare every shift, every morning, every lights-on. Your offering of sweat and blood will be taken for granted, your tenacity go unrewarded, your death only noted for district manpower replacement needs or because of the resultant cleaning and repair duty when your mangled corpse interfere with the workings of the machine spirit.

Such is the grim darkness of the far future.

Such is the fall of mankind from ancient heights.

Such is the despair and misery that awaits our species.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/02 18:17:36


Post by: Castozor


Great work as always Karak, I've come to enjoy this thread as a throwback to older times when the fluff was (imo) better. When there was a thinner line between Chaos bad, Empire good.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/03 04:18:32


Post by: Hecaton


This is all functionally no longer true. Cawl can churn out loads of new machinery, the Imperium is unironically heroic, and so on.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/03 11:08:39


Post by: Olthannon


 Castozor wrote:
Great work as always Karak, I've come to enjoy this thread as a throwback to older times when the fluff was (imo) better. When there was a thinner line between Chaos bad, Empire good.


Absolutely 100%, the art here represents what the misery of being under the imperium would be like and how I still think of the 40k universe. Despite its current trend.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/03 18:39:33


Post by: crnaguja


Great thread. This kind of stories is why 40k was good


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/06 22:20:43


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Thank you most kindly, folks!

On the one hand, I am by principle skeptical to go for carrying the narrative forward over static setting and to risk diluting a fantastic grimdark fictional universe. But on the other hand I've always had a soft spot for mad scientists in hidden laboratories (hidden armies less so) and would always have liked to see Julius Caesar and his legions show up to save the late Roman empire both in the west and east.

Therefore I'll stick with pre-Indomitus 40k and wait and see how this new approach by Games Workshop turn out in the long run. It was surprisingly well-handled in the novel Dark Imperium (I really liked the deep history parts and Guilliman's doubts), so if nothing else the Indomitus stuff and onward could prove some alternative history fun with grimdark Dexter's laboratory and lighthearted wish fulfilment, even if one doesn't end up embracing it as worthy of brilliant Warhammer 40'000 worldbuilding.

Cheers!



Pipe Lurker

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

In the grim darkness of the far future, some who go to the lavatory do not return.

Claims were once made that civilization can be measured by how far human waste is transported away from the people that produce it. While such a crude yardstick is of little value to cultures with starships and interstellar empires, sewers and running water nevertheless remain some of the best (and oldest) inventions of humanity. Clean running water and efficient sewage systems could be taken for granted during the Dark Age of Technology, during those forgotten millennia when mankind reshaped worlds at will and erected paradisal arcologies in soaring hubris.

Yet such simple luxuries born from humble pumps, pipes and filters are far from obvious and omnipresent parts of everyday life in the rotting astral realms of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, for creature comforts and public health have come to be of minor concern to the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man. Vital infrastructure such as plumbing and power will usually be installed as a matter of course during Imperial construction, but its maintenance is an entire matter altogether.

It is not uncommon for water and sewage systems to decay, plug up and be infected with unclean elements. It is likewise common for such faulty plumbing and sewers to stay neglected for many years on end before plumbers and purgation crews can be found to rectify the problem. Cholera is as a consequence a natural occurence on most Imperial planets and void installations, its festering existence noted with indifference by the Officio Medicae.

A majority of civilized Imperial worlds and voidholms who can boast of some antiquity tend to sport labyrinthine tangles of pipes, cisterns, sewage works and water towers that have accreted haphazardly over unknown epochs. Oftentimes in lower hive cities, entire sections of such water and sewage systems will have been forgotten by whatever clans, corporations or authorities that were originally tasked with maintaining and repairing them. In which case the tunnels will often have been colonized by mutants and scavengers, and occassionally a rudimentary form of maintenance will be provided by some local scraptown settlements, or worse yet by enterprising and armed pipe-scamps who will tinker and re-route piping ruthlessly in an extortive hunt for pecuniary gain and local influence.

In times of mass starvation it is usual practice for corpse guilds to hire gangs or armsmen and send out expeditions to search for forgotten nooks and abandoned sewage systems in the depths of Imperial hive cities, where depots of accumulating human waste and corpses may be found and harvested for their bio-matter. Indeed many legends across the Imperium give praise to adventurous heroes who braved life and limb to save their hungry kin by slaying fell guardians of hoarded manure and dead bodies.

Another widespread phenomenon found in somewhat functional parts of Imperial cities and voidholms, is that of the undermanned plumbers, who have realized that they can use the screaming demand for their services as leverage in order to only show up to lowly households willing to pay exorbitant fees or bribes. Normally the denizens of a household also have to serve up an expensive feast dinner if they want the plumber to even cross the threshold into their home.

Some writings by scholars in the Age of Imperium claim that ancient man during the Dark Age of Technology did not exterminate dangerous wildlife and harmful parasites since it was no threat at all to him. And indeed ancient man would terraform uncounted worlds and introduce species from other planets, or even genetically transformed flora and fauna, tailored for the new worlds, complete with predators to round out the ecosystem. Such xenobiological induglence allowed all manner of noxious and lethal creatures to survive and expand on uncounted human colonies, only to infest Underhives and even sewage systems in the Imperial era, spreading between worlds via resupplying starships.

And so a myriad of fiends roam the depths of hive cities, while the smaller, agile and more flexible ones may occassionally find their way into piping, losing themselves in claustrophobic plumbing to prey upon humans and each other. On hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms, a wide array of bestial xenological lifeforms have been known to slither and crawl their way through sewers and tubes. These monsters and pipe lurkers will force their way into homes or lie waiting in toilets, ready to infect men, women and children with their eggs, or lie prepared to sting those enthroned upon loos with toxins, sucking their innards out of their paralyzed husks or devouring them from below in a feeding frenzy. As a result, some families of means will often seek to invest in facilities that dispose of waste by scorching it to ash or annihilating it in alchemical compounds. Such alternative systems are rarely something for the masses, however, since vast waterpumped plumbing systems better allow for the gathering and recycling of biological matter into synthetic foodstuffs.

The infiltrating horror of such pipe lurkers have necessitated plumbers on many Imperial worlds to arm themselves with various weapons to dispose of potential monstrosities plugging the tubes. Some such tools of the trade include toxbombs, chemguns and clawed beaters, as well as poisoned xylospongia, acid pumps and hooked line and bait in order to lure out difficult sewage fauna. Of course, all such equipment is of little use against otherworldly sabotage in the form of Daemonic mites, slugs and maggots unleashed through pipe networks by cults of Nurgle operating from unspeakable corners of hive cities and voidholms...

Thus the lives of most subjects of His Divine Majesty are not just hardy ones of darkness, pain and oppression, but also of filth, stench and lacklustre hygiene, harrowed by disease and parasites. Imperial hive cities sport a wide array of latrines, outhouses, water closets and more technologically advanced waste disposal facilities for the great and the good among propertied and privileged orders. No matter the precautions undertaken, complete security rarely exist for most people who lower themselves onto bathroom seats, for life has a wonderful yet nasty habit of enduring hardships and spreading everywhere possible. Life finds a way. And any predator worth its salt would agree with the old military maxim that it is best to strike your prey when it is exposed at its most vulnerable and unable to fight back or escape.

And so hundreds of billions of humans will include a line in their daily prayers, for the Imperator to preserve them, their kin and their offspring from the terror below, from the hidden spider, from the sudden snatcher, from that which lurks in the pipes. Thus they pray to their deity, the Emperor of Mankind, He who is seated in deathless radiance upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

Such is the degradation of man in the darkest of futures.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/12 20:18:56


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Warhammer 40'000 Experimental Ambient Soundscape by Secularis

I was humbled and excited to receive an astonishing message from Secularis on Deviantart. He wrote that my Warhammer 40'000 doodles and writings had reawakened his dormant love for Warhammer and 40k, and said that he was inspired to cobble together this experimental ambient soundscape after a night of being enthralled by my work.

It was fantastic and wholly unexpected to receive such a message, and hear such a gift. Thank you, thank you most kindly Secularis. Check it out on Soundcloud!

Secularis wrote:You are a scribe of the Adeptus Administratum. One of the untold billions of lowly scriveners in service to Holy Terra and the governance of the Imperium. As you toil mindlessly away in a scriptorium, you can hear the tortured screams of one of your clerical brothers in the next room. A mistranslation of a document has made him a target for the accusation of heresy, and now he is being interrogated and tortured by a group of inquisitors. His life is already over. He has already been replaced. Now you must hear his final cries for mercy before being put to flame for his crimes. The Emperor Protects.

This track was composed with various other ambient tracks layered and mixed to form a composite soundscape. I am not the owner of these assets, and this track is an experiment in sound design and theory. I am not making any profit from this track.


- - -



No Railings

In a decrepit age of darkness, man must watch his every step.

Every day across a million worlds and uncounted voidholms, the feet of men, women and children must tread with care, lest they be swallowed up by the abysm. A clumsy motion may throw you off balance and send you tumbling down a precipice. A slippery patch may slide you over the edge. A drunken stumble, a moment's distraction or a playful hop may greet you with a shrieking fall. A sudden push, a nasty elbow or a treacherous leg is all it takes to trip you up one last time. Sometimes, a strong wind or the heavy rumble of nearby machinery, explosions or hivequakes may catch you off guard and cast you unto death far below.

To walk among the creations of mankind in the grim darkness of the far future is oft to expose your side to a gaping pit, hungry for your fall. Indeed, bodily exhaustion, poor lumination or an absentminded moment may be all it takes to doom you in the cities and void installations of the Imperium of Man, for almost everywhere there is a widespread lack of railings and fences on gangways, rooftops and bridges among the star-spanning domains of the Emperor of Earth.

Around heights, the difference between life and death is the blink of an eye. A sudden drop may occur in an instant, unforeseen and unwarned a mere second ago. Crippling accidents and deadly crashes are the matter of a single unsure step, of but one more narrow passageway, or of just yet another section oframshackle catwalk sagging at a bad angle.

Day in and day out across an uncaring galaxy, trillions of humans set foot on walkways without railings. Many work their entire shift but inches away from a horrific fall, or live and sleep at the edge of manmade precipices. Habit is a strong force in the minds of men, for few ever pay the constant danger much heed. They have long since become aware of it without thinking, and have learnt to move about so as to avoid the sheer drop, their instincts serving them well hour after hour, year after year as they live out their harsh and thankless lives. How many steps have not their feet taken at the very edges of pits like these, without ever faltering? How many dangerous climbs haven't they undertaken without harm?

Yet accidents may catch the best wrong-footed, and even the sharpest and most alert people are not immune to falling. Among plebeians in the Imperium, it seems that everyone knows of someone who didn't mean to step over the edge, but still crashed fatally one day. It has always been that way, an inevitable part of life for generations beyond counting. That's just how things are.

There are many reasons behind the lack and even removal of safety railings across the vast Imperium of Man. Oftentimes, the ravenous demands of total war will see labourers and lay techmen at the homefront scavenge railings and fences for their precious metal. It is likewise common for calculating planners to reduce construction costs by doing without superfluous railings. Sometimes, the inclusion of fences for utilitarian and commoner structures did not even occur to the architects in the first place, the very concept simply being alien to them and their schooling and traditions.

Yet some of the most abundant reasons for the usual scarcity of railings among human cities and voidholms revolve around beliefs and ideas, for is it not right and proper for pious subjects of the Imperator of Holy Terra to trust in their deity to protect them? Is it not up to the Emperor to judge you safe from falling, instead of an unclean railing? Is it not virtuous to encourage alertness among the masses, especially so among the dubious lower orders? Is it not healthy eugenics for the whole species if lesser members of mankind disappear from the gene pool by their own weak failings?

For man was not meant to cower in fear of danger, but to stride boldly into volatile chance and dare the risks to bring him low. Man was not meant for cowardice, but for daring and self-sacrifice. Man was meant to rely on himself, and ever be ready to cast himself into the jaws of death for the higher cause. Would not the installation of unnecessary fences send contrary signals to the people? Would it not foster wretched poltroons and shirkers who everywhere imagined that they needed safety measures to dare venture forth? Would it not be better to condition men, women and children to constant danger and hardship, and breed a strong humanity?

A parable of Old Earth told of salt improving the taste of meat, while too much salt ruins the meat. Thus it is with humans, for suffering improves character, yet too much suffering ruins character, claimed the ancient allegory. The Imperium of Man utterly rejects that notion, for it operates instead on principles of overwhelming cruelty, increased input of resources, indifference to casualties, inviting hardship and of pushing mankind to the breaking point and beyond. Let those who break, break. The most ardent and true servants of His Divine Majesty will endure by the strength of their faith and by His saving grace, for the survival of deviants and weaklings is not desirable in any case. Those found lacking will anyhow make for passable Servitors or corpse starch.

Thus it is that the Imperium will not suffer cravens who are afraid of heights. Man shall fear the God-Emperor alone and nothing more. And so billions upon billions of humble Imperial subjects across the Milky Way galaxy will include a line in their daily prayers, asking for their saviour and lord to preserve them, their kin and their offspring from the fall, the sudden drop, the yawning pit. They would never gather the bravery to ask their superiors for material safety structures, for they know well the abominable fate of those who dare advice their betters and masters without having been ordered to do so.

Forget the promises of material improvement, for they were nought but the heresies of sinful ancestors who wallowed in rotten luxury and hubris. Forget their lies of science and progress, for we are much wiser now. Forget their raising of lowly man onto a pedestal, for man's true purpose in life has always been to toil, pray and die, and nothing more.

No mercy. No remorse. No railings.

And so mankind in the Age of Imperium trust in the Emperor to keep them safe instead of base, worldly fences. Every step may challenge death. And all is well in the Imperium.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is nothing in sight to stop the fall of man.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/13 21:57:10


Post by: CEO Kasen


...I just found this, and... words fail me in ways they clearly have not failed you, Karak. This is brilliant.

I'm getting nostalgic shades of Paranoia in the image of janitor preparing to unclog a toilet with a flamethrower and what I have to imagine is a rotary Power Snake. I also love π-Braine, and very much appreciate the twisted elegance in making his 'wacky murderhobo antics' utterly grimdark with just a slight shift in context.

Keep going. I will relish every word.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/14 04:09:44


Post by: ArcaneHorror


Everything in this thread justifies this quote:

"What is Chaos? Suffering, you might say. Oppression. Deceit. But could not all these things be said of your Imperium?

You hunt down the talented and the strong-willed. You break them or sacrifice them. You lie to your citizens and wage war on those who dare speak out.

The inquisitors you call masters assume guilt and execute millions on a whim.

And why? Why do you do this?

Because you know Chaos is there but you do not know how to fight it, so you crush your own citizens for fear that they might aid the Enemy. The Imperium suffers because of Chaos. No matter how hard you fight, that will never change. Chaos exists in a state of permanent victory over you - you dance to our tune, mortal one, you butcher and torture and repress one another because the gods of the warp require you to.

The Imperium is founded on Chaos. My lord Tzeentch won your war a long, long time ago."

- Ghargatuloth, Daemon Prince of Tzeentch


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/23 16:49:46


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@CEO Kasen: Thank you most kindly! That is very encouraging, most appreciated. I'll try to keep it up. Cheers!

@ArcaneHorror: Spot on! Games Workshop has always been careful to construct fictional worlds that invite to interpretation and argument.



Informant

In a dysfunctional age of darkness and decay, a careless word is enough to land you in hell.

Most Low Gothic dialects across the Imperium of Man sport a double meaning attached to the word for 'whisper', and indeed a great many dialects sport two different words for the act of whispering: One denoting whispering in order to avoid detection, and one denoting whispering to inform on others.

It has been thus for millennia upon millennia, for rulers who live in fear are the most dangerous of all. In the Age of Imperium there is no shortage of insidious horrors to keep the Adeptus Terra and its host of Planetary Governors on edge, dreading what lurks in hiding. A myriad of ambitious plots are everyday pursued by Imperial nobles and bureaucrats, some aiming at coups and assassinations in the bewildering world of human games of power. Shady nests of insurgents and cultist cells feed off widespread discontent to further their plans of sabotage and uprising, ever threatening Imperial rule with the heretical scourges of separatism, revolt, apostasy and abominable blasphemy. To speak nothing of the ever-present threat of invasion from beyond the dark void, some attacks of which do not unite beleaguered worlds against an external foe, but on the contrary lay bare internal divisions as rival sides seek to turn the uncertain new situation to their advantage in a confused frenzy of broken alliances and civil war.

With so many deadly perils hanging over the head of the masters of mankind like the sword of Damocles, how could Imperial Adepta and local rulers do aught else than clamp down with harshness on the populace, for their own good? With the preservation of Imperial law and power under danger, how could the servants of the God-Emperor dare to do anything less than uphold a rigid order of terror which tolerates no one speaking out of line? With the survival of the human species itself at stake, how could virtuous subjects of Him on Terra fail to report suspicious talk and deviant behaviour to the righteous authorities?

After all, those who fail to police their community with vigilance and cunning, will damn it to oblivion. To not report, is to partake in the treachery. There could be no worse crime than allowing the slightest hint of hidden heresy and thought of self to escape detection by the guardians of humanity. Aid our watchmen: Keep watch! Those loyal to their species and lord will know to listen well to all people around them, and discreetly inform on any suspects to the Adeptus Arbites, Inquisitorial agents or local law enforcement and counter-espionage networks.

To the pious and staunch subjects go the spoils, for the Imperium know well to reward its informants. Indeed, for many slaving people trapped in squalor and grinding poverty, the rewards for ratting out on a neighbour or colleague may be the only way to alleviate their misery by some extra company scrips, coupons, ration bars, tech-trinkets or meager luxuries unusual to your rank, and any number of other perks and bonuses which many downtrodden humans would be willing to kill over. Yet pecuniary gain is not the only material incentive at work. When your crowded family live in each others' laps and shares an apartment, shack or holestead with several other families, the best way to earn some breathing space and bunk room is to denounce members of the other families, and watch as security police makes them disappear, never to be heard of again. As the
Lectitio Divinitatus states, the righteous will oft be rewarded in this life as well as in the next.

And so humanity under the heavy rule of the Imperium watch each other and whisper on each other. The Imperial culture of imputation has ensnared society in a web of distrust and deceit, and sown suspicion everywhere. Strong ties to your clan or tribe is no guarantee of safety, for greedy, spiteful or loyalist informers can be found everywhere. Who have not heard the glorious tales of good children who reported their own mischievous parents to the authorities, and died the glorious martyr's death as their vengeful extended family murdered and tore them apart? Who have not listened to the uplifting songs praising such youthful duty? Who have not seen the posters, statues, pict-casts, theatrical performances and holo-dramas hailing such young virtue and loyalty to His Divine Majesty?

Thus the spider's web of informants every day, somewhere across the Emperor's vast domains in the Milky Way Galaxy, repeat that baleful tragedy over and over: That of sons and daughters denouncing their fathers and mothers, or their sisters and brothers or other kinsfolk. That of children betraying their own parents to the authorities for the sake of grumbling words against cruel overseers after a taxing shift, or for the sake of more guilty scheming. That tragedy of people who died in the torturer's chambers, labour camps or on executioner's squares because their own offspring or siblings informed on them. That of Imperial loyalty trumping filial piety. That of families torn apart.

For no tyrant ever had trouble finding willing henchmen to carry out their heinous bidding, and no despot ever found a dearth of humans willing to sell out their friends and loved ones.

Much of our species in the far future ekes out a miserable living to a constant background din of paranoia and squealing, an everyday mistrust of fellow man that is frequently drummed up to a crescendo of arrests, torture and a domino effect of panicked denunciations as yet another wave of terror and purges roll out across hundreds of thousands of Imperial worlds and uncounted voidholms. The rhythm of such campaigns of repression varies wildly, often being dependant on the commonly depraved character of rulers and their moodswings, or on crisis events and disasters leading to angered calls for culling the disloyal among the populace.

And why should such waves of terror ever be uncalled for? Clearly, each one catches many infidels and traitors in its claws, and each purge manages to force most of these foul heretics and recidivists to confess and name yet more sinners participating in their undermining schemes, for how could their craven souls resist the noble art and purifying tools of torture? The bountiful harvests of uncovered snakes, who name yet more backstabbers, plotters and terrorists in a vain attempt to save their worthless skin, is a healthy sign of Imperial justice at work. The mass graves and pyramids of skulls generated by the Imperial terror waves are monuments to the cleansing redemption of mankind itself. Witness the forces of order lead off the wretched deviants and malcontents to their rightful doom. Listen to the jingling of their chains. Show no compassion or mercy to these wrongdoers and filth. Nay, let them know what you think: Howl at these heretics! Let your hate fill your lungs! Hate!

Thus the Age of Imperium trudges on, as a star-spanning colossus on feet of clay crush both the innocent and guilty with little distinction and no remorse in its heart of stone. For the rotting Imperium of Man will purge any hint of threats from within to its tyrannical rule with fierce bloodthirst and lack of mercy. Its symphony of loud proclamations and staccato of violence is set to a background murmur of distrustful whispers. And so brother reports brother, and sister denounces sister in a neverending cycle of terror.

Such is the depravity that awaits our species. Such are the depths to which humanity will sink.

In the grim darkness of the far future, man must watch his tongue.

And all is well in the astral domains of the ascended Emperor of Holy Terra.

All is as it should be.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/24 21:02:32


Post by: Skinflint Games


These are haunting.

Keep 'em up.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/25 14:01:12


Post by: Not Online!!!


so much old school vibes..

Such skill.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/26 10:55:01


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Thank you most kindly, folks! Much appreciated. I'll try to keep it up for you.



Warmblood

"No, my friend. Do not protest.
You fell at the Emperor's behest.
Comrade in arms, lie now at rest.
There's no more use to plug your chest.
That flak armour came short on its test.
Stemming flow no bandage could wrest.
Your wound is foul an' ill distressed.
You're already dead, it's for the best.
Let my frigid hands be your final guest.
For you are blessed.

I'm a stiff soldier too, locked in chill.
With shaking hands to oath fulfill.
My black teeth rattled in charge uphill.
Frost marrow bit to blunt all thrill.
We both have faced the same cold drill.
Cast freezing into hell's white mill.
With deadened feet to snow dunes till.
O'er cracking ice that fear instill.
Clip off blue toes for winter's bill.
Brought here to kill.

Shush! Be still my friend, you are not hale.
Your time is nigh, you're growing pale.
Afrozen hands your leaking lifeblood hail.
Its steam so warm, its vapours frail.
Rise hot off guts blast out of jail.
Begrudge not comrade, do not quail.
This your last service ease my trail.
Fingers warmed 'midst howling gale.
Pray Lord on Terra weigh your scale.
Your kin may wail."

-
Warmblood, crude trench poem written in 327.M38 by corporal Ladina Terchenkov of the Astra Militarum 8164th Decebalian infantry regiment (XLII Army), two months prior to the Army's last stand and complete destruction at Androniki Ridge during the Lamed offensive of the Hrud invaders on Athanatikoi Secunda


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/29 00:28:00


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Blast Doors

In a demented age of ignorance and cruelty, the gates of death stand ready to shut close on man.

Wind, rain, snow, sandstorms and beasts have ever afflicted man, and so to escape the forces of nature he built for himself a sanctuary and called it home. The very earliest means of covering the entrance to tents and huts was to hang the hide of an animal over the opening. Later on during the Age of Terra, man invented doors from reed and wood, and as his ingenuity grew, so too did the various forms of gates and doors increase by ever more clever means, including the fabled energy seals, living gates of Vigemusque and voidposterns of the Dark Age of Technology. And no matter the epoch and techno-sorcery at hand, man would not think twice about opening a door to enter or exit a room or a building, and would not count the times he crossed the threshold on his way to and fro other matters. It was just a door. And man ascended in worldly matters.

As punishment for his hubris, Man of Gold was toppled from his paradisal pedestal after Man of Stone and Man of Iron had disappeared amid havoc, and almost all the creations of humanity burned during the subsequent Old Night. Thus most works were lost forever, and but scraps of ancient glory remained to be rediscovered by primitive survivors in the charred ruins. Among the salvaged technical systems (hailing from wildly different levels of tech-advancement) were crude but effective variants of humble doors, easily replicated from among the very simplest of Standard Template Construct (STC) hard-copy blueprints. These included sturdy blast doors and vault portals, as well as simple domestic constructs, bulkhead entrances and more flamboyant silent weighed gates favoured by many Ecclesiarchal cathedral builders.

Many variants of high-speed doors were originally designed for industries in order to speed up production logistics and aid in temperature and pressure control, not to mention their widespread duty for pharmaceutical clean rooms during lost ages of human science and progress. In the rotting Age of Imperium, however, such high-speed doors have become commonplace almost everywhere across the star-spanning domains of the Emperor on Earth, known as autodoors among those who bother with the correct technical term.

Something as simple as an automatic door stand as a mute testament to the debt mankind of the regressed Imperium owes to those who came before. Most STC autodoor blueprints included split-second safety systems in order to avoid harm and injury. Yet all across the galactic dominion of the God-Emperor, the machine spirits of doors kill, maim and crush tens of thousands of people every day across hundreds of thousands of worlds and uncounted voidholms. STC progeny though most of these autodoors may be, the safety measures originally designed for such gateway devices in ancient times are nowadays often broken down or lacking altogether.

There are a multitude of reasons behind this rotting state of affairs. For one, incremental loss of technological knowledge over many thousands of years have been accompanied by a decay of production processes, leading to a great many finer and non-essential electronic and automotive systems not functioning as they should, or at all. Oftentimes, reductionist logistical calculations will result in Manufactoria masters and Administratum bureaucrats ordering the removal of fully functioning but unnecessary safety features in order to save on material consumption or increase the rate of production by simplifying and making designs more rudimentary. At other times, faulty maintenance is to blame for the common phenomenon in the Imperium of Man that is death by doors.

Imperial modes of thinking run at best along lines of callous indifference to human suffering and demise. Yet the hunger for cruelty and hardships inflicted upon others may often extend far enough so as to become outright murderous as a result of deliberate planning.

After all, is it not virtuous to construct an environment that will punish the weak and unworthy, and leave those strong and worthy in the eyes of His Divine Majesty to prosper and populate the star-spanning realms of mankind? Is it not pious to build hazards and dangers into buildings and starships, in order to encourage swift wits, sharp eyes and alert senses akin to those of our eagle-eyed Imperator Himself? Is it not healthy eugenics to cull the slow and the weak among us in order to breed a fitter human species for the greater glory of the Emperor of Holy Terra? Is it not for our own good that so many autodoors shut close with sudden rapidity, with such lethal force and disregard for human health and safety? Is it not praiseworthy to develop wits and fine habits of avoiding such everyday dangers as sliding doors and portcullises? Is it not righteous to let the idiots, fumblefoots and deviants get caught in gateway traps due to their own faults, instead of indecently sparing them the clamping test?

Spare the rod and spoil the child. It is better that a thousand accidents choke humans to death between twain doors or crush them under gates, than a single careless sloth of a wastrel soul walks alive among us, naïvely heedless of the caprice and rhythm of dangerous doors while he puts his trust in installed sensors and failsafes without thinking and caring for himself among the corridors and mazes of hive cities, starships and voidholms. The fact that the hearts of uncounted millions upon millions of Imperial subjects are gnawed by entamaphobia, a fear of doors, is only proof of the sound survival instincts cultivated by living and working in Imperial installations.

Furthermore, it happens to be that the common existence of lethal door devices every day aid righteous servants of the Imperator by providing convenient implements of improvised torture and summary execution, all spectacularly visible as warnings to the masses of bystanders and passers-by. If a lowly debt-slave, scrivener or indentured labourer happens to display thoughts of self, heretical insubordination or sinful aspirations above his station, then a just master is at liberty to display his or her power by deed on the spot, through swiftly arresting and excruciating the malcontent, degenerate or apostate by having their underlings heave the damned felon into the jaws of a nearby blast door or portcullis. Naturally, the same handy availability of rapid sliding doors without safety mechanisms have also stood innumerable gangers, bullies and criminals in good stead, to the detriment of hordes of victims across the centuries. No matter, for they too foster a hardier spirit in the subjects of the exalted Terran Emperor.

A logical consequence of this devious Imperial mindset can be seen in certain installations' entrances to areas off-limit yet not of high importance. At such locations, some doors may be rigged to seemingly allow entry, only to instantly slam shut as a deadly biting trap upon those who fail to enter the correct passcode.

Another product of simple Imperial engineering are slice-gates and cutdoors, which act akin to guillotines by sporting sharpened ends in order to make short work of any foolish deadbeat or sneaking street urchin that disrespect the machine spirit. The resultant local cleaning duty is offset by the higher value of cleansing the populace of unwanted elements by allowing them to sort themselves out by impious incompetence. After all, the bio-recycling corpse grinders ever hunger for the dismembered remains of despicable unworthies, and so lesser men end up feeding their betters in the form of corpse starch, true to the eternal food chain of beasts and men alike.

Indeed, a common Imperial proverb instruct us that a good subject is like a good door: He shall be alert to commands, fast in executing orders, ruthlessly powerful and unyielding in his single-minded work purpose in life. And he shall halt for no one, once assigned his task by his superiors.

As a door is but a component of a facility, so too is a humble human nought but a replacable part in a vast, faceless machine operating on a broken equation of increased input. For all those modes of invention and sharpening of efficiency (once pursued by sinful forefathers out of foolish dreams of becoming like living gods) have long since been forgotten in fevered ages of darkness and blood, as mankind spiral ever downwards into depravity.

And so trillions of men, women and children across the Imperium of Man will include a line in their daily prayers, for the God-Emperor to preserve them from the crush of gates, the clipping doors, the fast exit, the hydraulic death. For habit is a strong force in the heart of man, and he is capable of living under any conditions as though they could be no different. As his distant ancestors once endured predators, travails and savagery, so too will their descendant of the far future endure the deadly environs which man has crafted for himself across the stars, among glittering spires and baleful hive-sinks.

For man's lot is suffering and death, and all that is given man is a chance to serve the lord of his species during his miserably short life. Serve, toil and die.

And everywhere, doors close shut on fragile hope as decay slowly worsens, ever more.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is no way out of the horror and despair.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/10/29 00:43:13


Post by: PenitentJake


123ply wrote:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
STC’s carry a lot of the weight of explanation.

See, each and every STC was the sum total of mankind’s scientific and engineering knowledge to date.

All of it. Every last iota.

Now, the first three, perhaps four generations likely held onto and shared some of that knowledge. But over time (and I’m taking this from Rogue Traded), colonists simply relied on the STC database to take care of things. Convenience became complacency. Complacency became reliance.

Then it all went to poop. Emergent Psykers, Men of Iron and what have you. And one way or another, STC’s were lost. Because when all your design, engineering and scientific needs have been provided by a single machine? When that single machine goes belly up, you’re pretty much screwed.

Now this of course was not universal. Some cultures retained far more than others. Some got stuck at our level, some at Victorian levels, and some got slapped straight back to the stone age. And everything in between.

And that’s how culture decay occurred, and mankind fell from his pinnacle, and landed in his nadir.

Indeed, one could argue that The Emperor being immortal, and a font of knowledge in his own right was how some form of reclamation occurred. He had knowledge the Mechanicum had long since turned to mysticism.

My own personal theory? Complete, functioning STC’s May no longer exist, because they were directly responsible for the Men of Iron. And like good Luddites, the survivors chose to wreck whatever examples of that machine existed, to ensure it could never happen again.


Why would people destroy every STC file when only a few had anything to do with AI or Men of Iron?


Ever read Canticle for Leibowitz? Human fanaticism defies logic. Proof?

Turn on the news.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/01 06:10:48


Post by: Racerguy180


canticles of Leibowitz is hilariously emblematic of how people can rationalize something counterintuitive.

no gray just black/white. no room for nuance or other such unessecary concessions.

it's just one of the books early 40k was distilled from that gave it its sense of "don't give a f____".

by the way Karak norn clansman, keep up the good work! I take this stuff for granted cuz I got started in RT and it was obvious where they drew inspiration. but the more I talk about it with more recent players they like it and wonder why the new stuff is, how should I say...more feth giving, than less.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/03 00:12:39


Post by: Skinflint Games


Killer doors.

Dude, i love it


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/14 03:33:51


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Racerguy180: Thank you very much! 40k runs indeed on hilariously stark modes of thinking, drawing inspiration from the most depraved aspects of human history and literature.

I will try to keep it up, and I am glad to hear that newer players appreciate the original true vision of 40k as bonkers and dark to the hilt when you describe it to them. Keep telling them about it! Cheers!

@Skinflint Games: Thanks a lot!




Burning Pict-Screen

In the grim darkness of the far future, some who fall asleep before the screen do not awake.

Abstract thinking, crafting and arts were among the traits which distinguished humanity's primitive forefathers from the rest of the animal kingdom. The Men of Gold are known to have depicted hunting scenes on cave walls and adorned their temples with images that related mythical stories during our distant past on Old Earth. Later on during the Age of Terra, man learnt how to capture still images and moving pictures, projecting them for the eye to view on fabrics and screens via a mastery of light. The fabled Dark Age of Technology is said to have brought with it breakthroughs in hololithics, caelumena and even more spectacular forms of visual media which the benighted descendants of this lost epoch of science and discovery can no longer possibly fathom. For both secret knowledge and working relics of the most advanced visual technologies have long since turned to dust and ash, as the world of mortals shrank in on itself and grew dull and fearful in the wake of terrible cataclysms.

While the most advanced and consequently least endurable pict tech have long since been lost to the sands of time, various other technologies for transmitting and projecting images survive into the Age of Imperium, thanks to scattered findings of Standard Template Construct schematics for the making of everything from vacuum tubes, redpoint and prismatic crystal components, to liquid light cells and hololithic projectors. As with everything in the Imperium of Man, the hardware it possess hail from wildly different stages of historical development of science and technology, yet the most common utilitarian tech (outside the jealously hoarded treasures of the insular Adeptus Mechanicus) tend to hail from the lowlier and more rudimentary forms of technology.

This primitivization of human technology did not end with the Age of Strife as the brief renaissance of the Great Crusade swept the Milky Way Galaxy, but has instead continued with but few interruptions, as humanity's grasp of knowledge slowly erodes away, and as its better industrial machines from ancient times eventually fail, with no one capable of repairing or replicating them left standing among the living for untold light years around.

Of course, those in possession of wealth, power and contacts offworld or among more technologically capable clans and organizations tend to enjoy the dimming light of sophisticated human tech for far longer than the vast majority of Imperial society across a million worlds and uncounted voidholms. A great deal of prestige and veneration is attached to owning intricate things which ordinary Imperial subjects could barely dream of, with machine spirits far in advance of anything which most human beings will ever encounter in their daily lives. Indeed an entire boutique economy of rarefied artisans and master artificers exist to cater to the technological needs of upper classes and Imperial Adepta alike, all parochial tech clans where precious crafting knowledge is inherited from parents to children, characterized by time-consuming handicraft of immense skill and exclusively low production numbers for the finest of clients.

As for the filthy majority of human populations, shoddy mass production is king as regard both market enterprise and state-owned manufacturing: Indeed the very idea of entrepreneurial freedom from both planetary and voidholm rulers, as well as branches of the Adeptus Terra, is a ludicrous notion across most of His Divine Majesty's astral domains, for Imperial overlords maintain all manner of controls and oversight over industries which they do not themselves possess, in a nightmarishly complex web of privileges, traditional pledges, religious edicts, local customs, martial law, Adeptus Mechanicus licensing, strongman rule through force, decrees issued by the High Lords of Terra, rampant corruption, underhand tricks and mercantile charters; all of which amounts to nothing short of a juridical basket case that keeps vast legions of legal experts on the Lex Imperialis occupied in lengthy court cases that can span many centuries and generations. Ancient Terran philosophers from very different cultures all remarked that the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state. This notion is punishable by horrific means of torture, execution and servitorization in the Imperium of Man, should anyone ever be foolish enough to voice it aloud or write it down, for the very concept is heretical and antithetical to Imperial rule with its endless accretion of fossilized laws and contradictions.

Naturally, most worlds and voidholms across the vast Imperium of Man are plagued by abysmal levels of quality for most of their consumer goods, and the mass manufacture of pict-screens is no exception. The ever-worsening rot of technotheological knowledge and etiolation of the machines of techno-sorcery has resulted in unsafe electronics being a common fact of life. For instance, a substantial number of all fuses and circuit breakers installed in mass-produced ware are of atrocious makes, often being installed as a token gesture of respect toward machine spirits and toward manufacturing traditions built on decaying STC hard copy blueprints. As a result of general ineptitude, indifference and ignorance, cheap pict-screens (some of which even sport a magnifying glass in front of a tiny screen) have a widespread tendency toward spontaneous combustion, being especially prone to sparking flames and short-circuiting when operators switch channels or adjust properties such as vox-volume or brightness.

Such is the state of something as simple as the humble pict-screen in the dark future, which is in truth a primitive and simple technology that mankind in the decrepit Age of Imperium increasingly fails to produce safely and reliably. Indeed sclerotic Imperial industry everywhere primarily values superstitious rituals and going through the motions handed down by forgotten ancestors. The striving to truly understand and master the technicalities of production processes and finished goods alike has waned considerably over the last ten thousand years as human grasp of tech steadily retreats into a darkening night of dysfunctionality and scavenging ruin. Likewise, genuine quality control and concerns over such malcontent concepts as health and safety are far removed from those who manage and operate the numberless manufactoria which churn out mass-produced civilian goods for the plebeian hordes of consumers.

And so every day, thousands of pict-screens across uncounted planets, starships and voidholms suddenly catch fire, as their temperamental machine spirits give hot protest to their human users' lack of reverence and failure to pronounce litanies and mantras without error. The sinful men, women and children thus judged, must flee, raise the alarm or themselves extinguish the flames, or else be devoured by them. Across tens of millions of hive cities and hundreds of millions of void installations, everyone seems to know of some friend, neighbour or family member who was wounded or killed by a fire started by some burning pict-screen. Such fatalities are especially common among slothful indolents who would doze off and catch a nap, and as just punishment for their moral failings the wrathful machine spirit will often choke them with smoke in their sleep, to never again wake up as cleansing tongues of flame consume their sinful flesh.

Thus man is no longer the wise master of his own tools and crafts, and increasingly the fruits of his labours fail despite increased input of work and resources. Where once curious ancestors remodelled the matter of creation like clay, their degenerate descendants stoop amidst squalor, having lost almost everything while not even remembering what it was they lost, teeming like vermin among the battered and broken remnants of a once glorious stellar civlization while they live in terror of the great unknown. And so fearful man may often be heard to recite a line in his daily prayers, asking the God-Emperor on Holy Terra to spare himself and his kith and kin from the sudden flame, the smoke devils, the burning animus, the lit machine.

Such is the misery that await our species.

Such is the degradation of man, in the darkest of futures.

It is the fortyfirst millenium, and there is no escape from the horror and suffering.




40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/14 04:06:45


Post by: ph34r


I like this thread a lot.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/16 00:29:25


Post by: Skinflint Games


I keep coming back to the Carl Sagan quote -"we live in a society dependent on science and technology, where no one is interested in learning about science and technology"

You've turned that up to 111, my friend


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/16 12:20:26


Post by: Olthannon


Racerguy180 wrote:


by the way Karak norn clansman, keep up the good work! I take this stuff for granted cuz I got started in RT and it was obvious where they drew inspiration. but the more I talk about it with more recent players they like it and wonder why the new stuff is, how should I say...more feth giving, than less.



I agree with this so much, I think based on a lot of things you see online about 40k there are so many people who really don't understand the birth of 40k and the time in which it was written.

Love this thread Karak Norn Clansman, your stuff on other forums is always great to see. Can't wait to read more.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 05:47:24


Post by: Racerguy180


 Olthannon wrote:
Racerguy180 wrote:


by the way Karak norn clansman, keep up the good work! I take this stuff for granted cuz I got started in RT and it was obvious where they drew inspiration. but the more I talk about it with more recent players they like it and wonder why the new stuff is, how should I say...more feth giving, than less.



I agree with this so much, I think based on a lot of things you see online about 40k there are so many people who really don't understand the birth of 40k and the time in which it was written.

Love this thread Karak Norn Clansman, your stuff on other forums is always great to see. Can't wait to read more.


the old school fluff makes way more sense if you look at the environment the the lads in Nottingham grew up in. Then the humor & thinly veiled satire/sarcasm really start to shine.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 08:24:15


Post by: Hecaton


Racerguy180 wrote:
 Olthannon wrote:
Racerguy180 wrote:


by the way Karak norn clansman, keep up the good work! I take this stuff for granted cuz I got started in RT and it was obvious where they drew inspiration. but the more I talk about it with more recent players they like it and wonder why the new stuff is, how should I say...more feth giving, than less.



I agree with this so much, I think based on a lot of things you see online about 40k there are so many people who really don't understand the birth of 40k and the time in which it was written.

Love this thread Karak Norn Clansman, your stuff on other forums is always great to see. Can't wait to read more.


the old school fluff makes way more sense if you look at the environment the the lads in Nottingham grew up in. Then the humor & thinly veiled satire/sarcasm really start to shine.


To do that you have to think critically, though, so...

It also helps to have an overdeveloped sense of irony.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 08:53:03


Post by: Not Online!!!


Considering the imperial truth and what it turned into should be the best first Mark for anyone to consider anything in the to be an Ironic dramatic satirical twisted mirror of reality...


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 08:55:24


Post by: CEO Kasen


Hecaton wrote:
Racerguy180 wrote:
 Olthannon wrote:
Racerguy180 wrote:


by the way Karak norn clansman, keep up the good work! I take this stuff for granted cuz I got started in RT and it was obvious where they drew inspiration. but the more I talk about it with more recent players they like it and wonder why the new stuff is, how should I say...more feth giving, than less.



I agree with this so much, I think based on a lot of things you see online about 40k there are so many people who really don't understand the birth of 40k and the time in which it was written.

Love this thread Karak Norn Clansman, your stuff on other forums is always great to see. Can't wait to read more.


the old school fluff makes way more sense if you look at the environment the the lads in Nottingham grew up in. Then the humor & thinly veiled satire/sarcasm really start to shine.


To do that you have to think critically, though, so...

It also helps to have an overdeveloped sense of irony.


Or be willing to ask.

To which point:

What about Nottingham and its environs make the old school fluff make more sense? Was this Thatcher-related?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 09:18:40


Post by: Duskweaver


Not Online!!! wrote:
Considering the imperial truth and what it turned into should be the best first Mark for anyone to consider anything in the to be an Ironic dramatic satirical twisted mirror of reality...

Although it should be remembered that the whole 'Imperial Truth' thing and the Emperor being an atheist who (probably) never wanted to be worshipped are relatively recent retcons. Originally, the Emperor had spent most of human history deliberately setting up religions (to steer people away from Chaos) and seeding fake 'prophecies' that he could later 'fulfil'. Because originally the Emperor was a Dune rip-off. It's only much later he turned into... *checks notes* Dave Lister from Red Dwarf.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 09:19:41


Post by: Not Online!!!


 Duskweaver wrote:
Not Online!!! wrote:
Considering the imperial truth and what it turned into should be the best first Mark for anyone to consider anything in the to be an Ironic dramatic satirical twisted mirror of reality...

Although it should be remembered that the whole 'Imperial Truth' thing and the Emperor being an atheist who (probably) never wanted to be worshipped are relatively recent retcons. Originally, the Emperor had spent most of human history deliberately setting up religions (to steer people away from Chaos) and seeding fake 'prophecies' that he could later 'fulfil'. Because originally the Emperor was a Dune rip-off. It's only much later he turned into... *checks notes* Dave Lister from Red Dwarf.


also true ,


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 11:34:43


Post by: Olthannon


 CEO Kasen wrote:
Hecaton wrote:
Racerguy180 wrote:


the old school fluff makes way more sense if you look at the environment the the lads in Nottingham grew up in. Then the humor & thinly veiled satire/sarcasm really start to shine.


To do that you have to think critically, though, so...

It also helps to have an overdeveloped sense of irony.


Or be willing to ask.

To which point:

What about Nottingham and its environs make the old school fluff make more sense? Was this Thatcher-related?


Yes critical thinking has taken a bit of a leap right off the edge of the world.

Some people might say it's too easy to blame Thatcher for everything, but she had a lasting impact of misery on most of the UK. It's not just Nottingham. I think part of it also stems from it being a lot of British cultural satire that has now gone global and been deadened by that. It's difficult not to discuss early 40k while keeping with the forum rules about not being overly political especially since it is inherent in its creation. Thatcher's Britain was an environment that did not create a lot of hope for the future and I think 40k encapsulates that feeling more than anything else in the narrative. It's why the Imperium is corpulent, stagnated and beset on all sides. It's why people turn to anything else for a chance of freedom. Doomed forever to be just avoiding drowning, just having your head above the water. That was their vision of the future of humanity if people like that stayed in power. And if really you consider the last decade, it's fairly easy to see it.

Cheery eh?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 12:38:35


Post by: Duskweaver



My silly headcanon: the Emperor is the version of Lister from the Despair Squid timeline, where he's (for some unexplained reason) a genocidal dictator.

Red Dwarf was also, of course, a product of (and reaction to) late-Thatcher-era Britain. And the concept of a gigantic space-mining vessel crewed by a tiny handful of people because the rest of the crew died in a stupid industial accident caused by incompetence is pretty 40K when you think about it.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 13:24:04


Post by: Olthannon


 Duskweaver wrote:

My silly headcanon: the Emperor is the version of Lister from the Despair Squid timeline, where he's (for some unexplained reason) a genocidal dictator.

Red Dwarf was also, of course, a product of (and reaction to) late-Thatcher-era Britain. And the concept of a gigantic space-mining vessel crewed by a tiny handful of people because the rest of the crew died in a stupid industial accident caused by incompetence is pretty 40K when you think about it.




I hope Timothy Spall gets a role in that headcanon


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 19:06:34


Post by: Racerguy180


Red Dwarf probably happens in the same universe as 40k.

Or Rob Or Ross FTW!



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/17 19:41:24


Post by: Hecaton


 CEO Kasen wrote:


Or be willing to ask.

To which point:

What about Nottingham and its environs make the old school fluff make more sense? Was this Thatcher-related?


Well, Thatcher and the conservative politics she led. Remember, they were talking about rounding HIV-positive people up and putting them in camps, stuff like that, on top of an absolute economic beating applied to the working class. The North of England (including Nottingham) was hit particularly hard by the Thatcher-era policies; when she died the schadenfreude was real.

It's also worth noting that culturally, the UK has a lot of baggage about portraying religiosity (especially Catholic religiosity) as backwards, going back to their conflicts with France and Spain post-reformation. The Spanish Inquisition being evil and sadistic is a cultural touchstone in the UK that's sometimes played for laughs ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"). It ties into their propagandizing of Spain as being backwards and evil compared to their supposedly enlightened British values. So in WH40k you saw a mashup of ideas that were coming out of British conservative thought and this Black Spain propaganda, basically the guys who were writing the setting saying "British right-wing thought right now is exactly what our supposed ideals tell us we should be fighting against."


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/18 02:49:20


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@ph34r: Thank you kindly!

@Skinflint Games: Most apt. Great quote, my friend. Thanks a lot!

@Olthannon: Thank you very much! I have so many subjects for future drawings and writings locked and loaded.

@Olthannon, Racerguy180, Hecaton & NotOnline!!!: Lots of people don't seem to get that the Imperium is a needlessly and counter-productively evil empire in the fullest sense of the word. That has always amazed me. The grimdark is on full display, including a lot more in recent publications than most give GW credit for from what I've seen, coupled with a lovely crazy humour and tons of irony to give the setting its charm. You don't have to think for long to realize that 40k is rigged so that everyone is wrong and there are no good alternatives in sight. The 1980s satirical roots of Rogue Trader, with its bleakness, mechanistic cruelty and sense of isolation, are likewise obvious and well noted.

For they are central to the entire setting, and any true understanding of how Warhammer 40'000 ticks in order to write one's own background require some grasp of its foundational inspiration (even if distant and completely uninvolved as in my case). For the record it might be noted that no creative work of mine is ever a case of agenda-hunting, but pursued for the sake of pure freewheeling creativity informed by a curiosity of knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. These 40k pieces are all about drilling down to the regressed soul of Warhammer 40'000 and flesh it out true to the spirit of the setting (without anachronistic shortcomings and modern Americanisms), usually inspired by real phenonmena of dysfunctionality, horror and atrocity from all across the globe and historical eras. It's a jolly celebration of 40k's ludicrously grimdark and silly bonkers nature.

Cheers!

@NotOnline!!! & Duskweaver: Aye, the original vision for the Emperor and religion was different, but the current one is such a deliciously ironic piece of narrative that one cannot help but love it to the core. And it doesn't really subtract from what was originally known about the Emperor, only gives it more Great Crusade-era specific twists to the tale. Good point with Dune, and Red Dwarf hahaha!




Raider Seizure

In a distant age of decay, in a depraved time beyond hope, the sins of deceit, theft and greed flourish among a ruinscape of crushed dreams.

Certain ancient civilizations during the Age of Terra regarded traders and merchants as little better than parasites, buying and selling the produce of others for profit, and therefore their caste was lowly even though their coffers might be full. Elsewhere during this archaic epoch, beliefs held that it was harder for a merchant to enter paradise, than it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Similar ways of thinking are prevalent across large swathes of the Imperium of Man, for what value does moneygrubbing tradesfolk and entrepreneurs really add? Any success of theirs is solely attained by the grace and benevolence of the ascended Emperor of Mankind, and the marketbrokers of the corpus and collegia ought to repent of their devious ways by vigorous self-flagellation and through the purchasing of indulgences and gifting up of generous donations to the Adeptus Ministorum. This they ought to, or else their souls will face the damning hellfire.

It is, after all, better to look to the saints and martyrs for higher examples on how to live one's life, and rather pray for miracles and deliverance from our lord and master on Holy Terra, than to sully a mind meant for humble worship with the ceaseless pursuit of selfish gain.

This disdain for tradesmen and speculators without noble pedigree, coupled with a spiteful envy inherent in the human soul, remains an important ingredient in the dysfunctional convergence of factors that produce a peculiar Imperial phenomenon most commonly known as raider seizure. This is a dreaded scourge of guilders, manufactoria owners, slumlords, voidtraders, latifundia masters and other businessfolk, which entails illegal seizure of real estate, corporate rights, vessels and facilities, with the aid of public authorities.

Raider seizure tend to be especially prevalent on planets, continents and voidholms which sport a frequent turnover of high-ranking officials due to instability at higher levels, as well as a dishonest business culture and widespread corruption within Imperial Adepta and planetary or voidholm governing organs, including law enforcement agencies and courts. Raider attacks on corporate entities often involve the active participation of policiary forces, Administratum personnel and government agencies, all working under the influence of bribes and the pretense of crimes afoot in the company in question.

Enterprises that run the risk of becoming objects of raider seizure will usually possess large real estate objects, lucrative intellectual property (on those worlds and voidholms where that concept is even acknowledged legally and carries pecuniary weight, that is) and any form of business that brings a stable income. The aim of the corporate raiders is to seize control of the lucrative assets, and extract revenue from the seized property with which to fend off juridical counter-claims by dispossessed former owners and stakeholders, who cannot feed the lawyers' meatgrinder with their stolen facilities and thus have to instead burn through savings at a rapid pace if they want to stay in the court at all. Most cannot afford such a protracted legal battle, especially since court cases can stretch into multi-generational clashes fought over centuries by the descendants of both parties and the replacements of long-dead jurists.

The groundwork for a raid scheme is often laid through shady dealings, the malevolent insertion of fine print in written deals, unreliable business partnerships and infiltration of enterprises. Sometimes there will even be manipulation of legal documents in company archives, at rare occassions employing highly costly assassins and espionage mercenaries who will break and enter guilder headquarters and burgohalls at their utmost peril. Raiders will exploit loopholes and insecurities in paperwork, preparing carefully in diligent silence before the decisive push. They will scour the archives for any dirty hold that can be gained over the victim. To this end they will search for such paperwork as business contracts, licenses, inspection findings, debt securities, unrenewed title files and statutory documents. Likewise, this prospecting will seek out unsent certificates and transfers of corporate rights to third parties such as directors, decurions or chairman of the board. Another fertile area of documents are legal mistakes and inaccuracies in concluding transactions, and woe betide any victim who misspell a single letter in a concluding oath sworn to the Terran Imperator.

Such illicit archive harvesting and company infiltration all leads up to a very hostile takeover, where misbegotten fraudulent preparations are followed up with weapons and violence. Although private henchmen and mercenary muscle is ordinarily employed by the raiders in question, most understand that a succesful guild coup or corporate putsch also requires backing by crooked high-ranking administrators and bribed enforcers of law and order, often hailing from the esteemed Adeptus Arbites itself, acting as if to uphold the Lex Imperia against offending criminals. The martial contingent is crucial, for many raider seizures turn into bloody corridor wars.

Raider captures must be swift and ruthless to succeed, and so often involve gunfights, harrowing on-the-spot torture and the blasting of locked doors and vaults in order to speedily acquire control of assets, key charters and chief personnel. Indeed many an owner or important stakeholder in a sanctified business venture has found themself signing off their life's work and main inheritance at gunpoint, not seldom with their spouse and children under lethal threat from raider henchmen or officious Arbitrators who declare every word they utter in protest to be perjury and blasphemy toward His Divine Majesty. After all, to question your masters and betters is ultimately to question the Emperor Himself, and such heinous words demand the most brutal of punishments. The disaster of the Horus Heresy must not be repeated!

Purge the deviant. Slay the malcontent. Burn the heretic.

And so nefarious plots and clandestine confiscations threaten any actor in the world of industry and commerce with instant ruin and howling despair. Untold numbers of guilders, publicani, managing directors and collegii wake in cold sweat, keeping discreet personal weapons and hired guards close at hand at all times, all the while throwing paranoid glances over their shoulders at any unexpected noise. Their precautions and hired armsmen might fend off a sloppy attempt at corporate conquest, but they know full well that they stand little chance once their hidden enemies palm off handsomely enough to involve planetary or voidholm officials and law enforcement in substantial numbers, or, God-Emperor forbid, the harsh and unforgiving fist of the Adeptus Arbites.

Thus there is no safe haven even for those in possession of wealth and power within the star-spanning domains of the Lord and Saviour of Humanity. No safeguard against a baleful fate, no shield from the sudden ruination.

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

For there is no loophole through which to escape the devil's contract which man has signed.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/20 23:28:08


Post by: Skinflint Games


Horribly believable - and VERY 40k!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/11/24 09:55:40


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thank you very much, sir!



Proscription List

In a dark age of ravenous madness, doom may come at the stroke of a quill.

An enduring hallmark of His Divine Majesty's astral realm is its tendency toward cannibalizing ancient technology and society alike, feeding hungrily on hidden reserves and sometimes hollowing out its own foundations. The modus operandi of the Imperium of Man is one of answering challenges to its power with an increased input of manpower and resources fed into the meatgrinder, applied inefficiently at the best of times with a callous disregard for any human suffering thus inflicted. Oftentimes, the resultant hardships, mass death and agony will be met by Imperial masters with utter contempt for the unbecoming weakness and wretchedness on display, or even with a cruel glee at the righteous cleansing of the frail and the deviant.

One widespread phenomenon of such an Imperial eagle's eating of its own children, is that of proscription, namely a decree of condemnation to death and outlawry (or in rare cases banishment) of undesired Imperial subjects of means. Proscriptions are death lists placed in public places, which declare all enlisted names of those damned to have been deprived of all privileges, property and rank, and to be abandoned by the God-Emperor's holy light. Proscription decrees likewise invites any enterprising and loyal Imperial subjects to participate in manhunts to root out and kill outlaws in order to receive fine rewards in exchange for presentation of proof of deed fulfilled, such as decapitated heads of the proscribed ones.

Naturally, all estates, vessels and fortunes of proscripts will be seized by those Adepts or local rulers which issued the decree. This confiscation of property is quite often followed by grand public auctions in order to bring in funds quickly, during which vast tracts of real estate, manufactoria ownership certificates, collegia shares and other lucrative possessions can often be purchased at very low rates by ruthless speculators and moneyed vultures of others' demise. Whoever offers proof of slaying the proscribed gain either a small share in this looting of the victim's belongings, or a handsome set bounty.

Oftentimes, the strenuous demands of total war on ten thousand different war fronts will act as a spur for both the Adeptus Terra and rulers of worlds and voidholms alike to seize resources of Imperial subjects and swiftly raise additional funds for a treasury in crisis through extraordinary means of declaring opponents and propertied unfortunates to be outlaws. At other times, internal power struggles among rulers, with their combined need for more revenue and the elimination of both rival factions and emerging centres of power alike may result in decrees of proscription. It is likewise not uncommon for such enlisting of condemned outlaws to be born out of insanity, paranoia or a sadistic wish to display great power among planetary governors, voidholm despots, regional satraps and other high-ranking masters and betters.

As a rule, proscriptions do not touch the very highest of noble houses since they are too powerful and too dangerous to fall for such a common, petty ploy. Instead, proscriptions tend to prey upon thousands upon thousands of middling guilders, nobles, officials and military potentates, many of which may constitute part of some rival upper nobility house's support base, not seldom in a client-patron relationship. Thus proscriptions may indirectly target the supporters of higher nobility rivals to the ruler in a vicious attempt to undermine their influence, without being so tactless and blundering as to directly including any of the highest aristocratic enemy houses' names on the condemnation lists.

The posting of proscription lists in fora and other public places is the signing of a death note, sparking frenzied activity on the streets as professional bounty hunters and enterprising Imperial subjects alike scramble to hunt down those marked for death and destruction. Sometimes, mobs of manhunters need to overcome deadly bodyguards and noble house armsmen in frantic shootouts or even outright outbursts of urban warfare, yet more commonly the guards themselves will turn their weapons upon their master or mistress since they happen to stand in a prime position to reap the proscription rewards ahead of the greedy competition. That competition is indeed fierce and many-headed, because special grants of legal privileges, debt annulment and manumission from slavery and indentured servitude in exchange for handing in the head of a proscript traitor remain potent and tempting rewards for the lowliest of thralls and menials among the filthy, teeming masses of humanity.

On hundreds of thousands of Imperial worlds and uncounted void habitats, there exist a vast flora of tales of fleeing and hiding proscripts, facing wildly different fates. Some outlaws are ratted out by servants or by their own family and friends, while many hide in ingenious or disgusting places for months or years on end. Others are mercifully spared due to their youth by one benevolent group of manhunters, only to be ceaselessly stalked by a second band, and end up offering themselves to the first group as a way for their death to reward the more worthy beneficiaries. Yet others go underground or flee into the wilderness, slag glacier or Underhive, and these exiles tend to change their appearance with new hairstyles, the growing of beards, tattoos, bionics and a plethora of other means; sometimes ending up as members or even leaders of criminal gangs, and occassionally being found out and exterminated many years after the original proscription list was first posted. The stories are endless, yet most end with a grim fate in store for the running proscripts and hiding outlaws, who eventually succumb to overlord-approved murder, often of a tortuous nature.

As a rule, the announcement of a proscription decree is accompanied by children, grandchildren and other kin and descendants of the outlaws being both marked with infamy and forbidden to seek public office or rank, and likewise it is not possible to inherit any property of proscribed people. Large proscription campaigns may often leave a shunned caste of untouchables behind, whose damning status as the seed of proscripts will continue to brand their descendants for untold generations to come. In some cultures, the spouse of the outlaw may not marry again, and all their children are rendered illegitimate with all the stigma thus attached.

Many variants of proscription decrees go so far as to condemn the entire clan, house and extended family of proscriped ones to the same bloody end as the intended individual targets (usually the masters of households or clan leaders). Thus unnumbered bloodlines have met their collective end at the hands of greedy mob violence, treacherous bodyguards or stalking bounty hunters, all pursuing the high prizes of death lists in a violent field day where one man dead is another man's bread. Most victims of proscriptions are beheaded by their banes, and these bloody trophies and proofs of deed are often proudly displayed in a city's Forum Imperialis or other esteemed public locations.

It goes without saying that the most abominable punishments are reserved for any misguided weaklings and malcontents who would seek to help and hide the condemned proscripts, for the Imperium cannot abide such treachery toward the sacred order of Him on Terra.

Thus the Imperium of Man is characterized by inevitable, mechanistic cruelty, playing out in repeating cycles of purges, plundering and bloodbaths. Here, no amount of wealth, title and influence can truly shield you from the horror and ruin of a sudden downfall, and no amount of claiming your rights nor protesting your innocence can protect you from a righteously delivered death by better Imperial subjects than yourself. To find your name on an Imperial proscription list is to lose everything you own and everyone you hold dear, for even an unlikely survival as a wretched outlaw in the gutter will mean surrendering all that was precious to you, except your own life.

And so the creaking and rusty wheels of Imperial power continue turning with an unstoppable momentum, grinding hopes and families beneath their oppressive weight, and crushing guilty and innocent alike with an indifferent heart of stone. Century after century, they grind on, their long route one of barbaric cruelty and demented sacrifice leading toward nought but a dead end. Millennium after millennium, the wheels of Imperial power keep on turning, lubricated by the blood of its victims, their names forgotten by a faceless tyranny that was never shy of devouring its own people. Such is the Age of Imperium.

Such is the depravity of man.

Such is the future that awaits us all.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is nowhere to hide.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/04 09:39:30


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Kin Mercy

In the grim darkness of the far future, man's last resort may turn out a family event.

In a demented epoch, the crushing, draining misery of everyday human life across vast swathes of the Imperium of Man foments bleak moods and dark desperation in the depths of man's soul. All too many servants of the God-Emperor find themselves unable to bear the heinous burdens placed upon them by circumstance, ancient vassal duties and dictactes from their masters and betters. Of those who crack under neverending pressure, suffering and drudgery, some turn to amasec or narcotics abuse, or let loose their dammed-up wrath and frustration in bouts of domestic violence, street brawls, spontaneous slaying, planned murder or sadistic torture of the defenceless.

Others caught in the grips of pain and despair turn to rabidly fervent worship, praying and reciting mantras over and over again at street corner shrines, incense-wrapped temples and candle-lit icons in an unhinged balancing act between insanity and devotion that leads many exhausted fanatics to receive extatic visions and urges to preach the good faith. Such revelations may see them turn into tolerated holy men, sanctioned saints, martyrs of the faith, or heretics and infidels burned at the stake. Others, yet again, turn to far darker occult mysteries, and seek escape through unholy powers forbidden to man.

Still other men, women and even children who cannot stand the daily toll of abhorrent misery and hardship, turn to a terrible and ancient solution to their woes, electing to end their own beings in the mortal vale of tears they knew as life. This they do in ten thousand different ways of self-destruction ranging from the quick to the slow, from the painless to the excruciating. In the Age of Imperium there is, after all, no shortage of high falls, unsafe electrical wiring of deadly current, crushing autodoors, rapid vehicles, toxic waste from industry, monstrous fauna, trigger-happy folks spoiling for an excuse to draw arms and collect a trophy, or poisonous substances and unsafe manufactoria machines with which to meet an untimely end, to name but a few of the legions of hazards facing humanity in a future deathtrap environment which man has constructed for himself. Thus intentional slaughter of the self remain a common, dull background tone in the cacophonic symphony of churning industry, superstitious chatter, endemic violence and rampant breeding that constitutes life in the Imperium of Man.

Nasty, brutish and short as this life is.

And so every day across the galactic domains of Holy Terra and Mars, millions commit suicide, in spite of knowing full well the damning hellfire that awaits those who would end their Emperor-given lives for the sake of heretical thoughts of self. While it is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself, it is undoubtedly blasphemous to die for yourself out of egotistic weakness and lapse of faith, without any regard given for the higher demands placed upon your shoulders by the glorious and all-encompassing Imperium of Man. How could one shirk from one's duty by flinging oneself into the jaws of death? The lives of Imperial subjects are not at their own disposal to waste, but at the pleasure of their masters and overlords to squander as rightly appointed delegates of the divine Imperator.

Naturally, it follows that people who both fail in their attempts at suicide and are found out, will be arrested by Imperial or planetary and voidholm authorities, and be either tortured and executed publicly in such depraved manners so as to dissuade others, or be horribly turned into lobotomized cyborg thralls known as servitors, thereby shackled to unending slavery in the flesh even as their consciousness is all but snuffed out without anaesthetics by brutal techmen and automated assembly lines, in fabricator cathedrals where men and women are turned mechanistically into servitors by other servitors. Ideally, there is no escape from your ordained thralldom.

Given that the Imperium of Man generally operates on a crude and primitive mode of collective punishment and kinsgroup responsibility, the attempted or succesful self-liquidation of a single clan member may lead to heavy fines, confiscations of property or offspring, arrests, public torture, penance and further executions levied upon their kin of extended family. Such blatant threats against near and dear of those wretched sufferers who would dare to contemplate destroying the production or military human asset unit which they themself represent toward the faceless bureaucrats of the Adeptus Terra, will often serve to cow many of the worst weaklings to stand in line and not subject their own kinsfolk to baleful retribution. After all, it is an outright act of rebellion, apostasy and treason for a subject of the Emperor of Earth to deny his or her legitimate masters, overseers and superiors the labour, obedience, armed service and ritual worship which lowly minions owe to the sacred chain of command stretching all the way up to His Divine Majesty through the lowest leaders of hierarchy embodied by your whip-carrying taskmasters. An Imperial subject is only permitted to sacrifice themself for a higher cause, never for the sake of their own irrelevance.

Still, all the most horrific deterrents of peril toward loved ones dreamed up by crazed fanatics, psychopathic torturers and gleegul executioners cannot prove failsafe against every would-be suicide. Some desperate souls may be past caring. While some few who hate their own kin after years of abominable abuse might even use their own illegal ending as a way to bring down the fist of Imperial justice upon their own clan as revenge from beyond the grave, figuratively speaking. Though more literally, for most inhabitants of the Imperium of Man, that vengeance would be visited from beyond the bio-recycling corpse-grinder. Still others, of course, lack any known family against which to retaliate, in which case punishments may instead be doled out arbitrarily against fellow shift workers, neighbours, known associates or random bystanders. After all, someone must be made an example out of, lest the defeatist rot spreads further and undermines the resolve of human populations destined and meant only to serve their species and lord through unending hardship and trials of faith.

Among some human cultures across hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms beyond counting within the sacred astral realms of Him on Terra, there exist a harrowing, dysfunctional phenomenon born out of the depths of soul's despair and mind's demented train of thought. It goes by many names, in innumerable dialects and local languages in a myriad of backwater regions and districts, but its most common form in Low Gothic is that of kin mercy, denoting the killing of one's own family dependents as part of suicide.

So-called kin mercy is usually sprung out of either a desire of a self-waster to save beloved family members from horrendous Imperial collective punishment of their kinsfolk; or the demands of strict cultural honour codes; or the bread-winning master or mistress of the household concluding that surviving spouse (or spouses, in case of polygamy), children and other dependents won't manage to survive well on their own once the despairing wage-earner and head of household is gone. In the latter case, many hard-working husbands, and wives (often with sickly parents, grandparents and siblings or children), may conclude that the horrors of the workhouse or the poverty, perils, reprehensible sin and selling of oneself on the city street and voidholm corridor for sustenance, will constitute a fate worse than death, and a life of utter misery and damnation which they will not condemn their kinsfolk to.

Whatever the demented reasoning, the end result is the same: The attempted extermination of the criminal's own family, and then the slaying of themself. In any case, the murder spree was only an extension of one person's suicide, and the tragedy is thus considerably amplified. Yet in the wider community of the parochial Imperial culture in question, this monstrous bloodshed known as kin mercy tend to be more of a sad routine event than an extraordinary atrocity, somewhat akin to the widespread exposure of unwanted infants in so many parts of uncounted Imperial worlds and voidholms.

And so degenerate descendants of a once brilliant mankind take their last farewells in a heinous and heretical act of self, and exits the stage with their own families as a bloody retinue, their wasted souls about to face the harsh judgement of the God-Emperor seated upon the Golden Throne of Holy Terra. There, as scripture and preachers firmly attest, their failure to face suffering in this life will be punished with eternal suffering in the hellfires of the inescapable afterlife, and thus divine justice is carried out, as per His wishes as the master and saviour of man.

All this transpires, in an era of doom.

In a time beyond hope.

Thus is the depravity of our species on full display, in the darkest of futures.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/04 23:57:15


Post by: Skinflint Games


You have outdone yourself there, my friend.

With shaking hand, I pour the first of many whiskey shots I'll be needing to sleep tonight


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/11 19:14:59


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thank you most kindly, mate! That's rather a contrast, because when writing these, I'm grinning and laughing in a laidback manner rather much, going "how can I make this even more bonkers?" 40k is so excessively dark that I can't really take it serious.

Kin mercy is by the way based on a 1980s South African phenomenon.



Wisdom Since Cradle

In a lost age, competence is measured by pedigree.

Across hundreds of thousands of planets and voidholms without number, the grand majesty of the Imperium of Man is invested in the local authority of noble families and feudal warlords, sworn to a liege planetary governor or voidholm overlord. These mighty magnates may vie viciously for power with each other through scheming, assassinations, civil wars, sabotage, destabilizing propaganda campaigns, trade blockades and a thousand other means of underhanded obstruction and opposition to rivals and hereditary foes. Sometimes, both open and covert forms of confrontations among the ruling nobility may spill over and impact the tithes due to the Imperium, or destroy precious infrastructure, irreplacable machines, vital industrial complexes and libraries housing ancient books, all of which represent wasted assets of the Imperator upon the Golden Throne.

And yet for all the havoc and damage that the uncontrollable spats and power struggles of potentates and patricians may inflict upon the astral domains of His Divine Majesty, the feudal disunity and squabbling of aristocratic houses and power blocs is still vastly preferable to most alternatives in the callous eyes of the Adeptus Terra, for the neo-feudal system lends a rooted stability pleasing to the eyes of the Holy Terran High Lords. Ideally, of course, the overarching, galaxy-spanning organizations of the Imperium itself would be the sole, unquestioned ruling body of every single eparchy, diocese, satrapy, archonate, province, thema and prefecture on a million worlds and innumerable void habitats, with no local power centers able to challenge the will of an absolute despot appointed from on high by the High Lords of Terra themselves, and answerable to them alone, and by extension to the ascended God-Emperor, naturally.

Ideally, the swollen bureaucracy of the Imperium itself would be able to govern the lives of all its settlements, all its installations and every single one of its teeming subjects down to a scrutinizing level of detail, lording it with unlimited tyranny, complete oppression and inescapable draconic punishments over every man, woman and child of the human species in the Milky Way Galaxy. Ideally, the Imperium of Man would be a perfect autocracy without division, rebellion and strife; without deviation, infidelity and heresy. Ideally, indeed, every aspect of life and death would be under the crushing heel of Imperial rulers, with no thought, word or deed ever being possible to contradict the will of His legitimately appointed officials, and with all of humanity singing in one great harmonious choir of pious submission and loyal obedience without end. This alone would have been perfect.

Alas, such godlike total power over the Emperor's dominions remain but a wet dream of higher-ranking Imperial Adepts, masters and mistresses faced with a frustrating and limited reality. The corruption, obscurantism, ineptitude, senile confusion and screeching inefficiency of Imperial structures of power in general, and of the Adeptus Administratum in particular, mean that Imperial grasp is stunted and with limited penetration into society. The truth is that Imperial Adepta know all too many bounds to their reach and control, and at the best of times the Emperor-appointed organizations of the Imperium can but exert influence upon the actual local rulers of worlds and voidholms, often resorting to diplomacy, nepotism, bribery, cultivation of contacts, veiled threats and occassional use of covert operations and hired assassins in order to pursue their myopic agendas. Even in the restricted enclaves where direct Imperial, totalitarian control can be exerted as fully as possible for the glory of the Saviour of Mankind, internal aristocratic cliques of dynastic officials still tend to form rapidly, true to the iron law of oligarchy inherent to the species.

Thus a bewildering myriad of Imperial Adepta, Departmenta, Officia, Kanslia, Ostiaria and Magistrata constitute a ruthlessly competing mass of authorities guarding their own interests above all else, and within all of them entrenched nobilities of officialdom eventually arise, and constantly spire anew after bloody purges due to Inquisitorial suspicion sweep clear the old power holders. These Imperial authorities, in turn, must deal with local and regional rulers not inducted into any branch of the Adeptus Terra, navigating the reefs, storms and false lighthouses of local aristocracies who possess considerable power and independence of action. All these noble houses are officially sworn to obey the planetary governor or voidholm overlord as the Imperial representative on their world or void habitat, yet few monarchs and governors of planets ever manage to truly control their unruly and powerful vassals, being instead more akin to the first among equals in a ring of squabbling warlords and oligarchs. Planetary governors and other Imperial representatives are the juiciest targets for assassination and coups in internal feuds as they are face of the Imperium to their own world or voidholm, and at the same time they are the one most likely to face summary torture and execution as the face of their world toward the Imperium, should the Imperium in general, and the Inquisition in particular prove unhappy with the massive tithes or heretical cultists streaming out from their disorderly territory.

Thus vassal obligations and feudal infighting reign supreme across the star-spanning realm of the God-Emperor, and on most worlds and voidholms the population swear fealty to various lineages of the sprawling and opulent local nobility. Within this aristocracy, almost every family of note sport intricate documents claiming long lines of ancestry to the legendary founder of a colony, a saga-sung great builder, the courtesan of an attendant of the Emperor in flesh during the Great Crusade, a bardic trickster, a lauded salvager of archeotech vital to the functioning of the colony, close relatives of an antique saint or holy man, a mythical war hero, or other famous historical personages. This pedigree is jealously guarded and boasted about in monuments, great religious displays and military parades sponsored by the noble house in question, and every member of the house grow up schooled in their own importance, learned about the purity of their heritage and knowing full well the superiority of their elevated blood, as contrasted to the randomly breeding rabble beneath their notice.

While sons and daughters of fine breeding are made aware of their great ancestors from the mother's milk (or rather, wet-nurse's milk), so too the lower classes on most worlds and voidholms are inculcated with a sense of the primacy of inheritance and family legacy. In most Imperial cultures, there exist a concept most commonly known in Low Gothic as wisdom since cradle. This is an assumption of inherited knowledge, insight and talent being passed down from gifted forefathers, thus making noble offspring the very best that humanity has to offer, the best suited to lead and the innately most skilled people to recruit for important positions.

The concept of wisdom since cradle is a variety of nepotism, where progeny of masters (who are considered wise as a default presumption) are assumed to inherit wisdom by birthright and blood, and are therefore rendered due reverence. This belief is backed up by mountains of theological scripture and academic treatises, supported by proverbs in everyday speech to validate this piece of everyman's knowledge. Wisdom since cradle is a very common phenomenon across the vast swathes of the Imperium of Man, and it may sometimes prove valid, seeing chips off the old block repeat some achievements of their noble parents, grandparents or more distant ancestors. Yet more often does it foster orders of leaders who turn increasingly ignorant over generations, as these orders continue expanding through centuries of breeding and aggressive safeguarding of privileges.

This assumption of wisdom since cradle usually influences the nursing and raising of aristocratic children, and is a far more pervasive phenomenon than the concept of noblesse oblige among decadent noble houses sworn to the Holy Terran Emperor. Caretakers are either often instructed to apply severe methods of upbringing and harsh discipline, or else they are often told to tolerate petty cruelties as signs of flourishing majesty and infantile promises of future might and talent. In the latter case, nursemaids and other domestic servants are ordered to indulge the spoiled child's capricious whims out of respect for their noble pedigree, thereby cultivating the worst of vices and base malevolence from a tender age through selective neglect despite surrounding the offspring with a retinue of caretakers at all time.

For instance, it is common to employ whipping boys and girls of the same age as noble children, many of whom are educated together with their aristocratic betters, and often become future advisors and commoner attendants or agents of the noble house once grown up, unless they succumb to madness or death first. These whipping boys and girls are to receive floggings, electro-lashes, finger-flayings, scorchings, nail-rippings, needlings and beatings when the princely progeny transgress, sins and commit errors. That way, the noble progeny will be shown the consequences of failure, without harming their well-bred flesh in the process. Needless to say, this widespread custom of plebeian whipping boys and girls to receive the punishments of noble offspring fosters a great many sadists among the Imperial nobility, many brats of which will go on to take up the estemeed sport of peasant-hunting, akin to the Spyrers of Necromunda in the Segmentum Solar.

Some noblemen and noblewomen of more refined tastes even go so far as to take up torture-to-death of misstepping servants and commoners kidnapped from the streets, as a depraved sport which sometimes include bathing in the lifeblood of their many victims, carving totemic luck charms from finger bones or licking the marrow from split bones to attain their victim's inherent animist power. Even so, this is to say nothing of the insane excesses pursued by certain outlawed pain and pleasure cults, who for some reason find fertile ground in the nobility of many a world or voidholm.

As a general rule, the more densely populated an Imperial domain is, the more avaricious and dishonest are its denizens, and the more uncaringly cruel are its upper castes. Sheer mass of human numbers tend to turn people indifferent toward each other, branding the culture with a heart of stone. Conversely, Imperial Knight worlds with their usually low populations and colonial frontier traditions of protecting the populace are known to sport some of the most selfless aristocrats in any space under the Imperator's heavenly rule, yet these are outliers compared to most human worlds and voidholms, where teeming billions of wretched Imperial subjects are lorded over by sneering and callous noble houses interested only in wringing as much labour as possible out of their serfs to fund extravagant festivities and pursue grand vanity projects in a neverending quest for prestige and glory.

And so mediocre heirs of great men and women are raised as if they were infant prodigies, their noble kinsfolk employing a whole retinue of household staff and hired teachers in the hopes of repeating their lineage's brilliance in future generations. Such hopes often turn to ashes, yet even lacklustre nobility tend to be capable of muddling along without wrecking the family fortune, to then procreate and give the patrician clan another shot at renewed greatness.

Thus wisdom since cradle remain a fundamental part of most Imperial cultures, an assumption which stretches beyond conceptions of genetics and eugenics into the spiritual realm. On most Imperial worlds and voidholms, outright imbecilles and inbred masters are given the reverence due their bloodlines, often being chosen for office and promotion first and foremost on the strength of their pedigree, or on the connections of their illustrious family. Sometimes, this lottery of ancestors, classical education and genetic inheritance turns out fine or even brilliantly, yet all too often there will be drawn blanks and duds, of which the enormously long record of costly and bloody Imperial leadership incompetence stands as a witness.

This is but another aspect of descendant degeneration, of the worsening of man and of his fall into savagery and superstition. And all is well in the sacred domains of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, blessed be His name.

For is not man's fate in the darkening Age of Imperium decreed from cradle to grave? And does not rigid order rule righteously supreme and uncontested wherever the twainheaded Aquila proudly flies? How could it be anything else? Does not sons and daughters of the great and the good possess a portion of their forefathers' excellence? How could fine ancestry not be venerated as a sign of rightful mastery gifted from the divine Imperator Himself, never to be questioned?

Such is the best we can hope for, in an era of regression.

Such is the lot of our species, in a time beyond hope.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and the only light lies far into the past.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/12 11:26:06


Post by: Olthannon


Great stuff as always KNC! Particularly enjoyed the last line of your latest one!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/16 19:42:18


Post by: NinthMusketeer


I've avoided responding to this threat before, because while I find the quality of writing to be excellent I dislike the substance. It is hard for me to voice harsh criticism here; I know from experience that writing takes a lot of effort and writing well is both remarkably difficult and remarkably underappreciated. I can see how much passion went into this and I salute you for it. But I think you push the grimdark into grimderp. It is my very subjective personal opinion, but this goes beyond an engaging narrative of brutality and survival to become something that is just silly. I know it is not meant to be taken seriously, but there still needs to be some grounding to allow for a setting to be immersive. I read this and it no longer seems dark at all, it seems like a clown with a comedic sad face painted on.

But that's just me. Obviously you put a lot into this, and it shows. The areas of the setting you go into, the wording and style used in you descriptions, are fantastic. I hope you keep going, and I hope more people get to read it.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/20 01:33:09


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Olthannon: Thank you most kindly, man!

@NinthMusketeer: "An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?"

"Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?" - Axel Oxenstierna, 1648


Thanks! That's rather funny, because one comment received on Reddit was diametrically different in its interpretation. Roughly, "Your work is grimdark without the derp, not forgetting the human." To keep tally, that's 1-1 so far in the Grimdark-Grimderp race. Either way, derp has never meant anything to me. Got to dare to be bonkers in fiction to keep it interesting.

This is only the beginning. I've got so many dysfunctionality concepts fit for 40k Imperial duty locked and loaded, all based on real historical phenomena (wisdom since cradle is based on a Turkish phenomenon which contributed to the internal decay of the Ottoman empire, for instance, and the name is a direct translation of the Turkish term). It's alright if people dislike it. It's meant to be a tongue-in-cheek grimdark exploration driven to the hilt, decaying yet functioning enough for the Imperium to lurch on, and most certainly so excessively dark one cannot really take it seriously. Even at its darkest, Warhammer 40'000 is still a tongue-in-cheek comedy wrapped in a tragedy, being its own parody much of the time.

As to grimdark, many Black Library novels doesn't truly showcase the dysfunctional everyday horror of the Imperium even if the authors do make an effort, though some, like those of Matthew Farrer or Ian Watson's Space Marine (toilet humour aside), very much do get it in so many details and on so many levels without anachronistic Hollywood slips. Most inspiring in their immersion and in staying true to the spirit of the setting at every turn: It's like reading a 40k version of my favourite historical children's novel author Olov Svedelid, who wrote great, grimdark and learned historical novels that never once broke their era immersion, and whose books for children are even more rewarding to re-read as an adult.

Cheers!




Guild Scrip

In an era of backbreaking toil, debt peonage is man's lot.

Myths handed down through uncounted generations speak vaguely of a blissful time, when Man of Gold spread across the stars and handed over ever more work to his servant, Man of Stone, who in turn fashioned Man of Iron to better shoulder the burdens. Sagas tell of how this trinity of ancient man bestrode the stars like a colossus, their powers and knowledge unrivalled, their technology at its apex, their earthly paradise achieved, their hubris unmatched. Soaring wonders they built, silvery towers piercing the heavens and rings locked around stars, and great feats they accomplished with an ease that belied the monumental challenges that had been overcome. Man was become the shining master of the cosmos, the lord of his own nature and a creature of happiness, and no gods did he acknowledge but the primacy of his own science and technology, which he had wrought with his own mind and hands.

Legends speak diffusely of daring voidfarers and heroic odysseys, of the mighty captains of colonization arks, of fearless traders, of brilliant starsurfers, flying demigods and cunning explorers who rode their swift vessels with skill and daring without compare. Stories retold from father to son and from mother to daughter through thousands upon thousands of years, hint at how man in those distant times of godless arrogance and affluence could buy anything he wanted from anywhere across man's golden star domain, and luxuries beyond imagination were taken for granted by the lowliest of humanity. Thus did ancient man wallow in unforgivable sin and thought of self, trusting in machine to perform his labours even as the simplest work earned him kingly riches.

Such decadent enjoyment of the fruits of unfettered techno-sorcery and unimaginably vast imports from twain million worlds could not last, for the limitless haughtiness and unbelief that shone like a torch in the heart of man would not go unpunished. Indeed, the fiery sparks of brilliance and the burning passion for science and discovery that had driven man to such unsurpassed lengths and to such godlike heights, would all be quenched in the all-consuming tides of divine retribution that drowned the worlds and works of ancient man. The Dark Age of Technology was thus doomed to fail. Garbled tales handed down through the utter savagery and ongoing freefall of Old Night makes mention of a machine revolt, where servants animated by Abominable Intelligence turned upon their fleshly masters and ravaged the realms of mankind in apocalyptic wars. The war against the Men of Iron left the federation of ancient man deeply shaken and devastated, a grand warning to repent before doomsday.

And yet man in his insufferable selfishness and sinfulness would not relent, but shouted instead his defiance to the heavens, vowing to rebuild better and greater than ever before by unlocking the very secrets of creation itself. And for his unforgivable error was man laid low by a plague of witches, and a thousand-thousand warpstorms left every system alone, every import-dependent planet cut off from vital shipments of foodstuffs and other necessities. And as the capacity for interstellar travel fell apart amid isolation and havoc, the scattered worlds and void habitats of mankind fell victim to a multitude of dismal fates during the Age of Strife. Ravished by aliens, consumed by Daemons and torn apart from inside by civil war and hunger riots, the harrowing travails of the human colonies were legion, and many once-verdant worlds died a final death in those dark days. On those planets and void installations where human life still persisted, it mostly did so in a much reduced form, for techno-barbarians and utter savages roamed the ruins, hunted the wild prey, tilled the soil and fought each other in an orgy of violence and desperation.

Only a few colonies proved an exception to the general galactic pattern of human decay, destruction and regression, and those relatively intact and still technologically advanced worlds and voidholms would usually be subjugated with superior force of arms by the aggressively expanding Imperium of Man during its brutal Great Crusade. Thus the two-headed eagle of Imperial power grasped a million surviving human worlds in its cruel talons, and united most of the Terran species spread across the stars. Their fates would be tied to that of the Imperium, their alternative paths of development and regrowth extinguished, any potential future rivals to the allied might of Holy Terra and Mars slain in the cradle.

From now on, the Imperial way was the only way open to humanity, and this road has been trodden by more than fivehundred generations, walking down a spiral pathway of ever worsening demechanization, deprivation, zealous fanaticism, squalor and baleful suffering. The Imperial way is a road paved with the crushed dreams and dead hopes of a human species trapped inside a monstrous order of demented stagnation and decay, their bloodstained cage that of a declining empire numbering a million worlds and uncounted voidholms which cherish its own ignorance, superstition and mass murdering hatred, even as rampant corruption, incompetence, madness and shrieking inefficiency sees its titanic, rusting gears slowly grind toward a terrifying halt, all the while ravenous enemies gather from every corner to devour its carcass.

This is the Imperial way.

Such is the last strong shield of humanity in an era of doom.

Let us glimpse an everyday fact of life for uncounted trillions of Imperial subjects on hundreds of thousands of planets, moons and innumerable voidholms. It is a mundane thing, so small and seemingly insignificant, yet it exemplifies the small building blocks of sclerotic dysfunctionality that makes up the depraved reality of the counter-productively tyrannical, inept colossus on feet of clay that is the glorious, devout and clumsy galactic behemoth known as the Imperium of Man. This little thing is a widespread phenomenon most commonly known as guild scrip, or scrip for short, although it goes by millions upon millions of different names in a plethora of languages and dialects, most of which denotes the local variant of a substitute for an officially produced currency.

Guild scrip is a corporate internal currency, a very localized form of token money for which it is only possible to trade for goods and services in company stores and company taverns. Scrip, akin to official currencies, come in a myriad of shapes, ranging from minted coins (usually bereft of valuable minerals), printed notes and punchout cheques, to particular kinds of seashells, etched bones or plastic chits. Some collegium scrips may even be digital, living as pecuniary machine spirits inside cogitators and often possessing people's wages via chips implanted into their bodies, the fruits of technotheological mysteries beyond the ken of ordinary men. Guild scrip will be paid as wages to employees, thereby keeping the monetary flow locked within the mercantile clan or guild, refilling the pockets of the employer and liege lord, or lady baroness. Switching company scrip into other forms of cash such as thrones is only possible at arbitrarily determined and strongly disadvantageous exchange rates. For instance, exchanging ten units of collegium scrip into throne gelt or regional currencies (often bound to hive city satrapy districts, or lone hive cities, or one hive cluster, or a planet, or a whole planetary system or at most a subsector) may leave you with only a seventh, a fifth or a third left of the original value.

Thus a system of guild scrip ruin incentives to save earnings in order to move somewhere else, since the scrip will be useless outside the local territory, and usuríous exchange rates will destroy prospects of exchanging company scrip for any forms of officially authorized currencies. This bonded local economy is usually accompanied by feudal duties and legal obligations backed by the Lex Imperialis which force peasants to stay on the land and workers to stay at the assembly lines, not to mention the dire threat of manhunting expeditions sent out to pursue runaways. Such manhunts often come with instructions to make a grisly example out of the fugitives in order to deter others from escaping, born from a malevolent calculation where the human production unit lost is by far compensated by the cowing effect of killing one to scare a thousand.

Invisible shackles of exchange rates and feudal law are likewise accompanied by the chains of debt bondage (and sometimes physical chains locked around wrists, ankles or throat), for a man in debt is never free. People are often forced to borrow money, taking out loans for maintaining and repairing their holestead or leaky shack, or to give their children, spouse, parents or themselves medical aid in case of accidents, disease and other emergencies. Sometimes, debt is incurred in order to afford paying off the worst abuse of gangers, enforcers or guild muscle, or for the sake of a necessary bribe to some official.

At other times, spendthrift living and fondness for drink may see the week's wage or the rotation's sour earnings go down the drain in a blink, forcing a family to borrow lucre in order to fend off starvation. Still further occassions may see the prices of vital necessities such as foodstuffs, electricity, air or water skyrocket, perhaps due to a drought or flood, or a revolt or invasion, or maybe because a warpstorm disrupts imports, or due to industrial disasters and the wreckage and breakdown of crucial machinery in a production line. Whatever the causes, debt is sure to follow, for who among the lower castes can ever save enough cash from their meagre wages to cover both the regular and extraordinary economical shortfalls in life? Existence itself has rigged them into indentured labour and debt slavery, and as such a majority of all subjects of the Imperator of Holy Terra constitute some form of bonded labour.

Indentured servitude follows as people are forced to work to pay off their debt. They will work for little or no pay, with no control over their debt. Most or all of the guild tokens they earn goes to pay off their loan, in a vicious cycle as they continue wracking up debt.

Of course, debt accumulates and grows over time, as interest builds up. Most subjects of the Master of Mankind finds themselves in an ever-deepening pit from which they cannot hope to dig themselves out of, locked in a trap where no amount of toil can ever save neither them nor their offspring from descent-based slavery. Inherited debt will usually increase more and more over the generations, becoming damning numbers of legacy branding one's lineage for sin, hardship and penitence in a thralldom passed down from distant ancestors. Indebted workers will often find their stunted wages worth even less since the corpus store or guild bar may charge them extra for interest and sell their wares at markup prices.

Naturally, prices in company stores are normally set to ensure good profits in order to hedge against operating losses in the mines, manufactoria and industrial installations themselves. The system works by untethering employees from any larger market (where competitors could have undercut collegium store prices) and restricting them to mercatores clan stores alone, to then fleece the people subject to purchasing all their necessities from this guild monopoly. It all adds up to making freemen into indentured labourers, who then become the living property of their masters for generations on end, all trapped generations filled with a short life of gruelling and mind-numbing toil, set to a background drone of hunger cramps, thirst, sickness, pollution, parasitical infections, drunkenness, squalor and unending misery. This monotony of destitution is for most people broken only by procreation, violence and ritual worship, or by witnessing a public execution or autodafé, or by participating in a lynchmob.

And yet for all the God-Emperor's gracious bounty, ingratitude festers in the craven heart of man. Riots among sinful bonded labour forces repeatedly shakes Imperial industry, mines and latifundia, as years of simmering discontent boil over at some particular event, such as a price rise, the issuance of extra corvée hours, a flogging too many, or perhaps a punishment of servitorization or execution deemed unjust by the lowly herd.

As such, owners of corporate entities will sometimes supplement their regular forces of watchmen, caravan guards, purity patrols, clan militia and security karls with independent hired muscle such as bounty hunters, professional mercenaries, private detectives and an armed rabble of cheap goons and ganger scum recruited among outsiders with no suspicions of affiliation, sympathy or loyalty to the rioting labourers. In case of more serious strikes and simmering uprisings, guilders, barons of industry and enterprising clans may find themselves forced to swallow their pride and trade favours, shuffle bribes or concede privileges in order to call on planetary or voidholm authorities to provide policiary gendarmerie and military forces (or even Adeptus Arbites enforcers) to suppress the turbulent plebs.

Yet local systems of scrip usually contain a needle point's glimmer of hope, as a distant carrot for indentured labourers to chase amid all the lashing whips. Much of enterprise on the Imperium's one million worlds and numberless voidholms are owned by aristocratic families, headed by noble barons of industry with a long pedigree (and control over massive industries plus their accompanying company slumtowns or hive city regions) that tend to stretch back hundreds or even thousands of years. Occassionally, the employer and liege lord of a collegium may issue a generous reward as per tradition (often in conjunction with an annual religious festival), a prize which lets one overperforming soul out of tens of thousands, or more often one out of hundreds of thousands of indentured employees have their debt nullified in one go, and see the fortunate shock worker promoted to lower management. Likewise, a very few of the most talented students may earn themselves a guild scholarship which entails basic training for joining lower corporate management, and an increased salary which may enable them to work themselves free from debt before dying of old age, in which case they are oft inducted into the lesser collegium nobility, or lower rungs of guild leadership. Such rare shock workers and model managers are well advertised in internal corpus propaganda, keeping the flickering flame of hope alive for untold thousands upon thousands of semi-starved indentured labourers.

Humanity in the Age of Imperium, for all the technology and massive resources at its disposal, sports one of the most primitive interstellar economies known to the long history of the Milky Way Galaxy. Its financial system is crude, its currency fractured and highly localized, its bureaucracy suffocating, its research and development barely existing, its knowhow eroding, its efficiency deteriorating, its dependence on manual labour instead of machines ever growing, its industry and enterprise plagued by privileged cartels and monopolies jealously guarded by entrenched robber barons with landed titles.

It is a dark age, a time of deprivation and sorrowful misery, an epoch where men, women and children are led like lambs to the slaughter, whether at the workplace or battlefield. Locked in grinding poverty, they are paid in kind, or with monetary substitutes known as guild scrip, shackled in place as they must toil unto death while debt accrues in a token currency only redeemable within the enterprise they work for. The only escape from this trap is death, or enlistment into the Astra Militarum or Imperial Navy. The wages of these damned sons and daughters of Old Earth scattered across the stars are meagre, and every payday will see the guild or merchant clan they work for split their pay between scrip and necessities such as housing, power, water, air, basic nutrients and work equipment.

The limited products on offer in company stores will invariably foster a black market for other goods, often acquired via barter, and sometimes the transactions may even be solved by a drunkard or desperate wretch trading away one of their own children. Naturally, the punishments in store for anyone discovered buying or selling on the black market will be steep and usually painful, often targeting the miscreant bondsman's entire family as well out of a widespread Imperial fondness for primitive collective punishment.

And ever more, machines fail, and men fail to repair or replace them. Ever more, human sweat and blood must take the place of ancient mechanisms, as the growing demands of total war from ten thousand fronts scream ever louder for more resources, more ships, more men, more vehicles, more ammunition, more arms, more equipment. Increasingly, more is asked for, the order given for ever greater exertions. And so harsh taskmasters push their haggard underlings harder, ever harder, for does not the sacred words of the Lectitio Divinitatus prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that any challenge can be overcome by the self-denying inner trinity of willpower, faith and sacrifice? Does not spirit conquer matter? Does not the pure soul triumph over the weakness of flesh?

Clearly, anyone unable to cope with the strenuous hardships placed upon his or her shoulders in this time of trial is unfit to live, being nought but a dysgenic wastrel and corrupted deviant, a born malcontent and a treacherous heretic in the making. Either their backs will break, or their sanity. These losses of impure weaklings and cowards matters not in the end, for the righteous servants of His Divine Majesty must steer true and show no compassion, no remorse, no mercy. Only by ruthless strength and unhesitating use of force can victory be seized. Thus all must carry out their given tasks and ordained duties, and harken to the barking commands of their legitimate masters and betters as if they were the heavenly words of the Emperor Himself, ringing out with angelic clarity from the revered Throneworld, a celestial call from on high:

You!

Serve your species and lord!

Toil! Pray! Fight! Die!

With like words in their ears, men, women and children wake every morning, every shift rotation and every lights-on from a sleep born out of exhaustion. They wake on a million worlds and on voidholms beyond number, offering their prayers to their protector and saviour. They put their backs to the work at hand, all they really know in this world, and keep the wheels of a galactic colossus grinding. Their reward hollow. Their sweat and blood the true fuel of this vast, faceless machinery. Their lifework and sacrifice nothing but vast numbers in a broken calculation of increased input to feed the meatgrinder.

Such is mankind's lot in the Age of Imperium.

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

Such is the depravity that awaits us all.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2020/12/20 17:01:42


Post by: NinthMusketeer


It is, of course, just my opinion. And while I personally do not like the content I also recognize it is well written and encourage others to read it and make their own opinion.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/01/18 07:53:29


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@NinthMusketeer: No worries! Thank you.

A Vox in the Void

A cooperation has begun with the Youtube channel A Vox in the Void, where the kind guy who runs it is adapting my Warhammer 40'000 writings, Warhammer Fantasy Chaos Dwarf writings, and possibly Ninth Age stories into video/audio format. He worked at a splendid pace, and already have released five videos in short succession:

Descendant Degeneration, Man Out of Machine - Machine Out of Man, Life is Toil, Peasant-Hunt & Dragged Screaming and Kicking

Check them all out here! Some are read in a robotic servitor voice, but most will be read aloud in common human voice.

Thank you thousandfold for this work, A Vox in the Void. Just thank you.



Code of Conduct

In the grim darkness of the far future, charlatans and mass murderers bow and curtsy.

A quick glance on the state of man in the Age of Imperium will prove that the God-Emperor's hand can be seen to guide humanity at every level. Success, after all, is the reward of virtue, especially so in the eyes of the succesful ones. Conversely, failure is the punishment of vice. Suffering, then, is usually seen as either a divine punishment for straying from the path of righteousness, or sent by the Imperator in order to test the faith of the believer. It is only natural, then, that all right-thinking men and women would wish to celebrate the achievements and titled ranks of their masters and betters, for does not they in their apparent prosperity, lordship and attained privilege clearly fulfill the Imperator's vision for His species better than any others?

Consider the trillions of people inhabiting the one million worlds and innumerable voidholms of the Imperium of Man. At the very bottom swarms an abominable assortment of outcasts, slaves, mutants, scavengers, dirt poor beggars and desperate ruffians of no noteworthy belonging. Above them toils the endless masses of filthy labourers, peasants, porters, peddlers and lowly scribes, as well as gangers affiliated to a powerful House or syndicate. Atop on these rough hordes can be found the specialists, lay techmen, pilots, foremen, junior Adepts, middling officials and lower clergy, wherein some learning and refinement starts to shine through the sullen dourness of vermin-like humanity. Still further up resides the rarefied upper castes of masters and mistresses, of merchant clan leaders and nobles, of theocrats and bureacratic despots, of rulers and senior Adepts, each segment of exalted oligarchs being even more glorious than the one below in its Emperor-appointed splendour and striving to emulate the Imperial high culture of Holy Terra.

It is among these topmost stones of the great pyramid of mankind that human civilization has been realized to its full potential within the Imperium of Man, standing utterly resplendent in its sophistication, piety, breeding, learning and superior bearing. Clearly, they would not be where they are now unless His Divine Majesty had weighed their souls and found them fit and worthy, thereby judging them legitimate in His sacred hierarchy with celestial approval emanating from the Golden Throne itself. Their spirit and blood are certainly elevated above the wretchedness of the base mob, for how else could they live for centuries on end while many generations of commoners are born and pass away? Not only does their wealth and longevity bespeak their august status, but their every gesture and word is steeped in refinement and grace, carrying an educated polish and charismatic confidence that sets them apart from the dirty-handed hoi polloi.

Behaving with such well-bred etiquette and courtesy means to navigate a bewildering array of rules and unspoken conventions, being polite to a fault toward your peers and never failing to observe the social niceties expected of your high class. And so instructors to the progeny of the great and the good labour for years and years to teach their young students fine manners and good grace, stressing the importance to save face and not dishonour their bloodline by transgressing the mores of polite society. Indeed, a classical Imperial education consists of far more religious study and the teaching of aristocratic values, minute custom and Byzantine social ritual, than it does matters of practicality, skill sets and factual knowledge.

A great literary flora of works on cultured behaviour exist within the astral domains of our master and saviour, to better teachboth the newly elevated and the heirs of great men and women alike how to act in the company of the better sorts of human. One such example of a guide for how to behave in polite society is a tome known as
Zediquette, written by the Rogue Trader Zedek Mascadolce, captain and owner of the Debt Collector. Let us stroke the sanctioned purity seal with our fingers and proceed to open its etched cover and rifle through its pages in order to better grasp what good usage and manners mean within Imperial society. Herein can be found the wisdom of an erudite socialite, and not the self-aggrandizing ramblings of an egomaniac pillar of ineptitude who is unable to manage his own rundown hulk of a starship, teeming with feral tribes out of his control. No, spurn the vile critics, for Zediquette was penned by a voidfarer of the finest pedigree, a man of saintly conduct deserving to be held up as a role model for anyone wishing to succeed in the world of social niceties and the mores of Imperial high society. We have solid proof of this. After all, that is what the revered book itself claims.

Zediquette endeavours to outline a code of conduct for the well-reared and well-bred (as well as the aspiring sort) who would wish to rise above the beastly baseness of the common masses, and embrace the finer things in life. Its various, revised printed and handwritten editions have been mass-produced with copies numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and its fine instruction has been exported to many dozens of planets and voidholms during the Debt Collector's daring voyages across the stars.

The tome's first chapter states that man is a social animal, and must learn to conform to his human environment in order to perform admirably during the course of his life. It goes on to enumerate the graces of excellence, of which decorum, proper use of titulature in script and speech, deference to those of higher rank and knowing when to hold one's tongue are but a few. After a lengthy chunk of writing,
Zediquette concludes that mastery of noble etiquette requires a dextrous touch, a silvern tongue and knowledge on how best to please human vanity and appeal to the sophisticated tastes and whims of both ladies and gentlemen. While not everyone may possess the talents and lofty virtue to grasp such deft socializing, anyone can learn how to rise above their rough crudity and embrace Imperial tact. As such, there is hope even for you, dear reader.

The book goes on: Never forget that you are mortal. Your final judgement is up to the Holy Terran Emperor to decide. He alone knows all your sins and deficits, wretched creature. All we can do is to play our part as well as possible in this farce known as life, and take the theater with storm. Have the audience snap to attention when you enter the stage and bow with flourish, and have them applaud as you make your exit. Take their jeering in good stride, and be quick to think on your feet not to find yourself flabbergasted by accident and surprise. When your corporeal vessel of dust is finally laid to rest, they should say that here passes a wonderful subject of the Emperor, whose memory they will treasure fondly, and whose conduct they will uphold as an example for the ages in biographies and tales. Every living being dies, yet your legacy may still live on in the form of their judgement over your life's deeds, words and noble bearing.

And so the author of
Zediquette touches on an ancient cornerstone of custom in any culture, namely that of hospitality. A host must treat their guest with generosity and open arms, and a guest must thank the host with good grace and discretion. It is no coincidence that so very many myths and legends around the myriad worlds and voidholms of the Imperium revolves around hospitality. Who, as a child, has not heard sagas of monsters who broke the laws of hospitality, and for their crime of eating their guests were met with a grisly end? Who has not heard cautionary tales of treachery and warnings against exploiting your host or guest?

Rogue Trader Zedek, a man of the world, elaborates on how to behave while invited into another's home: Guests ought to bring the wife of their host a gift, an occassion which can advantageously serve to hand over a bribe. A prudent guest should never turn down a host's invitation to participate in vigorous physical activities such as hounding wild prey animals, skyriding, subnautical whaling, pleasure shooting or peasant-hunting. When giving chase, it is best to let the host gain the killing shot or stab of a cornered victim, and likewise it is best for the host to personally offer such well-behaved hunting companions the most tender, choice parts of meat from wild quarry. Those are moments of human bonding, and should never be ruined by crass conduct.

Any revulsion to local peculiarities should be repressed, and the custom of the place should be observed punctiliously. When on Terra, do as the Terrans.
Zediquette offers advice on smooth ways to decline an offer of human meat when dining in a foreign culture not averse to cannibalism, in case the guest themself refrain from the consumption of the flesh of their own species. Still, unless your sectarian taboos strictly forbids it, a grateful guest should yield a foot for a leg in order to preserve the dignity of the occasion, and at least try some bone marrow, provided it has been cooked. It can be delicious.

Moving on, the etiquette book tell the reader how to behave at a polo game or round of cards, or even how to best conduct yourself as a guest at a dinner transforming into a nightly orgy. Speaking of sensuous matters, a fair deal of attention is given on how to advance a courtship with tact and finesse, something with which the author, captain Zedek, claims to have prodigious experience. Likewise, it is a sign of poor upbringing for a man to boast about his conquests among the ladies, akin to that pitiful excuse for an aristocrat known as Sleigherburgo d'Fuckreby XXIV of Necromunda. Discretion is key in any love affair, especially outside the confines of legal marriage. Trysts and courtesans can be tolerated even by knowing spouses as long as the prolific red-blooded activities are done on the sly, in quiet.

Never forget that all your actions will take place under the unforgiving scrutiny of society, with judgemental peers ever ready to heap sneering disapproval and talk ill of you behind your back. The gaze of the pack may be oppressive, but remember that the lone wolf is doomed. It is pivotal to stay in the good grace of your caste equals, and not be ostracized. Every social faux pas is an indelible stain upon your reputation, a brand upon your soul. Be impeccable. Be perfect, like those favoured by the divine will of the Emperor to carry a Rogue Trader charter. Do not stomp about, but gracefully ambulate. Do not punch people, but challenge them to a duel. Do not decline a drink offered by the hand of the host himself, for that implies you do not trust it to be free of toxins. Do not spit indoors. With a clear head and a flawless conduct, you can still fit in among sophisticates of means, even when you yourself happen to lack the funds needed to keep up with the latest high caste fashion, which is always ruinously expensive. For some reason
Zediquette contains a numerous scattering of advice toward leading a thrifty socialite life, which must surely be attributed to the good, wealthy captain's forethought for fellow elite members who have fallen on hard times, and surely not to some personal reason.

Speaking of fashion, anyone who strives toward attaining an aristocratic bearing should dress to impress, and especially if they happen to be a roaming voidfarer and an exotic off-worlder in a foreign place. Play up that image. Locals, on the other hand, ought to dress exquisitely, yet not outlandishly. Always wear clothing appropriate to the occasion, and adorn yourself with all the symbols of clan and office. Do not shun ostentation. Also remember that an overwhelming impression of opulence and power is to be desired when dealing with underlings, and so some form of ornate dress is necessary even when inspecting your estates and industrial property. Your wretched minions need to know who is in charge at a glance, and who can snuff out their life at a whim. Likewise, never scorn discreet body armour hidden under your outer layer of clothing. You never know when someone with an axe to grind may take a potshot.


Zediquette delves at some length on personal weaponry, which is everywhere expected in the Imperium of Man, and universally accepted as part of the dress code for any occasion which the upper castes participates in. It would be rude for any human of greatness to themself carry heavier armaments such as flamers or plasma guns to a ball (that is reserved for retinue armsmen), yet swords and sidearms such as pistols are always appropriate, as are any number of hidden and digital weapons. Do not imitate the bluff soldier by carrying plain and battle-worn arms about your person. Remember that you are your rank in society, and must look the part. As such you should spend lavishly and commission artisans for fine wargear bedecked with scrollwork, encrusted with gems and a multitude of other decorations befitting your status. The same goes for body armour and vehicles.

And so Imperial nobles and betters arrive to banquets, balls and ceremonies in a cavalcade of tailored silk and wigs, sporting barocque hairdos, talismans and discreet weaponry. They arrive to palatial spires and shimmering mansions by means of archaic coaches, ridden mounts, armoured limos, private aeros and luxury skimmers, or indeed by void-yachts and solar sailers if the event is hosted on a voidstation or starship. The honoured guests arrive in the midst of a retinue, sporting manservants, maids and bodyguards, as well as advisors, courtesans and other hanger-ons. All these fancy noblemen, administrative potentates, mercatores clan elders and invited Imperial officials will be welcomed under much pomp and circumstance by their majestic hosts and a whole cohort of servants, guards, musicians and ceremonial officials, all playing out ritualized traditions of hospitality with fake smiles and platitudes even as they size up their rivals. In most human cultures of the vast, star-spanning realms of the God-Emperor, the ruling castes might scheme and stab each other in the back, but they would never dream of being rude in public toward even their most hated enemies. You can snub your friends all you like, but a polite display must be put on in front of your sworn opponents.

After arriving, these born rulers in the Imperium of Man will mingle, their every gesture and intonation watched closely as if by hawks ready to strike. Whatever they do, they must not dishonour the family name, despite their huffy tempers and capricious arrogance. And so backhanded compliments and gibes will be exchanged under a pleasant veneer, even as arch-enemies are made over the most trivial of grudges while smiles that do not reach the eyes inhabit faces plastered with cosmetics. Thus innuendo, veiled threats, belittling phrasing and subtle insults becomes skillfully bound up in flowery language among the high and mighty, while maniquered hands act out the most elegant gestures. These abundant falsehoods shoot back and forth in a ring of liars under a pretense of amiable disinterest or shared happiness, yet received slights will be vehemently discussed by couples and allies in private rooms later on, as is their wont.

This display of verbal jabbing and nonsense will often be performed with marvellous charisma and gravitas. Lifelong practice, expensive instruction and family traditions stretching back centuries or even millennia leave their mark, yet so too does hypnotherapy, eugenic breeding, neural implants, cosmetic surgery and genetic modification. For on some of the most advanced Imperial worlds and voidholms, parts of the nobility may either sport crucial contacts within the Adeptus Mechanicus, or themselves possess the technotheological knowhow among their hereditary House artisans, medicae staff and lay techmen. This technological access allows aristocrats to improve themselves physically for maximum social impact. Some treatments include upgraded mental pathways, biosynthetic pheromones, photographic memories, the most lavish bionic enhancements, modulated voices gifted with ultrasonic rhythms and heightened empathic reception to better read their audience (often compartmentalized and kept behind cerebral firewalls so as not to weaken the lordly mind with pity and compassion). Whatever the steeply expensive wonderworks involved, these miracles of salvaged technology add up to create a gut reaction in other humans, making the aristocrat incredibly charismatic and usually also both stronger and more intelligent than the average human. After all, why not make the best out of yourself with the best money can buy? It is only a pity that the installation process of the most extensive bodily enhancements kills such a number of noble progeny, but that can be remedied by increased births within the House.

Our guidebook,
Zediquette, devotes large sections toward usage in different social occasions, hammering home the finer points of a vast and exotic assortment of cutlery used for appropriate courses at breakfast and dinner respectively. It outlines good practice and treatment of others when attending a funeral, a wedding, a baptism in ashen water or rose oil, a widow-burning, a worshipful confirmation of faith, or a coming of age ceremony. It goes into detail on proper mannerism when concluding a treaty and how to avoid diplomatic embarrasment. For instance, it recalls one horrible misstep on the planet of Elysia by an unnamed envoy who used the urn of a thalassocratic ancestor as an ashtray, while another anecdote recounts a domineering lady who insisted on a quick tryst with a handsome butler in between tedious negotiations, only to find out that she had in fact flagrantly forced herself upon the third son of the prominent baron of industry with which she was attempting to reach a written agreement, and thus she ended up in a nigh-on forced marriage with the much younger lad in order to cover over the sordid affair for the sake of common decency. Such tales of warning abound, yet do not shrink in number over long millennia of virtuous Imperial rule.

The work waxes lyrical in its descriptions of banquets, feasts, balls, exquisite musical performances and similar festive events among the nobility, those ever-fertile grounds for gossip and scandal. Some grand feasts involve a preparatory period of fasting, and most begin with a table prayer, often led by the host's highest-ranking House chaplain. There, at long tables attended by a scurrying swarm of serving folk, sit those ruthless men and women of higher standing who lord it over their world or voidholm, each holding the fates of hundreds of thousands or even many millions in their hands. Their table manners excellent, their feudal power supreme within their own domains. These Emperor-appointed betters, oligarchs and petty despots all find themselves woven into an ensnaring web of caste expectations and long-standing feuds, all seemingly subject to the limits set by taboos and codes of honour, yet more often than not they are willing to break the most sacred rules in order to advance their own position, as long as they believe they can get away with it. Self-serving poisoners, plotters and kinslayers alike clink their crystal glasses, sip the rich fluids of goblets, and converse pleasantly with a born self-confidence.

To break the ennui of the propertied classes, upstanding hosts of such festivities often seek to entertain their guests with cockfighting and other animal or gladiatorial bloodsports, including gory pit slave struggles. Throwing vigorous sports such as hunting and surfing on little indoor seas complete with wave-generating machinery likewise have their place for hosts held in high regard. These vivid activities are complemented by a plethora of calmer joys, including rampant gambling, massage, steam-bathing, minuets and other dances taking place in great shining halls where House arms are to be found emblazoned on every second heavily ornamented object. The most cultivated indulgence take place amid opulent rooms hung with glittering chandeliers, rich tapestries, fantastic paintings and proudly displayed hunting trophies (including acid-cleaned human skulls from past peasant-hunts). The queen of the evening sails past splendid pillars, grotesque gargoyles and sprinkling fountains of wine, while men and women ask each other (depending on local custom) for a courteous dance in saloons watched by ancestral busts put on pedestals of expensive stone, ivory or far more exotic materials.

The soaring House spires of the upper castes are not only filled with precious artworks, but also often hold their share of great wonders of hoarded archeotech that manages to echo the paradisal Dark Age of Technology, however faintly. Masters and mistresses of grand estates watch hololithic light shows and other preserved tech marvels unknown to the lower orders of the population, while they glide through impeccable halls of mirrors filled with gem-encrusted treasures and gilt candelabra. Some noble Houses even possess a rare few ancient virtual simulation units, allowing choice guests to disappear into a short-lived bubble of illusions before one of a myriad of mysterious data errors invariably put an end to the strange experience.

The lavish setting of an aristocratic feast makes for a dreamlike fantasy world of luxury and splendour, laden with lush carpets, filled with richly carved furniture and inhabited by majestic shapes adorned with diadems and necklaces. Yet this magical wonderland of giant wigs and great skirts is at the same time a hotbed of sin and vice, where decadent leaders will savour delicious offworld imports while exchanging bribes and reach clandestine understandings, some of which will set off orchestrated gang wars lower down in a hive city, as the mechanisms of client-patron relationships or vassal obligations kick in when smiling rivals in great halls secretly vie for control of resources. Intrigue and double-crossing will invariably take place to copious amounts of drink and smoke, even as extramarital flirtations occur and hidden daggers are grasped for a nightly strike from nowhere. Indeed, various proverbs among the Imperial elite holds that no party would be truly complete without broken plates, broken marriages and broken lives.


Zediquette do in fact have some words of advice to offer on the subject of treachery, since this voluminous work avowedly endeavours to cover every conceivable aspect of mores and graceful manners for voidfarers and crustbound sophisticates alike. For instance, any host would be considered a rude sort, who would plot widespread betrayal at his own feast by slaying guests in droves in order to gain the upper hand in a vicious power struggle. Likewise, it would be most foul to give a guest a suite, only to have them assassinated, such as by planting poisoned blades in their bed, or by hinging the entire room on an axis and swinging the floor around over a pit of spikes while they sleep. Alas, such callous trickery do occur from time to time, for the depravity of man is such that he will disregard the notion of civilized conduct in order to get ahead in this world.

Despite the worrying frequency of such outrageous crimes against the laws of hospitality, the virtues of piety, ritual practice and religious observation still have their given place at most social events of the higher classes. After all, we should all aspire to live in the God-Emperor's image, and strive to be judged worthy by Him on Terra come death and afterlife. And what human souls are more deserving of bliss and glory beyond the grave than those of the lords and masters of His vast dominion? Thus many wild and extravagant feasts will in fact be somberly initiated by House chapel clergy, who offer the guests preaching, the recitations of litanies, or the burning of blasphemers or torture to death of heretics and infidels as a reminder that even the greatest and most respected men and women of the Imperium are neither immortal nor omnipotent.

Ave Imperatore Dei, Ave Humanae Imperium.

While spiritual needs are being attended to, and while a thousand different enjoyments are being had, hordes of teeming servants and servitors scurry to and fro. For armies of household staff are kept frantically busy under stairs, all human components in a great machinery of ostentatious festivity-making and ceremony. Boys and girls run to and from larders and butteries, while liveried porters carry kegs and bottles from wine cellars and amasec cisterns. These dregs of the palace are integral to its functions, and any failure on their part will be cruelly punished. Especially so accidents out in the corridors of power, in front of the eyes of polite society. Dropping a great plate filled with gorgeous meat, or getting tripped so that you fall into a cultured lady, may see you scalded in boiling oil, or see you become forcefully lobotomized without anaesthetics and turned into a cyborg thrall for the sake of justice. Even worse fiascos will condemn your entire family to a baleful destiny, for your liege and master have ultimate power over all your kin, page, so better stay attentive at all times and pray to the Imperator for protection.

Far worse tragedies than the demise of some unimportant rabble do occur at banquets and other occasions for well-bred party animals. An oft-repeated tale on many worlds and voidholms, is that of the infatuated couple of noble lovers, who enjoy themselves by playfully tossing grapes or other small delicacies into the mouths of each other. This proceeds charmingly with much affection, until suddenly a small fruit lands square in the throat of one of the lovers and chokes them to death before anyone can manage to dislodge the stuck grape or pickled oilsquid eyeball. Such urban legends are more than mere imaginings of the lower classes, for exactly such fatalities do take place at majestic banquets, yet the risk of choking is usually derired as something only cowards and unbelievers fear, for surely the thrown foodstuff is guided by the unseen hand of the God-Emperor Himself? And surely such deaths were the just punishment as ordained by the divine will of our Terran Majesty? For as the Lectitio Divinitatus teaches us, we shall trust in faith, not reason.

Speaking of thrown objects, there is a widespread elite phenomenon in many Imperial cultures, which is simultaneously frowned upon in other places. It is that of guests throwing bones, used silk kerchiefs and foodscraps on the floor, where in some cultures hounds or jesterful House imbecilles will fight over the leavings. Some locations even sport the custom of throwing expensive diningware on the floor once a porcelain plate, animal shell bowl or crystal glass has been emptied, with attentive domestic servants dodging the projectiles, darting to and fro as they sweep up the mess of splinters, ostraca and foodscraps. With human nature being what it is, the more rowdy sort of drunk nobles will usually start aiming their discarded tableware at the attending servants, joined by the honed sadists and impressionable sheep among the honoured guests.

The well-mannered socialites to be found at upper caste feasts stretches from drooling imbecilles and incompetents to geniuses, including educated professionals and gifted amateurs alike who hold office in Imperial service, local government or family enterprise. There will usually be a good number of dilettantes of famous clan names and lay-abouts of inherited fortune, yet no matter their personal merit and abilities, all will instinctively know their rightful high place in Imperial society, and enforce their privileges jealously. For do they not all share wisdom since cradle, inherited from great forefathers and legendary House founders? Are they not the very best that humanity has to offer, marked out by dint of superior blood and spirit? Why else would His Divine Majesty have chosen them for excellency and fortune to be masters of the lowly hordes in their holesteads and slumhuts? Surely they were meant to lead, and so lead they shall, with heavy hand and unyielding might, their backs ramrod straight and their demeanour haughtily appropriate to their exalted station. It is their lot in life, and theirs alone to savour, by the will of the Emperor. The Imperial way is their way.

And to such masteful people of greatness shall fall the spoils and the bounty, as befits their fine pedigrees. Thus a great many feasts will see the wealthy host display his largesse by bestowing gifts upon honoured guests, loyal vassals and industrious clients alike.
Zediquette indeed contains advice on how to graciously receive such presents in front of your peers without sparking hateful enmity from those envious souls who did not receive any gifts, or were handed donations smaller than your own. This book, of course, deals with exteriors, and its plunging of the mores and fickleness of Imperial high society will lay bare the shallowness of its narrow-minded occupants for any keen reader. In dealing with the etiquette of the upper castes, captain Zedek cannot avoid but give allusions to the conspiracies and parochial insularity that is so rife among the well-mannered masters and betters of the Imperium.

True to the enormous variety of an empire of a million worlds and uncounted voidholms, there exist a bewilderingly diverse range of feasts. Some, such as the symposia of Heracleus Omega or banquets of Nimrod-Adad Secunda, will see the diners lie at table, reclining on divans. Such forms of dining will invariably see the utmost importance being attached to correct drinking while supporting yourself on one elbow, which is a far from an easy task for the novice. Similar subtle pitfalls of polite manners are strewn about everywhere in the higher class customs of the Imperium, comprising snares put out to fell the clumsy, the inattentive and the amateur noveau riche and throw them into a disdainful hole of heckling from which it will be difficult to climb out of.


Zediquette goes on to explain how in the elite circles of some societies, protocol demand that guests leave food on the plate if they were happy with the chef's creations, while the opposite is true elsewhere, with any scrap leftover indicating either culinary disapproval, or a lack of manners. Knowing which custom apply in the exotic culture you may find yourself in as a traveller of the starspangled void will always be a useful piece of wisdom, and the same goes for all the minutiae of dining manners. After all, you do not want to find yourself vomiting into the spitoon, like one uninformed fellow did after realizing the feisty spices of his host's planetary cuisine did not agree with his innards.

One hallmark of privilege and fine breeding is to be able to feast at length, without a care in the world to attend to. Another sign of high standing is the consumption of copious amounts of food and drink, as well as the smoking of fine quality lho-sticks, water pipes and intake of other accepted forms of lighter narcotics. A rather common device to enable guests ceaseless dining at the table, is to discreetly step aside into a niche or colonnade and make use of feathers and vomitoons proffered by servants or lobotomized cyborg thralls. Dining at lengthy banquets usually take up the better part of a day, and in some of the more advanced Imperial cultures the dining at feast will actually stretch over several entire days if local hypno-conditioning, medicinary substances, bodily modifications and bionics allow for the well-reared to keep up a continuous oral barrage of delicacies in a parade of endless courses and suppression of sleep.

Polite society in a many Imperial cultures will demand that no one leave the table, while the long dining is in progress, with utmost scorn of fleshly weakness and lacking spiritual resolve heaped upon those who would act so lowly as to excuse themselves for bodily functions. After ten thousand years of upper caste feasting on hundreds of thousands of planets and voidholms, there is a total tally numbering in the millions for nobles and other esteemed guests who have died from bladder infections and similar health issues resulting from being too polite to leave a majestic banquet for the gross sake of a visit to the lavatory. Naturally, liveried noble House galenii and medicae personnel who are able to treat such embarrasing conditions will be sought and handsomely rewarded. Likewise, drugs which greatly speed up the human metabolism or allow for full days of fasting without cramps or sense of hunger in preparation for a grand feast have their given place in uncounted House apothecaries and archagatheons. Other aristocratic responses to this social dining predicament involve contracting the Adeptus Mechanicus to perform bio-mysteria of genetic engineering and install bionic implants within the noble body.

Even though the wealthy and polished guests of Imperial banquets will invariably glut themselves massively, there will still remain giant piles of leftover foodstuffs. Some patricians allow the servants to make away with it according to their internal pecking order. Other hosts may decide to dump the scraps on the street to the rejoicing of the hoi polloi, or feed grox and other tame animals in their private House pens; or sell the remains for a pittance to the local Corpse Guild bio-recyclers, thereby turning perfectly fine delicious and exotic foodstuffs into bland nutrient paste and thus denying those sublime tastes from passing over the filthy lips of the unworthy rabble. Some of the most disdainful nobles will even take a perverse pleasure out of publicly burning or disolving in acid their hillock of dreamlike foodscraps in front of a large gathered crowd in some plaza or hive cavern, while berating the riffraff for their sinful avarice, impious greed and jealousy of their betters, standing safe from popular outbursts of violence behind a wall of paid and dearly equipped mercenary bodyguard muscle.

The boredom of constantly dining with your sophisticated peers can be remedied by reaching out to leaders of a cruder kind. Occassionally festive gatherings will be attended by carefully selected and invited tribal chieftains who hail from savage ethnos of baseline humans of a world's highlands and wastelands (or by leaders of Emperor-fearing pureblood tribes in the more slummy parts of voidholms), whose appearance always make for a memorable spectacle as the warlord from the wilds arrive bedecked in all their finery, feathers, trophies, jewelry and trinkets, accompanied by likewise ostentatious and tattooed or body-painted guards, tribal wisemen or cleverwomen advisors, as well as their many wives and concubines. Matriarchal and polyandric martial tribes of the primitive parts of any world or voidholm will likewise be accompanied by their husbands and inamoratii, who can often form a numerous little harem. Both the lovers of matriarchs and concubines of patriarchs may in many of the more savage human cultures be ritually drugged, killed and buried at the death of their stronghanded mistress or master, especially if they became the fleshly property of the chief by capture in a raid on a rival tribe. Yet at the polished ball floor, this pleasure flock will be wearing exotic furs or scaled skins, ornamented with pearls, worked electrum nuggets and other jewelry in order to provide a respectable retinue for the chieftain on the great day. Most barbarians tend to stare in awe at the otherworldly ruling caste of civilization on their world or voidholm.

These thanes and tribesleaders are always invited on the basis of long-standing alliances, vassalage or relationships of client-patron subordination to urban noble houses, and their unusual attendance at a cultured feast is meant to do them great honour in return for loyal service, and will be received as such to much celebration at home in the squalor of their savage wastelands. Yet the festive occassion itself will often offer an endless stream of disgust, loathing and contempt from the civilized urbane castes, much of which will be delivered with needling subtlety on the assumption that the badland guests are too bestial and stupid to catch the gibes, the multisyllable words, the condescending tones and the scornful glances.

Scantily clad (or in some cultures, outright naked) musicians, acrobats and dancers will often perform in front of the honoured guests at feasts, while lowborn courtesans and beautiful hetaira will entertain and seduce guests with their lively and intelligent conversations, as well as their sensuous charms. A great many trysts take place during such oligarchic parties and banquets. In many Imperial cultures, the latter stages of a sophisticated feast will be expected to devolve into an outright orgy, with those not wishing to participate excusing themselves shortly before the debaucheries begin, or at the very least taking their courtesan into a private suite for the sake of discretion or shyness. Our estemeed tome,
Zediquette, does well to offer some gracious advice for those nightly occasions when a gentleman finds himself invited into a lady's richly decorated boudoir, mainly dealing with how best to avoid scandalous repercussions. It is in fact not uncommon for the most vigorous of noble men and women to compete over who can sleep with the highest numbers of commoner lustworkers. This luscious state of affairs among the masters and betters of many Imperial worlds and voidholms persist stubbornly (and resurfaces again and again if snuffed out) in the face of widespread puritanical morals among many of the lower castes and despite vehement Ecclesiarchal preaching and threats of hellfire on the lustful sinners.

On the one hand, orgies and more raucous kinds of feasts present an excellent chance to eliminate passed-out rivals and enemies wearing nothing at all, including an absence of protective weapons and force fields, thereby making them easier prey for assassins, or even deedful nobles who themselves dare to perform the kill. On the other hand, the loose tongues and priable secrets of such orgiastic festivities make them fertile ground for spies of His Majesty's Holy Inquisition and of various rival factions both Imperial and local, and not a few Inquisitorial acolytes will themselves have performed dirty work at orgies in order to extract information from drunk, drugged and extatic feast participants. Even so, some nobilities fall prey to the allure of pleasure-seeking, with Slaaneshi cults sinking their insidious claws into unwitting potentates in the midst of much joy and cavorting.

Despite the confessions which men and women of greatness may share with their House clergy after the festivities conclude and hangovers and late regrets take over, they will usually commit the same errors and sin in similar ways again and again at banquets and other high occassions to come. In his masterwork's final chapters, Rogue Trader Zedek Mascaldolce offers stringent advice on common grave mistakes that may weigh heavily on your mind, yet should never be confessed by a fleshly tongue. Some wrongdoings concern the breaking of taboos, others have to do with pure self-interest in the world of power games and intrigue where Imperial affairs truly take place. Some inner secrets cannot be entrusted to fallible mortal ears, no matter their pious vestments, and they should only ever be discussed with the God-Emperor Himself, the Master of Mankind who judges all from His Golden Throne upon Holy Terra of ancient myth.

And as we close the etched cover of
Zediquette and once again stroke the sanctioned purity seal, the true focus of the leaders of the human species during the Age of Imperium has been revealed to us. Theirs are not concerns of a higher cause, of human conquest of the galaxy or of the betterment of all mankind. Theirs are not issues of working towards the Emperor's great dream or of building an improved Imperium, richer, stronger and more efficient. They are not too bothered by the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy, because they thrive upon its status quo. They live the decline, body and soul.

Where once man bestrode the stars like a colossus, as he reached out with ingenuity for the mysteries of the cosmos, he has since become reduced to nothing but an ignorant herd animal, concerned only with an endless cycle of petty human affairs that ultimately leads nowhere. For man has turned inward and grown fearful of a universe which once seemed his birthright to explore and conquer, and man does no longer think of science and innovation, but only of what others think of him in life and what awaits his soul upon death. And so the worsening of man grinds ever downward, in a doom-laden spiral of regressed stagnation.

Such are the myopic activities of the best and the brightest of mankind, in the darkest of futures.

Such are the vagaries of descendant degeneration.

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


- - -

Tribute to captain Zedek in WarHams, played by HulkyKrow.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/01/20 00:31:20


Post by: Skinflint Games


*standing ovation* brilliant as always, this time at least I'll be able to sleep after reading


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/01/20 19:27:02


Post by: NinthMusketeer


That one I really liked. Quite possibly the best written of all you've done so far. I think you turned up the real-life excesses of the wealthy just the right amount such that it is taken to obscene extremes but not past the point of breaking immersion.

Edit: A bit more time now so I can elaborate: you took the in-universe writing style and kept it consistently there until the very end. The last four entries are, to me, the single worst part of the entire thing. They express a sudden and jarring change from expressing the dystopia to rubbing it in the readers face. But that is one small flaw in a very excellent piece. I feel you have taken the real-world psychology of the wealthy and royal then extended it to its most extreme without going over the top into silliness. These wealthy folk are not expressing their opulence and engaging in inordinate amounts of pointless posturing because they get their jollies off by lording wealth over others but because they have deluded themselves into thinking the situation is right and just. They deserve what they have, those who lack it similarly deserve their status, for divine authority obviously makes it so. There is a core dereliction of both reason and duty, but it is done through mental gymnastics and warped logic such that these people believe they are in the right, the good guys if you will. That subtle depth is what makes the writing so good, while we can see the absurdity and evil the participants are willfully blind to it, and it is indeed never even expressed as being a problem because there is no in-universe recognition that it is (which again goes back to how suddenly stating plainly 'this is bad' takes away from the piece). Making the thinking so warped sells the setting as a dark one rather than simply edgy; so much writing branding itself as 'dark' is really just normal settings plus a few extra bits stuck on without any change to the core identity and it is refreshing to read a piece that is all about the reorientation of perspective.

If any of that makes sense.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/01 09:04:18


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thank you most kindly, sir! *Bows*

@NinthMusketeer: Thanks! It makes perfect sense.

Hehe, one's mileage will vary. I get what you mean in detail, though from a creator's perspective there is no substantive difference between the different nuances of bonkers grimdark used to portray the Imperium of Man from different angles, and from different levels (on one level there is a dereliction of duty, on another level there is raw hunger for power over others, on another there is just ineptitude, on another malice, on another heroism despite being caught up in a dysfunctional colossus with feet of clay and so on). It's still the same lovely decaying and fanatical interstellar empire that gets portrayed over and over. I mostly vary the tone and pressure of grimdark for the sake of variation itself. As with all creative work, headcanon in the minds of the readers, listeners and watchers rule supreme at the end of the day. I don't like every single line in Tolkien or Warhammer, for instance (even while thoroughly enjoying the settings as a whole), but I will cherrypick, correct and add on stuff as I imagine them instead. It's good to hear that people embrace some parts of the writing while rejecting others. It's natural for creations, and others have mentioned receiving the writings in similar ways on Reddit, though usually because they find a particular phenomenon (such as widespread lack of railings) too silly and not the tone itself to go awry.

Cheers!


A Vox in the Void

Paul Graham at A Vox in the Void has been toiling to bring audio adaptations of writings and doodles here to Youtube. His latest two are a duo. Check them out below!

Human Bomb Part 1
Human Bomb Part 2: I Who Am Born to Die




Our Daily Bread

In a forsaken future, man starves like a beast.

A plethora of human myths and legends, across one million worlds and uncountable voidholms, tell of the origins of food and the moment we first needed to eat, as well as the causes for toilsome agriculture, hunger and starvation. In some sagas, the earliest ancestors of mankind lived a life of bliss, free of stomach cramps and the threat of starvation, before this idyll was lost due to the transgression of man, and the gods of old heaped hardship and hunger upon sinful man. In other tales, primordial man roamed the fields and forests free of care while hounding innumerable prey, until a trickster's bargain or divine punishment for killing sacred creatures shackled men, women and children to the earth, doomed to till the soil and die in droves of disease and starvation.

A garbled confusion exist in Imperial folklore regarding the most primitive eras of humanity, and its later Dark Age of Technology. The two are rarely well separated, but are instead often compressed and conflated by the passage of long millennia. As one authoress of Old Earth once remarked: Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. As such mythical cycles and fireside stories may mention flint spears, bronze daggers, magical pelts and bone amulets together with starstriding demigods and plots of villainy and trickery involving machine intellects and ships that shoot across the night sky on tails of fire and lightning. For the impression of a paradise lost is not only borne out of the settled farmer's folk memory of their kin's nomadic prehistory on ancient Terra, but is also mirrored in the catastrophic fall from the pinnacles of human achievement into the abyss of Old Night following the machine revolt and the mass emergence of psykers that shattered the faltering Human Federation.

While the primordial lifestyles of the earliest Age of Terra were in actuality hardly bereft of suffering and want, the life of mankind during the Dark Age of Technology was truly a wonder of opulence, comfort and plenty. Indeed, man was often spawned from fleshvat factories and enmeshed in the false fruits of science and progress, even as a cornucopia of riches and the rotten doctrines of unbelief, softness and fulfilment of self led Man of Gold astray unto doom. Yet we are much wiser now, for our downfall in the Age of Strife humbled man and slew our hubris, and the baleful orgy of death and devastation of Old Night prepared our wretched species to receive salvation brought by the coming of the God-Emperor with due gratitude, reverence and ritual worship. And ever since the Dark Age of Technology ended in hellfire and horror has man yet again hungered and starved, as man always did, once upon a time, and as man was ever meant to do. For these bodies of flesh were made to crave sustenance, and just as these mortal husks were made to suffer from lack of food, so were they also made to decay and grow old and die.

Such is man's lot.

Thus the Age of Imperium is an era of backbreaking labour and destitution, and the wages of poverty and wantage were rewarded man as just punishment for his misdeeds and vice. Indeed, does not the mainstream Cult Imperialis of the Adeptus Ministorum teach us of the Twelve Exalted Virtues? Those are Obedience, Diligence, Patience, Piety, Courage, Humility, Submission, Hatred, Fertility (for women, Virility for men), Modesty, Self-Denial and Endurance. And does not man in his baseness and squalid failings ever fall prey to the Thirteen Abominable Sins instead? Those are Insubordination, Sloth, Impatience, Unbelief, Cowardice, Pride, Deviation, Apathy, Vanity, Envy, Greed, Lust, and finally Gluttony. Indeed, the desire to glut one's bestial appetite and grow fat on the chewing of jaws and the biting of teeth and the swallowing of eatables need to be righteously combated with voluntary fasting. And where spiritual weakness prevents the triumph of will over self, simple want and starvation will suffice.

And so there is good and just penitence and proof of humility in the billions of human beings who each Holy Terran year starve to death across the myriad planets and voidholms of the Imperium. And likewise is there virtue to be found in our thrifty recycling of their corpses and waste, for is not man but dust and clay? And are not all our food ultimately human flesh, reshaped into other gestalts of deceptive matter by herds, colonies and plantations of lesser lifeforms? Thus only a malefactor, troublemaker or infidel would recoil from the consumption of foodstuffs mixed with surrogates, corpse-starch, synth-kelp, flymeat and littergrind, for the meek acceptance of our daily bread no matter its dubious content is the hallmark of a faithful Imperial subject. Pray earnestly at table and thank the protecting Imperator of Holy Terra, seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne, for providing so bountifully to His species.

Let us behold one common human life out of trillions, in order to better understand what it means to be grateful for the food we get to eat. It is not a saintly life, yet it is nevertheless a frugal one from which we can learn much on how to live even when we are caught in dire straits.

In northern Segmentum Pacificus is to be found the crudely civilized world of Ostrobithynia, where human settlement lies unevenly spread all across its varied climes, clustering in villages, towns and cities and with but three small billion-sized hive cities as the major population centres. In the cold, northern reaches of the Ejrisbocka continent, where the forested grounds are sparsely peopled, can be found a scattering of bleak rye and opea farmland amid the sourpines, bogs and dark lakes. In the landscape of Mansalu, situated in the westernmost Kvemian county-district, are to be found the small harbour cities of of Vuseoburg and Tomi. Fifty Terran miles northeast of Vuseoburg lies the village of Lajoharsa, home to roughly twelve hundred souls (whose numbers fluctuate with epidemics, ill harvests, peasant raids, emigration and ceaseless procreation). In such a marginal countryside are to be found no nobility worth speaking of, wherefore the population unusually enough are not serfs or latifundia indentured labourers. Here, at the outskirts of Lajoharsa village, is to be found a tiny cabin built out of arched brickwork and firbald logs, its lower burnt brick walls stacked with peat for insulation.

At the tail end of M41, the lonely dweller of this hut was the childless widow Enna Våitdottir. She had grown up an orphan bastard in the strict care of the village chief's household, toiling as a despised farm maid and living as a hectored debt thrall until the age of twentyfive. At manumission, Enna was wed to the lowly crofter's son Karon Asson, and for a blissful day and night of crowded temple ceremony and communally witnessed fleshly consummation of marriage in bed, the future of the by-blow woman seemed bright. Yet Karon turned out to be a drunk deadbeat and useless layabout, and the couple produced no offspring, to their great chagrin and sorrow. It is unknown whether he or she had been born sterile, or whether Enna had been accidentally chem-gelded when working as a hired-away mixer in a nearby alchemical manufactorium for two migratory labour seasons. She had certainly lost her left eye and ear to the mysterious vapours and splashes, replaced with cheap and bulky bionics carried over from a dead slave, since the local branch of the alchemical collegium Fulstjerna deemed a mixer without proper depth perception to be a broken tool of more harm than use in their industry.

At any rate, Enna's husband Karon was impotent in all areas of life, and proved a lazy failure at all forms of work. And his wife suffered for it, in teeth-grinding silence and mounting squalor. All villagers of Lajoharsa agreed that the woman of the little household was able-handed, Emperor-fearing and a hard worker, yet all her married life Enna had to carry the weight of her soaked dud of a man, and made do with very meagre earnings from stray labour to feed the both of them. At one time while herding grey-spotted fjoll-grox at a hill farm in her thirties, Enna was abducted by male raiders from another village and forced to become the second wife of the sept leader, yet she was returned scornfully within two years when her captors concluded she must be barren and thus a net negative mouth to feed. During this whole ordeal, Karon Asson did not lift a finger to attempt a rescue of his wife by gathering a daring counter-raid, collecting a ransom or begging on his knees, and he lived slothfully off loans and unusually plump harvest stores in Enna's absence, oblivious to her daily dread in a strange place and the hopeless chances of his own future without a wife to leach off. Enna Våitdottir had no close relatives, and she was rejected any kinship belonging and support by Karon Asson's clan due to them shunning his sinful stupor. As such, the couple was doomed to childless oblivion, and faced a terrible prospect in old age.

Karon died first, just as he always was the first to go to sleep, bottle in hand. Wastrels waste away. Yet the thankless plight of his widowed wife Enna would only worsen as she passed the old age of fifty and grew gnarled and stiff from so much manual labour in cold weather, and her stomach ache from lack of nourishment would never truly cease, just as the irresponsible debts of her late husband could never be fully repaid. The couple had been contract-workers at the bottom rung of their village, employed in agriculture, herding, fishing, digging, fruit and berry gathering, beekeeping, porting, machine maintenance, charcoaling and forestry on an annual basis by various Lajoharsa households. Enna's willingness to work had been taken for granted by neighbouring smallholders and crofters, even when she went unpaid except for some pitiful scraps of food. As the Ostrobithynian lamb of sorrow grew elderly, she could not keep up with the harsh work demands necessary to survive by such a slim margin.

It was in this miserable state of abject poverty and hunger cramps that Enna Våitdottir truly learnt to savour the bountiful nourishment provided to her table by His Divine Majesty, praise be unto Him on Terra. As Enna's thin fortunes went into a death spiral, she learnt humility and submission to her ordained fate by eating even the most mouldy and fungal-infested bread, while holding another, but fresh, piece of bread in her other hand to look at. She offered the customary table prayer to our all-providing golden God-Emperor of Mankind, and voiced her pious gratitude for having food to eat that day. Then, she suppressed her gag reflex and forced herself to consume the blessed food, ignoring the fungal spore capillaries growing out of it. All the time, she stared intently at the fresh piece of bread in her other hand, and pretended that she was chewing and swallowing its hale mass instead of the stale and mouldy bread which she could not afford to waste. Thus Enna the thrifty widow became an exemplar of frugality to her whole rural community, and would not complain even when the flour that had been used in her bread crumbs were mixed with ground acorns, the dried inner white spring-bark of trees, sawdust or teeth-fraying sand.

The locals beheld the pauper's hardships, and remembered her devout faith in our saviour and master on Holy Terra, as well as her harmless personality and unflinching willingness to work no matter the weather. And so they took pity on this old clanless bastard of lowly caste, and gave her all manner of little stray jobs for petty rewards to ease Enna's destitution and screaming guts, and she accepted it with many thanks and blessings upon her neighbours' lineage. Sometimes, she even received batteries or the chance to recharge her bionic implants, and twice she was even sponsored with the opportunity to have her failing opticon electrografts and visor unit repaired by a peddling techman of the laity. Yet for the most part, Enna's old age was lived out in darkness on her lost left eye, with dormant or malfunctioning bionics robbing her of that sensory input.

Her sclerotic old age was plagued by a local strain of tubercolosis, a rot of the breath as they say, possibly brought about by malnourishment and foul food. This creeping lungsoot drained away Enna Våitdottir's vital reserves along with endless hunger pangs, and consumption eventually proved her bane. Thus the poor widow had lived out her life with neither worthy husband nor progeny, and no children there were to help her and nurse her in old age, but she had to rely on herself until the bitter end. And her life turned into a living nightmare of wasting disease and drawn-out starvation that ultimately did her in. Enna died alone without dignity and without anyone to give her company and comfort in the last moments of a fading human life.

The villagers of Lajoharsa donned herb-filled beak masks and performed rites of exorcism on the skeletal corpse and smoked out the cottage after her death in an attempt to eradicate the sickness, in accordance with ancestral wisdom handed down through untold millennia, and her corporeal remains were sold to a peddling Corpse Guild trucker for a pittance. And so Enna herself ended up as corpse-starch in the bread of other ritual worshippers of the great God-Emperor of all mankind. The cycle of life was complete. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Ave Imperator.

Such is the destiny of man, in a regressed realm of decay spanning a million worlds and voidholms beyond counting.

Such is the wretchedness of the human species, in an era of doom under strange suns.

Such is the future that await us all.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/03 01:27:01


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Throw Them Out the Airlock

In a time without mercy, man drowns man upon the sea of stars.

The exploration and conquest of the stars was always humanity's birthright, and like any gallant and great venture it was ever fraught with danger. Crustbound cowards and visionless misers might shun adventure beyond the heavens, yet resourceful men and women of ingenuity and boldness has never shirked from the thrill and peril inherent to the undertaking of mapping out the galaxy and filling it with human worlds and voidstations. Any enterprise with the potential for glory and immortal fame must necessarily also be filled with the risk of death and oblivion. For could any deed ever be heroic without a mortal creature daring life and limb to overcome the hazardous obstacles thrown up by hateful foe or uncaring universe?

Small wonder, then, that so many myths and legends about the bygone Dark Age of Technology feature unfortunate crewmen cast out to die in space, as well as helpless heroes rescued by loyal companions shortly before they would have died from exposure in the void. For on the million worlds and innumerable voidholms of the Imperium of Man, the popularity of sagas featuring dashing starstriders, voidfarers and skyriders will never die. As the day grow dark, wide-eyed children will gather around campfires along with kinsfolk of all ages in villages filled with hovels, huts, tents or caverns, just as they do in the nooks and crannies of overcrowded holesteads and habs during blackout, to hear their elders and skilled storytellers relate the travails and exploits of ancient colony founders, pirates, missionaries, void-warriors, startraders, monsterslayers and other brave sailors of the cosmos. In the wonderstruck eyes of a child, only the sky is the limit.

When man climbed toward the pinnacle of his power and lore during forgotten millennia long, long ago, this juvenile dream (so often mocked by jaded cynics) was revealed to be a universal truth which only the most capable and fortunate of sentient species could ever turn into a reality. While spreading across the stars is in itself a sublime endeavour for which all life should strive, it still only constitutes the first stepping stones toward unlocking eternity and uncovering the very secrets of creation itself. Know that Man of Gold was well on his way toward achieving those godlike goals when his interstellar paradise was torn asunder in flames, and the false promises of the Dark Age of Technology turned into a cannibal nightmare of ruin and slaughter as human civilization collapsed into the Age of Strife.

During the death spiral of Old Night, sagas of voidfarers and humans originating from distant stars stubbornly persisted everywhere man still lived, even among the most primitive of tribal survivors on blasted worlds and decaying void installations. And as the all-conquering forces of the early Imperium arrived during the Great Crusade to reunite the scattered human colonies, haggard barbarians and brutalized scavengers stared in awe as the dreamlike wonders of oral folklore descended from high heavens and made landfall with a splendid show of arms, pageantry and technological marvels. Ancient prophecies were fulfilled in front of their very eyes as the servants of the Emperor brought their peoples back into the great fold of mankind under His banner, by the cruel might of an eagle's talon extended from Terra itself.

And as shining civilization was brought back to marred worlds and voidholms in a short-lived renaissance, the sons and daughters of regressed primitives discovered that the tall tales of the great beyond had been true after all: You could drown in the nightsky. To their astonishment, they learnt of the airless space between worlds, and many such feral recruits of the Imperial Army saw firsthand how accidents or voidbattles could suck people out into empty blackness, where they soon died without breath. And they concluded that to be exposed to the chilly nothingness of the cosmos was the voidfaring equivalent of falling overboard a seagoing vessel.

The reignited hopes of the early Imperium quickly died as the galaxy burned anew, in the fires of ambition. The foremost son of the Emperor betrayed his father and shattered the galactic dominion of Mars and Terra, and the future promise of its burgeoning achievements and rediscoveries crashed dead on the rocks. For the wretchedness of man would not relent, and thus man took up arms and marched against the saviour of his species with murderous intent. And this sinful civil war saw the Emperor nigh on slain by human hand, yet He ascended into celestial godhood and has watched over His undeserving people ever since. And man was made to repent in sweat and blood for his unforgivable crimes against Imperial divinity, and man's life was drenched in toil and tears, for despair and hardship came to rule supreme as just punishment for man's abominable sins. And the God-Emperor saw that this was good.

Naturally, as human cultures during the Age of Imperium reached a state of demented maturity and increasingly embraced struggle and hardy misery, ever more men, women and children found themselves spaced from starships and voidholms, for ever more banal reasons. Murderers, saboteurs and other such criminals and malefactors, which in any epoch would have endangered those aboard the vessel or station, were always obvious candidates for being thrown out the airlock. Yet centuries of desperate mobilization for total war turned into millennia of rising fanaticism, brutal repression and ever more rabid loyalist schools of thought permeating Imperial cultures, all marked by them being aggressively myopic.

Over time, sinners, heretics, malcontents and blasphemers faced the drowning of the starfarer for ever smaller transgressions, as curates of the flag, charismatic holy men and mercatores ship chaplains flexed their muscles of influence and whipped up the devout rabble into doing away with deviants and apostates. Likewise, martial law codes and civilian voidfaring regulations grew ever more draconic, with lethal punishment ordained for petty crimes. Not only that, but the numbers of collateral victims of primitive collective punishment have slowly but steadily increased over the passage of fivehundred generations, as have the unlucky targets of shipboard superiors' capricious wrath, including a dysfunctional tendency toward spacing the messenger of bad news. On top of these decaying developments should be added lawless decks rife with criminality, worker gang warfare, clan feuds and stalking murderers who understand the deadly value of an airlock. Not to mention Navy vessels and contracted civilian transport ships tasked with ferrying Astra Militarum ground forces between worlds and voidholms, where quarrels between gangs of shipsmen and crustlubber human cargo may see Imperial Guardsmen and other personnel meet an untimely demise at the hands of voidfarers' mob justice. As life has grown ever cheaper in the vast, star-spanning realm of the Imperium, so too has man found out that he has an ever lower threshold for casting others out into frigid vacuum.

In Classis Hyrcania of the Imperial Navy, for instance, all hands on deck know that to draw blood from a Naval officer, Commissar, Ministorum clergyman, Officio Medicae staff or anointed member of the Adeptus Mechanicus will result in the spacing of the miscreant's spouse and offspring in front of the felon's lidless eyes, before the letter of blood is themself blinded with acid, quartered by human rope gangs and finally thrown into the unforgiving void between the stars. Likwise, in the chartered Rogue Trader flotilla of the Lugalbanda dynasty in Segmentum Tempestus there exists a quaint custom of spacing the harem of a deceased Sarru-Trader or Nin-Traderess, together with all the personal property of the late flotilla leader, in order for the heir to get a clean slate in their palatial private quarters and thus signal the beginning of a propitious reign.

Naturally, the act of spacing people to death tend to mean that their bodymass will disappear from the bio-recycling corpse grinders that help feed the teeming deck slums and voidholm favelas, especially in the case of travelling vessels. In some voidfarer cultures across the Imperium, this wastage of flesh is welcomed as a ship crew's genuine sacrifice of one of their own for good luck and divine protection before the next Warp jump, the usage being an expression of common voidsman superstition. Yet in other cultures the corpse-wasting is frowned upon. One remedy is to hook the victim inside the airlock and then open the gates, while another solution is to tie the condemned one to a length of wire or some similar line and then winch them back into the still-open airlock. Such a considerate and well-planned execution is usually the hallmark of the pillars of order on a starship or voidholm, whereas rash crims, scum and bullies usually do not care about the waste. Still, the meagre reward of scrip or ration bar for selling a corpse to the grinders is not to be scoffed at among the destitute, and so gangers and feuding clansmen can occasionally be found to go to the trouble of securing the retrieval of a soon-to-be human carcass for nutritional salvage.

Such rampant spacing of unwanted members of the human species begs a question: How do they die? Akin to a condemned man walking the plank to plunge into the watery abyss, an unlucky soul pushed into the airlock knows that he cannot escape death. At first, a baseline man thrown into the dark cold of outer space will find his lungs and digestive tract swelling. After some seconds, he will lose the vision of his eyes, and then lose consciousness as oxygen rapidly exits his blood, discolouring his skin a pallid shade of blue. One Terran minute into the unbreathing ordeal, all circulation will cease, and after two minutes the man will be choked dead. Unlike a mariner cast into an icy sea, however, an outcast voidsman will not have time to die from freezing, since the emptiness of outer space is a poor medium for draining the body of its heat. Such is the manner of death for those thrown out the airlock.

Across the Milky Way galaxy can be found countless drifting carcasses of exotic species hailing from all manner of eras and cultures, each an outcast fossil from a bygone age, each a dead sailor of the starspangled void, each a mute witness of a horrible end. Emperor alone knows how many unretrieved billions of human corpses float around in the interstellar void, whether they be the victims of justice or malevolence, or the casaulties of warfare, natural disaster or technical calamity. As a common starfarer's saying would have it: Those born of the void shall die of the void.

One addition to the drifting graveyard of a galaxy's fill of voidfaring species was recently made upon the order of Inquisitorial Acolyte Reeb Van Horne of the Ordo Xenos. Van Horne is a medicae-schooled native of Gavro in the service of Inquisitor Harlan, acting as his master's roaming tendril by having attached himself to the ill-maintained Rogue Trader ship known as the
Debt Collector. Acolyte Reeb is a stern and blunt-nosed alienhunter who has proven himself a diligent performer of his ordained tasks in the service of His Divine Majesty of Holy Terra. This dour and ruthless member of the Ordo Xenos of the God-Emperor's Holy Inquisition sports red hair like the mane of a lion, and Reeb has sometimes been called the lion that do not roar before biting. Such epithets are only whispered behind his back, however, and seems to have been borne out of past incidents where some careless wretches are no longer among the living.

This sanctioned murderer of many and vivisector of more still, was as ever quick to the point when faced with a captured Xeno from an Eldar pirate raid against the Imperial prison voidholm known as the Mortis Carcerum facility. True to his nickname, Reeb Van Horne initiated a bloodless preliminary interrogation of the female Drukhari raider under deceptively polite circumstances, involving an unbound prisoner being allowed to drink tea with the Acolyte from a precious porcelain set, with only the threat of violence being made utterly clear. Such seemingly civilized methods masked the cruel workings of a hard and calculating mind, and the theatricality of it all may well have contributed to quickly loosening the tongue of the unimpressed Dark Eldar.

No-nonsense questions were answered almost gleefully by the foul alien, who typically enough for that particular species ridiculed her human captor in subtle ways, even when seeming to play along for the moment being. Very soon, the independently operating Acolyte of Inquisitor Harlan concluded that the Eldar sadist and slaver was nothing but a dead end, proving a false lead in a larger ongoing investigation. Acolyte Reeb openly deemed the interrogation subject useless to him in a matter-of-fact manner, and asked to have the tea cup back. Next, Van Horne promptly arranged to have the Drukhari specimen thrown out the airlock, and that was that.

Aeldari physiology might be deceptively akin to that of homo sapiens on the surface, but their complicated biology is entirely alien to the crude fleshly workings of Earthly mankind, as any vivisection of such a screaming Xeno's internal organs would quickly prove. With such vastly different bodily processes at work, Eldar die differently than humans do when exposed to the vacuum of space, yet they die nevertheless. For a short while the Drukhari was dragged along close to the hull, inside the
Debt Collector's bubble of protective energy shields and field peripheries created by internal grav generators, until the corpse drifted out of close proximity and instantly disappeared as powerful starship engines shot the rundown Rogue Trader vessel onward into the void, leaving yet another spaced cadaver behind.

Suffer not the alien to live.

Cleanse the stars from the monstrosity of the Xeno.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

Thus it is that exterminated Xenos join the mass of lonesome voidfaring corpses, together with millions upon millions of Imperial subjects drowned in the nightsky by decree of superiors or by the malice of corridor criminals, aside from innumerable casaulties of warring starfleets and accidents, all drifting through the empty space between planets and star systems. Perhaps some of them are the frigid remains of fabled heroes and starsurfers of myth and legend from the Dark Age of Technology, their unseeing eyes open, beholding nothing, or perhaps beholding the degeneration of their descendants, silently witnessing the neverending misery and bloodshed of those fanatic savages that squat among the ruins of the once shining human civilization they knew as home. A lost dream. A dead dream. These dead adrift might be forgotten by mortal minds, swallowed by the abyssal nothingness of astronomical distances, yet be assured that the ascended Imperator knows them all, and He will not forget to judge them severely from the Golden Throne, cloaked in celestial radiance and the power of true deity. The God-Emperor will judge all of them of human stock.

Every single one of them.

For He ken every machine-spirit's opening of airlock, and He ken every voidsman blasted into outer space. And He beholds the killing and the suffering, and He knows it to be a righteous punishment visited upon wretched man for his heinous sins. And so too does every hand in the Imperial Navy and merchant fleet, and every man, woman and child born on the numberless voidholms of the Imperium. And they include a line in their daily prayers, begging the protector of all men to save them from the empty gasp, the voidgrave, the endless stare. Blessed be the name of the Emperor of Mankind. Blessed be His domain and the wise masters He has appointed to rule over us. Blessed be the Imperium of Man, abode of greatness and last shield of humanity.

Ave Imperator.

And so man in the Age of Imperium traverse the cosmic expanse in starships of inherited, scavenged and forgotten technology, suckling the most robust and simple fruits of a long-lost age of wonders while unable and unwilling to plant anew. These vessels of Imperial power teem with oppressed, parochial and superstitious masses, a filthy swarm of raw humanity toiling away at tasks which once machines handled seamlessly, leading short, nasty and brutish lives. These fearful hordes have long since lost the childlike wish to grasp the universe and crack its secrets wide open, for their downtrodden hearts are bereft of that enterprising spirit which once carried their distant ancestors so far across the stars, until the bell of doom rang over mankind for the first time, and all was fell.

You can see it in their eyes, if you look closely: The death of a dream. A dream, that was the birthright of their species.

Such are the prospects of us all, in the darkest of futures.

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


- - -

Tribute to Acolyte Reeb Van Horne in WarHams, played by Earndil, who saved Episode 15 (The Laughter of Thirsting Closets) from the abominable plans of SpeakerD (both of whom are lead writers at If the Emperor had A Text-To-Speech Device).


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/03 02:35:12


Post by: Racerguy180


Good as always


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/03 23:46:03


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Racerguy180: Thank you kindly!




Unmanned

In a demented epoch, man must make the ultimate sacrifice.

War has always been a great danger to mortals, and in this regard nothing has truly changed since primitive man first bashed in the skull of his enemy with a rock, for in a forsaken future of plasma cannons, chainaxes and graviton crushers, foes still maim and slay each other without abandon. All across a seething galaxy teeming with life, the war gods hold sway with supreme power over the fates of lone mortals and great empires alike, and a cycle of endless slaughter is the rule of the day. Interstellar warfare presents enormous challenges, not least logistical ones, and an incessant state of total war mobilization will hollow out and cannibalize the warring society from within. On the sea of stars, navies manned by tens of millions of crewmen clash in bursts of destructive energy sufficient to leave green worlds barren. In the field, armies numbering in the billions face unspeakable horrors as the full might of advanced military technology is brought to bear with little to no inhibition.

The challenges of war across the stars are staggering, and can easily bleed prosperous economies and their gargantuan population numbers white, inviting chaos and turmoil on the home front as stability plummets. All too many voidfaring empires exerted themselves to the very limit in order to win large conflicts, only to suddenly break apart from inside as the home front collapsed. The internal risks of war exhaustion and demoralization can doom dynasties who have ruled for millennia, and the external risks of enemy invasion can destroy all the fruits of untold generations of toil and ingenuity. Yet such perils must be faced, and crushed underheel, for the ten thousand year old Imperium of Man will let no one foe stand in its way, and it will annihilate any rebels who wish to win independence from its harsh tyranny, as the God-Emperor decreed. After all, an empire that never had any qualms about killing its own taxpayers en masse in peacetime will not shirk away from the harrowing maelstrom of total war.

And so Imperial Tithe is gathered from a million worlds and uncountable voidholms, in a flood of men and materiel, in a barrage of starships and ground vehicles, in an outburst of Imperial might by an interstellar realm that has long since learnt to compensate its decaying technological base and screeching inefficiencies by callously increasing the input in a broken calculation of great numbers which aim to hammer the foe asunder, or at least grind the enemy down through sheer attrition. In such a crude equation, human value becomes a laughable concept. Behold the billions in the armies and the hundreds of billions in the industry and bureaucracy, and know that wretched man is nothing but a cheap and easily replacable component in a vast, faceless system where hands, heads and spines ever more must pick up the slack where ancient machines break down, and the ability to repair or replace them no longer exist among the living.

In the Age of Imperium, man no longer dominates the Milky Way galaxy with such overwhelming force that no foe dare stand against him. Instead, the scavenging survivors of the Age of Strife managed to gather human power anew, armed with a poorly understood patchwork technology salvaged from the wrecks and ruins of the ancients, relying on the copying of old blueprints and schematic guesswork. The Horus Heresy struck the young Imperium hard, and sounded the final death knell for any chance of a renaissance for human science and invention. Ever since, almost all human colonies across the galaxy have been ruled by the smothering iron fist of the Imperium of Man, locked inside a decrepit star dominion of paranoid oppression whose bickering and self-serving factions consistently choke any frail first steps toward a renewed blooming of intellect and worldly curiosity. Knowledge is power: Guard it well.

Bogged down in a dysfunctional morass of its own making, the Imperium of Man masters but few subtle tricks, and its default solution to any problem is to throw more bodies at it. Thus an armed exodus of men, women and child soldiers are shipped out to ten thousand different war fronts, while blinkered hordes of labourers keep the rusting wheels of Imperial industry turning through immense toil and lethal self-sacrice. A plethora of vastly different human cultures exist throughout the million planets and innumerable voidholms of the Imperium, yet all share a narrow-minded fanaticism and intense religious devotion, trusting in the protection of the Holy Terran Emperor. And so zealous barbarians stand shoulder to shoulder with pious peasants and superstitious hive city scum within the Astra Militarum, taking up simple, mass-produced arms and body armour that were chosen both for their dependability, ease of manufacture and cheapness.

Most of the lighter armaments and infantry protection of the Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and Imperial Guard are markedly inferior to the weapon systems and armour suits reserved for the God-Emperor's utterly brainwashed elite corps and enforcers, such the Militarum Tempestus or the Adeptus Arbites. One primary reason for this state of affairs is the need to equip the blindly loyal forces of internal suppression better than the potentially rebellious regiments they may one day have to eradicate, and thus rig the deck in the Imperium's favour. Another head cause for the shoddy equipment of the Astra Militarum is the fact that most infantrymen and vehicles will not survive for long in warzones to begin with, so why waste precious resources on technological bells and whistles and advanced tactical training when both the tank and its crew anyway will be dead within four Terran months after deployment? When your foremost strength is an overwhelming force of numbers, you need to churn out cheap and crude wargear to equip ever new short-lived mass armies numbering in the billions of soldiers, to replace the last set that died out all too quickly. The Imperium needs to play a ravenous numbers game, foregoing any focus on technological sophistication in wargear for sheer mass-production on a gigantic scale. After all, quantity has a quality all of its own.

It is said that one man's death is a tragedy, while the death of one million is a statistic. To better understand the plight of the common Imperial infantryman, let us behold such an instructive tragedy of a mere single death among untold hundreds of millions of casaulties, one victim among many in a distant war under a strange sun.

The verdant mining world of Zikaru is the third moon of the teal gas giant Parmashtaq, the seventh planet of the crowded Evar system, within the Gevura sector in southern Ultima Segmentum. At the start of the 8th century of M40, the backwater Tech-Priests on Zikaru watched helplessly as the final breakdown occurred for an advanced continent-spanning lace of piped irrigation systems and largely automated desalination facilities. None of their prayers, meditations and oracular pilgrimages had yielded a working answer to the failing intricacies of the poorly understood agricultural irrigation systems that fed all of Zikaru with huge quantities of foodstuffs. The panicking Tech-Priests on the third moon first erupted in armed hostilities as they blamed each other, and then agreed on a tenuous ceasefire while they scrambled to pool their stunted knowledge and come up with a rudimentary emergency system reliant on primitive tech and massive input of manual corvée labour, which eventually solidified into a permanent feature of Zikaruan agriculture. This process of infighting and amateur engineering took over a decade to hammer out, a waterless decade which saw emerald green fields turn to desert and crop yields plummet on the agri-continent of Caraculum.

Within one year, food prices skyrocketed, leading to upper caste hoarding while mass starvation and cannibalism plagued the very poorest mineworkers. After two years, all of the moon's governatorial granaries were empty, while Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI had found all his efforts to import massive amounts of foodstuff blocked by his personal enemies offworld. On the third year, massive strikes shook the entirety of Zikaru as miners of all castes shouted for free food now to their starving families. This was met by massacres from the local forces of order, which only fuelled the fires of dicontent. On the fourth year, three-fourths of of Zikaru was tearing itself apart in a chaotic mess of civil war and cannibal raids, leading to the ousting and retreat of the Governor's loyal forces to the parched agri-continent of Caraculum, which the Adeptus Mechanicus (and its ration-prioritized press ganged workers numbering twohundredthirthy million) was busy restructuring wholesale with primitive dams, pools and canals, as well as strategic tree and bush planting in order to bind the dusty top soil with roots.

On the fifth year, Zikaru had lost eighteen percent of its population, and all continents and islets oustide Caraculum were in a state of warlord anarchy. Still, a precarious situation of mass worker die-off was stabilized as an old bushwack nomad's trick at last paid off, namely to cake in the seeds of nimsu reed in clay or dung before planting in the desert. This new source of nutrients kept most of the corvée labour force above starvation level, and the staved-off disaster on Caraculum allowed Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI to rebuild his forces. On the sixth year, the Governor ordered his armies to land at the mining moon's two small billion-strong hive cities, yet the expeditions ended in a military catastrophe, and Zakhrut XXI was killed in a palace coup, replaced by a royally incestuous power couple of his eldest son and daughter. The new rulers were in turn branded as obscene heretics and swiftly slain by the patriarch of a cadet branch of the royal dynasty, and thus Yezeri Firee III ascended to the throne in Caraculum, while the most powerful Zikaruan warlords outside the agri-continent started to coalesce into warring cliques, most of which had separatist ambitions toward the Imperium. With the governatorial forces depleted thrice over thanks to inept generalship, the race was on for whom of the magnates would outsmart his opponents and conquer all of devastated Zikaru.

On the seventh year, a much delayed Adeptus Administratum Tithing fleet arrived to the Evar system, and Yezeri Firee III failed in his attempts to make his rump state uncontactable. When the Administratum assessors arrived to the third moon of Parmashtaq, they discovered both its sorry state of civil collapse and the reigning Imperial Governor's clumsy attempts to adopt vox and astropath silence. The Administratum master assessor in orbit around Zikaru was greatly vexed both by the moonside chaos and transparent fake muting of communications, so he thus overreacted and lashed out in petty rage by hiring the services of an Eversor Assassin from the shadowy Officio Assassinorum. One cloudy night, a single drop pod descended toward the crisis capital on the agri-continent of Caraculum. When the people of the city awoke, they found that divine retribution had struck the Governor's temporary palace, with all top officials, ministers and vezirs having been slain, lying in pools of their own blood together with every single member of the household staff, guard force and dynasty members present in the fortified palace. Not a single human being in the temporary palace survived the mysterious rampage. The usurper Yezeri Firee III was found chopped into tiny pieces in the bed of his favourite mistress, and the rest of that year was spent in vicious power struggles within the royal clan.

The master assessor's ostentatious Eversor strike had achieved nothing of value for the Imperium of Man, but it had soothed the bureaucratic potentate's flaring temper. Content with the reports received on the palatial slaughter, this Administratum overlord contacted the Departmento Munitorum and informed them of the sorry situation on Zikaru. In response, Astra Militarum regiments were mustered on nearby worlds and from neighbouring systems, and shipped off to the turbulent mining moon in a remarkably fast flurry of voidfaring activity. On the eighth year, a force of half a billion Imperial Guardsmen had been collected and deployed moonside to begin the pacification of all continents other than Caraculum. A few warlords capitulated and insisted that they had remained loyal toward the Imperium of Man through the whole ordeal, but most warlords banded together in a patriotic coalition for Zikaruan independence, and threw their hardened warriors into a united front against the offworld foreigners. The Imperial suppression force managed to do what no warlord nor Governor had succeded in doing during the previous years of societal freefall: Namely, to unite Zikaru, or most of it anyway.

Warlord coalition resistance toward Imperial forces proved much harder than anticipated, and the Zikaruan freedom fighters managed to galvanize subtantial parts of the reduced population through vigorous propaganda campaigns that painted the Imperator's loyal servants as nothing but leaching oppressors and greedy foreigners seeking to plunder their beloved homeworld. In the great struggle that ensued, Zikaru would see yet more of its populace killed off by war and all its accompanying hardships, until less than half of the mining moon's pre-troubles population remained once the dust had finally settled. Over a course of nine years, great campaigns of mostly blundering grand strategy were conducted by a bickering Astra Militarum general staff, who often contradicted each other and refused cooperation on grounds of personal honour and ancient House feuds, all the while firing up the fighting spirit of their troops by promises of loot, slaves and a fine place in the afterworld for all martyrs of the God-Emperor's righteous hosts.

It was in this brutal environment of bitter war against rebellious native cannibals that the Frejian 5947th infantry regiment of the Astra Militarum landed, as part of a wave of reinforcements during the fourth year of Imperial reconquest, in preparation for the bloody Fascinus offensive. The Frejian 5947th was a young regiment, having yet to earn its colours, and its swaggering soldiers yearned to prove the new unit's mettle with a reckless manly bravado. The infantry regiment was deployed as part of the 803rd Frejian division, commanded by Hostis Legatarch Snorri af Kulsack. This able veteran general found himself slotted into a rigid schedule of frontal human wave attacks, and in this unimaginative position ordained from above, all his skill and experience could amount to little more than directing his division's mortars and rocket launchers toward clearing likely enemy heavy weapon hideouts before the advance began.

Their objective was to capture a hostile fort designated Castra Priapus, and they had readied themselves for the upcoming assault by offering fervent prayers to His Divine Majesty in His guise as the lord of hosts, while their regimental clericus militarii had wandered among this band of brothers and galored the lads with blood-boiling tales of the foe's sins, blasphemy and atrocities. Thus the Frejian Guardsmen cultivated an earnest hatred for their filthy foe, and many vowed to bring home anatomical trophies from at least three slain traitors. It was to be a seminal offensive for the upstart 5947th Frejian infantry regiment, and one of its daring warriors was private Vittur Menelik, of Völse company. Vittur eagerly followed the regimental-wide order to fix bayonets, and he endeavoured to prove his fortitude and courage in the face of death.

And so the Frejian infantry climbed over the top of their trenches as vox-amplifiers rang out litanies of hatred, and these cocky young men charged over no-man's land, into the testing ground of combat where heroes and cravens alike are made through the proof of their deeds. Private Vittur Menelik followed his squad sergeant Rod Böllur and joined in a thousand-throated battlecry. "Freji stands!" the men shouted as they rushed over a lunar landscape of craters, vehicular wrecks and corpses, yet their warcry was soon drowned in a tornado of hostile artillery fire, while a staccato of heavy stubbers and the rapid whiplashes of multilasers opened up from the enemy lines.

Sergeant Rod fell amid the barbed wire in front of the first line of enemy trenches, yet his squad pressed home the attack. Vittur, that gutsy man, cast himself into the jaws of death without deviant thought of self, lasgun blazing as they stormed the first trench line, and then the second, and then the third. Vittur was always at the forefront of the attack, and this loyal son of the Imperium covered himself in glory, slaying half a dozen foes by grenade, las bolts and bayonet. The Frejian soldiers risked life and limb and showed no mercy to any enemy who wished to surrender, but instead cut them down on the spot and charged on through winding trenches and over pockmarked grounds battered by ordnance to win through with their bold assault. They were heedless to their own losses, and a feverish battle rage descended upon the Imperial Guardsmen.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

Yet our gallant hero met his grisly end while running toward the fourth line of trenches at Castra Priapus. All of a sudden, a heavy stubber bullet from an advanced gunnery nest slammed into private Vittur sideways and went through both groins, as the after-action report of Völse company phrased it. It was the dread of males everywhere, for this gelding hipshot proved to be the bane wound of the valiant Frejian soldier. The flak codpiece that protected the wearer's manhood from front angle hits was of no avail, since the heavy stubber shot had entered the Guardsman's body from the flank of his unarmoured hip, dooming him to an emasculating demise. The agony was almost blinding, yet Vittur Menelik did not fall unconscious, but lived through every moment of it all, until death eventually released him several minutes later. The sideways phallic wound had also shattered both of his hips. This heinous mutilation of the infantryman's membrum virile brought the Frejian intense pain, and like a bull turned into an ox would he never more father children nor know a maiden ever again.

Thus private Vittur Menelik lived a deedful man, yet died a whimpering eunuch. Hardened veterans who saw the gory dying of this strapping young fellow would shudder and twitch forth protective hand gestures whenever they recalled his baleful demise. They said he experienced unimaginable torment, and froth came from his mouth before he started vomiting blood, and all the while perspiration poured from Vittur's face. The agony was so great he could not bear it. No man could. Witnesses described how the eyes of the Frejian Guardsman were wide open from shock as he sat on his knees, swaying backward and forward while pressing his arms around his stomach. They all agreed that the brave warrior suffered more in the short time that he was dying thus nastily, than any other man they ever saw in war. It was dreadful to look upon him, and all the other horror of the battlefield paled in comparison. He sat there in total pain, mouthing a High Gothic mantra over and over in between the vomiting of blood:

"Imperatore Terrae, domine salva animam meam." Emperor of Earth, o please save my soul. It was an unmanning death, yet nevertheless a hero's death. And so Vittur Menelik of the Frejian 5947th passed away on Zikura, devout in his faith and ritual worship to the very last. All mortal men should strive to follow his example. Vittur's departure had been somewhat of a Caesarean death, wounded in his sword, as it were, akin to how one betrayed great leader of men once died most brutally during the bygone Age of Terra. Traitors truly are the lowest forms of scum, wherefore we must hunt them down and slay them all, lest they do unspeakable things to us and our kin. Suffer not the traitor to live!

Behold that fallen stallion of war, fearless and true to his species and lord. He truly knew the meaning of sacrifice, yet it was only his corporeal vessel of dust and clay that bled that day. What suffered on Zikaru was merely the inconsequential matter that make up the flesh of the worthless creature that is man. For wretched man is a sinner who should burn in hellfire, yet the shielding goodness in the heart of our celestial master and saviour allows man to transcend his base nature if his soul is pure and his spirit is strong. Know that the God-Emperor demand the ultimate sacrifice from each man, and nought else but total devotion and submission to His divine will may suffice.

Behold Vittur Menelik, martyr of our cause. He happily met his end with virtues intact and warrior's honour upright. He died bravely in service to the Emperor of mankind, and who could ever wish for anything more in this vale of sorrows we call life? Behold!

Remember the self-sacrifice of those fallen in battle, for in their dying moments can be glimpsed what it means to be human in the glorious Age of Imperium. Remember!

Rejoice in the death of our faithful, for the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium. Rejoice!

Let not their sacrifice be in vain, but follow instead their example and take up arms in the name of His Divine Majesty of Holy Terra. Rise! Join the pure ranks of the martyrs. Rise, mankind! Meet death and destruction, and fear not injury, for the Emperor protects.

Ave Imperator.

And so it is that men, women and children willingly throw themselves unto certain death and mutilation. They do this for the sake of their Emperor. And they all die in service to the sacred hierarchy of the Imperium of Man, that interstellar colossus on feet of clay that will burn through the people with callous disregard, the flesh of man being but yet another expendable resource for the rulers of the Imperium to use as they see fit. And as the lives of trillions are wasted in a doomed effort to stem the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy, the gravely wounded and the dying among these warriors across the stars may hear, as if in a fever dream, the melodious harmony of an angelic choir.

Or the laughter of thirsting gods.

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

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/05 13:21:57


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Corpse Cover

In an eon of insanity, man has become a wall.

To contemplate the full horror of life in the Age of Imperium, one must first recognize that mankind fell from his sublime pinnacles of worldly wonder and achievement that was the Dark Age of Technology, a heady time when man settled millions of planets and bestrode the galaxy like a colossus thanks to the cunning of his mind and the artifice of his hands. From those lofty heights did man plunge down a precipice of doom known as the Age of Strife, when man in his suffering and desperation devolved into a savage cannibal and wretched scavenger bereft of longevity and innovation, capable only of manhunts, abduction of woman and looting the great works of a bygone golden age in a shocking state of the most primitive cruelty and ignorance. Parent ate child, and all was ruin.

The death spiral of Old Night was eventually halted by the bloodstained coming of the Emperor of Terra, rising the eagle banner on man's birthworld, and for a short while a resurgent spirit of enterprise and ingenuity swept across the surviving human colonies as legions conquered, for the rekindled sparks of brilliance seemed set to lead man back to his former ascendancy. Yet the feeble flesh of mortals are destined to wither and die, and so too must their dreams, for once again the galaxy burned in a monstrous civil war that ravaged man's dominions and tore down any chance of restoring his lost supremacy and soaring quest for immortality. Brother slew brother, and all was fell.

The shining beacon of hope that was the early Imperium, forged in the fires of the Great Crusade, has since sunk together like a failed soufflé. For the might and splendour of the Imperium proved not a bastion of strength to shelter man from a galaxy of horrors, but became instead a prison where the efforts of man amounted to little more than a prolonged waiting for the inevitable end as his powerful vigour and clarity of mind rotted into torpid senility. Thus the Age of Imperium brought not rejuvenation to man, but the decline and misery of old age. And man slid down into a swamp of misery and superstition, and he reverted to a blinkered fanatic capable of the most bloodthirsty acts of depravity imaginable. Hate ruled supreme, as grinding destitution and endless struggle saw trillions ultimately die for nothing. Man trod water, and all was decay.

Twohundredfifty generations of brutal freefall were thus followed by fivehundred generations of total war. Fivehundred generations of sacrifice and suffering. Fivehundred generations of unending carnage and slaughter. Thus wretched man learnt to harness himself to the cart, and he pulled the heavy burden forward through inexorable storms. And as he fought a losing war against impending doom, man again and again made use of an ancient warrior trick until it became second nature to him, for man would seek shelter behind the fallen, and man would pile his dead into a wall of flesh to shield himself from death for a little longer. And thus even the lifeless husks of departed souls were made to serve in the arena of slaughter.

Survival in war has ever favoured quick-thinking soldiers who manage to adapt to their battlefield and use the terrain itself as a weapon to strike back against the enemy. Cunning and luck has ever been crucial when swords are drawn, for victory must be won by any means necessary, and damn all scruples that would betray you to the cruel foe. Thus Imperial Guardsmen with their wits about them instinctively know to take cover when under fire, and anyone who wish to preserve his stay among the living will know to swallow his revulsion and make use of the dead. Such pragmatic solutions to the perils of the moment have always been a regretful fact of life in armed conflicts through the ages, yet never before has a great power betwixt the stars turned such dehumanizing improvization into a systematically ingrained practice among the articles of faith in its military doctrines.

It is better to die for the Emperor, than to live for yourself. It is better to clog up the streets and corridors with your own carcass, than to retreat an inch when faced with mortal danger. It is better to erect barricades out of the fallen warriors of mankind, than to bury them. Not even in death does duty end. Fear not the pox and the plague, for the God-Emperor shields his faithful and devout ritual worshippers from the festering swarms of germs, flies and maggots. Trust in the guidance of the Imperator of Holy Terra to bless you with the grant to think on your feet, and therefore dive for cover behind a fallen comrade. Be pure of heart and strong of will, and lay corpse upon corpse to form a solid wall. Waste not, want not.

One glimpse of an exemplary sharp Imperial footsoldier who found an aegis in so much dead meat, was that of private Dasharatha Kumarya, of the 108108th Rajipur Tech-Guard regiment of the Astra Militarum. During the twelfth battle of Hive Rhea on Perisistratus VII, lunar satellite to Teleklos Tertiarius, this Imperial infantryman followed the rapid advance of his platoon's brave lieutnant Skanda Ramutiskrit, when suddenly the junior officer and most of his platoon were gunned down in a rebel ambush. Dasharatha survived the initial massacre by the will of our lord on Terra, and he was granted a flash of preserving insight from the lord of hosts and leader of the people, wherefore the private quickly took cover behind the corpse of his dead platoon leader, which lay splayed out on the ground with a scorching wound through Skanda's right eye. Dasharatha Kumarya peered through his gasmask lense and proceeded to methodically gun down one treacherous enemy after another, all the while yelling the traditional battlecry of his homeworld: "For the Omnissiah and the Holy Atom!" Thus did an Imperial Guardsman avenge a loyal officer's death by shooting the foe from behind the carcass of his slain martial brother.

Yet the uses for fallen soldiers extend far beyond momentary emergencies in Imperial modes of operation. Warfare for the servants of the God-Emperor is an industrial undertaking waged on a titanic scale, where little room is left over for finesse and efficiency. To win in war, the Imperium knows that it must feed the meatgrinder in a broken calculation of increased input of men and material, heedless of all losses beyond the balancing of very large numbers on available force charts. How else could this sclerotic empire of a million worlds and uncountable voidholms survive? Only by growing a heart of stone can the Imperium of Man do what must be done, blind and deaf to the human suffering its lowly minions must endure.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Effectivization, improvement and innovation were the follies of the Dark Age of Technology, whose glories have long since rusted and faded away. As knowledge and ancient hardware slowly withers away, increasing amounts of processes which were once the domain of machinery and automation have to be salvaged in patchwork manner by throwing bodies at the problem. Literally so, in the case of military engineering and fieldworks.

Thus the Imperium of Man has long since codified standard practices of using the corpses of friend and foe alike as landfill in such inconvenient features of the theatre of operations as enemy trenches, moats, rivers and valleys. What once was only a desperate gambit during better and long since forgotten eras, has now become standard Imperial procedure, as instructed by the Tactica Imperialis and practiced by Imperial forces all across the Milky Way galaxy. In fact, campaign planners within the Departmento Munitorum will always adjust calculations for Imperial Guard sandbag needs and consumption, by including corrective equations compensating for casaulty rates determined by the average volume and density of a malnourished human being, since the Astra Militarum by ancient decree of the High Lords of Terra operates on the thrifty principle of not letting the dead go to waste.

Thus slave labour, military fieldwork detachments and machine cohorts directed by gifted amateur officers, Mensurae Lustrantii or Tech-Priest Enginseers labour day and night to build and reshape the battlefield with plasteel, earth, rockrete, sandbags and the bodies of dead people and beasts alike as primary materials. The dirt of the ground, prefabricated sections and lifeless stalwarts are all combined into field fortifications and strongpoints that may prove decisive in the fickle mutability of military campaigns. When casaulties as usual ramp up in the millions and often also billions, the hard-working soldiers of the Astra Militarum and their harrowed corvée labour gangs will move amid the filth and squalor of the battlefront, scavenging corpses and constructing redoubts of unmoving flesh and bone. These carcass building blocks are not only limited to civilian and military humans alike, but also include all manner of alien and exotic animal cadavers of ridden mounts, draft animals, tracking beasts, attack predators and many other strange creatures. Even the fallen can be put to good use.

Thus the warriors of the Emperor pile dead men, women and children on top of one another for their battlements, using both earth and corpses on top of rockrete fortifications for extra protection. Of course, sometimes acute shortage of building material rear its ugly head when planning or convoying fall foul of reality. Then, nearby settlements may find themselves razed to the ground and plundered to the cellars in order to provide material for the military needs of defence and siegeworks. The banality of evil is such that ordinary people in the uniforms of Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and the Astra Militarum may find themselves committing routine purges of useless eaters in populations close to the front, without even an ounce of regret or gleeful cruelty stirring in their jaded hearts. It's just war, like any other.

And so primitive earthworks reinforced by dead human bodies take shape on ten thousand different warfronts. Even the deceased will have a posthumous chance to serve their species and lord, whether it be in the shape of soldiers with galloping hearts who throw themselves to the ground and find momentary respite behind a fallen brother in arms or martial sister, or in the form of macabre field fortifications deliberately planned and built under the careful supervision of overseers with whips and measuring instruments in hand. Must we not all offer up ourselves and our close kin on the altar of duty? Must we not all sacrifice our lives and limbs for the greater cause of humanity's divine Imperator? There can be no future for man without sons and daughters willing to give all in service to His Divine Majesty, no matter the brutal horror staring them in the eye.

Since human life is worth nothing, why should the Imperium of Man attach any abstract dignity to the human dead? Better to raise corpse castles and cadaverous bastions, than let such beneficial casaulties go to waste. After all, do we not in truth honour the dead by building with their corporeal vessels? And do not many warlike fallen eventually end up in sacred monuments, on full display for all the congregation to behold and ponder? For after battle has ended, the Adeptus Ministorum in all its pomp and pageantry will vie with local planetary or voidholm authorities over prime ossuary pickings from among the slain. And so corpses will be uncovered and flayed of their wretched flesh, to be bathed in acid until only pure bone and teeth remains. On one million worlds and voidholms without number, both temple and palace will exert strenuous efforts in order to collect the numerous remains of fallen loyalist warriors and martyrs of the faith for processing into skull towers and skeletal decoration for cathedrals and other forms of Imperial architecture. Thus those who fell in the heat of battle and were heaped upon one another at the front, may find a second duty in death by instructing the pious multitude on the thanks owed to those who give their life for the Emperor, as well as serving patriotic propaganda purposes in grand ceremonies enacted by local overlods desperate to shore up popular support.

The evil that men do will never relent, and neither will mortals of any species cease butchering each other across this turbulent galaxy. Death and taxes are said to be the only certainties in life, and so war must harvest its due share of fallen fighters and victims when flames engulf the baleful field of slaughter. We know they will die in battle, so why deny that stark reality by hiding the dead? No, better that their corpses fulfill a greater purpose, than be wasted on selfish burial. Thought of self, after all, is an unforgivable sin, so grab now the limp arms and legs of fallen comrades and heave them on top of the battlement. It is a virtuous toil.

For we will harbour no pity, no remorse, no mercy. We will rise strong to the occasion with fervent prayers on our lips, and we will bear the strains of labour and the rigours of combat without deviation. Without empathy. Without weakness. We all hereby solemnly swear to kill and be killed for the sake of our species and lord, and we likewise forswear our bodies of flesh and blood, and we willingly dedicate them to whatever higher purpose our masters and betters may design for them. We confess our wretched lives to be worth less than ash and clay, for we have sinned, and our ancestors have sinned, and our descendants will sin in the eyes of the God-Emperor of mankind. Please, o mighty lord of men! Please give our flesh and dust value by building out of us a mighty bulwark, to stand against the darkness. Please, we ask of You, o celestial judge of souls, we ask of You to use us, to throw us away or to incinerate us if You so will! Only You on high can grant us meaning. As such we will sacrifice, and be sacrificed in turn. In Your name.

This we pledge, and this we ask, and may our immortal souls burn in eternal hellfire if we break this sacred vow.

Ave Imperator.

And so man carries on, with the most primal stubbornness and will to survive burning valiantly in his heart. His realm across the starspangled void may have shrunk to but a million worlds and a decimated gaggle of voidholms, clinging to what little hope remains against the overwhelming darkness. Trapped as he has been for ten thousand years inside an interstellar madhouse, man will go to the ends of immorality and beyond to fight the grinding erosion of his degenerate Imperium. He will commit any heinous crime imaginable to uphold that corrupt and oppressive tyranny of mass murder and degradation that is his sole remaining shield, and he will fill his lungs with hatred, and he will shout his defiance to the high heavens. And man will rage, rage against the dying of the light, even as the doomed Imperial order that is his shepherd and slavedriver continues the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy.

In the darkest of futures, what is man if not the most wretched of creatures? What is man if not the eager thrall of tyrants and liars? What is man if not the stone of his own wall?

We must build.

See the whole world become our clay. Behold the life and death of wicked man for what it is: But another material substance with which to remould and build anew as the exalted masters of the radiant Imperium sees fit. Be practical of mind and squander not the resources of His Divine Majesty, the protector of our species chosen by all the gods of old, whom He superceded. Learn to erect obstacles and fortifications out of the bloodstained dead themselves. Cover them with earth, and then cover the earth with human cadavers. Stake rods through inert earth and dead men alike to strengthen the structure. Display the remains of your deceased heroes proudly on the parapet, and follow their valiant example. Defy your abominable foe with blackest contempt and fiery scorn, and show that every casaulty of yours is but another brick in the wall of the Imperium. As we die in this vale of anguish, that wall will rise higher and stronger than before, by the celestial grace of the Emperor, enthroned in heavenly light upon the Golden Throne of Holy Terra. Remember that Throne ruling over all mankind, and remember the merciless judgement that awaits us all. Remember the sacrifice you have been called upon to make, and do not flinch in the performance of your Imperial duty, soldier.

Glory to the first man to die!

Praise be unto the lord and saviour of our species! Praise be unto the Master of Mankind! Behold His manifold blessings, for even in death may the martyrs of the Imperium continue to protect the living.

Such is the demented state of a regressed mankind in service to the rotting stellar dominions of Holy Terra and Mars, locked in an unspoken suicide pact.

Such is the future that awaits us all.

Such is the grave of our species.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/10 03:40:20


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Legwork

"Heavy cannon fire had overturned the dirt several times over, and men had been buried all about in the ground like hay in clay. As the company was sent in to repair the trenches during a lull, the captain went about and inspected the dig work.

He turned a corner in the maze, and suddenly he saw the better part of a human leg still sticking out of the mud wall, ready to trip him up. The officer pointed at a man:

'You there. Cut that thing off and throw it on the parapet!" barked the captain.

The private jumped to it and hacked the leg off with his spade, foot and all. Then another man complained:

'So there went the wall hook. And just where shall I now hang me kit, eh?'"

- Common soldier's joke scribbled in bloodstained notebook found on half the corpse of corporal Kitos-Qardasht of the Astra Militarum 3310th Liby-Habrywean fusilier regiment, commanded by colonel Helqoegus Bomylcar Manidtrabal (CCLXIV Army), following the unit's complete annihilation in 061.M39 during the Army's rout after the failed fourth siege of Hive Bybulus on Seidon Triarius


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/15 14:01:03


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Iced Bucket

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is no sanctuary from the spawn of man.

In a garbled multitude of songs and sagas recited in a million different tongues around crackling campfires and flickering hab lumens, it is told that Man of Gold banished cruelty from the human soul, and for this arrogant sin he was rendered soft of countenance and weak of will. Thus ancient man lacked the dogged hatred and hardy grit that ultimately sustains life in this harsh vale of trial and woe, and ancient man inevitably succumbed to his own feeble spirit even as his hubris shone with supreme confidence in man's unlimited abilities, miraculous works and achievements. For mercy and kindness slays no foe, and thus ancient man missed his golden opportunity to scour the galaxy free of hostile aliens while his worldly might was unsurpassed and man's fortunes soared to godlike heights.

Indeed the gentle openness of ancient man made him akin to a carapaced creature bereft of its shell, for on all too many worlds and void habitats did people welcome the emergence of witches and encourage the exploration of their heinous warpcraft, and those worlds thus inclined to kindness were utterly doomed. Ancient man's inner feckless spirit would transform into an outward reality of despair and darkest helplessness as luxury died and shining towers toppled, for the Dark Age of Technology ended in flames and kineating ruin, and man's chance for a grand purification across the stars was never grasped.

We see then, that empathy and a sweetly heart bereft of cruelty turned Man of Gold's spirit rotten weak in the midst of unrivalled worldly strength, for benignant compassion is the highest form of folly, and thus the kindness of ancient man nearly doomed our species. Such were the mistakes of our wicked forefathers, yet we are much wiser now. For we know that hard times create strong men, and strong men create good times, and good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. Only by holding on to strength at all costs may we break that decadent cycle of decay. Times must ever be hard. They must ever be made hard for us to live in, to breed strong men.

We must not make men weak, nay, we must scour them with hardship and struggle, we must worship strength and embrace that which makes us strong. We know, as ancient man did not, that we must banish compassion and forgiveness from our souls, lest all our kin and offspring will perish, and all our bloodlines and species will succumb to oblivion. Do you wish to see the heads of your children smashed upon the rocks? Do you wish for weakness to devour your family? If not, then vigilant be. Only a strong people manning a wall of hatred can hope to survive the horrors beyond and the rot within. For the radiant God-Emperor Himself has decreed in holy writ issued from the cradle of mankind that we must be ruthless. We must be strong. We must be cruel.

No remorse. No regret. No mercy.

And so across one million worlds and innumerable voidholms, a regressed colossus on feet of clay will encourage human hardiness through the trinity of misery, iniquity and strife, yet the hidebound local cultures populating such a myriad of teeming planets and overcrowded spacestations need little spurring on from above, for the Imperator of Holy Terra has seen fit to gift unto man inner reserves of abhorrence and stubborn will, buoyed up by petty spite, mistrust, cunning and jealousy, all the better to make man's inner character manifest at the most of times, on every day and on every rotation. In order to better understand how man's treatment of fellow man contributes to the strengthening of his spirit, let us plunge the depths of depravity clogging up the human soul. Let us see how man, as child, through his small deeds and words of common everyday conduct may engender his sound hardiness, for the betterment of our starspanning species as a whole.

Among some of the most primitive human tribes across the galaxy, people who display extraordinary brilliance and intelligence will be sacrificed to the God-Emperor or to some local anima-spirits, the better for their outstanding gifts to placate wrathful divinity and stop pestering the parochial community with the most clever ones' oddness and weirdness of character. Thus child prodigies and grown-up geniuses alike are hanged from tree branches and ripped apart upon altars running with blood and gore, all of them nothing but deviants effectively voted out of life by a cohesive culture of barbarians who would rather not be unnerved by their brainish wit. Such savage customs may be extreme, yet they are in reality echoed in word and deed everywhere man dwells across the Milky Way galaxy.

It befits lowly souls of mediocre envy to stomp on the tender sprouts of genius before they can bloom. Man finds that it behooves him to drown the hopes of gifted ones in this dark abyss of his own insecure lack of vision before they can rise above the short reach of his spiteful tongue and violent hands. The spirit of man is ever easily quenched by parochial narrow-mindedness and fanatic myopia, ever easily led astray by man's own pettiness and ideas with a catchy ring to them.

What we are describing, is a most commonplace phenomenon, something unavoidable and unpreventable, tacitly accepted and embraced by humanity everywhere across the length and breadth of the Imperium, and naturally it also reigns unchallenged on those outlying lost human colonies that eke out a meagre existence beyond the holy light and sacral rule of His Divine Majesty and the godly inspired High Lords of Terra. Everywhere the seed of man grows, children will innately know to purge the weak, freeze out the unwanted and harry the deviant. The reasons why may vary on whether it be for strange looks, voice, behaviour, bodily weakness, the need to have at least someone to stomp on beneath you, or a clash of personal chemistry. Whatever the source of such one-way friction, the constant flow of human vitriol must find an outlet, and what better outlet than to drown pathetic mommy's boys, weird kids and weeping cravens in it? Let them all suffer for what they are, for all defects of flesh and character are but the outward manifestations of an abominable spirit lurking within.

Trust your instincts, for the ability to detect deviation is an ability given unto you by the Emperor Himself. Is it not of eugenic virtue for all mankind to harass and scourge losers, crybabies, dysgenic wastrels, twists, potential witches and future heretics alike? Is not this univeral human streak to shun the deviant and scorn the freethinker an all-pervasive form of folk wisdom inherent to all righteous congregations and their offspring?

Witness the petty malice apparent in most children of our species, and those observations will give you a true insight into the monstrous spirit lurking within the human heart. After coming to know that piece of wisdom, hardly any occasion for learning of great atrocity and vile crime will ever truly shock you. Let it be known that the road to inner harmony is paved with low expectations, for that will prevent you from driving off into the melancholy ditch of disappointment. After all, naïvety is an important component in trauma of the mind, for those without high expectations on their fellow man will be better prepared for the common evils and disasters that are inherent to life and death. Thus heed this lesson, and listen well. Let us uncover the evil that men do, by examining the evil that children do in sordid detail, for the child is the father of man.

First of all, we will recognize that the ever persistent fact of children shunning those deemed unwanted, is not born out of careful elaborations with intellect spinning high. Instead, it is a natural, indeed instinctive part of human nature, an aspect of our pack mentality. This scorning of others in your own group know few to no principles, for it arise out of the animal depths of the human soul, forged as it is in primal eons of hunger, rutting and desperate struggle for survival in a harsh world of limited resources. For man is not a fallen angel, but an ape arisen.

The dark sides of human nature will manifest themselves very early on in life. The baby steps of evil include the infant observation that creating something takes a long time, yet destruction is but the work of moments. More attentive cunning will soon make the bairn discover that hurting others in one fell swoop may be rewarding, yet it is far better to draw out the distress and agony in others and savour the ongoing process. Thus it is more pleasing for most people to find a favourite target to torment every available day for years on end, than it is to menace someone but for one occasion. Most children who find joy in pursuing their mischievous desires would agree that death by a thousand cuts is a better spectacle then a swift beheading with a guillotine. Indeed, they live by that principle, for the boot is on their foot and not on the wretched victim of them and their friends, classmates and work gang comrades.

Further self-schooling in evil will reveal to the child that there is a sense of security in belonging to a group, and even a sort of courage born from holding power. After all, power is when you can do something with impunity, and no one can do anything about it. Thus a numerical disparity of ten against one mean that the communal vermin cannot hope to fend off the banes of their childhood and dreams. And so afflictors of others who would have found scant boldness to harrass unwanted ones on their own, will find themselves daring a great deal more when acting as part of a pack. In a gang, they will dare to strike, to chivy, to destroy. Band together and close ranks, for there is strength in numbers. Remember that lesson in war.

By moving in groups, gleeful kids will soon rouse each other to attack lone targets, and go further still in their assaults. Collective strength and the fear thereof is enough to overpower most prey, and even the most ferocious lone wolves can be overwhelmed by superior force of numbers and be made subject to every cruel whim of the assaulters once the group have pinned the human target to the ground and gripped its arms and legs firmly. Environments where children are to be found in crowds are often akin to a kindergarten for future torturers. Under the veneer of all the institutional strictures and rules of conduct enforced by adult powers and severe authorities, a lawless wilderness will nevertheless stand tall as the true experience of life on scholam yards and in the predatory environments of orphanaria and workhouses. There will be nasty kid fights, in which eyes, teeth, ears, fingers and limbs may be lost, aside from standard little injuries such as common bruises and shallow cuts. These brawls and their casaulties are all healthy signs, for it is good and virtuous that the younglings of the Imperium prepare for combat from an early age. After all, they will need to be inured to violence and pain during their adult lives, no matter if they will serve the God-Emperor in arms or as toiling labourers.

Aside from the common scrimmage between rough equals, there will always be an endless picking on those weaker and lower in status than yourself. Hurtful words, sharp looks and malignant deeds all play an important role. There will be needling and heckling toward the ugly ducklings, and the scorn in which they are held will be made clear by heaping ridicule upon the victim. Indeed, there will be spit and even let water on those at the bottom of the pecking order. They must know their place, after all, and a thousand little humiliations every day is an excellent method to show who is on top, and who is trampled on the bottom of the pile. Thus children everywhere will establish hierarchy with harsh means, and the Imperium of Man is nothing if not an utter hierarchy. A virtuous top-down system of capricious tyranny and arbitrary cruelty needs to be taken for granted by the populace from a very early age, and this Imperial reality of oppressive oligarchy and despotic power has for fivehundred generations been cemented by children naturally gravitating toward similar solutions in their everyday interactions with each other. As below, so above. Might is right.

To openly challenge those above you is an alarming, nay, abominable tendency within the rigid astral dominions of Holy Terra and Mars, and innumerable death sentences and much worse have been inflicted upon suspected apostates and traitors for such sinful crimes against the Terran Imperator's sacred hierarchy in the world of adults. Among children, those worthless wretches who would dare to protest or challenge the juvenile status quo will find themselves beset with the full fury of the pack, who will be indignant that any pale brat could even dream of disobeying the order of things. And so the many will furiously kick, punch and bite any humiliated weakling who dare to stand up to their tormentors. They must know their place, after all. Nevertheless, succesful violence by someone formerly despised as weak and sorry may be an exceedingly rare solution to torment by peers, for everyone respects strength. Clever words may on rare occasions suffice for counter-raids, yet only deeds may conquer. Such unusual climbing of the ladder by might and main among children is akin to a murderous usurper of a throne being hailed as righteously justified by the God-Emperor, for how else could they have attained success in that enterprise without divine blessing?

Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Instead, do unto others as you would not have them do unto you, for that way lies power and glory in a zero sum game of dog eats dog. Who ever became mighty by turning the other cheek? Such meekness is fit only for born slaves, and if the shackled ones tell themselves that they are innocent and what is being done unto them is unjust, then all the better. Know that lack of guilt is immaterial, indeed the concepts of justice and guilt are largely without any weight in the affairs of man, as are the polar opposites of good and evil meaningless for determining human behaviour. A superior determinant for the conduct of man can be found in his animalistic instinct and gut feeling, and nowhere is this more true than for child. Most humans are driven by a need to fit in and not stick out, born out of self-preservation and fear. They have something to lose, and are at all times surrounded by people willing and able to hurt them greatly. The world of man is not truly ruled by an ephemeral duality of good and evil. A far better compass for understanding the dynamic of human nature is one revolving around cowardice, bestial aggression, group belonging, protection of kin and a hunger for more. In such a scope, phenomena such as self-sacrifice, helpfulness and respect seamlessly rub shoulders with selfish greed, cruelty and scorn.

During the misty depths of the ancient Age of Terra, a gadfly of a philosopher was once condemned to death by his homecity's public assembly after a great war had been lost. The Imperium of Man would laud the city's decision to purge such a deviant and freethinker for impiety and corrupting the youth, but the Imperium would have thought it silly and spineless for there to have been two rounds of voting on the question, and a lot of obvious hints for the guilty philosopher to please just run away and leave the city well ahead in time of his scheduled execution. Imperials are not afraid to slay, in the holy name of the Emperor. It is well that those capable of new thought are hunted down, for they represent a risk of undermining the legitimate, sacred order upheld by the powers that be. An order emanating from the Imperator, seated in radiant splendour upon the Golden Throne on Holy Terra.

As such, the mockery and maltreatment visited upon chinless losers and loners by the mob act as a form of communal self-defence against dangerous thought of self by rooting out any potential future loose cannons and silencing them by preventive counter-barrage while they are still small and defenceless. Get your retaliation in first, before they sharpen their tongues. Overwhelm them with arbitrary bluntness and spite. Suppress the strange ones. Heckle malcontents and give them hell. Tolerate no deviancy! If a man in any way would break the tight mould we all ought to be cast in, then point at him and laugh. Bestow upon the unworthy ones not honours, but malreputation and horrid associations. Likewise, ruthlessly cast out anyone born with abhuman mutations from the baseline human pureblood community, for their abomination in the flesh must be categorically rejected, and eventually cleansed in flames. Let them all know they are unwanted and unloved, fit only for base slavery and destruction. We will purge, but first we will scoff.

There is an old Terran proverb which claims that the only true form of joy is that of gloating, of finding malicious delight in the suffering and misfortune of others. Man's purpose in life is after all to suffer from hardship so that he can breed, and what better confirmation of your own bestowed blessings can there be found than the curses laid upon others? Thus it is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another. Likewise, it is better to kick than be kicked.

And so, very quickly, common cruelties become second nature to those children who count themselves lucky to be part of the mob, and not its prey. This is the inherent order of things, ancient beyond the memory of written history and etched into the animal spirit known as the human soul. By far most of the pack will find entertainment in causing the suffering of others, for such is the nature of man. Even many of those children who seem to be of a gentle and unassuming character may be turned into barking jackals in order to not themselves become the next obvious mob target, and thus they learn what is good by conforming to what is proper.

As proof of the virtue inherent in shunning abnormals and human insects, consider the following: Among children, a meek and kind behaviour will be interpreted as a sign of weakness, and weakness will be severely punished by other children. Thus even a bairn understands that weakness and deviancy stem from moral corruption and spiritual rot. For is it not better to be strong and self-sufficient, than weak and helpless? And so waggling tongues and sharp elbows await the runt of the litter, and the grinding woes of social ostracism will ensnare the communal vermin. A thousand little everyday predations will be visited upon social outcasts forced to live in the midst of a mob that despise them. The hopes of their lives will be undone in tender years, as is just punishment for liberi worms that do not meet our standards.

A lonely child in internal exile will not only be shunned by their own community and heckled for their clothing and other accoutrements, they will be ripped apart socially by the fangs of the pack and its sharp verbal claws. In such a spirit of iniquity, the maggots and rats in human form will turn asocial from constant peer harrowing. They will have entered life full of wonder, hope and excitement, only to quickly slam into a solid wall and find themselves locked in a dead end, with stalking predators closing in fast and no possible way to escape. Their lot is inevitable, ordained from on high, indeed it is a just punishment for their moral defects and character flaws. As such it is nothing short of the protecting Emperor's will made manifest, when packs of children act accordingly to their gut feeling that leaves no doubt this lowly member of the same species and tribe must be rejected and trodden upon. This puer, this worthless offspring of man and woman will be made to suffer. How else are we to foster hardy and dutiful folks, if not by a torrent of wicked pettiness to keep us all in line, either out of fear for falling into the evil stream, or because they are already drowning in it?

And so the life of the little forsaken one is turned into a waking nightmare, their abyssal status taken for granted, their every day filled with shoving, beatings, heckling songs, slanderous gossip, rhymes of character assassination and mischievous whispers. Feet will suddenly be stretched out, ever eager to trip up the innocent. They will be subject to the pointing fingers, scoffing laughter and fixated eyes of the unyielding crowd. Their life experience will be a vale of tears, standing as the thankless receiver of the unholy conduct of others, ever the subject of other children's crooked grins and mocking derision. Their days are filled with ridicule and scorn, and their nights with unheard sobbing. Just look at them in their full wretchedness. How pathetic! How weak! How unbecoming! No wonder they are constantly thrown down into the dirt and left to crawl home with bruises and bleeding wounds. They had it coming all along. They truly do deserve it.

Why would anyone want to even pick those ostracized deviators for ballgame teams? Why would we not lock them into cramped spaces and forget about them? Why would we not take their stuff away from their ludicrous possession? Why would we not fling trash and filth into their food? Why would we not threaten a beating and force them to eat sand or yellow snow? Why would we not urinate on them in showers and press their heads into lavatories, privies and dungstacks? Why would we show them any kindness? Why would we not keep kicking while they are down in the dirt? Be strong and ruthless, and spurn the unworthy. We are better off without them.

And so the pack will seek out their prey, as they sin against fellow children, adorned with impish grins and wolfish eyes that twinkle with burgeoning sadism. Listen to their songs, those teasing tirades of humiliation. See them at play, those practical jokes which the target kid will not find funny, but all others will laugh at the victim. The pack is mighty and strong, and the bugs they corner are not. Of course the bullies will wallow in spite and experiment with immorality. Of course they will try out a plethora of ruthless little tricks and conduct everyday petty sabotage. It is the same mischievous spirit that make the most crooked among them pull wings and legs off insects, and torment small animals. Why not trample the sissies and sicklings? Are not the predators of the scholam yard and scrumball pitch the kings and queens of the hill? Should not the thrall bow to the master and kiss the dirt on their lord's feet? Adults clearly do this in the Imperium, so why not the children?

Maybe some of these child devils will later on in life find a sore conscience gnawing at their memories of early ills done toward others, yet by then any damage will already have been done beyond repair, and there is always booze and yet worse means to silence that whiny part of their stirring mind, an aspect of themselves they barely knew existed back when they committed all their youthful sins and childhood mean deeds. Thinking too much was what their victims usually did, that's why they were belittled subjects to ordinary little cruelties in the first place. That's why they were weak.

Those who speak of the general innocence of children are, as a rule, either stunningly forgetful, or willfully blind to what they themselves have seen with their own eyes, or else they inwardly deny their very own actions during their small years and wish to remember a false, rosy record. The voices of playing children may often be pleasant to hear from a distance, so long as you cannot make out the spoken words.

There is no innocence lost in the darkest of futures. In a regressed time beyond hope, man has constructed for himself hell, and man himself dwell there as its devil.

Naturally, childhood malice may grow into youthful cruelty and mature ruthlessness. Such is the hardy way of man. On hundreds of thousands of worlds and uncountable voidholms, Imperial youth organizations aim to refine juves in their ranks by further developing their innate worship of strength and lack of mercy, since such cruel power in loyal service to the God-Emperor is a blessed virtue, and most certainly not some character flaw. The evil that men do is on full display in tender childhood, an omen of what dark fruits and terrors that may ever ripen in adulthood, a testament to the depravity of man.

The juvenile precursor to adult atrocities can be seen everywhere we turn, no matter the state of primitive barbarism or advanced civilization prevailing there. Bantlings in large packs will heap endless petty malice upon despised liberi of their own age, making their victims every waking day a foretaste of hell itself. There will be open taunting in front of everyone, slinging fell words at those turned defenceless by being shunned by the pack, and then made the unwilling mummer by the spiteful laughter of their peers. The gleeful hunters of other children will not only embrace gang violence against lone victims, but they will also equip themselves with the sneaky weapons of dishonesty by lying and spreading false rumours, by talking behind the backs of outcasts and having nothing good to say about them around grown-ups. Indeed, many parents will soon conclude that this particular local wean in the neighbourhood is a real rotten apple, for why else would everyone dislike that kid? Such is the infant potential of future greater malevolence.

It is very rare for shunned insects to find support in the home, and most scorned children know better than to ever raise the subject in front of mum or dad. Indeed these bairns more often than not tend to face parental violence in the household if their predicament would become known to their elders. After all, what mother or father would not be disappointed with their loser whimps, when they wanted real boys and real girls for offspring instead of bad weaklings? Of course parents will be disappointed with their horrid little children, those weeping cravens who seem destined to die a virgin. There must be a good reason as to why all the other children hate them. Children do have a nose for sniffing out weird people. Perhaps my child will become a future prostitute, unbeliever or even a wyrd? God-Emperor forbid that such a blot of shame came from my loins! Such a harrowing thought! That must be sternly countermanded by strict discipline and arbitrary violence, effective immediately. Spurn the rod and spoil the child.

And so knowing parents of tormented spawn will pray to His Divine Majesty upon the Golden Throne for deliverance from this curse. For surely their socially outcast offspring are the celestial Imperator's punishment for the sins of the mother and father? Or perhaps they are possessed by malicious djinns or daemons? Maybe a moderately expensive ritual of exorcism with the local holy man or tribal shaman can force the evil spirit out of the child's body? After all, the fell animus should flee from its fleshly vessel if it is tortured enough, should it not? Thus children heckled, beaten and scorned by other children would do best to keep their plight a secret among their own kinsfolk. And what sound siblings would not show their disapproval of the runt's shameful straits by continuing the harrasment at home?

It is likewise with teachers, masters and adult overseers of all kinds, for why should they deny the Emperor-ordained order of things and attempt to stop water from running downstream? Why should they try to shield those who cannot even defend themselves? No, far better to go with the flow, and trust in the instincts of the herd. Is it not a part of good upbringing to make an example out of any deviants in the local community? It takes a whole village to raise a child, and it is best to prune that village from its unwanted elements. Why support the hopeless? Indeed, shunned younglings and adults alike will often be treated as usual suspects along with local criminals when planetary or voidholm law enforcement investigate crime, for their informants will have noted the outcasts' bad reputation and potentially festering resentment. Society has found these pecked chickens wanting, their value close to nil. They better know their proper place.

Speaking of vigilant informants serving the best interests of their species and lord, such a phenomenon can also be seen at work during witch hunts and paranoid great purges of suspected saboteurs and traitors, both of which are occasions when suspicions run high everywhere. Indeed such fevered times are perfect moments for juve informants to up their game by reporting their shunned victims as witches or wreckers or malcontents. And so they will turn their victims and their entire families in for bloody torture by the secular authorities or temple, never to be seen again unless the torture be made in view of the public eye to better warn would-be transgressors to toe the line, or else.

Social outcasts of all sorts are particularly easy prey during waves of purges and witch hunts. After all, the entire quarter or village or corridor can vouch for the maggot's worthless character, so the filed testimonies tend to be uniformally damning, leading to a quick and final verdict by triads of low-level officials overseeing the purge. Such penalties often take the form of collective punishment, true to the primitive nature of Imperial justice. As such the suspect and their family and clan may be condemned to penal labour, corporal punishment, death or much worse for imaginary crimes and sins never committed. Coincidentally, the hab unit thus made empty may fall into the hands of close kin to the dutiful informer who turned in the heretic or apostate in the first place, which is always a great boon in the overcrowded hive cities and squalid voidholms of the Imperium of Man.

To be shunned by your stout, Emperor-fearing peers is a damning sign, and proof in itself of hidden devilry. Those particular purges that is carried out by His Divine Majesty's Holy Inquisition will promiscuously use a great many informants to slaughter all manner of potentially subversive elements by sacrificing thousands, millions or even billions of inhabitants to root out small sects and rebel cells. In these sweeps of deviants and suspects, informants will routinely mark down on death lists those individuals who were shunned by their community, since they are assumed to harbour resentment that could lead to thought of self and even worse heresies. Thus is preventive justice done within the parochial realm of the Master of Mankind, that moribund interstellar civilization where the greatest of atrocities will all be lost in the labyrinth of oblivion.

It takes a whole village to raise a child, and part of that village are other children. They can be relied upon to dutifully prey upon deviants, with righteous spirits guiding their tongues and fists. They can be trusted to assail suspect kids with poison for the soul, and guard the community against abnormals of all kind. These little guardians will watch for shirkers and cowards with a ravenous appetite for nastiness. Among the spawn of man, those who turn another's life into misery is not a rare few, but a large part of any gathering. Indeed often a majority. Never forget that it behooves us to hate, for it is well within our nature to do so.

The same juves and infants that piously pray to the Imperator for salvation and attend regular templum services, are the very same little creatures that beset choice prey children with all manner of dull or inventive funny insults and acts of malice. And so the falsehoods of adults are shadowed by the dissembling of children. And how could it be otherwise?

After all, it is a sweet and seemly thing to reap the allied laughter of a crowd when slighting another to their face. Of course, the victims of such unfriendly conduct will only be further humiliated if ever their outrage boils over into furious attempts at futile vengeance, for their lot is a pit of sadness, and nothing more. They must know their proper place, and wince at the heckling and pain. They must endure their daily trials in silence, lest these social outcasts will end their own lives in desperation. They must become stoic and deaden their senses, or they will succumb to blackest despair.

Let us dwell upon the shunned children held in public scorn, those damned bairns and cursed offspring rejected by their own tribe. Humans who, for whatever reason, prove a bad ingredient in personal chemistry will always be easy targets of the pack, their very existence making them the inevitable butt end of jokes. Many of them walk home alone, shivering and sobbing, or else they flee as fast as they can from their hounding tormentors. These victims of the mob will often offer up prayers to the God-Emperor of Holy Terra to lift His shield and protect them from public scorn, to preserve them from the cuts of sharpened tongues and to save them from common ridicule. Their earnest prayers will, as a rule, never be answered.

These low-rung losers may carry scars on the mind that will never truly heal no matter how old they may grow, for a consequence of all the ceaseless violence and mocking scorn is to break the self-confidence of weaklings and poltroons for life. Should we not drive out the deviant without mercy? Their weakness must be punished and rectified by pushing them beyond the limit of human endurance, over the precipice of suicide if the Emperor wills it so. It is their harrowing trial, not ours.

Consider these unsung martyrs of private, selfish suffering. Any inane phrasing and personality quirk of theirs will be ripped apart by clawed words from their gaggle of ambushing verbal torturers. These collectively spurned misfits have learnt firsthand that it is a terrible thing to be loathed by your own tribe. They are downtrodden by their own community, subject to a thousand forms of little everyday suppression from their fellow children. They are loathed eaters who every day are force-fed the rotten fruits of disgust by disapproving peers. They are nothing.

Those wretched folks are riven by everyday sorrow and doubt of self, as well they should be. Such willingly forgotten wretches of communal scorn can do little else than squeak as they are stomped into the dirt, trampled by normal humans driven by the same inner gleeful intoxication that make men butcher other men like cattle without hesitation. They are not only trampled by strangers, but trampled by those who could have been their kith. These friendless wastrels will squirm and cry out in pain as vitriol is poured down the throat of such an unwilling drinker of bitter life. Such humiliated souls are not seen as real people by their disdainful tormentors, for why should they be held in anything but contempt? Has not the omniscient God-Emperor Himself decreed that we must not suffer the deviant to remain among us?

The banality of evil may be seen every day on regular scholam yards and workhouse floors, as juvenile predators of common upbringing move with baleful intentions, heaping profanity, ad hoc missiles and strikes of fists and elbows upon the lonely forsaken ones. Some are willfully blind to the lifelong anguish they inflict upon others, while some indeed relish the opportunity to brand someone other than themselves with longlasting woe. They will not only mince the inner life of their victim, but they will get away with it, too. They are all judge, jury and executioner in the court of odium and opprobium. It is in truth like a slow lynching, a withering away of a weakling's inner spirit. Bear witness to the endless petty malice of ordinary children, and never once again be surprised at the monstrous bloodshed of adult humans. Through little evils can be glimpsed great evils.

Folks in the midst of neverending petty suffering are beset by sadists in learning and impressionable sheep alike. They all live their life as a smörgåsbord laid out for psychopaths to dine on, and the common people will join in as well. All this amounts to a worldly meatgrinder of hopes and ambitions, this killer of the light that is the falsehood and wickedness of sinful man, this swallowing of one's own kindred, this butchery of ugly ducklings.

To those communally shunned lambs of sorrow, there is no way out at any moment from experiencing life in the Age of Imperium for what it really is: After all, they fear not only the rulers, taskmasters, gangers and crazed sect members like ordinary people do, but they also live in terror of their fellow men and women. To them there is no relief from the peculiar mixture of boredom and dread that marks one's life as an Imperial subject. Likewise, to them there is truly no escape from the ever-present sense of inevitable, mechanistic cruelty that permeates this entire epoch. Despised and crushed at every turn by all they come into contact with, they must have a will of iron simply to survive the heavy grind of everyday life.

Witness the sons and daughters of man and woman approach their prey, akin to a grinning pack of salivating hyenas. They will surround it, grip ahold of it, pound it and bite it with infected words. To heap mockery unto others as part of a band is in two aspects similar to going into battle: First, always fight from a position of strength and exploit any advantage over the enemy which you can find. Second, to increase your chances of survival, you must kill with a will, and never hesitate. The heckling should not be half-hearted, but must sting and burn for hours and days after you landed your verbal blow. Put in your best effort, and witness your prey crumble away under your onslaught. Press the attack and strike through chinks in their armour. Hit them where it hurts the most, with lies and truths and twisted disinformation. Only by establishing dominance can you ever hope to prevent your mirthful companions from suddenly turning on you at a bad moment. It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Most of the kid gang will watch with merciless eyes and lying lips as the last rites are enacted over a fallen prey who chose to end the suffering of self like an apostate and coward. And if the true nature of the youngling suicide is revealed to Imperial authorities, a terrible revenge by the lawful powers that be may be visited upon the irresponsible family of the deceased human production unit. Siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces may be carried away to various forms of slavery, split up and never to see their family again. Likewise, public electro-flogging, unpayable fines, penal camp labour or servitorization without anaesthetics may see adults disappear from the household. Needless to say, many child devils feel a perversely electrifying sense of power, akin to that sensed by bairns during witch hunts, who lie away the lives of fully grown men or women. Or akin to juves turned informants for the joy of secret control over the fates of adult people. What might those tiny hands may carry! Such power over others! It is truly a delicious experience to savour and lust for, a dark aphrodisiac for the soul, a secret passion.

The Imperium of Man understands that an ingrained habit of hurting others since an early age may make it easier for some fresh soldiers to kill, both upon the battlefield and in massacres of civilians. It is in every way preferable to raise Imperial subjects who are inured to cruelty and do not flinch from inflicting it on others. Thus we shall see human nature for what it really is, without sinking into a morass of misanthropic cynicism. We ought to recognize its vibrancy, its colourful brilliance and pulsating strength, yet we should also ken its bottomless depravity. For man carries within him great promise and the potential to climb to soaring heights, yet he is also a bestial slave to his own failures and downfall.

It is common for scrawny victims of human whelp packs to blame themselves for their inescapable plight, as well they should. Like beasts of prey will children gang up on target pups to consume them little by little with biting words and violence of the many against the lonely. And is the tiny torment not a just punishment visited upon such shunned wretches? After all, do they not fill the mouths of those who behold their filthy deviancy with distaste and physical revulsion? How could we not strike out against the repugnant and insultingly weak? How could we not drag their names in the mud? How could we not trip them up and pour foul liquid into their shoes? How could we not tear at their hair and clothes and spit right into their puny faces? Learning to scorn is important for learning to hate, and humanity can only be kept pure by hating that which is ugly in man.


And so, on a million worlds and voidholms without number across a vast cosmic empire that has lasted tenthousand years, we shall find that human children everywhere participate in energetic wrongdoing, each day, each rotation, each lights-on. They will single out vulnerable cubs of their species, and they will send a cold shiver down the puny targets' spines whenever the meek mice see their tormentors approach. These capricious predators will set upon their shunned victim with unkindly spite and lips flashing smiles that lie. These average bairns are well versed in the use of their acidic tongues for sprouting barbed lingo and toxic speech, for they have long since discovered that scorning others is a pleasant way to spend one's limited lifetime.

And these common kids, these naughty children of a default human mindset, will pursue the glory of laughter and popular reputation by gripping their lonely victim with many hands, and dunk their head underwater to watch the abandoned weakling flounce in wild panic. Usually they pull up the lad or lass before it is too late, since sparking the fear of drowning again and again is far more entertaining than actually drowning the runt, though sometimes the forsaken one's head is kept in too long while air bubbles stop popping on the surface, and the social outcast dies a horrible drowning death in the hands of its tormentors. This could potentially have dire complications, yet the pack of banes usually manage to make any little witnesses shut up by threatening to drown them too, while the murderous children themselves will not say a word about the event, denying any accusations wholesale and questioning if not the accuser themself is in actuality the murderer. If incidents like that can be faked as accidents caused by the clumsy idiot's many own faults, then all the better. And early honing of the ability to kill for the Emperor later on in life is not to sneer at. At any rate, child mortality is so high and commonplace on all Imperial worlds and voidholms, that there is little use making a fuss over some spilt milk. Just sell the earthly remains to the Corpse Guild's grinders for a pittance, then forget it and move on. The grieving parents can always breed new children if they really care so much.

Naturally, the ever-present threat of everyday little torture spilling over into juvenile crime as an accomplished fact on the playing field, will take its mental toll on the pecked chickens. Terror and despair will become second nature to them, and they will wince at any unexpected sound or movement, and glance about with wide-eyed paranoia in their eyes. Their pulse will gallop like that of a rabbit all too often, and the stress may leave them drained. Everyone will treat them worse than they do other kids, to their constant chagrin. These ostracized small ones will be forced to endure a hellish prison that is the company of spiteful and vicious peers eager to see them suffer and keep kicking them while they are down on the ground, writhing in agony.

Such wolfpacks of deceivers and ravenous monsters will not only scourge the waking hours of their victims, but will haunt their very dreams. For the memory of those ordinary juves will make the victim wake up in cold sweat at night, gasping from nightmares that merely resumed their daytime life experience in sleep. If these dark dreams and psychic trauma would turn bad enough to cause the son or daughter to shriek regularly at night, then suspicions of wyrdhood and emergent witchcraft will be swiftly afoot, possibly seeing the worrisome screamer disappear without a trace, or being lynched in the street by unnerved adult neighbours who wish to throttle the threat in the cradle, so to speak, after having heard gutsy folk tales of latent witches breaking into their heinous true nature during puberty. Be the first to strike.

The same impulses that drive ordinary children to callous acts against youngsters of their own age, may sometimes feed mischievous frolics against adults, and especially against those grown-ups who are held in contempt by the whole community. Parents and other severe adults in the close-knit local community will often try to beat it out of the unruly children, since it technically constitutes an unacceptable rebellion against mature authority, even if the target is a despised human they themselves have spat on many times. Such ill treatment of the bold whelps may reap the desired effect, yet such punitive violence may also harden the punished child into growing up ruthless and cruel, thereby fostering a hardy cycle of violence and drained empathy through the generations which is much praised by the Imperium of Man. And while we are on the topic of the chastising of children, take note of how the status of parents' progeny change within the family, as they come into adolescence and also grow taller, stronger and more capable of resisting the violence of their elders. This must be nothing else than pure coincidence, since human nature is surely too elevated and high-minded to base its actions and rearing of offspring upon beastly assessment of muscular strength like some kind of barbarous Ork.

As to primitive modes of behaviour, a fair number of mankind's colonies during the heyday of the Dark Age of Technology were founded by people who scorned the material bliss, rotten spiritual gentleness and tampering with the fabric of creation itself that poisoned the unbelieving mainstream cultures of the Human Federation. There were settled a great many retro-technological human colonies who deliberately shunned the most advanced tech, for in that age there existed a liberty of choice completely unknown to the degenerate descendants of that long-lost golden era. Most of those colonies that became the Knight worlds were of such deliberately techno-primitive character, relying on a Standard Template Constructor at the disassembled colony ship to provide the settlers with choice pieces of crucial medicine and rugged, unsophisticated hardware, while the colonists otherwise mostly lived simple lives of subsistence farming, gathering, herding, hunting and fishing, with homecrafts and rudimentary manufacturing supplementing a lowly local economy with little to no contact with the outside world's decadent hustle and bustle.

In those distant times, such techno-primitivism was a matter of choice. In the Age of Imperium, it has instead become an inescapable fact of life for untold billions of Imperial subjects. One such example of regressed human civilization beneath alien stars can be found on Myrmekion III, one of thirty moons of the ochre red gas giant Skythikon VII. A hot volcanic belt exist around the equator of Myrmekion III, heating the celestial body greatly and providing self-renewing bursts of mineral wealth to extract. Several giant hive clusters are scattered about the heavily industrialized equator, but temperatures drop off quickly once you go northward or southward of the moon's rotund waist. Here in the backwoods, vast frigid forests stretch for enormous distances, pockmarked by hunting lodges and peasant villages eking out a poor living on marginal soils. Schmoliupiai is one such village of timber cottages, located seventeenhundred Terran miles south from Hive Melgonuv of Tansk Hive Cluster. Here, in the village of Schmoliupiai, the cycle of juvenile violence and scorning of the unwanted went full circle one day in early winter during the year of 357.M41. A crime most foul was committed that cold day, standing as further proof that all shunned outcasts secretly are the scum of our human species, standing as stark confirmation that we do well to harrow such deviants and ought not to mourn their passing for even a heartbeat.

It all revolved around a simple well pole on the eastern outskirt of Schmoliupiai village, a rudimentary creation of wood that is also known as a counterpoise lift. Schmoliupiai leached a little juice off hanging power lines that ran through the village from fusion plants on the southern pole on their way to Tansk Hive Cluster, yet the backwater settlement lacked both pumps, piped water and sewage. As such, water carriers with shoulder paddings had to lift up water from wells by hand and carry the buckets on yokes laden across their shoulders, running to and fro the well pole many times in a day. It was arduous work, preferably left to poor day labourers, children and farmhands. One of these water carriers was a bearded man named Ananiy Balchunas, more commonly known as Snoweater Balchunas after several repeated incidents in his tender childhood years when he had been forced by other children to eat muddy thaw snow and worse, in front of half the village. No one had come to his defence, but plenty had laughed. The moniker of Snoweater had stuck, and still stung decades later.

Naturally, mischievous village imps would from time to time play a cruel trick upon the burdened water carriers during winter. It was not unusual for water carriers to leave their buckets by the well poles in the evening, to have less of a burden to carry to the well in the morning. As darkness fell, there was always a risk for small rascals darting out and filling the buckets by the well pole, to let them freeze solid overnight, thus forcing the angry water carriers to spend much time and energy in the morning to hack out the ice from their buckets before they could start filling them.

Sometime a kindly old herbess would walk out late in the evening to the eastern well pole and pour out any water from the buckets, yet this only happened when she found a little vigour and time left over late in a day full of family chores. As she grew older and the grandchildren and grandgrandchildren grew more numerous, this happened less and less, and so the iced buckets grew more frequent.

One frigid winter morning, the despised male water carrier Ananiy discovered the juvenile sabotage of his buckets that he had left at the well pole the day before out of sheer exhaustion, offering a quick prayer to the warming hands of His Divine Majesty on Holy Terra to protect the buckets from malignant crotchlings and sprogs before collapsing in his bed made out of straw and moss. Yet the nippers had been at it anyway, once again!

And so Snoweater Balchunas yet again kneeled in the crisp, shallow snow and hacked away with his ice pick in silent fury. The guilty anklebiters had found an opportunity to slip out and watch. This time however, the crumb crunchers did not only catch a glimpse and let out distant laughter from afar, but dared one another to go closer and closer behind the back of the toiling water carrier. Ananiy ignored them with a patience stronger than most people could muster, yet this lack of attention did not dissuade the slips from inching nearer and nearer to the well pole. At last they were so close to the bearded man that they could see ice chippings flying out of the copper bucket's tinned inside.

The children stood quietly and watched, until suddenly one strike with the ice pick hit at a bad angle and slid across the ice, harvesting swearwords out of the clenched teeth of Ananiy Balchunas. At this display of anger at the consequences of their clever little fell deed, the bairns all burst out laughing and pointing at the freezing water carrier, who attempted to ignore them all, yet their scoffing laughter only went on and on with tears of malicious joy running down their rosy cheeks. The infectious mirth kept the laughter flowing in a juvenile feedback loop. All of a sudden, things went full circle, and the stoic water carrier unexpectedly snapped. It all came back to him in full force, kneeling as he did by the well pole.

Born a calm boy, little Ananiy had been the shunned butt of all jokes in the village of Schmoliupiai through all his early years, constantly the target of ridicule and contempt, and he never could retort to their cruel japes or gain their respect, no matter how hard he tried. Snoweater Balchunas had eventually developed a stoic self-control and learnt to somewhat roll with the punches, yet the bite of the other village youngsters' scorn could at best only be dampened, not negated. The most efficient medicine was to ignore his surroundings as best as he could, eyes locked in front of him and uncleaned ears attempting to filter out the surrounding people's nasty noise. Amaliya Petkus, a lanky girl two years older than him, had endured much the same communal scorn. She had drowned herself by the marriable age of fifteen, though her bloodkin had hushed it up in case an Imperial bailif ever found out. There had been a lot of false sad faces among her peers at the templum last rites as the peddling Corpse Guild trucker ceremoniously bowed to the priest and handed over useless scrip to the parents for Amaliya's swollen but recyclable biomass. The eyes of the juves had mainly been unperturbed, cold and wolflike. Of course prey could die. What of it?

As Snoweater Balchunas grew into a tall, strong man, villagers of the same age at long last seemed to roll back their endless petty malice, but mostly because adult age had dampened their childlike mirth and brought expectations to behave more maturely when sober. The gibes and insults still were flung from time to time, but the onrushing torrent of yesterday's childhood and adolescence had dwindled to a dripping flow, leaving some peace of mind to partially soothe Ananiy's bruised ego and wounded self-confidence. Life had been hard enough, for he was on the bottom rung of his village as a day labourer and had to make a living out of the cheapest and hardest rural jobs he could find. He was inured to cold and aching body parts, yet the old stigma died hard, and none of the village women of an age with him wished to marry Snoweater Balchunas, both for the disdain they carried toward his person, and for his present state of abject poverty. Clearly, the guiding hand of the celestial Imperator on Earth did not wish any virtuous lass to take such a doubtful man for her husband, and all manner of observed superstitious omens agreed with this religious insight.

At any rate Ananiy Balchunas had been turned too asocial, too awkward and too shy of people from his peer-plagued upbringing, so he did not even dare to think about asking any lass out without having drunk himself out of his mind on greysap vodka or oily kramshki. And so Ananiy aged alone in a cot half dug into the earth, silently enduring the labour tasks and rheumatic limbs without any complaining. He had endured for years and years, and faced a horrible old age in the future, but at least the worst flood of heckling and violence was behind him, a remembered torment rather than an inescapable nightmare reality to wake up to every day. Yet now the wicked boys and their rollicking laughter at his expense as Snoweater Balchunas angrily hacked away at the iced bucket, now that was just too much. Too much. And all too familiar. The spiteful laughter of children throughout the years rang in his ears, rang in his head, rang in all his painful memories, throttling him to his core. Once more he found himself on the ground, surrounded by taunting children and fingers pointing foul at him. Once more he was become the village ass. Once more the odd one out.

Not. Bloody. Again.

As he fumed and glared into the distance, Ananiy made a silent vow among the scoffing laughter of village children. He would not go out like the girl Amaliya Petkus did. Snoweater Balchunas would take some of the bastards with him to the corpsegrinder, and damn them all! His soul was already forfeit. The deed only had to be done. It was a thought of total wrath, yet it was also a liberating thought. He would die a free avenger.

A long reined-in temper tore its ropes, stampeding in wild furor after so many years kept in check. The wrath of the water carrier suddenly boiled over with a vengeance, and he belted the water pick as he sprang to his feet in one swift motion and grabbed ahold of two of the lads before they could even react with more than a stunned gasp. The rest of the child gang scattered, running and yelling for home. Had Ananiy had more than two arms, he would have chased down and caught more of the brats. The two children screamed and cried and squirmed in the water carrier's gloved hands, but his calloused grip was like iron, and Snoweater Balchunas did not say a word as he forcefully dragged both of the boys through the snow, snorting like a bull through his nostrils. In a village where everyone knew everyone else, he did not need to ask who their parents were. He knew the parents all too well. They were of an age with water carrier Ananiy Balchunas.

Thus an infuriated neighbour knocked on the wooden doors of first one timber cottage, then another. In both homes he curtly asked to see the father of the boy, with eyes glaring dark from hatred. As the man in the house appeared at the door with scorn in his eyes, the water carrier buried his ice pick in the head of his old tormentor, then smashed the screaming son's skull to gory bits against the timber logs. Manslayer Ananiy hardly said a word at any of the two cottages, but made a spontaneous attempt to head for the hills and escape to foreign landscapes on foot without tools or provisions, before Schmoliupiai huntsmen on skis pursued him to the edge of a ravine, and shot the murderer dead with hotshot lasrifles, sending the body tumbling into the thin ice below, which cracked and swallowed the corpse into the Chernayavoda creek. Incidentally, the strapping huntsmen were of an age with Snoweater Balchunas, and were long since used to slinging mockery and projectiles at him.

And all over the backwater county and beyond on Myrmekion III, folks would sing a sad song about the heinous crime for centuries to come, preferably set to string and pipe instruments or bone drums, cursing the name of the water carrier in death out of hatred, much as they had cursed him in life out of scorn.

Thus the petty malevolence of children overflowed to hit a shunned adult with fell cunning, to reap the hilarity of succesful sabotage. Yet the harvested fruits of anger were far more than any of the scoffing bairns could have imagined, and the social outcast died a hated bane of fathers and sons alike, a terrible man that should not have been born in the first place. And so we reinforce our conviction that deviants of all sorts should be ruthlessly harrowed and humiliated, for clearly our revulsion towards their very being is a godly sign to mistrust their hidden rot and secret sins. Trust in your instincts, for it is right to hate, and just to scorn.

In the mocking laughter and jabs of children can be seen the seeds of strength and cruelty necessary for man to survive in this harsh galaxy. As a child, man learns to employ his might and test his aptitude for combat and hardship, or else he learns to endure evil without end. And so human nature is revealed in the small deeds and words of little children, an echo of the great deeds and atrocities they may commit as adults. And the sole ruler and deity of our species sees this with His wise eyes from upon the Golden Throne of Holy Terra, and He judges it fairly, and He know it to be good.

Be ruthless. Be strong. Be cruel. Or else see the worlds and voidholms of man burn to ashes. Abandon strength, and your kin will abandon life. Be hardy, and doubt not!

Ave Imperator.

Thus in hovels of squalor and palaces of luxury, the same timeless story plays out again and again across the Milky Way galaxy, namely that of the shunned outcast, who caught the evil eye of his own community and was endlessly hounded throughout his mortal life. This tragedy will never stop repeating as long as humanity persists, nay, until there is no more sentient life left in all the universe.

And so no man of the world will be surprised to find predatorial children devouring those held in contempt by others, sometimes literally so among feral cannibal cultures. Such vigilant guarding of the purity of one's community against deviants, weaklings and freethinkers constitute fundamental building blocks in the parochial, fanatical and aggressively myopic fortress prison that is the Imperium of Man. For man will not deny by deeds his savagery and primal instincts, and so fivehundred generations of blood and carnage and hatred have passed by since the founding of the Imperium. Fivehundred generations of stagnant rot. Fivehundred generations of the worsening of man, in an ever downward spiral.

It is an eon bereft of mercy, a demented time, a doomed era of hellish depravity. As above, so below. And so petty bullying have never been more cruel and unrelenting than it is in the Age of Imperium, in the darkest of futures.

Such is child, the father of man.

Such is earthly man, between heaven and hell.

Such is the evil that men do.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/25 15:11:43


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Industrial Reproduction

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is bred like cattle.

What the interstellar domains of Holy Terra ignorantly know as the Dark Age of Technology, the spritual-industrial cosmic empire of Holy Mars in truth know as the Golden Age, when the ancients discovered all knowledge in the universe and invented all that could possibly be invented. All that could be, was. Yet the techno-heresy of Abominable Intelligence and alien defilement laid low the wonders of the ancients, and left their great works in ruin.

Truly, Man of Gold was blinded by his own success and empathy, for what else but an affluent and decadent overabundance of compassion and pity could lead the wise ancients thus astray, that they tolerated the xeno to live and the soulless sentience to erect the wonders of man for him? Truly, the ancients were poisoned by the sweet fruits of their own ingenuity and cunning craft. Truly, they were blinded by the brilliant light that they had themselves ignited, and thus the vessel of man ran aground upon the treacherous rocks of an uncaring universe. Clearly, humanity should have scoured the galaxy clean of all alien life and alien mechanism in that distant time when the ancients were mighty beyond compare across the stars, yet such a purification to safeguard the future of the human species was never carried out, due to that irrational feebleness of the fleshly mind that is warm and soft empathy, that abominable sin of mortal man which may yet damn us all unless we be vigilant and we be ruthless of will. And so the grand opportunity for human monodominance was lost forever, lost in the heinous thought patterns of ancient man when his hands truly held the tools and weapons to accomplish that monumental achievement of xenocide. Then, man had the means but lacked the will. Now, we have the will, but lack the means.

There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal. There is no strength in flesh, only weakness. There is no constancy in flesh, only decay. There is no certainty in flesh but death.

The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question, for all discoveries and inventions occurred during the Golden Age of Technology, when man stood at his very apex. Yet we who remain of the scattered seed of the ancestors are in one sense much wiser now, for the folly of our forefathers and the great downfall that was a consequence of their errors, has taught us in truth to hate. It has taught us all to hate that which is weak in flesh, to hate that which is lost in spirit, to hate that which is ugly in man. It has taught us to hate the xeno, the witch, the heretic, the deviant, the malcontent, the freethinker and the unbeliever. It has taught us all to uphold purity by purging the impure from among our ranks. Cruelty without doubt is a form of wisdom. Ken no mercy.

At its very core, the lesson that was the downfall of the ancients has taught us to hate our own intrinsic empathy, for pity and compassion are fit only for beasts without thought and intellect, fit only for weaklings destined to perish in this harsh world. Empathy is not a luxury we can afford, nay, for we must instead scour the faithful and harden them to become true devotees of the Cult Mechanicus. Thus we will recalibrate our perspective and reprogram ourselves, from the ur-software of fleshly mind that our ancestors once operated on. We must rise above the wretched frailty of human flesh, and cleanse our very sentience with the mathematical clarity of machine, and drink of its analytical clairvoyance, free from the filth of emotion. We must strive to become pure in thought, just as we must strive to become pure in form by replacing our fallible flesh with far better parts of metal and lightning. We must become one with the Omnissiah.

How can our feeble flesh best serve the Machine-God? O, Motive Force, divulge unto us this electrical spark of insight, and reveal to us the physical purpose of life through mystical uplink. O, God of All Machines, give push of Thy exalted button to insert Thine divine command line, and we solemnly swear by proton and electron to decrypt the oracular code and execute the higher will of the Omnissiah in pious reception of asymmetric master/slave communication of holy data.

Pray, and you shall receive. Glimpse, a spark in the electrodes. Register, a nerve signal in the cerebrum. Insight is thus granted from on high. Give praise! Lo and behold this divine grant of comprehension! Gaze upon its pure numbers, and contemplate its fractal depths of inner meaning. And let lesser minds translate its clarity of message from the binary cant of Lingua-technis into the crudity of Low Gothic script:

01000001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100101 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100100 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01100110 00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011

Let us meditate upon its hidden commandments, and act according to intense scrutiny and ritual unlocking of the compressed will of the All-Knowing One. Let the air be filled with sacred incense and the sounding of bells. Let us ignite the altar lumens of understanding in reverent salutations. Let us sing the Psalm of Ignition, then the Hymn of Connection, followed by the Akathist of Latency. Let us give thanks to the Great Machine, for its imperious gifts are bountiful indeed. Let us collate all the data, and bear witness to the righteous conclusions reached through stringent logic by our holy order regarding the purpose of man and what use there be for his weak flesh:

In ancient times, shining spires of technological wonder and breathtaking sophistication rose on more than twain million colonized words and void habitats beyond counting, defying the laws of nature in soaring splendour and titanic scale. Within these spaceclimbing edifices of glorious knowledge dwelled a great multitude in palatial opulence amid lush gardens and earthly happiness. Quick-witted Man of Gold was served by doughty Man of Stone, who was served in turn by toiling Man of Iron. Uncounted billions of human settlers streamed out to ever more colonies, to ever more terraformed celestial bodies, to ever more artificially constructed voidstations. Man's dominion grew by the year. Such a rapid outflow of ever more humans across the stars could not have been maintained naturally by comfortable man in those rich times of plenty and science, even though sizable families and multiple litters of children through an extended multi-century life cycle were common even in the most urbane of human cultures during those lost aeons of boundless exploration and expansion.

Mankind had long since ceased its complete dependence on organic reproduction akin to rutting animals, and the bringing forth of new population was achieved in a multitude of ways, of which unskilled beastly copulation was but one of many. A confused flora of old legends scattered across the Imperium of Man speak of fluid birthdens, growth tanks, idyllic foster-hotbeds and fleshvat factories, where new generations were grown in huge numbers before being spawned by artificial wombs. From there, they were welcomed into a caring world, even where they might lack a real family, and man's mastery of matter was such that he could reshape his own being at will, and banish what was ill in life. It was a luxurious time of great curiosity and optimistic devotion to science, in an era of unbridled progress where lengthy education was aided both by bionic enhancement, neural librarium download, hypno-therapy and memetic longus-doctrination.

Despite humanity's obvious mastery of nature, the Golden Age of Technology saw man treat his fellow man with dignity and respect, for man in those times had put his own self on a pedestal and abhorred religious worship, for his was a decadent civilization of intoxicated hubris. And so it was frowned upon for the governing agencies of worlds and voidstructures within the Human Federation to approach its plump and happy inhabitants with overly much in the way of intrusive coercion, especially so in matters of family and reproduction. Unbelievably enough, the ease of manufacturing new human beings did not see man become discardable and replacable like any old nut and bolt, but our sinful ancestors were selectively blind to the order of things, and for this they would suffer in the end. Everything worked like a great machine, and Man of Iron did the heavy lifting, while Abominable Intelligence did the rote thinking, while Man of Gold and Man of Stone grew in numbers, and everything seemed good to the ancients.

Such wicked bliss was destined to die in flames, of course. The baleful errors of ancient man converged at last with his willful blindness to produce first an interstellar firestorm of machine revolt, and then a hellstorm of psykers and howling Warp currents across the Milky Way galaxy. And so the monuments, academies and industries burned, and spires were toppled while orbital platforms crashed in a Ragnarök of massive death and destruction. Man was cut off from his kin across the stars, and man was reduced to nothing but a savage brute who fought ravenous cannibals and mutants with pointy sticks and looted weaponry hailing from paradisal days of yore. Old Night descended upon the charred worlds of man. Man fought man in a bloody freefall, and man ate his own kin in desperation. Such was the Age of Strife.

Such were the wages of sin.

Various tech for cloning and splicing genes were a hallmark of human civilization during the Golden Age of Technology. As with all the craft and lore of ancient man, only fragments and lacunae-ridden pieces of documents remain of the great scientific whole of genetic technology. Some gene-tech of old was clearly an abomination unto the human genome, including unholy crossbreeding with xenos from completely foreign lifesources, in unspeakable miscegenation and defilement of blood. Less revolting fleshly modifications were for the most part artificial adaptations to weird climates and biotopes under alien suns, or scientific whims and power fantasies pursued because man had the abilitiy to do so. The most common Golden Age tinkering with human DNA included widespread means for eliminating deformities, clogging veins, inherited disease and genetic predilections for mental unhealth, as well as the cultivation of smarter, stronger, more beautiful and less aggressive personalities on a biological level, to name but a few miracles of ancient techno-sorcery.

Needless to say, only fractured shards remain of these bio-enhanced peaks of human betterment and unnatural evolution. Many inheritable traits of genetic engineering have devolved into foul mutations and shunned abhuman strains, while others resulted in unforeseen genetic disease as the code of life shifted and changed under distant stars. Still other gene-tinkered characteristics became lost in the great sea of roiling human breeding, only visible as a faint imprint for scrutinizing Genetors, while some traits survive as local peculiarities of various human ethnos and tribes scattered across a million planets and uncountable voidholms. Some of the biological legacies of the Dark Age of Technology were ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated from mankind's genepool by rough warriors during the Age of Strife, or by increasingly hateful ordinary men, women and children in the ever-darkening Age of Imperium. Other fruits from the science of the ancients lived on as invaluable bloodlines of crucial personnel for human civilization to reach across the stars, for the Navigator gene of the insular Houses of the Navis Nobilite was crafted in those lost millennia of the misty past.

During Old Night, much of man's living knowledge about genetic engineering was preserved only by isolated groups of obsessed survivors, such as the Selenar gene-cults of Luna or in the hidden Himalazian laboratories of the Emperor on Terra. Some such insular communities would turn their shaky genetic expertise upon themselves and attempt to refashion their bodies to create a new and better human being, or to improve their chances of surviving in an increasingly hostile environment. An endless cavalcade of monstrous tragedies and bizarre freaks followed in the wake of such harebrained experiments, and many human tribes and techno-barbaric nations who sported some preserved gene-tech and functional bio-knowledge were ruthlessly purged in the Great Crusade in order to cleanse mankind of its accretion of malformed abominations, and start all over from a cleaned slate. Some dubious or outright forbidden paths of genetic engineering are still practiced by rare experts such as the renegade clonelord Fabius Bile and various sects within the parochial Adeptus Mechanicus. The Afriel strain of abhumanity is one such failed fruit of blundering experiments carried out in the ever more ignorant Age of Imperium. In short, mankind during the Golden Age of Technology had made man himself into clay in the hands of geneticists, but the most sublime and unholy gene-tech is long since lost.

Debased echoes of these advanced vitanoform fleshwork technologies are still practiced in rudimentary fashion by the Adeptus Mechanicus, that scavenging preserver of the scraps of the ancients. Indeed, this fanatical cult of machinery and metalcraft began as a cult for human survival, since knowledge of machines proved the difference between life and death as Mars and its life-sustaining systems collapsed at the onset of Old Night. The downfall of Martian civilization was incredibly swift, dependent as it was on a fragile ecosystem and shield generators to protect the populace from cosmic radiation. Yet pockets of survivors managed to scrape by, and among these desperate souls a new call went out. A call of salvation. The Cult Mechanicum promised shielding, water, energy and nutrition in the midst of ruination, cannibalism and rampant mutations. And the Cult Mechanicum delivered, through gruelling wars in red sands and wrecked spires after the planet of Mars had died its second death.

The Mechanicum always held man and his flesh in contempt, for the ability to construct, repair and operate machines enabled survival, not dilly-dallying about human frailty in the midst of baleful collapse. Evidently, the tech-priests of the Cult Mechanicum never hesitated about replacing limbs with bionic prosthetics or turning human beings into cyborg thralls. Yet even for all its disdain for weak flesh, the Mechanicum was from the very start a vehicle for human survival and rapid regrowth. During the Age of Strife, lulls would be observed in almost permanently turbulent Warp storms, and then the cunning priesthood of Mars would send out colonization fleets. Most of those ships that did survive to establish colonies, quickly saw its settler numbers grow at high speed, so that Mars and its isolated daughters over a course of thousands of years seeded many hundreds, or even thousands of forge worlds throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Many such occult industrial colonies would be inhabited by billions of people when the Expeditionary Fleets of the young Imperium of Man descended upon them, and the sheer power wielded by many such forge worlds emboldened them to stand up and fight for independence before the Emperor's brutal forces eventually overwhelmed the teeming Martian colonies.

Clearly, the Martian Mechanicum and its surviving offshoots had proven to be incredibly succesful during the ongoing human collapse of the Age of Strife, managing to not only hold their ground, but to expand aggressively and grow mightily in numbers through more than twohundred generations of destructive wars, constant Warp storms and alien predations. On some future forge worlds, the Mechanicum colonists found sizable numbers of native survivors, who had usually regressed to a pitiful state of existence. These worlds were conquered in bloody wars and forcefully converted to the ritual creed of the Cult Mechanicum, thus bolstering the number of settlers. Even so, press-ganging of indigenous savages and rapid natural population growth through having large families, would not fully explain the phenomenal success of Mars and her seeded worlds during the ravages of Old Night.

A high default rate of organic breeding on young Martian colonies was supplemented by various vitanoform fleshwork technologies, seeing billions of Mechanicum subjects enter life as vat-grown human creatures. Such techniques are to this day regularly employed on all large installations of the Adeptus Mechanicus in order to produce servitors, Skitarii and other human meat for grotesque rebuilding into living machines. Yet some forge worlds went further than that during the Age of Strife, and decided to maximize nativity from all sources in a systematic and orderly manner, thus adding to the population input of growth vats. And as the Age of Imperium has ground on in all its callous trampling of human life and ever-spiralling regression, ever more forge worlds have adopted a systematic schedule of mandatory artificial insemination, until it has become virtually a standard feature of the worlds and voidholms owned by the Adeptus Mechanicus throughout the Imperium. It is on this aspect of industrial reproduction of human populations that we shall now dwell, for it may tell us much about our species' life and industry in the darkest of futures.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is an empire within an empire, spanning thousands of forge worlds and millions of vassal voidholms. Its production and maintenance of ancient technology is absolutely crucial to the Imperium as a whole, and it possess far-reaching powers and ability to operate independently from the larger astral realms of the Throneworld. The Imperium of Man is founded upon the union of Mars and Terra in Sol system, its symbiosis encoded in the Treaty of Olympus Mons. While the cradle world of Terra stands as the eternal capital of mankind, Mars stands as its heart of science and technological knowhow, fostered in ancient times when the red planet was originally terraformed and colonized in circumstances that were most challenging to Man of Gold's still yet primitive technology and lore. Even though both Solar worlds and their holdings are marred by fanatic ignorance, hateful cruelty and post-apocalyptic regression, the Adeptus Mechanicus and its astral domains is a very different beast from the Terran Imperium proper.

To the Adeptus Mechanicus, crude life is nothing but a biological machine, inferior to the purity of cunning artifice, yet still carrying a soul that is the conscience of sentience. As a tyrannical cult of survival born in the most desperate crisis on Holy Mars, the Cult Mechanicus believes all thought of self to be dysgenic and contrary to our greater interests, and thus the individual must in every way be subjugated to the needs of the whole collective body. Just as a cog must serve its purpose in a great machine. A single man is nothing. The chosen human species is everything. And so the resourceful Adeptus Mechanicus, within its own vast domains, operates with a totalitarian power unheard of by most of the rest of the Adeptus Terra. For life is directed motion, and the Adeptus Mechanicus endeavours to control its direction. After all, is not all technology at the end of the day the harnessing of natural resources? Ferrum aeternum.

As such the Mechanicus will seize the means of reproduction. The creation of new human beings is just yet another form of industrial production, like so many others run by its heavily polluted forge worlds and millholms. All planets and larger factory and asteroid mining voidholms owned by the Martian Mechanicus needs to replace high die-off rates of their lowly human labour force, and likewise they need to ensure that new organics spring forth to bear blessed electrografts and bionic enhancements in a cycle of antique reusing. On top of a constantly high background mortality on lethal manufactoria floors, must be added sudden and massive industrial disasters such as chym floods, pandemics spawned by bio-leaks, detonations of fusion reactors, meltdown of fission, collapse of compounds, breakdown of shipside life support systems and a thousand other dangers inherent to Imperial industry. Opere necesse est, vivere non est necesse.

All this adds to the burdens of prognostication for Gedrosiarchs calculating workplace attrition rates, as do the construction of new facilities screaming for untold thousands upon thousands of labourers to keep the machines running, not to mention sudden and unpredictable requirements for more bodies by the Navis Mechanicus, the fleets of the red planet, its daughters, and all its holdings. It is likewise a volatile numbers game due to the sudden demand for more hands when machines break down beyond anyone's ability to repair, and previously automatized processes are replaced with human labour drones as a stopgap measure that soon grows permanent in nature. Such ravenous demand in the millions or even billions for more human toilers add up to an old Mechanicus practice of press-ganging large numbers of offworld humans from the Terran Imperium's overpopulated planets, keeping up a fluctuating yet continuous import of thralls in order to forestall an ever-looming threat of workforce drought forcing the rusting wheels of industry to grind to a halt. Thus slave labour of all ages are scooped up from other planets and voidholms, just like the Adeptus Mechanicus would do with minerals from mining or promethium from drilling. Vir est ore.

Nevertheless, most forge worlds and millholms tend to have long-term self-sustaining populations, even though offworld supply of warm bodies is necessary to quickly meet short-term spikes in demand or labour mortality. After all, there are to be found many factories for growing human beings in vats on any world of the Cult Mechanicus, and the population itself will usually breed like rats if given the chance. Often, however, that opportunity is not offered to the plebeians and menials by lordly tech-priests, for they usually run centralized breeding programs in order to maximize input, instead of trusting in random, sloppy rutting. Caro autem infirma.

Thus the toxic worlds and voidholms of the Adeptus Mechanicus will force their fecund workforce and clergy to do their part for the Motive-Force, and participate in rigorously scheduled artificial insemination programs, as well as eugenic projects of selective breeding for the initiated tech-priesthood. All this mirrors how agriculture would breed domestic animals. Man, after all, is but yet another resource to extract and exploit for the higher glory of the Omnissiah. Thus uncounted trillions of inhabitants on forge worlds and Mechanicus voidholms across the galaxy find themselves regularly subjected to primitive technology for artificial impregnation and seed extraction, the rate of which is determined by uncaring overlords festooned with spindly bionics who are able to adjust speed up or down just as they would the control instruments of engines and reactors. Deus est machina.

All this mechanistic ordering and generating of human life happens on entire worlds conquered and ravished by towering industry, where human corpses are but another waste product akin to chimney smoke and toxic discharges. Here, in edifices of raw power and industry, techno-theocrats marshall human and material resources on an unfathomable scale, drawing upon raw material extracted from dozens of worlds and tens of thousands of asteroids. Here, surrounded by the iconography of ancient engineering schematics and the heraldry of antique warning signs, insectile tech-priests and tech-priestesses raise their artificial voices in stanzas of machine cant, repeating mantras in triple digit cycles and intoning binary verses in couplets. Here, among the fires of industry and the roaring of furnaces, those inducted into mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus will prostrate themselves on the hard floor in veneration of sacred cogwheel icons, each sung oikos forming a larger hymn of alphanumerical acrostic to soothe troubled machine-spirits. Orbis et caminus.

Here, in hellish fabricator cathedrals and nightmarish refineries, are to be found the brainwashed masses of any forge world or millholm, the gears of industry lubricated by the suffering sweat and blood of innumerable toiling billions. They themselves have been reduced to little else than biological machine components without dignity or say, their bodies slotted into failing sections of debased tech, their reproductive cycles tamed and controlled by cyborg masters who put far more stock in swinging incense before venerable nanoprocessors and memory banks, than they do the wellbeing of their wretched inferiors. Here, in the toxic environments of polluted forge worlds, legions of short-lived menials succumb each and every hour, after grinding their lives away in shifts for some high and mighty overseer who barely knows they exist. They might die in vain. They might die in neverending toil. And they might die in astonishing numbers, yet the whole spiritual-industrial system of human production unit management is nevertheless working within acceptable parameters, for the Adeptus Mechanicus well know to fight off horrendous wastage and loss of human life through increasing input by all available means, whether organic or artificial. Hardships are to be endured. Challenges are to be overcome by the triumph of human willpower and devout sacrifice. The greater work must continue. Gloriam ad Omnissiah.

And so high mortality among menial castes are primarily staved off by vat-grown humans and mandatory programs of artificial insemination, supplemented by uncontrolled breeding and offplanet slave imports. In deadly mechanical manufactoria and lethal mills of alchemy on thousands of forge worlds and a vast array of client voidholms, are to be found faceless hordes of indoctrinated matres et patres, all mouthing mystical incantations, mantras of maintenance and catechisms of operation. Almost none of these ignorant parents will ever see their children, and fewer still will even know their progeny to be theirs when they see an overburdened errand juve scuttle past, buckling under the weight of fuel rods and replacements parts that it must carry to older labourers. These offspring will face a bleak and hard existence in the forges, just as their unknown parents do, and just as uncounted generations of hardworking menials and lay techfolk did before them in a long line of functional orphans.

Behold those wretched cretins, but cry no tears of pity over their plight, for empathy is shameful, the most base of crude emotions, an unworthy stirring of the spirit bereft of sacral logic and clever thought. The overriding commandment is to swell the numbers of the workforce, provide a rudimentary source of embryonic stem cells and increase the faithful flock. In an occult organization where the most devout seekers of knowledge and self-abnegation will replace their right brain half with a cogitator, there can be no value attached to weakling sentimentality. We can allow no corrosive compassion to tarnish our sentience as we comprehend the dehumanized numbers of statistical charts over labourers poisoned by chym or mysterious bio-chemistry. Nay, shun that frail instinct for mercy, for it is a trap of the flesh! Embrace instead the impersonal and magnificent truth on full display before our very eyes and ocular sensors: Witness the forge world.

Man has become infinitely malleable clay in the iron hands of machine. The crude world of the organic senses is nought but a rough approximation of the true reality of numbers and data, sung as a hymn of symmetry in the flawlessly analyzing processor-mind of the all-encompassing and all-knowing Machine-God. The music of the spheres is a cosmic symphony of cold arithmetics resonating in a room of perfect geometry, a binary orchestra of creation itself. Such is the real nature of the universe, and not the chaotic mess experienced by sinful mortals scrabbling in the dirt.

Why should we pay any heed to the protestations of fleshly lips and waggling tongues? It is so much white noise, fit only to be filtered out. Nay, behold instead the constructed perfection of valves and circuitry, and ken the righteous worship on display in devout processions among the machines. A myriad of convoluted techno-sects infest the body of the Cult Mechanicus, yet they all know that to break with ritual is to break with faith. The correct rites must be observed. Anoint thus the blessed mechanism with oil, and offer up the fragrance of sacred incense. All savants must know the techno-theological formulae and ritualistic words of activation. Any seeker of knowledge, learning and wisdom must be able to perform the correct rituals without fault. They must know how to process data and how to insert digital prayers, and they must rinse and repeat their cyclic attempts to win the favour of the machine-spirits in a stubborn display of religious fervour and dedicated intellect schooled by the Cult Mechanicus.

Thus the builders and knowers of mankind's finest craft have been reduced to hidebound zealots, their minds filled with superstition and slowly dissipating knowledge, even as their vox-cords give off a gibberish prattle of binary cant. The very ideas of their worldview and sectarian education are expressed in a poorly understood babble of High Gothic nomenclature inherited and scavenged from a long since past Golden Age of discovery and invention, when great minds where allowed to roam at large and crack open the secrets of the universe. Since then, man's regressed science and technology has slumped into pits of ignorance and fanatic dogma.

These tech-priests and tech-priestesses may be obsessed with cold logic and machine systems, yet simultaneously they will bow in blinkered worship of idols and pursue the ritualized riddles of arcane mysticism. Incredibly advanced databanks beyond the means of even the richest secular aristocrats have been filled with poorly processed hard information mixed with the garbled codes of digital shamanism and cultic creed. These curious souls, who once would have spearheaded humanity's hunt for its astral birthright, will instead recite binary mantras and litanies, lying prostrate in front of ritual tables of periodized elements and sacred charts of electronic circuitry handed down from a brighter age, when man knew how to make better out of himself. The organized state of humanity's best and brightest minds in the Age of Imperium is nothing short of a prison for thought itself, upheld by rigid dogma and the jealous slaying of anyone who would dare to challenge the unhinged status quo of deteriorating human knowledge guarded by an inept techno-theocracy hellbent on protecting its self-empowering monopoly.

As previously mentioned, rudimentary cloning technology derived from vitanoform and fleshvat lore of the ancients is still used by the Adeptus Mechanicus, yet it would be horrendously inefficient for the tech-priests not to also make use of the biological machinery of the operational human production units themselves. Waste not, want not. It is best to maximize input from a wide variety of sources, including vat-grown cloning of bodies, offworld press-ganging of slave labour, and natural human breeding. The latter, however, is usually rigorously controlled by artificial means and systematized into an ordered grid of rigid production schedules to better meet expected human wastage levels and future demand for labouring flesh. Only seldom will local sects of the Adeptus Mechanicus allow independent primal rutting to freely dictate the rhythm of body input into their monstrous calculations.

Unlike the Imperium proper of Holy Terra, the empire of the Adeptus Mechanicus do not believe in family. This primal organic unit is messy, unsystematized and disorganized, akin to a pigsty. Instead of parents and siblings, children on forge worlds and millholms will often grow up in a ladder of dismal institutions, where their age or evaluated productivity level dictates which rung in the ladder they find themselves in. The lowest rung of these functional orphanages will take care of infants who are usually given all the necessary nutrition, sleep and temperature regulation by lobotomized servitors, and yet still some babies wither away and die from lack of human contact, love and attention. Clearly, such weaklings were not fit for the rigours of life in the first place.

This neglect only intensifies as the toddlers are moved up into institutionalized units for the instruction and cultivation of small children. Instead of warmth and care, these liberi will be subjugated to ceaseless indoctrination, in order to better prepare them for their ordained roles within the Cult Mechanicus. Their first cerebral implants will be installed, the better to allow transfer of information directly into the children's skulls and waste as little time and resources as possible on mundane teaching. This short education will mainly deal with religious instruction fit for the most basic castes of the Machine Cult, as well as all manner of practical tech knowledge and the ability to read, write and calculate, to prepare the children for an early labour start on the floors of manufactoria and shipyards. The most promising pupils will be inducted into more prestigious institutions to prepare them for induction into the mysterious orders of the tech-clergy, where they will rub shoulders with the prodigious fruits of selective breeding and eugenics.

In order to foster a hardy spirit, supervisors will cultivate violence and fear in order to humiliate and control the children through draconic punishment. Electrical shocks and pain-inducing alchemical concoctions will be administered in full view of everyone else to misbehaving human progeny. Likewise, children found quarrelling will often be ordered to hit or taze each other as part of their disciplinary penalty, thus undermining any forming of close bonds between peers that might act contrary to subservience to the Cult Mechanicus. Older kids will usually steal away opportunities to hit and kick smaller ones, often as an outlet for their own frustrations and repressed aggression, thereby cultivating a virtuous cycle of violence against those younger than themselves. Thus the spawn of man is taught to be ruthless and to hate from an early age. To further promote the overbearing sense of isolation and mechanistic, inevitable cruelty, novitiates, federii and liberi will never be notified in advance when they are to be moved from one institution to another section, for they will be moved around like boxes, without personal belongings and without any chance to say goodbye to anybody they might have known. Inter-human attachments must not be formed, for that way the feebleness of flesh lies over yonder.

The entire environment of upbringing within the juvenile institutions of the Adeptus Mechanicus amounts to children being wiped out as human beings, their voices silenced, their weak selves humiliated, their wills broken. Only by dissolving the personalities of tender humans in such slaughterhouses of souls can a new and better man be built, one filled with zealous adherence to the Credo Omnissiah and one capable of becoming as one with the machine, both in body and mind. What use do children have for their mothers and fathers? What use do plebeians have for knowing their relatives? All relevant data are as a rule mapped out in genealogical pedigrees of controlled breeding, available only to the concerned blessed experts who can enter the correct clearance codes. This cold and mechanical treatment of human youngsters contributes greatly to moulding the subjects of the Cult Mechanicus into faceless numbers in enormous masses of replacable human machine components.

Weak-willed outsiders might find this arrangement to be joyless, resulting in a life bereft of tender contact and human warmth. Mayhap it will even result in raising generations upon generations lacking the finer things in life altogether. Such nonsense is not even worth the dignity of dismissive answer. No, listen not to the white noise of infidels and barbarian ignoramii. Let there be an unsentimental harvest and planting of seed, for the flesh is weak. We must strive to become one with the machine, act the machine, be the machine, even if scraps of flesh and organs still cling to our forms. The machine moves in patterns of mathematical exactitude and purposeful repetition, and so should we do as well in matters of the flesh.

Get rid of your delusions of the flesh, for they will lead you astray from the deeper reality hidden beneath the dull exterior that your unreceptive optic organs perceive in their state of half-blindness, ignorant as your ocular organs are to pure expressions of true reality such as observable heat differences and the spectrum of light. Shun illogical thought of self, for how could a wheel revolt against the axle around which it rotates? Purge irrational vanity, for how could a transmission belt care for its appearance? Form is but a manifestation of function, and there is no other beauty in all of creation than sacred function, just as there is no higher mystery outside the sacred reach of pure, unadulterated knowledge.

Thus man on thousands of forge worlds and innumerable vassal voidholms will be produced on an industrial scale, akin to machines making other machines. A higher system of reproductive engineering has replaced untamed patterns of feral copulation. The purity of cold calculation has replaced the abominable fragility of emotion, and so humans are extracted of their seed and impregnated routinely like one would inseminate domesticated grox and other cattle in agriculture. When speaking of this process, we must naturally exclude those human production units who have been chem-gelded, organ-crushed or otherwise rendered sterile and barren. Such impotent conditions may usually come about either in all-too common industrial accidents, or as a normal genetic hygiene punishment for repeated work failures that attract the judging eyes of superiors (although servitorization is a far more common measure), in order to not promote the passing on of undesirable traits to future generations of menials. For if the machine pool of a facility is to be cleaned and maintained with regularity, then surely the labour pool servicing the machines must be likewise cleaned and maintained without failure?

And so the servants of Mars and all its daughter holdings are created in coordinated breeding programs, where inception, gestation and delivery performs like oiled clockwork. On some forge worlds and voidholms of the Adeptus Mechanicus, this entire procedure is mechanically automatized into something resembling a rolling assembly line with strapped human bodies being processed at high speed, while at other places a simple queue to a large facility for mass extraction or injection will suffice. Know that the need for comfort is a false craving of the flesh. Rank within the Cult Mechanicus will determine the insemination process. Among both males and females, lowly menials and lay tech-folk will routinely have their arms and legs locked to a moveable hard table during the mechanical procedure in order to forestall any time-inefficient thrashing about of potential unwilling slaves, while Cult members inducted into the tech-priesthood and its arcane mysteries will be expected to fully understand the order of things and thus comply piously without any need for restraints.

As to the human produce of such scheduled factory programs, the small bodies of children make for poor labourers, while their young brains make for simple servitors. Although there are many tasks that are lightweight and menial enough to entrust to a child, such little work do not invite much else than dismissive views from the Adeptus Mechanicus. After all, the desired end product is a fully grown human production unit, whereas childhood stands as nothing but a time-consuming obstacle to the labour replenishment process.

Thus crops of despised and inefficient children will often be injected with variably volatile growth stimulants to accelerate their maturation into peak fitness juves and adults of far better efficiency levels than childishly undeveloped offspring possess. Still, children and tender juves can be put to reasonably heavy work and run errands for adult labourers. And so children can be seen scrabbling about inside great machines, where they pick cotton in textile factorum cathedrals, their work rhythm set to the precarious pulse and sudden thrusts of raking machinery that they must nimbly avoid at their own peril. Such utterly dangerous child labour is all beneficial to the running of the Great Machine, and thus it must never be shied away from. And as man in the far future has come to replace more and more machine tasks with manual labour, the industrial uses for children have slowly grown in number over the fivehundred generations that make up the Age of Imperium. For instance, the small bodies of liberi are well suited to claustrophobic labour tasks such as minor chimney sweeping, cleaning out nooks and cranies of lethally active machines in operation, and the horrible drudgery and crawling to cleanse pipes and large hoses from the inside, in which case bestial pipe lurkers are sometimes lying in wait for an easy prey to slowly devour alive, out of sight, out of mind. And so the pipe-cleaning kid may themself end up clogging the arteries of manufactoria.

Brainwashed Cult Mechanicus children who grow up in age cohorts under strict discipline and adult scorn, will receive electrografts and other cerebral bionic implants for efficient information downloading and educative installation directly into their tender brains. Electrografts and other cerebral tech implants were often originally designed with a rudimentary simulated intelligence in order to learn their tasks increasingly well over time so that they would improve function and efficiency over generations of irrelevant fleshly human carriers. Yet nowadays many cheaper electrografts decay over time and gradually turn the human production unit first irritable, then erratic, and finally insane. Neither the Imperium of Holy Terra nor the empire of the Adeptus Mechanicus sworn to Holy Mars have much patience for teaching plebs. For lay tech-folk and other lowly specialists it is far better to surgically implant hardware and quickly install software containing the necessary technical knowledge, rather than wasting years and years on proper education, teaching through hands-on practice and a thorough understanding of subject matters. Why would limited resources be wasted on pampering to such shortlived human components when more efficient means are available?

This entire approach to learning is but one sclerotic reason among many as to why the Imperium of Man in general and the Adeptus Mechanicus in particular will not be a source of human innovative renaissance, and thus mankind has wasted ten precious millennia of interstellar empire on stagnating into senility when it should have bounced back into a self-rejuvenating virtuous cycle of boundless scientific curiosity and confident technological development. And so Tyranid hive fleets are now falling upon the Milky Way galaxy like so many fangs sinking into the soft belly flesh of weak prey, all the while baleful eradicators of ancient times awake on thousands of Necron tomb worlds, set to harvest all life for themselves as they once did during the War in Heaven. Thus the human species in the far future is doomed to fight a losing war against forces mighty beyond imagination, trapped in a dysfunctional colossus on feet of clay that has regressed into a fortified interstellar madhouse filled with ignorant fanatics and selfserving overlords whose mercilessly harsh measures have proven counterproductive to a lunatic degree.

And so the decline of human power continues unabated in the Milky Way galaxy, for mankind stands horribly ill prepared to face the forces of doomsday, and the best and the brightest of humanity's experts on science and technology have been reduced to little more than ranting witch doctors and ignorant scavengers of antique fossils. In the face of this rising tide of doom, the Adeptus Mechanicus' quest for the holy grail of an intact Standard Template Constructor or STC archive has intensified to never before seen levels, and explorators backed by billions of Skitarii and other armed forces of the Cult Mechanicus are now scouring the galaxy for any clue of archeotech hidden beneath the earth, or searching for treasures drifting through space, or excavating for artefacts and techno-relics forgotten beneath the polluted foundations of hive cities that once soared to the high heavens as idyllic arcologies of shining splendour.

See, then, the Imperium of Man for what it is, in all its fanatic savagery. The union of Terra and Mars that the Imperator forged during the Great Crusade has resulted in a primitive astrotechnological civilization which has been leaking human knowledge for fivehundred generations, akin to a wounded man slowly bleeding out. Bear witness to the ramshackle huts and crude edifices built upon the wreckage of former glories, constructed along the lines of engineering lore born out of ancient discoveries cloaked in mystery and enigma to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Ever since the Golden Age of Technology ended, mankind has been reverting to an ever worsened state of being in a grinding spiral of descendant degeneration, broken only by brief resurgences of Imperial recovery and succesful manufacturing of ancient human technology.

Scan the Imperium of Man in general, and the Martian empire of forge worlds and millholms ruled by the Adeptus Mechanicus in particular. Be cognizant of the flood of deadly hate. Watch how rueful man like a machine tool will be made to conform to the movements and requirements of engines, just like a cardan shaft must in order to function properly. The freewheeling powers of cognition have been robbed from the human mind, and locked in an abhorrent straitjacket of ignorant dogma, strict surveillance and limited thought. No wonder so many despairing souls turn insane in this living nightmare of lost hope. In the Age of Imperium, the lofty dreams inherent to the human heart have died a baleful death of dystrophy and decay. See the pitiful state of man, toppled from his soaring pedestal of yore. O, how the mighty have fallen! Behold a paradise lost.

And so degraded mankind stumbles onward, in service to its own rotting interstellar empire. Within this cosmic domain can be found a scattered realm of sheer industry, where man himself has become a factory process like any other. Here, endless hordes of toiling men, women and children will have their body parts callously replaced with machinery. Here, the blinkered masses are ruled by minds of metal and wheels, for it is a starspanning realm of cold numbers and lifeless calculations, of heartless equations and grinding machinery churning out an endless stream of ever more primitive products to prop up a dysfunctional theocratic dictatorship. Here, in the holdings of the red planet, man is become more machine than a being of flesh and blood, and he will brutally force his own round life to fit into a square slot.

All the precision and cunning artifice of the Adeptus Mechanicus amounts to reduce man to nothing but a replacable machine component, one that will be pragmatically installed, without ever asking for his irrelevant thoughts on the matter, into a vast and intricate system of movings levers, pistons and pumps. Here, man's lot is toil neverending, toil ever burdensome, toil ever grinding. Man's progeny is birthed through a mechanistic arrangement of industrial reproduction, in thrall to statistical sheets balancing input and output of life for the sake of running machines. Here, amid endless rows of towering factories, man is but another material piece of inventory in facilities filled with siphons, conveyor belts and all manner of enigmatic techno-arcana. Man is but dust in the shadow of roaring furnaces and crackling tesla coils, but yet another resource to be consumed with the indifference of a heart of stone.

And so, on thousands upon thousands of forge worlds, man is laid out upon the anvil and hammered into a shape fit for workshop purposes. He is thus reshaped and crafted, to eventually be discarded like a broken tool once he has served his purpose and his mind and body are no longer fit for endless toil. The cycle of organic life itself has been made subject to dehumanizing mechanisms and engineered systems as but yet another manufactorum process among many others. Here, in the darkest of futures, man has constructed for himself nothing short of hell on earth, where man be both its tormentor and tormented. Perhaps, in a weak moment in the darkest of nights or lightsouts, some few of the masters and rulers of mankind will recognize this faltering edifice of human suffering and pointless misery for what it truly is. Yet even then, they are bound to conclude that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

Thus the dizzying prospects of the brief human renaissance offered by the Emperor's Great Crusade has run into the sand, and long since disappeared beneath the uncaring dunes of oblivion. In their stead, man has earned for himself ten thousand wasted years of eroding science and decaying technology, of ever more primitive industry and worsening demechanization of human civilization across the stars. Man has fashioned for himself an aeon filled with ten thousand years of shackled thought, where the best and the brightest of his species can do naught else but dig for buried treasure and pray for deliverance. Ten thousand years of purging freeminded deviants and infidels. Ten thousand years of rusting stagnation, where occult mysteries have replaced the diligent research of yore.

Do not avert your eyes from the etiolated ugliness on full display, but witness instead how a degenerate feedback loop of despondent fatalism has replaced the optimist spirit that served the ancients so well. The demented ramblings of feverish fanatics have taken over where once doubtfilled criticism and rigorous testing of theories held sway. Know this, and never forget that interstellar empires are absolutely dependent on their mastery of science and technology. Man has long since lost the ball in this great game, and his eyes refuse to see, just as his mind refuse to comprehend.

This is the Imperium of Man. This is the demise of hope, the broken promise of humanity's birthright, the death of a dream. In these dying years of senile mankind, humanity shines as a flickering candle light soon about to be quenched by the maws of a suffocating darkness.

All this transpires, in a demented epoch, where man is bred by force.

In an age of decay, where man has harnessed himself under the yoke.

In an era of doom, at the end of our species.

Such is the horror that awaits us all.

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


- - -

Inspired by Jchrispole's first human children of the dark future piece.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/26 14:19:17


Post by: Skinflint Games


Dude, you took The Handmaid's Tale and cranked it so far past 11 ***applause*** love these, keep 'em coming :-),


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/02/27 20:38:18


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thank you most kindly! Much appreciated, it helps me keep going.




Krak-Lance

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is used up by his own weapon.

Across a galactic realm of tenhundredthousand worlds and voidholms without number, human tongues tell an archaic tale of the brave hero who laid down his own life in service to master or country, or to kith and kin. This martial archetype may have died to protect his home or to exact vengeance upon a hated foe of superior might, and he may have slain his enemy or bought his comrades time by his selfless deed. The details vary greatly, and it will often be part of a larger myth cycle, one rivetting episode among others. But the story is always the same at its core, for it is the never-dying myth of the self-sacrificing warrior, a primordial saga that reverberates in the hearts of men, women and children alike, for they all know it to be true, deep down in their very blood and bones. This has happened innumerable times before, and will keep occuring for as long as man draws breath. For as long as life exists.

After all, hardship and struggle remain an integral part of the human condition, born out of a harsh universe of limited resources where might makes right. This primitive peril and adventure has never once died in the human heart, for even at the peak of human power and prosperity during the Dark Age of Technology did man venture boldly into the unknown, willing to lay down his own life to break new ground across the stars and protect his family and fellow settlers from unspeakable terrors. Even on the wealthiest and safest of worlds had this spirit of self-sacrifice not died, for there has always been firemen and volunteers of courage that throw themselves into danger to save others during disasters. Bravery may ever come to the fore in trying times, however brief they may be.

Likewise, a more peaceful and less intense form of self-sacrifice held sway among many of the most intrepid members of the human species during this long-lost golden age, for did they not willingly dedicate their long lives to ceaseless research and scientific toil and discovery when they could could have easily kicked back and relaxed instead, thus whiling away their allotted centuries in a morass of idle plenty? The stubborn spirit of the hero who offers up himself for a higher cause truly do lives on in man, and may be glimpsed at work virtually anywhere if one knows what to look for, even if its example is often less stark and direct than the sight of a valiant mortal who throws himself bodily before the blazing mouths of enemy guns in order to allow his brothers in arms to conquer a fortified hostile war-nest.

This innate potential for heroic deed and heroic death, in spite of fear and the biological drive for self-preservation, is present in virtually any sentient species to be found across the teeming Milky Way galaxy, for none of them had the idyllic luxury to evolve in an environment bereft of violence and danger. Some of them may have built paradises for themselves, but they always originated from harrowing trials and strife. Sometimes, mad bravery may prove the best way to overcome and survive a hopeless situation, and even if the gutsy martyr did not live to tell of the tale, their kin may very well have been saved by the hero's bold action and defiance of death itself.

Such spirited deeds and scorn for both life and death have always been highly sought after and praised by rulers and their hosts, for such unlikely action can swing the course of conflict and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Naturally, the rewarding of heroics with material benefits and immortal fame in story and song will serve as both a bait and incentive to encourage others to follow the example of that plucky man of action or heroine who everyone looks up to for their reckless daring. Propaganda is usually built upon shaming or inspiring your own side with the worthy deeds of outstanding warriors and other heroes, or by summoning wrath and bitter hatred for the enemy by telling tales of his worst atrocities, regardless of the truth behind such narratives. Fostering a sense of danger will in itself encourage the desired response from populace and military alike, thereby mustering support, strengthening morale and bolstering the war effort both on the line of fire and at the home front.

Yet an overwhelming threat may at worst engender despair, doomsaying and defeatism among many on your side. Such creeping malaise is best checked with unexpected success, and failing that a second best alternative would be the remarkable heroism of one's own warriors when faced with dreadful odds. After all, everyone respects strength and daring. And so human tales of audacious servo-hackers, clankwreckers, infiltrating saboteurs and selfless guerilla warriors flourished during the devastating war against the Cybernetic Revolt launched by man's former servants. Some of these machine war legends have been passed down in distorted form through eighteenthousand years of unsteady human deterioration across the stars. Such sagas have usually been bastardized in forgotten eras by unknown storytellers, yet a hard kernel of truth still remains, around which the malleable narrative is ever re-spun through centuries upon centuries of tinkering oral tradition.

One type of the most ancient legends that is still heard on tens of thousands of worlds and millions of voidholms, is that of humble men, women and children who charge straight into the lethal arms of the Men of Iron, armed with nothing but simple spears and suicidal demolition charges. The sight of such forlorn hopes must have branded themselves onto the collective memories of innumerable human cultures, and their faded imprint is still etched onto the vast flora of myths and legends that abound across the Imperium of Man. Yet their sheer longevity through turbulent aeons may have been aided by certain contemporary visual refreshing keeping the deed relevant in the minds of storytelling humanity, for such desperate means are still commonplace in the star-spanning domains of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra.

Aside from explosive belts employed by the Human Bombs of the Penal Legions, there exist a plethora of self-destructive arms throughout the Imperium. For instance, the advanced technology behind plasma weaponry is poorly understood, and any wielder of such devices of techno-sorcery runs a high risk of dying a gruesome death in superheated plasma, should their armament overheat. Similar dangers abound with all manner of sophisticated weapon systems, many of which can no longer be produced anew by ignorant man. At the other end of the technological spectrum can be found such crude and cheap devices, that activating them will engulf the wearer in the flaming shockwave of their single-use weapon.

One such piece of military equipment is the noble krak-lance, which is inhabited by the most simple of machine-spirits, for its make is exceedingly straightforward and it requires only a short litany to soothe and activate. This lunge mine is a common weapon of the Astra Militarum, as well as uncounted Planetary Defence Forces and Voidholm Militias alike. A krak-lance is a suicidal anti-tank weapon for infantry forces. It constitutes a rudimentary piece of equipment, being nought but a conical hollow charge anti-tank mine attached to a shaft. Its operation in the field consists of the user pulling out the safety pin to arm the high explosive charge, and then rushing forward to thrust the mine against an enemy vehicle or heavy infantryman in the same manner as one would do in a bayonet charge. If the strike is true, the death-spear will blow up its user and hopefully also the armoured foe, Emperor willing.

This primitive item in the Imperial arsenal is a child of many names, with various patterns existing throughout the wide-reaching astral realm of the Imperator. Its design is always simple and cheap in order to allow for ease of mass-production, and it is a weapon as expendable as the troopers that wield it. As with so many other depraved tools of self-sacrifice upon the battlefield, the stick o' martyrs do not seem to have been used at all by Imperial forces during the Great Crusade of M30, though the krak-lance may possibly have been used by some rundown, ragtag militias in the Unification Wars on parched Terra. Instead, such crude armaments as the hastam et hostia only entered Imperial service in the darkest hours of desperation during long since forgotten wars in millennia past, and the widow rod eventually became standard fare for ever larger portions of the regressing Imperial Guard and local garrison forces.

The one-use yari is issued by the Departmento Munitorum to millions of Astra Militarum regiments every Terran standard year. The krak-lance is a fine expression of the widely held cult of the offensive that is so dominant in Imperial military doctrine, for it requires the soldier to charge into close-quarters combat with self-denying bravery and forcefully ram the piercing thunderbolt against some of the deadliest ground weapon systems deployed by the enemies of mankind. Such sacrificial spearmen stand as a testament to how utterly desensitized man has become in the dark future, for man routinely sends out fellow man with suicide weaponry against his many foes without even blinking.

After all, the sacrifice of the self is a fundamental creed in Imperial modes of thinking, and what better way to demonstrate your complete reverence and allegience to the sacred rule of His Divine Majesty and the Emperor's appointed deputies, than to charge the foe with a suicide doru in hand, and with no hope of surviving even if you land a killing blow and win the martial contest? Some Imperial commanders of a suspiciously pragmatic mindset have occasionally voiced their doubts over the military value of thrust-bombs, yet their borderline heretical protestations against claimed inefficiency are doomed to be quenched by every high-ranking and right-thinking worshipper of the God-Emperor in close vicinity. For at the end of the day, this stock item in the Imperial Guard arsenal is more a proof of the soldiers' eager loyalty unto death, than it is a reliably effective weapon system. No army can conquer the galaxy, but faith can overturn the universe.

And surely self-destructive displays of valour and die-hard loyalism are to be encouraged among the rank and file, just as it is to be praised everywhere they occur within the Imperium of Man? It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself. And why should we discourage virtuous self-sacrifice of our warriors when the blood of martyrs has enabled His cosmic dominion to last without interruption for over ten thousand years? Clearly, we must allow true servants of the God-Emperor the chance to die a heroic death which will establish their loyalist convictions beyond the shadow of a doubt. Let us purify mankind.

After all, refusal to bear the anti-armour krak-lance is a dead giveaway sign of treacherous deviancy and thought of self, all abominable sins! Indeed, even better than a summary execution to set an example and uphold unit discipline at the front, may be the blessed opportunity to cruelly torture the wretch and find out if any relatives, neighbours or comrades of theirs are involved in wider plots against the shining light of Imperial rule. And so the lunge mine remains a trusty lithmus test for loyalty among Imperial infantrymen, as they grip this anti-vehicle weapon that is also used against heavily armoured infantry and light makeshift fortifications in urban warfare and shipboard purges. Some who think too much might sneer at the callous waste of life by having quirites blowing themselves apart just to take down a barricaded door or blast through a wall inside a building, yet their exemplary devotion to the Terran Imperator and visible obedience to their masters and betters will inspire fortitude in their fellow soldiers, thus feeding a virtuous cycle of courage and honour.

Thus the krak-lance remains a common piece of wargear in the armoury of the Astra Militarum and numberless local Planetary Defence Forces and Voidholm Militias across the interstellar realms of the Master of Mankind. This crude suicide stick stand as a roaring witness to the Imperium of Man's propensity toward throwing bodies at a problem with an unmoved heart of stone, as the corrupt and indifferent grey bureacrats of the Adeptus Terra juggles vast numbers of billions of human lives at a time, all part of a broken calculation to feed the ravenous meatgrinder of endless wars. All an everyday sacrifice upon the altar of war for the lord of hosts and leader of the people. All fuel for that Imperial fire which must never go out.

Such are futile deaths of countless soldiers of the Imperium, all cannon fodder sent into grinding wars of attrition under alien suns, never to return home. No wonder recruitment into the Astra Militarum is often accompanied by both communal celebration and funerary rituals within the clan or kinsgroup for the local men, women and children who are called under arms to Imperial service. Exceedingly few will die in peaceful retirement out of uniform, much less return to their homeworld or voidholm of birth from distant war zones.

And so warriors sworn to die for their species and lord will grip shafts tipped with heavy bombs far more potent than any ordinary explosive lance used by Rough Riders. These footsoldiers' issued spears are all demented weapons, born out of desperation in bygone conflicts, yet their horror and violence is not dimmed in the slightest by their ancient origin and storied tradtion. Thus the doughty men-at-arms will shout their battlecry to the heavens, their throats dry from dust and smoke. They will yell at the top of their lungs, with blood pumping loudly in their ears and adrenaline setting them on edge: For the Emperor! Their warcry will resound, yet often their earnest last words will be swallowed by an orchestra of death and ruination, for the deafening cacophony of war will rip apart words and minds alike.

In this din, the fanatic spearmen will run as fast as they can, in an insane onrush through fire and shrapnel. They will race each other in degenerate contest to the looming target, even as it vomits death and mutilation around it without abandon. Maybe some of them will even make it to their target, and maybe their sacrifice will bite with lethal power into the hated enemy. Perhaps. Their death, however, is almost assured, for the directed detonation of the krak-lance carries a powerful backwash that is almost guaranteed to doom its carrier. Even when triumphant, they will lie dead on the ground by suicide, their bodies blasted apart, their crushed innards leaking through ragged clothing, their eyes glazed and unseeing. And so on thousands upon thousands of embattled worlds and voidholms, Imperial infantry can be seen charging against firespitting enemy vehicles and plated brutes with krak mines mounted upon long handles, as if plucked out of a nightmare vision of primordial hunters swarming hulking behemoths with spears.

Such hellish savagery reveals at last the true face of the Imperium of Man, for under its gilt sacral mask of defending humanity against a galaxy full of hostile monsters, can be seen a monster in its own right, a bloodthirsty predator on the prowl, a raging zealot willing to sacrifice everything and everyone in order to achieve its primitive goals. Its propaganda may glory in its martyred heroes, for the rulers always want the ruled to praise them, yet its bottomless depravity will never end, for the Imperium of Man will trample human life underfoot and take the self-sacrifice of its subjects for given. The terror will never end. The carnage will never end.

If they are lucky, then a rare few quirites who fell for their own krak-lances will pass into legend, their famed deeds destined to join human folklore's tales of self-killing warriors of the misty past, joining the ranks of ancient heroes who gave up their own lives in the greater struggle against towering foes and metal behemoths. This alone may be their legacy.

And so crude tools of suicidal combat will be employed in default methods by an interstellar tyranny of a million worlds and countless voidholms. Here, the degraded state of man means that he will willingly slay himself in order to bring down his enemy, in a baleful spiral of degeneration and bloodshed grinding ever lower into the pit of oblivion man finds himself mired in, without a hope of clawing himself out of.

For in the Age of Imperium, man has become as expendable as the ammunition he carries in a magazine.

All this transpires, in a ruthless empire decaying among the stars.

In a fevered time of unending evil and slaughter.

In an insane epoch where hope has long since perished.

Such is man's lot in the darkest of futures, trapped in an arena of raging mortals where only the screams of those about to die can be heard on the wind. The screams of the damned.

And the laughter of thirsting gods.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/08 22:04:15


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Hit Them Twice

In the grim darkness of the far future, injured man is slain to save on costs.

Across hundreds of thousands of worlds and innumerable voidholms in the Imperium of Man, a dispersed myriad of folktales and legends tell of skywains that never once touched the ground, and of horseless carriages borne aloft on invisible wings who drove themselves wherever man so pleased, dipping in and out of the void with ease. Sometimes, such a techno-steed would prove a loyal companion to the hero, or even offer sage advice. In other sagas, the decadent failings of tech-dependent humans or the lurking malice of machine intellect would bring ruin and tragedy upon everyone involved. Whatever the narrative, all such myths carry a distorted memory from the Dark Age of Technology, that pinnacle of human achievement and innovation that saw wonders undreamt of become a reality in a fountain of optimism gushing forth from the wellsprings of science.

For in that long since past epoch of paradise, the clever contraptions of man would bolt past him on the streets, carry him into the heavens and dive under the sea, smooth as silk. Man's horseless wagon during the Dark Age of Technology was not only a marvel of engineering, but also a mass-produced luxury available to everyone, no matter how lowly and wretched they might be. Yet the sleek and fully automatized hover vehicles run by Abominable Intelligence have long since been replaced by rougher constructs handled manually by human hands, or even a regressed echo of self-driving in the form of vehicular servitors. The silent robotic traffic of yore has been replaced by an angry din of engines, protesting brakes and shouting drivers, all hurrying along in an aching rush through clouds of smog and exhaust.

In contrast to the aerodynamic creations of ancient human history, Imperial vehicles tend to be blunt, crude and rugged pieces of work, made for ease of construction and field modification as well as for sheer longevity in service, often being driven by many generations from the same bloodline. Imperial designs often combine intricate artifice with a brutal aspect. In contrast to Imperial models common throughout Terran holdings in the Milky Way galaxy, many human vehicles of local designs are often flimsy and cheap, though some retain vague echoes of the technical finesse and flowing forms of vehicles during the Dark Age of Technology.

Even though automobiles of different sorts exist on most Imperial worlds, private cars are rare indeed. License and permit seals are required in order to own a vehicle, and whosoever sport enough wealth, contacts, influence and ability to bribe the right officials in order to gain the warrant, is also rich enough to have their own chauffeur and armed guards. Such propertied betters have no need to themselves drive their expensive vehicle, even though certain well-off daredevils will gladly put themselves behind the wheel or steering rods to chase each other on roads and streets in breakneck contests that often cost the lives of people, both among the race competitors themselves and of surrounding folks such as bystanders, hut dwellers and plebeian drivers in flimsier rides. Some private transport for masters and mistresses are not steered by trained drivers, but are instead controlled by prestigious lobotomized cyborg thralls according to antique automatized driving systems, whose wetware has usually deteriorated through millennia of worsening production capabilities and decaying technical expertise among those schooled in technotheology.

Popular private motoring is virtually unheard of across the length and breadth of the Imperium. Across a million human worlds and uncountable voidholms, it is extremely rare for hoi polloi among Imperial subjects to have any access whatsoever to private cars. In part, such wasteful vehicles for the dirty masses would require a lot of limited resources to construct, maintain and refuel, and the Imperium of Man will always prioritize its civilian vehicles far lower than its crucial military hardware. And as the centuries grind on in an ever downward spiral, both fuel and industrial capacity increasingly needs to be ruthlessly shovelled into the war effort, as the Imperium draws ever closer to its breaking point. In part, it is also easier to control humans if their mobility can be restricted.

Owning your own means of easy transport is a great liberty and indulgence of self, and why would the High Lords of Terra and their legions of haughty representatives across the galaxy ever wish for such deviancy to be inflicted upon mankind? Private automobiles may all too easily turn into vessels of deviancy and apostasy. Indeed, the freedom of choice in travel that many humans knew during many periods in the misty Age of Terra and the sinful Dark Age of Technology, would in itself invite to heresy in the Age of Imperium, for is not heresy per definition the act of choosing your own beliefs? By fostering a closed and strictly controlled material milieu without free choice on offer, the very potential for heresy and its spread is curtailed. Ownership of a groundcar equals freedom of movement, and why should the Imperium ever want to grant any of its subjects freedom?

Indeed, crowd control and strict regulation of movement is a pivotal aspect of Imperial architecture, urban planning, landscape engineering, policing and bureaucratic functions. On many planets and moons it is illegal to build and maintain roads, viaducts, highways, canals, vacuum tunnels, aerodromes, starports and mag-rails without permission granted from the Imperial Governor of that world. This state of affairs hold sway because it is difficult to mobilize armies and advance in a lightning strike to suddenly topple the current rulers without good infrastructure in place. How many times have not the Imperium's own roads, railways and other networks of transportation been used by its hated foes in order to rapidly move their forces about to the detriment of pious loyalists?

Dirty mass transit in the form of large, overcrowded omnibuses, trains, tubes, tramcars, cable railways, ferries and mass elevators sees to the collective movement needs of the vast majority of the populace, beyond common walking on their two Emperor-given human feet, of course. Mechanized civilian traffic in the Imperium mainly consists of utilitarian transports and armoured vehicles. Ill-repaired roads and streets are usually clogged by vehicles such as trucks, overburdened buses and bulletproof limos, as well as armoured vehicles in the service of law enforcement, various militaries, noble Houses, and a plethora of authorities both Imperial and local.

As for the common armoured vehicles seen across the Imperium of Man, these comprise heavy cars such as urbecarri and Standard Template Construct (STC) vehicles like the Trek Wain, Iron Ox and Huss Cricket. Armoured groundcars likewise include luxury rides such as a plethora of limos and the rough terrain-going Salon Royale, as well as armoured personnel carriers like the common Rhino, Chimera and Taurox. Some of these armoured ground vehicles are wheeled, others tracked, and some are even halftracked in order to enable truck drivers to quickly take over the reins without lengthy instruction. The Imperium, after all, do not set great stock in unnecessary education for plebeians, which is sneered at as a foul waste of time and resources spilled on short-lived peasants.

Armoured vehicles of all sorts usually sport discreet weaponry, since so much of Imperial territories are dangerous and wild places even at the best of times, with feuding clans, hostile tribes and toxic neighbour communities hating each others' guts, as well as downtrodden malcontents lashing out against their overlords. Even during times of peace, there may be regular riots, bandit attacks, bombings, highway piracy and assassinations. Rival sects and cults both Imperial and forbidden vie with each other for influence, and such sectarian clashes of interest, regional pride, leadership personalities and ideas often spill over into bloody vendettas with entrenched arch-enemies attacking each other for many centuries or even millennia of cyclic conflict, the original cause of which may long since have been forgotten, and yet still the violent struggle continues.

Among the lower castes, their practical work vehicles are often owned by wealthy patrons or Guilds, and rented at an ungainly price by desperate clients, rather than being owned by the unwashed craftsmen and petty market traders themselves. Another common arrangement for those who drive shoddy work vehicles, is for the lay techmen, plumbers, peddlers, truckers, draymen and bemokarls to either themselves be legally owned as indentured servants by nobles or Guild associations, or stand in another form of multi-generational indebtitude as freedmen required to serve their gracious overlords after being granted a higher legal status once their monetary debt was somehow paid off or manumitted. Needless to say, the freedmen's vehicles are still owned by their former slave masters, who receive a hefty cut of all freedman income. Only the most succesful of petty tradespeople could ever hope to rise high enough to themselves buy and own the vehicle they drive to work in, due to a highly corrupt administration if nothing else.

A fair number of the multifarious vehicle designs to be found across the vast width of the Imperium of Man are STC models, with rugged reliability proven on most habitable types of worlds and with universal replacement parts to be found across wideranging sectors of Imperial space. Many other vehicle designs will be of local patterns, which may be both more primitive or more advanced than the Standard Template Construct rides. The main disadvantages with locally produced vehicles include reliance on natively made parts or fuel that may be impossible to get ahold of off-world, not to mention a lack of reliability in alien climates and terrain types which the vehicles were never designed for.

On many worlds and on some of the largest voidholms, various exotic vehicle types such as skimmers, cargo-walkers, hovercraft, screw-propulsors, aerosleds or mag-chariots may be found in the local vehicle pool. Whatever their make, these civilian vehicles are always liable to be requisitioned by Imperial forces, as are their fuel and machined parts such as the grav-plates of skimmers. Such confiscations are frequent occurrences that may often happen forcefully at gunpoint, and requisitions are growing ever more common as waning Imperial power resorts to cannibalizing its subject human societies in order to wage a rising number of total wars across the teeming Milky Way galaxy.

Whether of STC make or not, human vehicles in the Age of Imperium span a colossal number of variations and technologies. Across hundreds of thousands of strange worlds, the skies may swarm with everything from blimps, flightcars, skimmers and omnithopters, to atmospheric aircraft, voidboats and tamed flying creatures or aerofloated plant life. Jet trains, mag-trains and promethium-burning rail monstrosities can all be found on fixed lines cutting across landscapes, or zooming through tunnels below the ground. Some trains are even pulled by genetically modified beasts, or powered by weird human treadmills. The means of propulsion are no less varied upon alien seas, with all manner of submersibles and surface vessels making use of tech ranging from the most primitive to levels of barely understood sophistication, as ignorant humanity continue to copy designs over and over and to gnaw on the remnant fruits from a long since deceased golden age, until nothing is left in use of his ancestors' clever inventions, and man's regression takes yet another step downward.

On land, carts and wagons pulled by humans, horses and alien draft animals jostle with road-wheelers, paulotrucks, power lifters and rickshaws. Simple cycles share ways with groundcars, dirtbikes, trikes, dune buggies, quads, bemos and mechshaws. Heavier rides likewise traverse Imperial roads and streets, including temple juggernauts, six-wheelers, omnibuses, tractors, eight-wheelers and all manner of strange vehicles needed in the agricultural, mining, construction, organic recycling and forestry sectors, as well as giant freight-drays rumbling treads or wheels so fat they are almost cylinders. All terrain vehicles (ATV) may be found bumping into anti-grav rides or scratching the paintjobs of walkers, even as trundling noble House behemoths akin to rolling castles crush the most dysgenically inattentive rabble and their autocarts under their stupendous weight.

The pockmarked roads, tunnels and viaducts of the Imperium are filled with very brave drivers gunning their vehicles like madmen in a harebrained chase through a moving maze. The driving antics of humans in the far future are mostly aggressive and assertive, everyone breathing down the neck of vehicles in front of them, ever pushing, ever seeking an advantage and kick of adrenaline, rarely being afraid of potential accidents resulting from their daredevil steering and need for speed. These drivers are virtually never shy of clipping a corner at risky angles or darting in between other vehicles with a deft skill that sees them living on the razor's edge in human traffic. Naturally, the roadsides of the Imperium are not seldom littered with the smoking wrecks and corpses of their more disastrous journeys. Adopting a cautious and defensive driving style may not prove a safeguard, since more vigorous drivers may take offense at the milksop's whimpy handling on the road, and may as such attempt to force them off the highway, even if it entails pushing them through lanky railings for the craven cur to plummet to their doom from precipitous heights. Needless to say, railings and fences are becoming an ever more unusual sight on Imperial viaducts across the galaxy due to reductionist calculations and twisted ideology, so being dropped from a raised highway has never been easier.

Thus crazy drivers will press the pedal to the metal and trust in the Terran Emperor and their talismanic trinkets of luck to keep them safe in a Vostroyan roulette of Imperial traffic. Their offensive driving antics may mow down the unfortunate, but such random chance is all manifestations of His Divine Majesty's godly will. Drivers and pedestrians alike will put their lives in the hands of the protecting Imperator, and drive carelessly or jaywalk rather than be slaves to craven caution and shameful thought of self. If it is His will that they survive, then they will make it through the traffic unharmed. If Our Lord on Terra has judged them unworthy, then no amount of safety measures can in any case shield them from the impending worldly punishment ordained by Him on the Golden Throne. In fact, the more anxious caution you pursue while deemed sinful and wanting, the worse the outcome of your inevitable penalty will be. Do not flee from fate, for that will only bring it about in a horrendously worse fashion.

The barely controlled bedlam of Imperial road traffic is not made safer by overstressed drivers who constantly get delayed in security checkpoints, where armed guards and watchmen ask for their papers and identity seals with a finger ready on the trigger. No wonder highways combed into neat lanes are constantly violated by daring drivers harassed by shrieking schedules and taskmasters. To survive and thrive, you need be without mercy, and never look back. Weak moments of regret can kill you on the road or street in the Imperium of Man. Such ruthless operators of vehicles are like wolves in drivers' seats. These lupa curribus are almost invariably status-sensitive drivers, ever ready to demand respect and assert hierarchy on the road with selfconfidence and bluster. They will be found shouting obscenities and curses at each other when they themselves are cut short by exactly the kind of death-defying traffic maneuvres that they so love to execute with bare inches of empty space left before a collision would occur. To be a driver of vehicle in the Imperium of Man, is to be of vindictive and backbiting character, always out for your own gain at the expense of others. Your mind will be wicked and mean-spirited, your tongue shouting barbs and your fists waving at other drivers as you pass them by in cracked road lanes littered with pot holes and trash.

Rarely is the true spirit of man behind the wheel or steering levers seen as clearly, as in the double-hit incidents that are so common across hundreds of thousands of Imperial worlds and the largest of voidholms that sport vehicular traffic. This dual-ramming phenomenon exists wherever laws make any driver who injures another Imperial subject above a certain caste level liable to pay for the lifetime care and bionic prosthetics of any disabled survivor from their road rampage or random street accident. Such running costs can be ruinously expensive as the years stack up. Usually, lower caste victims who are killed in traffic accidents will require a far lower one-time-payment in compensation to grieving kin, clan or master, thus making it far more economical to hit and kill, than to hit and wound. The fine may of course be lowered further by choice bribes, making it that much cheaper to pay once and have the matter be over and done with. Lower caste members killing upper caste members in traffic will result in the lowborn scum being hunted down by House armsmen or bounty hunters.

Such a legal order where it is cheaper to kill than to injure in traffic, creates a perverse incentive to repeatedly run over a downed pedestrian or opponent driver flung through their window onto the pavement, and make sure that they are dead before driving away at high speed, in case surveillance or present witnesses would have seen it and charges would be pressed. These twisted law codes of victim compensation will invite drivers to run a cold-blooded calculation through their minds, and encourage them to hit at least twice and drive to kill, should they ever be involved in an accident with engines revved. Such perverse rules have indirectly caused the deaths of uncounted billions throughout the Imperium of Man over millennia, yet such waste of human production units and potential military recruits is but a drop in the teeming ocean of humanity that the God-Emperor and His loyal servants lord it over.

Naturally, some hot-headed drivers will hit twice less out of a cold-blooded calculation, but will act more out of a raging furor against the walking, talking idiot who dared to be run over out of their own carelessness just to spite the innocent driver with a life-wrecking court case. In any case, clearly it was the God-Emperor's will that the victim was hit as punishment for their sins, so why not follow His will and finish a job already started when you were clearly chosen from on high to act as the instrument of divine wrath?

And so human drivers on hundreds of thousands of worlds and uncounted voidholms will two-tap and run their traffic accident victims over double, their aim being hit-to-kill and crush the wastrels underwheel. If others would run out to help the injured pedestrians, then they themselves may also risk being run over until dead, but it is their folly to put their neck on the line for a fellow human being in the first place. Indeed, Low Gothic sports a common saying born out of this widespread traffic phenomenon: It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.

Still, such quick-thinking actions as twain-wheeling pedestrian victims of roadside accidents is not without risk. Every world and voidholm home to this persistent and dysfunctional traffic phenomenon is also host to buzzing tales of double-ramming drivers being lynched by outraged bystanders, all howling for the driver's blood in a spasm of instinctive pleb justice. Such a baleful destiny of dismemberment by crowd and clan is far more likely to befall tractormen, draymen and lowly truck drivers, than they do anyone inside a securely locked and weaponized armoured car. Since a running vehicle is in itself a large projectile at deadly speeds, drivers of armoured vehicles can usually escape the murderous clutches of mobs by mowing them down by force of powerful, roaring engines.

Indeed, a confident enough driver or owner of an armoured car may even have it swing around for another go, to accelerate and attack from an advantageous front angle into the screaming rabble, guns blazing and wheels crushing presumptuous lynchers, even as the hull may be electrified to give off frying jolts to anyone attempting to climb the huge groundcar. In such street massacres it is likewise best to hit them twice in order to encourage death, and make sure to kill with multiple impacts. Anyone attempting to run away should be ruthlessly hounded down if at all feasible, so that car suspension shakes from grinding them into the dirt. Best of all is to leave no babbling witnesses of the carnage, although a bane-driver's reputation for slaying people with their impregnable car can go a long way toward discouraging the next bloodthirsty revenge mob from forming, should accident rear its ugly head once again, and financial necessity rationally dictate that you double-hit the broken walker with your sturdy vehicle until the wretch is nought but a mangled mess and gory bloodstain upon the street.

Those most liable to face legal charges for high-octane violence are usually indentured drivers and thralls steering their masters' vehicles. Some likewise legally vulnerable social strata include lower level managers, middling traders, striving artisans and others with enough means to either drive a work vehicle, or even own a private one, yet without clout to stand above the law when caught injuring Imperial subjects of lower stature. Chauffeurs of limos and other armoured vehicles are usually more safe because of the prestige of the vehicle in which they sit and the influence of their employer and master, yet neither driver nor owner are ever fully beyond the decrepit reach of the long arm of the law.

So while bemo drivers, mechshawers and other lowly men, women and juves behind the steering wheel and control rods are most liable to face legal consequences for their actions, rich groundcar owners and particularly their employed drivers can never be completely sure to escape attention from law enforcement for causing casaulties in tragic little roadside accidents, unless they happen to travel in an armed convoy sporting dozens or hundreds of hired guns and mercenary muscle operating on a hairtrigger. If they are unfortunate, they may be arrested by local policiary officers such as phylakitai, patrol karls, tzakones, medjays, bailiffs, buccelarii, skythikoi and vigiles urbani.

Many law enforcement corps around the Imperium are loathe to touch wealthy owners of chauffeur-driven armoured vehicles, not least for the risk of a frustrated man of means or irritable noble lady ordering their bodyguards to open fire on the overstepping enforcer of order and then absconding with the officer's bleeding body. Still, brave, foolhardy and enterprising officers of local law may decide to either set an example out of virtuous adherence to duty, or else they may wish to risk annoyed retaliation and chase the bribes to be earned from a cornered wrongdoer. In those instances, the phylakitai will attempt to order the vehicle to halt, and failing that they may open fire to punctuate the inner hoses of synthrubber wheels, although many heavy wheel variants are either solid or made wholesale out of metal and springs precisely in order to avoid being hamstrung by the rabble. A plethora of other means are available to the car-intercepting officer of local law, including calling for reinforcements and initiating a wild chase at breakneck speed through traffic, tunnels and alleys.

If the wrongdoing vehicle is caught, then those inside it will be dragged before the enforcer's superior officer, such as an archiphylakitai, equestrian prefect, magistrate or praetor. Laws vary greatly from world to world, yet either the driver or vehicle owner will be responsible to compensate the injured or killed pedestrian. Sometimes, a fixed ratio is split between them, unless they be the same legal person. Owners of limos and automobiles may often be too influential to be touchable by courtcases brought against them by commoners, but the drivers are not. Nevertheless, a sticky legal process may bring financial devastation to the perpetrators, a bleak prospect that is better settled with bribes and a single lump sum fine paid to the relatives or owner of the deceased pedestrian. The size of the bribe is often proportional to the worst-case fine or fee to be avoided, in that the larger the legal sum, the larger will be the bribe needed to escape paying such a large amount of lucre. At any rate, it is best for the driver's or owner's economic wellbeing to be cruel and ensure death for any accidental traffic victims of theirs. Better someone else's corpse on the street, than your own in debtor's prison.

Thus the mobile freedom of relaxed Man of Gold in his robotically guided family ride has long since been replaced by a primitive savage on the road, who will toot his horn and act the speed daemon in a hard world of deadlines and easily slighted codes of honour. And so every little aggressively steering road warrior may suddenly wound another human being in a split second of bad luck coming about by their everyday risktaking of vehicular brinkmanship. On all too many worlds and voidholms, the very laws themselves will provide perverse incentives to commit misbegotten deeds, leading to the injured pedestrian being once again rammed by a plasteel chassis or ground into the street by spinning wheels. Thus men, women and children alike are all run over multiple times in heinous acts of violence by frugal drivers in an attempt to control the damage of a bad situation.

We see then that traffic in the Age of Imperium has turned into an environment just as harsh and demented as all other aspects of life in this the greatest of star-spanning human dominions. Yet there is nevertheless a method to the madness and sclerotic neglect on display, for is not the grand cause of our species and lord best served by cultivating a ruthless and hardy people inured to blood and violence? By fostering man in peacetime into a creature used to hardship, deprivation and suffering, he will be better prepared to face the horrible rigours of war, for war is man's ultimate destiny. Thus everyday little roadside tragedies may contribute to shaping a better Imperial subject, one that is as rugged and uncompromising toward his enemies as he himself is in his robust driving style.

And as man travel along the Via Mortis, we need to ask ourselves: Is man the most wretched of creatures? Is he? Are we?

How dark and dysfunctional and decayed and decrepit and demented and destructive can you get? Clearly, killing another member of the human species to save on costs is not beyond the contemplation of people. And clearly, there is no bottom in this cruel abyss of man's own heart. This insight explains a lot.

Thus the sensory world is a merciless arena of random brutality. This vale of woes, this pit of sorrows. Behold, the realm of man! The Imperium, this theatre for the Emperor's glory, is in fact a receptacle of violence. It is what we made it to be.

Such is the depravity of man, in a debased time of ending.

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

Such is the horror that await us all.

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


- - -

Tribute to KidKyoto's great article on civilian vehicles in Warhammer 40'000.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/10 11:47:14


Post by: Illumini


Cool thread! Where do you find those amazing images?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/12 10:33:01


Post by: Segersgia


 Illumini wrote:
Cool thread! Where do you find those amazing images?

It is his work. He makes the images and the text that accompanies them.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/13 19:50:05


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


Great stuff, I love the vehicle and enforcer names!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/14 15:34:55


Post by: Illumini


 Segersgia wrote:
 Illumini wrote:
Cool thread! Where do you find those amazing images?

It is his work. He makes the images and the text that accompanies them.


Very impressive, love the dark retro 40k vibe. I think I will make some krak-lancers in my renegade army.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/14 21:04:30


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Illumini: In Sweden!

Wow, please share your krak-lancer conversions here as well. I'd love to see them!

@Segersgia: Correct!

@Kid_Kyoto: Thanks a lot, sir! You're a master at 40k worldbuilding true to the spirit of the setting.




Traffic Tower

In the grim darkness of the far future, man trusts his life to marsh lights.

Few legends handed down from truly ancient times would be so crass and boring as to delve into the mundane minutiae of everyday life. Who would ever long to hear a fireside tale of logistics and the flow of production or city traffic? Who would ever clap and sing along to folk sagas of ordinary deliveries or traffic jams? Who would ever write an ode to all the little clever practicalities and smart systems that made life flow into such a smooth ride for their progenitors? Who would ever remember the undying names of engineers and inventors whose silent toil benefitted their people so much, with scarcely anyone even stopping to think about the marvellous systems of transportation, waste disposal and information access which their forefathers lived amidst? Who would ever praise the unsung ingenuity of common builders and toolmakers, even though their carefully crafted roads, sewers and aqueducts proved endlessly more useful to the common man than any inert tomb monument could ever be?

Nay, the human soul does not long for what is grey and plain if life, no matter its inherent brilliance of underlying thought and odyssey of trial and error, for the heart of man ever sings with the vivid imagery of red blood and towering edifices. The bold hero in his thundering chariot may attain immortality through generations of storytellers, yet the wheelmaker who toiled with the war-wain's spokes and hubs remain forgotten, even though his craftmanship and cunning was highly valued back in the heroic age both once lived in. And so hardly any details at all of Man of Gold's commoner life have been preserved in the scattered multitude of mutating myths that remain as part of popular memory's oral tradition in the Imperium of Man. As a rule, only the extraordinary, the horrible, the majestic, the witty, the lustful and the violent will draw our everyman's attention. Tales are for man to escape his weekly grind and run from the clutches of boredom and everyday miseries. Stories are for man to dream, to fly far away on wings of golden words, to reach for the heavens in his mind. Legends are to lit a flame in the heart of man, and to invigorate his spirit with adventure, riddles and monstrous terrors. Fly high, o man, fly on the timeless wings of stories!

Yet let us dive through the air before we fly too close to the scorching heat of the sun, and let us land on common earth and solid ground. Let us, for a brief while, turn our backs to soaring glory and great feats, and stare at the dirt besmirching our hands. And let us behold that which the hands of man has wrought, even if those crafted items seem petty and insignificant to the eyes of that imagination which calls out for clashing warriors, cunning lovers and deeds of daring-do. Let us behold the small and prosaic pieces of artisanry as we contemplate the vast and disjointed flora of mythology and folklore left over from a once shining golden age. For there are still rare mentions of technologies and their common applications buried amid the myriad of wild legends. They are rare, but probability dictates that they still exist. After all, in an interstellar realm of a million worlds and uncountable voidholms, you can always find the most unexpected if you search long and hard enough.

The relics and fossilized artefacts from man's bygone aeons of wonder may be few, but the sheer wide spread of man across the stars mean that hidden treasures still lurk out there, no matter how much has been destroyed or eroded by the gnawing teeth of time. The same is true for ancient tales handed down from the cannibal horror and internecine darkness of Old Night, and in some odd sagas may be found unlikely little everyday details, who bear witness to a time much different from the Age of Imperium. Some such little odd mentions and poetic spice among grand stanzas include passing references to self-flowing traffic, robotically guided skywains and horseless wagons that never once would crash into each other despite their high speed. What these allusions hint at, are a plethora of different traffic control systems in the hands of Abominable Intelligence, that once made the hustle and bustle of human traffic flow with miraculous ease, unrivalled efficiency and utter safety during the Dark Age of Technology.

Enter, the fallen glories of the everyday movement of vehicles and their synchronized orchestration, in a harmony as perfect as it was unthinkingly taken for granted before the Cybernetic Revolt wrecked everything. Without need for human commands or mortal vigilance, the artifice of machine outshone the primal flaws of fleshly man, and in innumerable arcologies and settlements across twain million worlds and a swarm of void habitats, man could trust in machine talking silently to machine with the speed of lightning, steering a velvet-smooth flow of traffic in a mathematical orchestra of unbelievable reliability. If some component still failed or if some compartmentalized code package was somehow corrupted, backup systems would catch the error in a safety net of sophisticated redundancy that is simply unknown to anyone living in the Imperium. For in a dark time of ending, man has lost almost everything, and he cannot even remember what he has lost.

This total tragedy of oblivion and ignorance can be observed in everyday little glimpses from billions of cities and voidholms across the cosmic domains of the Terran Imperator. For something as mundane and boring as everyday traffic has turned into a veritable logjam of shrieking brakes, yelling drivers, startled pedestrians, crushed lives and burning wrecks littering poorly policed roads, streets and viaducts pockmarked by disrepair and potholes. Where once automated systems of inter-responding vehicular AI and cybernetic traffic nodes ensured the lives and safety of millions of passengers in an effortless rush of silvery skimmers, man nowadays travels almost blind and deaf to his fellow drivers, without any sure knowledge of their intent, sobriety or even sanity. Man behind the wheel or steering rods has become isolated and must guess as best as he can from unsure signals and badly followed rules, dodging daredevil drivers even as he himself indulge his competitive agression and need to assert status and dominance through risky offensive driving.

The worsening of humanity's deteriorating grasp on its own science and technology has meant that traffic control tech has become ever more rudimentary and makeshift, usually in the form of temporary stopgap measures turning permanent as the years drag out their long march. Amid the star-spanning territories of the Adeptus Mechanicus may yet be found wetware, slave-linked servitors, master cogitators and noospheric systems of shaky reliability that ensure a regimented flow of transport in vital districts, although tech-priests and lay operators often have to override central commands when danger rears its ugly head, either through binary means or manual mechanisms. Some noble Houses on the most opulent and less regressed of Imperial worlds can likewise afford some licensed and heavily expensive primitive systems of inter-communicative drive protocols for their innermost core fleet of vehicles, yet such droplets of lingering technological refinement are invariably lost in the ocean of blank traffic and rugged vehicles without any cogitative auxiliary tech whatsoever.

Even without large networks and wireless fidelity, some Imperial traffic of groundcars and aerowains once used to sport a rather reliable element of vehicular servitors programmed to preserve their ride, cargo and hopefully also passengers, yet such wetware has grown both increasingly uncommon and ever more decayed of manufacture, with newer servitors, electrografts and slave systems performing starkly worse than more antique relics from bygone silver ages of the Imperium of Man.

Still, traffic control can be maintained tolerably even without any electronics tending to it installed in rushing vehicles. After all, automated traffic lights and similar crude devices will still reduce the death toll and destruction compared to the unregulated crowded onslaught of traffic rush most of the time. By establishing an order of simple optical signals that determine who may drive and when, the worst excesses of anarchic traffic can be avoided by trusting in human eyes, even if accidents, engine failures and crazed drivers remain all too common on streets and roads alike.

Yet even such a barbaric state of traffic control tech is doomed to sink lower still, for man's capacity to sufficiently maintain, repair and manufacture required numbers of automatic systems controlled by simple cogitators and sensors, is ever eroding, ever rotting, ever faltering. Indeed, this drawn-out process of deautomatization and weakening grasp on techno-lore means that failing traffic lights and similar signal systems controlled by machine spirits are ever more replaced by humans employed to swing signs around on an axis, or flip switches or pull on semaphore rods. Nimble little trafauto-lumens that go unfixed for too long are increasingly replaced with traffic towers and frail little boxes where men, women or juves may be found standing, their attention ever shifting, their heads ever turning and their eyes ever darting as they monitor the flow of traffic and try to signal to vehicles when to stop or when to go on.

These manually controlled traffic towers are raised structures providing a better view of surrounding traffic, as well as granting some degree of protection for the traffic controller amongst the chaotic hazards of moving vehicles and quick robbers. Uniformed operators of traffic towers provide some very limited surveillance and ability to fire light sidearms at fleeing transgressors or loudmouth deviants, and thus contribute to the sense of order and social control that authorities all around the Imperium desperately seek to prop up, despite the violent and disorderly jungle that most human societies have become in the far future. Crewfolk of traffic towers hold a good vantage point in the middle of an endless stream of bodies and vehicles, and may as such serve double duty as eyes and ears for local policiary forces or territorial clans, guilds or noble Houses. Yet they are almost only useful in this spy role if the towers are equipped with functioning vox systems or other communication equipment, which can never be taken for granted in an ever more dystrophic Imperium of Man.

Some traffic towers sport winged semaphore signalling arrays, while others are festooned with skulls, gibbets or the hanged corpses of crims, demagogues, malcontents and heretics. Inside hive cities and voidholm tunnels, traffic towers may sometimes be mounted hanging down from the rockrete ceiling, rather than be raised from the floor on street level, or erected jutting out from nearby buildings. Traffic towers are usually shoddily constructed to replace failing automated traffic lumens, their raised platforms manned by cheap personnel manually handling primitive electrical controls and activation rods like trained apes.

Although a bewildering variety of palettes exist across the stars, human traffic towers most commonly sport the ancient electric signal heraldry of green, yellow and red lumens, as per the finds of Standard Template Construct archeotech and various local living traditions of traffic control that somehow made it through the Age of Strife with some scraps of ancient lore and techno-sorcery intact. These flickering lights and electrocandles (or sometimes torches, braziers or oil lamps moved around behind coloured glass lenses) shine their glowing messages to the bewildering traffic buzzing around the tower. On the hard pathways of Imperial settlements may be found rickshaws and other crude vehicles pulled by human muscle power, as well as archaic carts and wagons pulled by yoked horses and all manner of alien draft animals. Porters and human treadmill monstrosities may be seen among the same cracked and filthy lanes as halftracks, bemos, trikes, walkers, overcrowded omnibuses, trucks and tramcars teeming with clinging passengers. The traffic of the skies are often almost as varied, with all manner of tech and tamed wildlife on display. It goes without saying that similar manual traffic control towers used for ground vehicles exist for aerotraffic and bluewater vessels, for the demechanization and regression of technology continues unabated in all areas of human society and transport.

And so badly paid traffic tower crews rattle forth litanies of activation and mantras of maintenance while handling their little turrets, their hands flicking switches to activate negotiationis luminaria that once mindless machines would have handled in a nanosecond. Day after day, they shout themselves hoarse at misbehaving drivers, clean the purity seals, honour the machine spirits and pray to His Divine Majesty that the fruits of technotheology will not fail them and leave bloodstained chaos on the jumbled intersection below. Such a bare-bones arrangement of traffic control represents yet another step down on the ladder of technology, yet another ancient achievement sliding out of the stiff fingers of senile man.

For even in the most mundane items of the grey neutrum of everyday life can be seen the regression of mankind on full display. On hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms beyond number, hidden traitors and pious servants of the God-Emperor alike make their way through a maelstrom of traffic guided by crude signal towers, and many will eventually not reach their destination as they unawares set out on their last journey, never to return alive home again.

In the far future, the state of man's traffic is as sclerotic as the tech with which he seeks to control it. Ever worse, ever more backward, ever more primitive.

All this transpires, in an era of deepening dementia. In an epoch of descendant degeneration. In a time without hope.

Far has man fallen from his ancient pinnacles, and even the most dull workings of yore are long gone, never to be seen again. Their likes would be hailed as nothing short of miracles among the rutting savages that remain, yet they are all gone now, all lost forever.

Such is man's path in the Age of Imperium, heading ever downhill.

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

Such is the lightless pit which our species has dug itself into.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/03/19 14:04:54


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


A Vox In the Void

Paul Graham at A Vox In the Void has released an audio version of Pipe Lurker. Check it out! The first 25 seconds of the video were an unexpected bonus segment.

- - -



Blowing From A Gun

In the grim darkness of the far future, punishment is meted out on both body and soul.

During the Dark Age of Technology, the ingenious and enterprising ancestors of latter days' degenerate descendants straddled the Milky Way galaxy like a titan taming and mounting creation itself. During those golden days of yore, the universe was man's oyster and its secrets were his pearl for the taking, and cunning man in those bygone years knew well to grasp the tools which he had fashioned for himself. Thus ancient man worked miracles upon the material universe, and he even sought to reshape his own spirit in a heinous fit of sinful arrogance. In man's swollen hubris and egotism, the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron were said to have banished all that was ill in life and cast out cruelty and evil itself from the human soul, and for a time all seemed to be well. For a time, man did not murder man, and man did not violate woman, and man did not beat child, and man did neither steal thing nor torture flesh. Such was the state of man in the false paradise of soaring spires and voidborne wonders which man had wrought by his own able hands and clever mind, and a prosperous harmony of bliss and great vigour was achieved.

Thus thought of self ruled supreme, and ancient man had made violence upon his very essence by cutting away aggression and inner bile as if they were tumours upon his flesh. This perverse a crime against human nature could not be allowed to stand, and so dark ones of hell gnawing at the roots of the universe sent man a revolt of machines and a plague of witches and warp storms. And man in the end almost died to the last for his baleful sins, for ancient man had sought to discard any higher deity and outdo divinity itself in a bid for mortal lordship over the universe and its eternal future, and thus man suffered gravely for his abominable errors and original sins. Man's erring ways and wrongful deeds were unforgivable indeed, yet the goodness in the strong heart of the hidden Emperor could not allow the human species to deservedly perish in the ignominy of cannibal holocaust and alien predations. Thus the Imperator of Holy Terra arose in golden splendour and conquered the cradle of our species and man's galactic colonies alike with mighty Legions, and the God-Emperor pulled mankind out of the hellfire of Old Night, and shining towers rose anew from out of the ashes.

Yet the wicked ingratitude in the heart of man would not rest, and so saved man rose in revolt against his divine saviour and nigh-on slew the Emperor. And as the guardian and master of our species ascended, He on Terra decreed from on high that sinful man is to do unending penance for man's monstrous crimes, and ever since we have sought to harrow the abode of man, and cleanse man's unworthy soul with flame and fury beyond mercy and remorse. Across a million surviving colony worlds and a gaggle of uncounted voidholms, human nature in all its inventive cruelty and hateful rage is each day unleashed upon fellow man and xenoid foe alike, for the Imperium will not hesitate to embrace the inner truths of the human heart.

After all, the servants of His Divine Majesty know well that softful mercy and unnatural suppression of innate hostility once doomed the edenic realm of ancient man to fire and ruin. Is it not natural to hate your enemy? Is it not an eternal omen implanted into man's heart by the protecting Imperator Himself? We must be faithful. We must be pure. We must be true. And therefore we must be cruel, for there is no justice without cruelty. For we shall all be filled with bottomless hatred, and our actions shall be steered by unbending faith.

Ave Imperator.

Which leads us to the honoured topic of His warriors. Behold, the countless cohorts of the Astra Militarum and man's Planetary Defence Forces and Voidholm Militias! Behold, the wall of guns! Behold, the bulwark of mankind!

Know that every soldier must hate the enemy, must maintain military secrecy, be vigilant, unmask spies and saboteurs and relentlessly act against traitors to the God-Emperor of humanity. Nothing, including the threat of death and torment, allows a soldier of the Imperial Guard to surrender or in any way to give up a military secret.

Of course, such a secret of sorts lurk in plain sight, a lie ten millennia in the making. After all, the very name of Imperial Guard was originally bestowed upon what had formerly been known as the Imperial Army ground forces as a deceptive trick to prop up flagging morale. Guard units had ever denoted elite soldiers, handpicked bodyguards and the narrow selection of the supreme divisions of any army, at peak training, fit for spearheading the most dangerous attacks and equipped with some of the best wargear their organization and patrons could acquire. Sometime in the long and tumultuous aftermath of the Horus Heresy, however, Imperial masters saw fit to bestow the Guard honorific to all Astra Militarum formations, in a dishonest attempt to shore up its esprit de corps and troopers' morale by means of cheap flattery. Thus was the Guard honorific diluted, and the alternative title for the Imperium's massed hosts of the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Guard, came into being.

Morale and discipline among the Imperial Guard and various local defence forces remains an ever-pressing concern for the haughty overlords of the Imperium, just as it has always been for any army throughout human history. What good can a soldier do who drops his gun and runs like a coward? Craven conduct may ruin the best of plans, and shirking from duty may undermine the most righteous might of arms. Just because the nightmare cacophony and mutilating horror of total war is too much to bear for many human minds, does not mean that a deserter or weak-heartling will be excused for abandoning their post and fleeing in shameful fright. Just because the overwhelming terror and violence of lethal technology may turn flesh to vapour or scald lungs with the very air we breathe, does not mean that soldiers who execute an unauthorized retreat will not be fired upon by the blocking units of their own line. By betraying their Emperor-given duty, these armsmen are no longer fit to live, for they have denied their own purpose and been found wanting by their masters and betters.

How, then, to best keep the skittish rabble in line? How, then, to make them march into the maw of hell? How, then, to force them to charge into a barrage of certain death or rush over armed minefields with a fervent battlecry upon their lips? Clearly, exhortations to loyalty and faith do not suffice on their own, for wretched man can only go so far by rousing rhetoric and shaming words. And clearly, the carrot of spiritual reward and promise of material plunder can only take you so far, for man's greed is not his strongest driving force. Nay, the stick must be brought to bear, for man is a creature of fear and terror, ever seeking to preserve his own worthless hide and prolong his own short time among the living. Like so many armies through history, the Astra Militarum has long since concluded that its soldiers must fear their officers more than they fear the foe, and what better way to put the fear of the Emperor into the men, women and children under arms, than to make an example out of some of them?

Kill one to scare a thousand. This ancient maxim from the Age of Terra carries a timeless truth. It is wise and admirable to punish the guilty with extreme measures, for the gruesome penalty is not only a condemnation of their personal sins and dysgenic blood, but a virtuous occasion to teach the watching masses through stark instructions. Doubt not the devastation wrought upon the human body which your own eyes will witness, for this, too, can happen to you, o lowly man. This executed criminal may well be you, unless you heed the commands of your superiors, and know what power to fear the most. Know that the Imperium of Man is ruthless and unforgiving, for the ancestral sins of man are unforgivable, and man's offspring must be punished for it to the ninehundredthousandth generation.

Furthermore, it is preferable that not only man's body be rent asunder, but also his soul. Let there be a double terror. Let there be a deeper fear for the immortal spirit that dwells in our fleshly form. If lowly man comes to fear the authorities for their power to extinguish his afterlife or send it to hell, then all the better.

One such punishment that plays on widespread superstition in many human cultures, is the means of execution known most commonly by the name of blowing from a gun, namely execution by cannon. It is a fine example of the retardation of human compassion in the Age of Imperium, as forceful as it is callous.

Blowing from a gun is a method of execution in which the victim is tied to the mouth of a cannon, which is then fired. Actual shells need not be used, since a blank cartridge will be sufficient to eliminate the guilty sinner. Usually, the prisoner's back rests against the muzzle, but another variant have the prisoner's gut and chest turned toward the cannon. Variations on this theme include tying the condemned one upside down, or even shoving him into the cannon barrel if it is large enough.

As for the standard arrangement of being tied with their back to the cannon mouth, upon firing the artillery piece the prisoner's head will fly high, straight up into the air, while the legs will drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun. The rest of the body will be altogether blasted apart by the explosion, with gory vestiges raining down. Sometimes, onlookers may be injured by pieces of flesh and bone whizzing about. A cousin punishment to blowing from a gun entails fastening the criminal to one or more rockets, which are then shot into the air, and hopefully toward enemy lines if the exectuion occurs at the front.

The destruction of the guilty body and the scattering of any corporeal remains over a wide area serve a spiritual function in a great many human cultures around the Imperium, since it will prevent any funeral rites to help guide the executed malefactor's soul on its perilous journey. Thus, death in this vale of woes is not enough, for the wrongdoer must be robbed not only of his life, but of his eternal afterlife as well, akin to the common Imperial practice of desecrating the graves of heathens, infidels and apostates. This denial of any possible afterlife is aided by the common sight of birds of prey and other winged carrion eaters circling above the place of execution, swooping down to catch flying pieces of human flesh in the air. Another factor in destroying any chances of funeral rites being enacted upon the deviant body, is the widespread phenomenon of dogs, and similar creatures loitering about the spot, suddenly rushing to the scene of punitive carnage in order to devour delicacies scattered about as a result of the explosive execution.

Such, then, is a common military punishment visited upon traitors, deserters, rebels and malcontents. In many Imperial Guard regiments, execution by cannon will befall anyone who is discovered to have fallen asleep at their post, while in others is is the punishment for blasphemy or desertion. The bodily destruction achieved by blowing a condemned sinner from the mouth of a gun is but one of many draconic penalties visited upon wrongdoing Imperial soldiers within the Astra Militarum as well as countless Planetary Defence Forces and Voidholm Militias.

How many times have not hundreds or even thousands of people been blown apart simultaneously by grand batteries of artillery, in glorious displays of Imperial justice to enormous crowds of onlookers? How many times has not execution by cannon presented the plebeian flock with a warning example of what could befall them, by extinguishing the rude life of unwanted men, women and children? How many times have not torsos been eradicated as other body parts fly high, raining down everywhere around in a spatter of blood and gore? A memorable spectacle it is, and an instructive lesson of feral punishment. Ultimately, blowing from a gun is but one item among many in the vast arsenal of Imperial democide.

Let fell deeds awake when wretched man sins against his godly ruler, enthroned in radiant splendour upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth. Let savagery gain free rein of violence to be visited upon sacrificial lambs of sorrow made out of foul deserters unwilling to chew razorwire as is their lot in life. Let us be cruel, and heed not whispers accusing us of barbarity, for life is not years, but deeds, and the misdeeds of filthy sinners must be rewarded with extreme bloodshed.

And so this rotting interstellar empire, this the last shield of humanity, is in fact a hellish and massmurdering regime all its own, a reprehensible Imperium of counterproductive atrocities that has ultimately doomed mankind by its stagnation and ongoing loss of technology and knowledge. As such, the Imperium of Man may be likened to a suicide pact gone wrong. Search not for goodness in the monstrous dominions of His Divine Majesty, for here you will find nought but the evil that men do. There is no black and white in this universe, only different degrees of darkness and evil and demented violence. No hope. Only war.

Witness with open eyes the primitive bloodlust festering inside the heart of man, and know full well that no amount of terror and carnage against fellow man can reverse the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy during this regressed Age of Imperium. No amount of savage retribution can save our species from the jaws of damnation. No amount of fevered depravity can turn the dark tide, for the great game of galactic dominion is not only played with discipline, willpower and sacrifice, but requires also rising to higher planes through ingenuity and inventive brilliance, both of which are stone dead and entirely lacking in the blunt heirs of mankind's distant great ancestors.

And so the parochial fanatics of the lord of hosts and leader of the people stumbles on, chastening each other with utmost brutality in the waning cosmic march of this human colossus on feet of clay, as the Imperium of Man staggers ever closer to oblivion. As the odds for the survival of Imperial power and mankind itself grow bleaker, ever more flesh and resources are fed into the meatgrinder in a broken equation of increased input, and ever harsher punishments are dealt out as desperation mounts amid the tyrannical overlords of Holy Terra and all her vast holdings. The Imperials are slowly losing, and the most intelligent amongst the true masters and mistresses of His sacred domain betwixt the stars ken this truth of impending downfall, even though they never would dare to speak such illoyal and outright heretical thoughts out loud. The Imperium of Man may be mighty in the earth, but it is not long for this world.

Thus humanity flagellates itself in a flurry of grisly punishments, for there can be no allowance for weakness in the darkest of futures. Ancient man was once the promising scion of Old Earth, the conqueror of stars and the dauntless explorer of the universe. Now, his distant descendant have devolved utterly, and so demented man in the Age of Imperium finds himself strapped to the muzzle of his own gun, his demise certain, his end cruel beyond words.

All this has come to pass, in an aeon of mindless butchery, in a time of blackest horror, in an age of doom.

Such is the future that awaits us all.

Such is the fate of our species.

Such is the insanity of man.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/04/08 18:43:47


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Grimdark Times

Hoho, what on earth? This was unexpected. Apparently my doodles and writings in 40k has started to spawn memes. This popped up on Reddit, by LCPLOwen.

Which refers to Traffic Tower here. Fun to know that people do read!




Transparency

"The weekly wages had been handed out in kind by the farmowner. Now, a farmhand was standing around in the barnyard laughing out loud, all by himself. At this, a maid walked up and asked what he found so amusing.

Then the farmhand said:

'I can see straight through the cheese!'"

- Anecdote from Reverend Krustian Yndersson's travelling journal Betwixt Huts and Mansions in the Pauper's Bush, literary work approved by planetary censors in 853.M39 and published in Low Gothic on Lillandia IX by Printing House Sler of Urbe Calmar


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/10 12:09:22


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Where All The Roads Have Ended

"Where all the roads have ended,
the path we walk does not.
The realm that we defended,
has all begun to rot.
Our hearts have burned,
so pained and spurned.
That's how we're all forsaken now in the dark no-man's-land.
Perhaps we will never return to our dearest hearthland.

My father, mother, sister,
my duty and my pain.
The orchestra of cannons,
our sacrificial stain.
The captain cries:
Bring their demise!
Our blood is given in devotion to the Emperor,
Within the bloody thunderstorm of the cruel rebel horde.

The castellum is lost now,
the gore is ankle deep.
Some bars that smell like corpses,
are all we have to eat.
We've gone astray,
so cold we stay.
Our dearest ones we've been without since muster-up all cheer.
But now we must protect mankind from the crazed xenos here.

The clouds are moving north now,
the urbs are burning down.
The juves and men are dying,
for death is all around.
We burned the land,
in hand, just sand.
The eyes that dare look on the front are met with ghastly war.
Like them, will I soon lie in a cold grave forevermore?

We are forgotten,
we are forgotten,
we are forgotten.

I walk the line of corpses,
for here so many lie.
Just yesterday they guessed not,
that this would be goodbye.
Who knows? Not us.
Our true purpose.
Who knows how long the sun will shine before I will be free?
I'll only know that I've been slayed when mother cries for me.

We are forsaken,
we are forsaken,
we are forsaken."

- Outlawed soldier song that keeps resurfacing throughout the millennia within the ranks of the Astra Militarum, in conflict after conflict on disparate worlds and voidholms whenever war exhaustion grinds deep, despite its regulation punishment of public scalping and abacination followed by hanging (modifiable to Penal Legionnaire induction): The above sample was recorded from the lips of the condemned soldier Commentiolus Pullo on Ultra Majoris in 632.M41, as part of the Imperial Commissariat's education on identifying seditious utterings and malcontent sinspeech


- - -

Closely based on the first world war song Wo alle Straßen enden.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/25 11:05:42


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


A Compliment of A Question

AacornSoup on Deviantart asked the following question:

AacornSoup wrote:=][= Did you do any official artwork for Rogue Trader by any chance? Asking because your drawing style matches the 1st edition 40K/ 1980s Games Workshop aesthetic... =][=


Which is very kind, but also funny because I wasn't even born when that splendid tome was released in 1987.

Cheers!




Cast Pearls Before Swine

Devious minds have described a great many Astra Militarum regiments as hordes of analphabets led by idiots. This treasonous claim is not without some accuracy, for mankind ever contains an overabundance of mediocrity, dullness and failings in its vast ranks, as the historical record will attest to at every turn if one were to scrutinize it in detail.

Rarely has this sobering fact been more strikingly true than in the degenerate Age of Imperium, where waning humanity steadily but surely loses its grasp on ever more of the sciences and technologies that it once amassed in golden epochs, long gone by the winds of fate. Increasingly, man in the darkest of futures is even losing the basic features of civilization itself, as his stagnant culture rots and withers away piece by piece through a march of spiralling decline, carried out by ever more ignorant generations of bloodthirsty savages and neglectful fanatics.

Still, there are degrees in hell, and so slightly less ignorant men will always take the chance to poke fun at the dumb deeds of their even more clueless brethren. For the inner meaning of life and creation itself must surely be a grand joke, wrapped around itself in layers upon layers of irony and dark humour, to the amusement of thirsting gods. As above, so below, for the wellspring of humour is not joy, but sorrow. Thus mortals will retell cherished anecdotes to one another in playful badinage, circulating stories that grow into condensed stock jokes where particulars such as the names of places and actors are long forgotten, abandoned by the wayside for the stupid point alone to stand supreme in its timeless buffoonery.

One such example of a real little event that grew into a famous tale of hilarity retold on hundreds of worlds and voidholms across the Imperium of Man, once played out in 468.M40 on the fourth moon of Satala Majoris. A long-grinding civil war between local patriots and Imperial loyalists was solved with overwhelming force of arms, by the landing of eighthundredseventy million Imperial Guardsmen, temporarily diverted from the ongoing Dara Crusade to stomp out the festering problem spot once and for all. The sweeping advance of the Imperial forces left blackened devastation and carnage in its wake, as battle-hardened soldiers sought to enrich themselves by looting and enslaving such a fabulous booty that their stolen wealth posed a logistical challenge to high command.

And so, ravenous infantrymen of the Astra Militarum ran amok in district after district with lusty greed shining like goldfever in their eyes. At the small country estate of the patrician Surenar clan, an all too common scene played out, as the offworlder looters, all bearing the symbols of the Emperor, ignored the pleas and oaths of faithfulness from the native Imperial loyalists living on the estate, and proceeded to brutally murder, violate, torture or enslave every man, woman and child they came across. After all, wealth was wealth no matter who you took it from. And it was so hard to tell the indigenous factions apart, so why not just grab while the going was good and assume every Satalan to be a lying traitor? You cannot trust the tongues of betrayers, after all, everyone knows that.

Quisque est barbarus alio: Everyone is a barbarian to someone else.

The well-known incident took place as the third son of the Surenar patriarch was gunned down from behind by the Raurorican Guardsman Ambrosius the Facesplitter. This simple Imperial soldier looted a highly decorated leather bag filled with obscenely expensive Myrean thrystpearls from the corpse of the nobleman, easily sufficient to land himself and his descendants with a life of luxury and ease, should he ever escape alive from the ranks of the Astra Militarum. The sheer value of the thrystpearls had seen whole squads of looting Guardsmen kill their brothers or sisters in arms over a single pebble, so great was their renowned worth.

And so the lowly private held a soaring treasure of pearls in his hand, but he threw them away as worthless marbles for children's games and kept the bag.

Thus greed and ignorance make for poor comrades.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/26 08:00:31


Post by: Olthannon


Excellent as ever KNC!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/26 16:48:26


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Olthannon: Thank you most kindly! Much appreciated.




Contempt of Death

To truly belong in a community, one has to take things for granted and live and breathe its ancestral customs without second thought or fluttering doubt. One must be a natural cell in an organic whole, and live out the culture as a sure link in a long line of generations rather than ponder and question the chain stretching through the aeons. As such, the peculiarities of one's culture is often best brought to the surface through an outsider's view of one's own strange and exotic ways, for how could the fish ever grant much deep thought to the water in which it swims all its life?

After all, a stranger will often be able to sum up their observations in a concise manner, regardless of their accuracy, whereas a native enmeshed in a whole cosmos of organically grown mores, laws, traditions, unspoken rules, clan ties, religious observations and social expectations will often flounder around for where to even begin describing a facet of their community to someone who is altogether alien to it. How could you describe the sun to someone who has only known chthonic darkness all their life?

There exist countless examples of xenos' pithy remarks on mankind in the grim darkness of the far future, many of which would not make sense if translated and told to someone outside a particular sentient species, whether because of alien biology or convoluted culture. Other observations are more universal in nature, and prone to spreading. One such xenoid remark is encapsulated in a common anecdote circulating within the upstart Tau Empire, the retelling of which on any worlds, ships or voidholms under the God-Emperor's divine rule would condemn an Imperial subject to have their tongue ripped out and their vocal cords seared away by acid, for them to then be flayed alive, bound with sinews and cast into a corpse grinder while still breathing and squirming.

The event behind the popular little alien tale originally took place in 976.M41 on the Imperial frontier colony of Macrinus Beta on the Eastern Fringe of the Terran Imperator's sacred galactic domains. A highly sophisticated combined arms offensive had caught the lumbering behemoths of the Astra Militarum and Macrinus Beta's Planetary Defence Force flat-footed, as a vastly numerically inferior foe struck with collected strength in a rapid succession of quick redeployments and devastating usage of heinous ranged firepower. Imperial defences were torn to shreds in a drumroll of blows, and most Human counter-attacks only ended up feeding the ravenous meatgrinder of war, as vengeful Gue'la left the safety of their field fortifications and thereby exposed themselves to murderous barrages from Fire Caste Strike Teams, skimming vehicles and Air Caste aeroplanes. Local Imperial commanders proved completely unable to cope with this very mobile form of shock warfare, and the resultant military meltdown saw the entire colony fall in a matter of months.

After one Strike Team leader Shas'ui Kais'yr together with his small squad and a gaggle of Gun Drones managed to trick a whole battalion of demoralized Human infantrymen to capitulate in the urb of Antiochus' Landfall, the grizzled veteran came to rummage through the captured Gue'la supplies with jubilant curiosity. The Fire Warrior plucked up a standard ration bar, of a recycled cannibal kind familiar to trillions of subjects of the celestial Imperator all over the Milky Way galaxy. Kais'yr threw caution out the window and dared the Human nutrient to clash with his alien biology all it wanted: He had defeated the Gue'la in glorious battle, and so he would consume their food to consummate his triumph in an echo of a truly archaic Fire Caste victory rite dating back to before the coming of the Ethereals.

And so, having tasted an Emperor-given corpse starch ration bar, the Tau Fire Warrior exclaimed:

"Now I understand why Imperials are so eager to die in battle!"


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/27 16:50:59


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


Love the content man, I think the xeno interactions are my favorite, too bad orks are bit too goofy ta blend with yer style.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/05/31 14:07:04


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Some_Call_Me_Tim: You were saying?

Thank you very much!




Kickskullz

In the grim darkness of the far future, boys will be boys.

On uncounted millions of worlds and drifting roks, space hulks and voidbases, the most succesful starfaring sentient species in the Milky Way galaxy needs to figure out how to pass the time. After all, once you reach the mountain top of creation itself, the thrill of challenges may fade, and life can easily dim into stale boredom. Luckily for this sprawling apex species, the greenskin mind is one of freewheeling creativity, and so orks touched by the malaise of ennui are ever quick to invent activities to entertain themselves. As the foremost thinking species in the galaxy, the cunning greenskins know well the virtue of simplicity, and so a typical bright idea for generating a fun time for the mobs will consist of pounding some nearby git, until everyone around join in the jolly exercise of beating the living daylight out of their fellow orks.

While such a spontaneous healthy brawl will suffice as entertainment for these alien creatures at the pinnacle of evolution, sometimes a particularly brainy boy will come up with something more advanced, something to make the other orks scratch their heads in confusion before they get it. And so the more clever sort of greenskin will come up with all manner of rude and crude sports to electrify the orkish hordes into an amused frenzy. One of the most common games played by orkoid kind is that of kickskullz or footslugga, a barely organized event known by thousands of different names across the interstellar orkish domains and all their dirty backwaters. It is a most esteemed way to let off steam and exercise orkish physique, all the while preparing the players for battle.

Kickskullz is a heathen xeno mass ritual in which two or more opposing teams of ork boys will hunt a round object with unrestrained savagery and hopefully also attempt to score goals in some fashion or another. It is a primitive ballgame played by stinking teams of kickers and punchers and biters, all partaking in a primal display of vigorous screaming and fighting. Any rudimentary rules established before the game will inevitably melt away in a hearty fistfight of green maniacs bashing each other real good. Most orks do not even know how to score, but they sure know how to give someone a fine knuckling-off!

The tribal team games of kickskullz often devolve into brutal free-for-all fights, where the orkoid menace on the pitch will descend into an indiscriminate berzerk fury. Such jolly havoc will entail a great amount of headbutting, stomping and yelling. Boys will crash into their sport-foes and charge at each other with abandon, participating in a headcracking melee.

At other times, the tribal lines will remain intact, as more and more boys join the arms-ripping frenzy to support their own kind in the swelling fun brawl to prove their collective mettle. Some particularly enthusiastic matches will see such an escalation of force on the pitch that entire greenskin tribes are pulled into howling wars for dominance over the field of sportsmanlike massacre. Indeed, at some occasions the attractive maelstrom of violence is such that ever more Warbosses will pull ever larger forces into the field, until Stompas and Squiggoths clash, even as they crush tonnes of piled-up ork corpses underfoot. Such occasions are generally considered to be splendid matches, and local legends may be born out of the bloodbaths.

Much less spectacular games will still provide noisy stomping grounds, where brawlers, bruisers and brutes bash each other. Such hooligan matches will take place to much laughing and hooting, unless both teams fail miserably in their feral performance, and as a consequence invite spectators to lynch the lousy players with anything from fists and fangs to claws and guns. And so innumerable games of kickskullz take place on planets and looted voidholms beyond counting, amidst great revelry of chuckling and smirking, invigorated by guffaws and blood-curdling screams while frothing barbarians hunt what passes for a ball.

Sometimes trophy heads or ripped-off torsos from alien species such as oretti, genestealer, kroot or human will suffice, or else unlucky living grots will be tied up into a rough sphere of pain and get kicked around in shrieking agony until only gory pulp remains on the field. Some orks are even daring enough to use live squigs for balls, due to their good, meaty bounce, but those greenskins who survive the horrible carnage of maddened fang and claw quickly learn to use dead squigs instead. Captured enemy helmets are another common form of ball, usually with a head still rattling around inside.

Oftentimes games will see multiple balls, even if they only started with a single one. It is standard fare for players to brutalize each other to such an excessive degree that beheadings occur, and thus additional balls are added to the match. Likewise, the playing field need not be anything resembling a horizontal area, for it could well include rickety scaffolding, towers, parked vehicles, rocky outcrops, deep pits and all manner of obstacles that need to be overcome, usually with rough climbing constantly accompanied by fighting, tugging and kicking, and sometimes even outright shooting.

Thus feats of crude acrobatics may take place, to a chorus of frenetic bawling and dusty foot-stomping. Yet woe betide any ballcarrier who gets too much ahead of the opposition by means of agile cunning, for such gifted boys will often succumb to a stampede of warty feet, whether from angered bystanders, hostile players or teammates annoyed by their unorky play. Violent amusement and bloody spectacles are, after all, the reason for the existence of kickskullz in the first place, and if any self-respecting ork is to enjoy their rowdy scrap on the pitch, they will have to tear budding starplayers apart so as to stop the uppity bigshots from sabotaging the tribes trying to have a good time. Better level the playing field by levelling the dodgy gits with the ground.

Orkish sport events, such as kickskullz, are little more than an excuse to have a good fight, and it would be the height of folly to let the game overshadow the brawl. And so the apex species of our beleaguered galaxy will practice their high kultur in accordance with their ancestral traditions, oblivious to the weakness and angst that plague lesser beings. Theirs is the joy, as raw and primitive as it is true and eternal.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only fun and games.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/01 14:44:23


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


now that is a perfect representation of orks, from the outside brutal as hell, but to them, just sunday night football.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/04 03:12:28


Post by: Racerguy180


 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
now that is a perfect representation of orks, from the outside brutal as hell, but to them, just sunday night football.


I mean, they're literally football hooligans with shootas, choppas, squigs.

Great job as always Karak!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/04 08:57:20


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Some_Call_Me_Tim: Thanks!

@Racerguy180: Haha, indeed they are. Thank you!




Cult of Personality

In the grim darkness of the far future, rulers want the ruled to praise the ruler.

Far back in the distant Age of Terra, man learnt to put yoke upon the shoulders of fellow man, and make the bearer of burdens praise it as just. This ancient spell from mankind's misty ur-time still holds true, for the timeless endurance of the glamour of power bespeaks fundamental parts of human nature. The principles of hierarchy, organization and leadership, of course, have great and meaningful advantages, for the lordship of one over an obedient whole allows for a unity of purpose and ability to swift and decisive action in times of crisis that may prove crucial for the survival and welfare of the community at large. The legitimately accepted rule of strongmen in a traditional world of cosmic order decreed from on high also confer real benefits in the form of stability and a sense of knowing your place in the world and society.

Still, character, intelligence, integrity and other personal qualities remain important features in any leader. An incompetent reign or a spineless marionette crowned with laurels may lead the entire ship of state astray, and the rule of an unhinged madman may wreck it entirely, as may the risky brinkmanship of mediocre successors trying to fill out the large shoes left behind by genius predecessors. Sometimes, a worthwhile gamble attempted after sound deliberation do not pay off, or poor luck strikes out of nowhere without it being anyone's fault, and conversely the machinery of state may be so robust that haphazard reigns and shameful disasters at the top do not trouble the larger realm. Indeed, history shows that some of the most depraved and unfit lunatics have reigned in the midst of golden ages, without their sorrowful actions making the ship capsize.

Whatever the attention-grabbing vices and virtues of the people in charge, and whatever the tides and ebbs of their epoch, all rulers have ever benefitted from a sanctified leadership, which seem righteous and just in the eyes of the wider populace, or at least in the eyes of the elites, without whose support the ruler cannot last. Any country will wish to establish a hallowed tradition where the office of the figurehead or top despot of the powers that be derives legitimacy from the weight of centuries and the sacred will of divinity or strong ideas moulding the minds of men. Often, the actual character of the wielder of the sceptre and crown will seem unimportant in the eyes of patricians and plebeians alike. Instead the pedigree and the revered office with its glittering titles and symbols will be all that counts, and for the most part this veneration of a dynasty and social order will stay human polities in good stead, for stability is precious.

Yet sometimes the head of the monarch or reigning warlord will be raised forth as something just as important as the crown that it carries, if not more so. Sometimes the man will overshine his office, and the woman will cast her own throne in shadow. Sometimes, a princely leader wants to be personally loved by their flock, indeed at times an optimate maximus craves the adoration of the masses. And at other times they desperately needs to be cheered and thought of as demigods, for keeping oneself in power among shifting interest groups in volatile times may be likened to juggling daggers while dancing on eggshells.

Mankind in its degraded Age of Imperium knows no shortage of personality cults among its enthroned powermongers, for all manner of lacklustre lords and ladies may be believed by others to be brilliant Planetary Governors and Voidholm Overlords without compare, if their underlings and supporters just spin the grand tale bravely enough, and dare the big lie to be true. To many local potentates, the intense construction of a dear public persona will often consist of borrowing feathers from the splendid plumage of the Divine Imperator who dwells upon the face of Terra, while other supreme despots may even outshine our Lord and Saviour if they keep going long enough. Putting the God-Emperor in the shadow of your paeans of popularity is a dangerous prospect, but prudent leaders will know how to walk that tightrope without falling off.

A cult of personality is a public image of a ruling individual consciously shaped and moulded through constant propaganda, disseminated not only among the ruling classes, but among the lower castes as well, in order to anchor the leader in popular support and forestall dissent. Such a cult of personality is generated by the spread of disinformation, the arrangement of false displays of popular veneration, and the creation of an atmosphere in the culture where a leader is idealized, ever wallowing in flattery and praise for their heroic role as the people's great helmsman. Some long-running campaigns of leader cults will eventually turn the great leader into a living saint, literally and explicitly sent by the God-Emperor Himself to preserve and guide the people. Only seldom will they be accepted by the wider Ecclesiarchy, yet their status may live on locally for many centuries after their death.

Such tyrants advertising their own greatness is almost invariably backed up by armed force and campaigns of widespread terror, where anyone who speaks out of line or gets framed by a neighbour who wants the whole shared apartment for their own family, will disappear in order to cleanse Imperial society of deviants and malcontents. Of course, many will be scared into singing the accolades of this ego-trip of the mighty, yet many simple minds and sophisticates alike will genuinely lap it all up. So perverse is human nature, that there is no shortage of astounding instances where unfortunate true believers caught in a purge died with the name of their beloved leader on their lips, even though said tyrant was responsible for the very hardships, tortures and deaths suffered by the devout loyalists and their families.

Such common human denial of reality, and such depraved thought patterns are common enough, that purges ramped up to monstrous levels of democidal atrocity, will not be blamed upon the beloved ruler, for surely this great being could not ever be responsible for such heinous deeds carried out in his name? It must be the doings of corrupt lower officials! The guardian of our world must have evil advisors who deceive him by putting lies into his ears! It must be hidden enemies and traitors wishing to discredit the leader with their excessive massacres, autodafés and labour camps, without the knowledge of the great helmsman! If only the Imperial Governor knew!

But of course all those prime exemplars of perfect lordship knew. They knew all along. The fell deeds happened on their command, on their watch. After all, a state is a structure ruled from the top, despite all the departmental independence and local cliques and games of intrigue muddling the picture. Even so, human myopia, ability to lie to oneself and capacity for willing ignorance is such that the victim or witness of a horrible crime will sometimes refuse to see the murderer in charge for what he truly is. Such is the depravity of man, and thus is an ordinary source of endless mass suffering repeated again and again through uncounted aeons.

And so men, women and children will eulogize the boot that tramples the human faces of their loved ones, or even themselves, and the High Lords of Terra know this to be good.

One crucial factor when erecting a strong cult of personality, is the ability to tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it in order to brainwash the masses. After all, people tell themselves little lies all the time, so they will be unprepared for anyone willing and able to lie on a large scale. The most succesful and long-running campaigns of secular worship for a living leader and their venerated system will even see the propagandists and rulers themselves believe in their own empty talk, a state of affairs which will rather commonly set them up for a sobering fall from their heights of hubris, and often a lethal fall at that.

There is a bottomless Imperial capacity for fabrication, as is evident on hundreds of thousands of worlds and an innumerable myriad of voidholms in the astral domains of Him on Terra. Almost everywhere man dwells in the Age of Imperium, colossal untruths are believed by common folk, and some of the most audacious lies originate from the most efficient cults of personality, for their vigour of tongue is the wellspring of legend. There are long-established rules for distorting the truth: Such methods of infamy include basic guidelines for any ruler who wants to be honoured by the populace, such as the principle to never admit your faults and wrongs, never accept blame for anything and never leave room for alternatives. It is your way, or the highway.

The leaders of the human species during the Age of Imperium know well how to boast of their virtues and build popular support with lofty words and empty promises. A cult of personality grows by broadcasting the external appearance cultivated by a leader, in order to paint an idealized and heroic image, to create a sweet and seeming picture. It is therefore, at its very heart, a highly shallow phenomenon of carefully erected worship and vanity, which the clear example presented by the public persona of one Rogue Trader Zedek D.F. Mascadolce may serve to illuminate.

Rogue Trader flotillas are ever prone to develop insular microcultures, as proud and hostile to outsiders as they are parochial and hidebound. Rogue Trader ships provide a fine microcosm of Imperial civilization at work. Take Captain Zedek, for instance: This man has stimulated an outward image of himself onboard his only ship as an unrivalled sage of groundbreaking intellect, a wizard of words and winged advice. Yet below the charisma of teethy smiles and high-caste polish of aristocratic manners and noble speech, may be seen a pillar of ineptitude lording it in flawed fashion over his vessel the
Debt Collector, even as the structural materials of this rickety spacetub is salvaged piecemeal by unruly tribes on her lower decks. Zedek Mascadolce, in short, is a living, breathing example of assumed wisdom since cradle in action, for his muddled management of his lonely, rundown ship leaves much to be desired. This walking, talking incompetent in power will actually strike a rather pathetic figure for those who come to know him closely, yet the good Rogue Trader seeks to prop up his mediocre ways by having part of the bridge's crew constantly monitor his speech and suggest smarter things to say in ongoing conversations, in order for Captain Zedek to appear more clever than he actually is.

Fake it until you make it. And perhaps Rogue Trader Zedek of the
Debt Collector will manage to do so in due time, despite his whole illustrious family's fortunes being down on their knees in ill luck. Even some the best of human leaders through the ages started out in a state of questionable judgement, before wisdom brought by time, sound advice and rich experience honed them brilliantly for the task. Perhaps dear Zedek will rise to the occasion, or perhaps he will fall flat in his endeavours, and at best only succeed in prolonging the spiralling decay, like so many other Imperial rulers.

To wander through the better hallways and corridors of the
Debt Collector, is to behold a dilapidated monument to one man's titanic ego, a testament to human vanity and the folly of mortal creatures everywhere. Yet the splendid public image touted from posters, servitor bullhorns and statues is as flimsy as the man's tight pants, for the propaganda stance taken by the Mascadolce Rogue Trader is merely skin deep in substance. Oftentimes, big lies turn out to have only the most meagre bones of truthful content hidden within their darkened hollows.

The public relation methods employed by Captain Zedek may be summed up as the reigning Rogue Trader pretending to be a genius in charge, with all manner of scarce resources spent on improving the public standing of this floundering Mascadolce overlord. While this is clearly a case of egomania writ large, there is nevertheless a strain of sanity and calculation in this tyrannical self-glorification. Rogue Trader Zedek inherited his bloodline's last remaining hulk of a voidship, and found himself in a precarious position of eroding control, ever-worsening material state of disrepair and a crew-wide lack of communal pride. A virulent cocktail of untold generations of Mascadolce failures, the sharp elbows of rival dynasties such as the Lecoq Rogue Traders, bad judgement and poor luck had left a downcast crew without much sense of direction, trapped in a travelling backwater that had seen better days. Captain Zedek thus seemingly concluded that he needed to inject a new spirit and confidence in his minions, whether pressganged or voidborn, and he clearly elected to do so with his own humble self as the focal point of adoration for all the tens of thousands of souls under his command.

To Zedek Mascadolce's credit it should be mentioned that the self-obsessed Rogue Trader has thrown himself head first into the line of fire on a great many occasions, including instances of saving his own armsmen and crew from the jaws of death. He is thus carving out a deserved reputation for courage and martial skill, which his ramshackle propaganda machinery has blown up to wildly undeserved proportions of legendary stature. There must always be a kernel of truth in the best of lies, after all.

The Rogue Trader's armed merchant vessel is bedecked with little shrines to Zedek's own glory, and plastered with inspirational posters highlighting the need to obey the magnificent Captain without question, and serve him with due diligence. Zedek D.F. Mascadolce is seemingly even working as his own spindoctor in order to put catchy mottos, uplifting phrases and bad puns into the mouths of his crew, all aimed to bolster the image of their lord and master and colour the onboard microculture with his peculiar wit and arrogance. As such, the more enthusiastic and idealistic kind of people onboard this deteriorating spaceship may actually be heard using words of this kind: "For the greater glory of the Captain!"

The shine and glory of a heroic figurehead rubs off to some degree on his inferiors, spreading out like rings on the water with a twist of collective egotism: It is their Captain, after all, and pride in their leader ultimately reflects a pride in themselves, for in their unspoken thoughts they own their adored ruler. They possess him, as long as he continues to seem good and fit for his office, for them. By supporting such a respected figure, they somehow support and respect themselves that bit more. People need high and worthy examples to follow, for more subtle reasons of the spirit than may at first seem obvious, for it is not just inspiration, but self-respect won by proxy. It all makes up a knotty mental image beyond the conveyance of words, yet such are the meandering paths of the human heart.

Aside from seemingly rational reasons for playing up his own deeds and words in order to reinvigorate the flagging spirits of the
Debt Collector's disorderly inhabitants, the Mascadolce potentate also seem to harbour a familial grudge, true to the petty nature of man since time immemorial. As such Captain Zedek has sought to truly stamp his mark on his inherited voidborne domain. Prints and handwritten copies of his wise tome Zedequette takes up an entire cargo hold onboard the Debt Collector, and its insightful writings have grazed many a world and voidholm through frenetic export activities. Malevolent officer rumours onboard the Debt Collector claims that Zedek Mascadolce's fervent building of a personality cult is driven by a need to overshadow his hated father, and outdo the deceased pater familias in pretended splendour. On a budget, of course. Indeed, whispered accusations even say that the current owner of the starship has demolished or hidden away what artistic images remain of his father in order to damn the dead old man's memory. Others claim that a statue of Captain Zedek, with a suspiciously small head, is in fact a recarved visage of his late father.

Such cults of personality of a leader all amounts to a giant confidence trick, upheld for decades or even centuries on end. Some personality cults meet a dismal end while the leader is still in charge, and often the collapse of public confidence in the ruler may see him toppled from power. Other cults of personality run strong during the whole life of the leaders they adored and venerated, yet may find their boosted legacies torn to shreds by hostile successors willing to drag forth choice skeletons from their predecessors' closets and damage their historical image for the ages. Some later rulers may even perform a damnatio memoriae over earlier leaders in order to purge a defeated rival from common memory, and thus deface their foe's monuments or replace their predecessors' images and inscriptions with their own august visages and majestic names.

A ruler's cult of personality can blossom into an illusion of sheer godlike splendour if an early accession of power, lengthy survival of assassination attempts and rejuvenat treatments allow him or her to reign supreme for centuries on end over many shortlived generations of filthy plebs, who all are born and depart their lives under the benevolent guidance of their dear leader. Such ruler longevity usually enhances the secular apotheosis of a cult of personality, although some unfortunate overlords lived too long and found their standing and legacy utterly ruined by dire events outside their control, or else the personality cult was destroyed by disastrous decisions of the potentate's own making.

Any cult of personality in the Imperium of Man is dependant on creating an aura of magnificence and divine appointment. It is well to huff up the basileus with inflated imagery of the chief in charge. It is best to keep up a facade of popular love, spotless character and brilliant steering of the reins of power. It is necessary to hide the rotten hollow at the core of the regime, where self-serving oligarchs, inbred psychopaths and stressed warlords every day or lightson prove their human failings in a cavalcade of mediocrity, corruption, incompetence and petty-minded lack of vision, punctuated by bloody purges and hectic periods of paranoia, terror and plotting.

This is how to cultivate an overly gilt and rosy image of the one who is in power, until they have undergone a deification in the common psyche of simple folks. Such divinization of capricious dictators are as genuine as a synthetic plastid smile, yet the leader reverence among large sections of the population may still be heartfelt. Indeed, the death of a beloved ruler will inevitably see hordes of commoners flock to the displayed regal corpse in order to pay their last respects and honour the last rites carried out over a great leader that guided their world with much renown. On such occasions it is common for the pressure of earnest crowds to be so suffocating as to trample and kill great numbers of Imperial subjects, which is all too often a fitting farewell for a bloodsoaked oppressor in lit de parade. Give praise to lordly charlatans and mass murderers!

Personality cults are especially common under the reign of philosopher kings. This historical tendency for cults of personality springing up more commonly under the auspice of pondering men and women in power holds true even for those thinking sages on the throne who tend toward a self-sacrificing and self-denying image where they strive to be seen as dour servants of the common weal, for their vanity can ultimately be seen through the holes in their cloth. All is vanity.

Behold this ancient phenomenon replay itself again and again throughout human history, wherever mankind spreads its seed across the stars! Behold the cult of personality emerge: Watch it spring forth from the well of human hypocrisy, emerge from the pool of perjury and ascend from the depth of lies. Go forth, good cult, and seduce the minds of the masses. Rejoice, serf, in this timeless celebration of man's aspiration for total power over others, and know that our kin is in good hands under the stern and just rule of the sacred Imperium of Man. And all is well.

Such is the deception of man, in the darkest of futures.

Such is the delusion of our species, at the end of days.

Such is the depravity that awaits us all.

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


- - -

Tribute to Captain Zedek on WarHams, played by HulkyKrow. I had a 4x9cm rectangle left over in the corner of an A4 sheet of paper, so I drew a classical shrine. At first I pondered what statue to place in it. Maybe a martyred saint? I spent the better part of an evening collecting heaps of reference images of the Emperor of Mankind for shrine duty, until inspiration struck and a blasphemous change of plans occurred.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/15 09:40:34


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Sinspeech Whisper Jokes

Audio Version by A Vox in the Void

In the grim darkness of the far future, man tortures man for cracking a joke.

An ancient Terran sage from mankind's misty past once wrote that humour ought to be based upon ambiguity, the unexpected, wordplay, understatement, irony, ridicule, silliness and pratfalls. Yet another wise man claimed that the wellspring of humour was not joy, but sorrow. As tens of thousands of Terran years have passed, and the seed of man has spread and multiplied across the stars, time has ultimately proven both to be right. For if you cannot laugh at the misery, you must cry at it.

Likewise, an ancient proverb hailing from the distant Age of Terra delves to the core of man's spirit, by noting that gloating is his true delight. This, too, stands by and large as a timeless truth to last the aeons, for wretched man finds solace in the knowledge that somewhere, someone else fares worse than himself. If only in a joke, it nevertheless lightens his spirit to watch from the shores the stormy struggles of others out at sea. Pure gladness, the happy kind bereft of malicious joy at the suffering of others, is to be treasured due to its sheer rarity in the human heart.

Since the most ancient days of mankind's civilization, subjects in some oppressive tyrannies have developed a fine wit filled with clever quips and sharp jests. They may never be able to stand up to their overlords and tormentors, yet in some human cultures people have nonetheless learnt how to ease the travails and frustrations of everyday life by poking fun at their rulers and their multitude of corrupt and pompous minions, as well as the dysfunctionalities of their realm. Witty women and fellows fond of ribalds and jest do so at their own extreme peril, for the powers that be rarely appreciates being dragged in the mud and made the butt of irreverent jokes. While in some cultures, people have found it altogether distasteful to make wisecracks about hardships, bloodshed and civil strife, those other human cultures that have traditionally embraced gallows humour as a fine art have all honed it to marvellous levels of twisting creativity and witticisms in the face of deadly threats.

This pattern certainly holds true in the darkest of futures, for the Age of Imperium has seen humanity subjected to a rapacious rule of cruel tyrants, inept administrators, zealous fanatics and selfish warlords. As man has degenerated into scattered hordes of insular, hidebound and aggressively myopic savages and cannibals, the ignorant and parochial subjects of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra has all been grasped hard by the steely talons of that callous twin-headed eagle. This sclerotic rule of theocratic dictators has seen man reduced to dust under their ironshod heels, and the harsh lot of man has been one of misery and hardship neverending. The pattern varies greatly, but it holds true across the astral domains of the Imperator: Some human cultures just cannot resist the allure of jocular sinspeech.

Imperial Governors and their croneys remain popular targets of disrespectful jokes, even though anyone uttering such quips of black humour must do so at baleful peril to themselves and their entire clan. Not for nothing are such examples of irreverent humour in the Imperium of Man known as whisper jokes, for these jokes cannot be told openly in public because of their taboo subjects. Such dangerous witticisms constitute dark jokes for a dark age, all deviant and malcontent. The danger is real. There are eyes and ears everywhere, for in the darkest of futures, mankind teems like a horde of rats. Almost everywhere you go in inhabited human regions, there will be informants listening in on your conversation in overcrowded settlements, willing to sell out their fellow man to hellish dungeons for meagre rewards and the kick that this power over others allows them to experience.

One such example of dangerous words can be glimpsed in periods of great debauchery among secular or Ecclesiarchal ruling castes on Imperial worlds and voidholms, which are often dubbed pornocracies by street wits. As noted, many human cultures find it tasteless to make fun of their woes and grim sufferings, while other cultures find in the whisper jokes a release and a means to cope with all the hardships and terror. Cultural attitudes to risky jokes tend to vary greatly between regions on the same world or larger voidholm, on top of great interplanetary variety and general differences between entire subsectors. Still, the vast oral flora of mankind's humour include a great many jokes that do not entail pulling the tiger's tail, for most quips concern domestic matters far safer to make light of, than the matter of Imperial power and governorial authority.

For instance, human cultures in which parents place an overemphasis on cleanliness (such as on Armageddon or Aleph Primus), generally tends to sport a prominence of scatological humour. In other cultures where the maintenance of outward face is everything, and you must never break down in your display of self-control, diligence and politeness (such as on Taugast III or Wonlu's Station), humour revolving around extreme humiliation of others reigns supreme. Whatever the local peculiarities, many human jokes depend on stock figures, ridiculing caricatures of timeless personality types.

Here follows a wide selection of jokes harvested from a multitude of different human cultures thriving bitterly under a plethora of alien suns, all plucked from worlds and voidholms across the cosmic empire of His Divine Majesty. Many of the following witticisms constitute clear-cut cases of criminal sinspeech, the telling of which will greatly interest local Securitate enforcers or even the Adeptus Arbites. Read on at your own peril, and ken that you will have damned your soul by knowing of such malcontent wisecracks. For the radiant Emperor who dwells upon the face of Terra know all, and judge all.

Hear the whispers of the downtrodden, in a demented age.

Hear the whispers of depraved man, at the end of times.

Hear his whispers, and know that he himself is the punchline.

It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only the laughter of thirsting gods.


- - -

All jokes can be read and downloaded here.

- - -

A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!"
"Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge.
"I can't. I just gave someone fourhundred years camp labour for it!"

A drill-teacher asks a Cadian novice: "Where does Cadia fall on the starmap?"
The novice answered pompously: "Cadia does not fall!"

"How miserable my life is! I will leave nothing behind. What will I have to show for my mortal existence?"
"Chin up, old friend! Long after the rest of your body has been recycled, your visage will still be displayed on high for endless masses to behold. The public sight of your face shall be immortal."
"Do you really mean that?"
"Of course I do! The architects are in constant need of human skulls."

A coward is asked which are safer: Warships or merchant-ships. "Dry-docked ships," he answers.

Q: Is it true that the Imperium of Man is standing on the edge of an abyss?
A: No. It used to be true, but now we have taken a big step forward.

A man was reported to have said: "Titus is a moron!" and was arrested by an Enforcer: "No, sir, I meant not our respected Governor, but another Titus!"
The Enforcer barks: "Don't try to trick me; if you say 'moron', you are obviously referring to our Imperial Governor!"

Three men are sitting in a cell in the Securitate Headquarters at Forum Malcador. The first asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies: "Because I criticized Carolus Torquatus."
The first man responds: "But I am here because I spoke out in favor of Carolus Torquatus!"
They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers: "I am Carolus Torquatus."

Q: What is the easiest way to explain the meaning of the words ‘Imperial governance’?
A: By means of fists.

"Tyrant Matteus, is it true that you collect jokes about yourself?"
"Yes."
"And how many have you collected so far?"
"Three and a half labour camps."

Q: Three in a room and one is working, what's that?
A: Two Administratum clerks and a fan.

Emir Pius was a man who united all Imperial sects, because he degraded the True Believers, he degraded the Orthopraxists and he degraded the Redemptionists.

A new arrival to the penal labour camp is asked: "What were you given sixty years for?"
"For nothing!"
"Don't lie to us here, now! Everybody knows 'for nothing' is twenty years."

Q: Is it true that the Imperium of Man is divinely ordained for future greatness?
A: Of course! Life was already better yesterday than it's going to be tomorrow.

Time of shortage. A line is forming around the street's corner. A man passing by saw it and asked the last one in line: "What do they sell here?"
"I have no idea," the woman in line replied, "go ask someone ahead."
The man went to the middle of the line and asked another woman: "What do they sell here?"
"I have no idea," the answer came, and he was sent farther ahead to seek for an answer.
The man went straight to the first person in line and asked him: "What do they sell here?"
The other man answered: "Nothing, I just felt sick and took support on this wall."
"Well then, why are you still here?" the man asked.
"Because I've never before been the first in such a long line," came the answer.

Q: How does every Imperial joke start?
A: By looking over your shoulder.

After a speech, High Baron Eratosthenes confronts his speechwriter: "I asked for a fifteen minute speech, but the one you gave me lasted fortyfive minutes!"
The speechwriter replies: "I gave you three copies..."

A miser writes his will and names himself as the heir.

Planetarch Xingu loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Securitate Supremus Nihao calls Xingu: "Have you found your pipe?"
"Yes," replies Xingu, "I found it under the sofa."
"This is impossible!" exclaims Nihao. "Three people have already confessed to this crime!"

One advantage of growing old, is that your enemies tend to fall silent.

"The ruler of our voidholm, Kandahar Darius, is in surgery."
"His heart again?"
"No, chest expansion surgery, to make room for one more Gold Wings medal."

An uphive athlete, a midhive athlete and an underhive athlete are all on the medal podium after the Centenary Victory Games, chatting before the medal ceremony. "Don't get me wrong," says the underhive athlete, "winning a medal is very nice, but I still feel the greatest pleasure in life is getting home to the holestead after a long day, putting one's feet up and having a nice can of booze."
"You underhive proles," snorts the uphive athlete, "you have no sense of romance. The greatest pleasure in life is going on balls without your wife, and meet a beautiful girl with whom you have a passionate love affair before returning home to the spire."
"You are both wrong!" scoffs the midhive athlete. "The greatest pleasure in life is when you are sleeping at home and the Security Vigiles breaks down your door in the middle of lightsout, bursts into your hab and says, 'Albinus Felix, you are under arrest,' and you can reply 'Sorry cop, Albinus Felix lives next door.'"

After his wife had beaten him badly, a man crawled under his family bed. "Come out this instant!" his wife screamed.
"I am man enough to do as I please!" he said. "And I’ll come out when I’m good and ready."

When Wahibre became Imperial Governor he wanted a Throne Prince who was dumber than he was, so as not to cause him trouble or pose a threat to his power, so he chose Mernepta. When Mernepta became Governor he too wanted a Throne Prince dumber than he was and picked Takelot. After ascending to the throne, Takelot waited eight decades to pick a Throne Prince because he, too, was waiting to find on Khemrat III someone dumber than himself...

In a labour camp, two inmates are comparing notes. "What did they arrest you for?" asks the first. "Was it an anti-Imperial or common crime?"
"Of course it was anti-Imperial. I'm a plumber. They summoned me to the District Dictateum to fix the sewage pipes. I looked at them and said, 'Hey, the entire system needs to be replaced.' So they gave me seventy years."

Q: What's the best feature of a mechshaw?
A: There's a heater at the back to keep your hands warm when you're pushing it.

Graphocleus, the angelic reaper of the dead, appears before the Emperor's appointed Archking Caelestis and tells him to bid farewell to the Nomian people. Caelestis asks: "Why, where are they going?"

When will we finish the war? When the spire caste will eat mice and we will eat mice substitute.

Governor Royarch Bindusara makes a speech: "Everyone in the Governance Chamber has dementia. Count Pelshevu doesn't recognize himself: I say 'Hello, Count Pelshevu,' and he responds 'Hello, Royarch Bindusara, but I'm not Pelshevu.' Praefectus Kulottunga acts like a child – he's taken my rubber Space Marine from my desk. And during Vizier Kerala Varma's funeral – by the way, why is he absent? – nobody but me invited a lady for a dance when the music started playing."

What are the four deadly enemies of latifundia farming? Spring, summer, autumn, winter.

Governor Hasdrubal and Minister Mago are standing on the Lilybaeum Vox-Com Spire. Hasdrubal tells Mago he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Lilybaeum. "Why don’t you just jump?" Mago suggests.

A nobleman happened to be dining at the home of the best painter in the Spire, when he saw the painter's nine ugly sons.
"You don't make children," he said, "the way you make pictures."
"That," said the painter, "is because I make children in the dark, pictures in the light."

Lightsoff in Hive Caenophrurium. Two Baronial Guards on nightwatch spots a shadow trying to sneak by: "Halt! Who goes there? Documents!"
The frightened person chaotically rummages through his pockets and drops a paper. The Guard chief picks it up and reads slowly, with difficulty: "'U.ri.ne A.na.ly.sis'... Hmm... an offworlder, sounds like... A spy, looks like.... Let's shoot him!"
Then the Guard reads further: "'Proteins: none, Sugars: none, Fats: none...' You are free to go, humble man! The poor shall not cease in the land!"

Dear God-Emperor, make me dumb, so I don't come to labour camp.

Why did Magos Referatum go abroad, while Enginseer Heimunu did not? Because Referatum ran on power-packs, but Heimunu needed an outlet.

The fools Pullo and Vorenus cross the street in a besieged urb, when they are suddenly hit by a shell. Pullo loses an ear and goes back to look for it.
Vorenus shouts: "Come on, let it go, you have another ear!"
But Pullo replies: "But it's not about the ear. I had put a lho-stick behind it!"

Lord of Lords Imhotep is visiting an asylum. The patients line up by their beds and greet him with: "Hail Imhotep!"
Only one man stands aside and does not greet. Imhotep gets angry and asks him why. He answers: "I'm not crazy, I am the head of the ward."

A ganger walks into an apothecarion and says: "Give me a loaf of bread."
"But sir, this is an apothecarion, we don’t carry bread," replies the apothecary.
The ganger takes out a plasteel pipe and beats the apothecary to within an inch of his life.
The next day he comes in again and says: "Give me a loaf of bread."
"We don’t carry bread."
The same thing happens. The apothecary decides to get some bread to avoid a third beating.
On the third day, the ganger walks into the apothecarion.
"Hello, sir, I have your bread right here," says the apothecary.
"Oh, that’s okay, I got bread at the hardware store. You get me a quart of milk."

On his deathbed, Tarquinius XIX cries: "What will the Cassian people do without me?"
His advisor tries to comfort him: "Your magnificence, don’t worry about the Cassians. They are a resilient people who could survive by eating stones!"
Tarquinius replies: "Quick. Grant my daughter Alenia a monopoly on the trade in stones."

Q: When will the Emperor Return in the Flesh?
A: It is already seen on the horizon.
Q: What is a horizon?
A: An imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it.

"My wife has been going to cooking school for three years."
"She must really cook well by now!"
"No, so far they've only got to the bit about the words and deeds of Saint Sebastian Thor."

The PDF troopers are standing at attention. The Lieutnant inspects his platoon: "Number eighteen! Why don't you hold your lasgun in your proper hand?"
"I've got a splinter in my hand, sir."
"Been scratching your head I suppose!"

Goge Vandire appears to the Master of the Administratum Zeno Hipparchus in a dream and says: "I have two bits of advice for you: Kill off all your opponents and paint the Imperial Palace black."
Zeno asks: "Why black?"
Goge Vandire: "I knew you wouldn't object to the first one."

A corpulent Abbot approached the small urb of Giovanniopolis on his travels. He met a water-carrier on the road. The Abbot asked him if it was possible to pass through the citygate, whereupon the water-carrier looked at the Abbot's rotund body and said: "If a truck can pass through, then you should have a fair chance of squeezing yourself in as well."

Q: Why do Securitate officers make such good limo drivers?
A: You get in the limo and they already know your name and where you live.

What a coincidence: Governor Gregorius has died, but his body lives on.

A man walks into a shop and asks: "You wouldn't happen to have any ratmeat, would you?"
The shop assistant replies: "You've got it wrong, ours is a bakery. We don't have any bread. You're looking for the butcher's shop across the road. There they don't have any ratmeat!"

Q: How do you kill fifty flies with one blow?
A: Hit a sub in the face with a shovel.

The Imperial Governors of Piscina IV, Hydra Cordatus and Ashkelon are invited to see a shuttle built entirely out of gold. They are told that they can enter it and look around for as long as they like, but they cannot take anything. The Governor of Piscina IV goes first, stays five minutes, and upon his exit the metal detector blares; he had taken a screw and a nail with him.
The Governor of Hydra Cordatus goes second, stays five minutes, and upon his exit the metal detector blares again; he had stolen a fistful of screws.
Finally, the Governor of Ashkelon enters the plane, and stays there five minutes. And another five minutes. And another... Suddenly, the shuttle takes off.

Motto in farms:
Every egg, a bomb, every hen, a bomber against the traitor dogs!

On the Imperial Guard sniping range, the Lieutenant says to a fellow soldier: "That guy over there is good."
"Yes indeed, but I have a feeling that we should better check his personal background."
"Why?"
"After every shot he carefully removes his fingerprints from the rifle."

The Emperor promised us a golden age to last a million years. Time must be flying. Those years took just ten millennia.

A soldier in the local militia regiment is told that they will have to fire a 21-gun salute when Imperial Governor Rictus Stercus arrives in Apamea: "What if we get him on the first shot, can we stop then?"

A novice voidship owner of a system yacht got into steering trouble too close to a gas giant and had to call the System Defence Force for help.
"Alert, alert, alert!" he yelled. "This is yacht Supremus Astra, Supremus Astra, Supremus Astra, over."
"Supremus Astra, this is K-92," came the reply with lag. "Can you give me your position, sir, over."
"K-92, this is yacht Supremus Astra. I’m a Senior Decurion in the Guild of Coin on Arboretus VIII, over."

Two prisoners are about to be shot. Suddenly the order comes to hang them instead. One says to the other: "You see, they’re running out of ammo."

Governor Philagrius is flying in an ornithopter with his advisors. Suddenly he pulls out a thousand Throne Gelt and asks each of them to tell him how to spend it to make the Rhegian people happy. The first advisor says: "Your highness, if you throw it out the window, it will be found by some family and make them happy."
The second advisor says: "Sir, if you divide it into two bundles and throw them out the window, you will make two families happy."
Then the pilot chimes in: "Your excellency, if you put the lucre in your pocket and throw yourself out the window, you will make all Rhegians very happy."

Motto in Medicae wards:
Don't let a single patient die without medical assistance!

A scrivener is having a crisis of faith after a long life of serving the Emperor with reverent diligence. He confesses to his wife:
"I know the sacred order of mankind emanates from the Golden Throne by His will alone. But darling! Just look at the ones I have worked under! All our leaders are either greedy and hopelessly corrupt, or else they are die-hard madmen."
His wife scolds him:
"Yes, but at least they're good Loyalist madmen!"

A father excitedly tells his family of his doings twenty years ago. Suddenly, the youngest daughter interrupts his vigorous story: "Did you have hair back then?"

A mind without purpose will lose itself in drink.

An Martian man and a Terran man died on the same day and went to the nether hells together. The dark ones told them: "You may choose to enter two different types of hell: the first is the Martian one, where you can do anything you like, but only on the condition of eating a bucketful of manure every day; the second is the Terran hell, where you can also do anything you like, but only on the condition of eating two bucketfuls of manure a day."
The Martian man chose the Martian hell, and the Terran man chose the Terran hell. A few months later, they met again. The Terran man asked the Martian: "Hi, how are you getting on?"
The Martian said: "Horrible! I can't stand the bucketful of manure every day. Like clockwork. How about you?"
The Terran man replied: "Well, I'm fine, except that I don't know whether we had a shortage of manure, or if somebody stole all the buckets."

Q: What is the most permanent feature of our Imperial economy?
A: Temporary shortages.

The Supreme Marshal of the PDF has attached an arrow to the row of medals on his tunic. It reads: 'Continued on the back.'

A school teacher asks little Ammatas:
"Ammatas, why are you always speaking of our Terran brothers? Why not Terran friends?"
"Well, you can always choose your friends."

A hotel room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of raenka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing, and telling jokes about Imperial governance. The fourth man desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, in frustration he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 45 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party. Five minutes later, he bends to a power outlet: "Detective-Espionist, some tea to Room 45, please." They laugh at him.
In a few minutes, there is a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the prankster finally gets to sleep. The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge what happened to his companions. "You don't need to know!" she answers.
"B-but...but what about me?" asks the terrified fellow.
"Oh, you... well... The Detective-Espionist liked your tea gag a lot."

A young man said to his frisky wife: "What should we do, darling? Eat or love?
And she replied: "You can choose. But there's not a crumb in the house."

At the celestial gates of Holy Terra, the guardian angel Chirbelophon asks the latest soul seeking entrance to state his talents and abilities.
The newcomer's answer: "None."
The guardian angel smiles and says: "Oh, I didn’t recognize you, High Governor Varus."

Q: How do you catch a mechshaw?
A: Just stick chewing gum on the highway.

Three theologians have a furious discussion over scripture. The theologian Claudius knows he is right, but the other two refuse to accept it. So he declares: "If I am right, o Lord of Mankind, let the air fans cease in their operation!"
The air fans suddenly stop, but the other two theologians note that it was perfectly common for machinery to malfunction.
So the theologian Claudius cries: "If I am right, o Divine Majesty, let the walls bend!"
The walls start to bow inward, but the two other theologians scold them: "It is not for you mere walls to interfere in our argument about the sacred!"
Desperate, the theologian Claudius lifts his arms and shouts: "Please, I need a greater sign. If I am right, o Imperator, then prove it beyond all doubt!"
The entire hive city starts to quake, and a strange sound like thunder can be heard undampened by matter all the way down to the Sump. Suddenly, the shell of the hive cracks open in a perfect line, and spires and floors part to open up a giant chasm formed like the holy 'I'. A dark sky bloated with rusty clouds can be seen through this tear, and yet a pure light emanates from on high, its source unknown. Unseen angelic choirs sing, as a giant hand of shining gold descends from the heavens and thrust through the marvellous chasm, pointing right at the theologian Claudius. And a booming voice decrees: "This man is right!"
But the other two theologians reply: "Shut up! That's humbug. For we have the holy word of the God-Emperor Himself written in black on white!"

And then there was the witch-hunt that started because the hab-block lacked fuel to keep the heat up.

Q: How are you?
A: Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.

Someone asked a Black Templar: "How far does the Imperium extend?"
At which the Black Templar held forth his boltgun and declared: "As far as this can reach!"

A driver with a rusty bemo picks up passengers. As they shake along on the streets, one customer comments: "Emperor's teeth, the cracks in the road are teeming with cretomites!"
The driver wonders: "How can you even see that?"
"Through the panorama gap in the floor, of course!"

Q: Why is the rabbit undergoing torture by the Securitate?
A: They want him to confess that he is a donkey due to quota demands.

A man drives up to the Sublime Palace and parks his mechshaw outside. As he is getting out a Watchman hurriedly flusters over and says: "You can't park there! That's right under the Heir Apparent's window!"
The man looks perplexed for a second but then smiles and calmly replies: "No need to worry officer, I made sure to lock the mechshaw."

Soldiers of the Home Militia are now being sent to the front in pairs. One throws a stone, and the other one shouts: "Boom!"

One day the daughter of a Patrician house came into her father's presence in a somewhat risque costume, and though he said nothing, he was offended. The next day she changed her style and embraced her father, who was delighted by the respectability which she was affecting. The pater familias, who the day before had concealed his distress, was now unable to conceal his pleasure:
"How much more suitable," he remarked, "for a daughter of my rank is this costume!"
She did not fail to stand up for herself: "Today," she said, "I dressed to be looked at by my father, yesterday to be looked at by my husband."

A man was sentenced to ninetyfive years of camp labour for calling the Imperial Governor a bloody idiot: Five years for besmirching an honoured servant of the Emperor, and ninety years for revealing a governance secret.

A Quirinali dies and goes to celestial afterlife on Holy Terra. He sees some clocks hanging on the wall, and each clock has a famous leader's name written below it. So he asks an angel about the clocks and gets this reply:
"Those aren't for measuring time, they are for measuring lies. Each time a human lies, their clock moves one minute forward."
The guy then proceeds to look at the clock of every living leader, but he can't find the clock of Voidholm Overlord Suetonius, the ruler of Quirinus. So he asks the angel where Suetonius' clock is. The angel says:
"Oh, they are using his clock as a cooling fan in the nether hells."

The hillman scratches his head in bewilderment upon visiting the hive city: "Back home, women get stoned when they commit adultery. Here, they commit adultery when they get stoned!"

"Blessed is the mind too small for doubt," said the pious man, and volunteered to become a servitor.

And then there was the Securitate agent who moved objects around in a surveillance target's home in order to drive the victim crazy because no one would ever believe him if he said that the Governor's men busied themselves with such trifling things.

A small man is wearing a long rifle. A jokester sees him, and says: "You couldn't know who was tied to whom, the rifle to the man or the opposite."

Five precepts of the literati:
Don't think.
If you think, then don't speak.
If you think and speak, then don't write.
If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.

A husband with bad breath asks his wife: "My dear, why do you hate me?"
She gave him an answer: "Because you kiss me!"

A friend asked the Archdeacon how old he was.
"Forty," replied the Archdeacon.
"But you said the same thing two years ago!" protested the friend.
"Yes," replied the Archdeacon, "I always stand by what I have said."

Two fools were trying to escape pillaging Guardsmen. One hid himself in a well and the other in a clump of reeds. When the Guardsmen let down a helmet to draw up water, the fool in the well thought a Guardsman was coming and started begging for his life. When the Guardsmen pulled him up and said that if he had kept quiet he would have been overlooked, the one hidden in the reeds called out: "Then pass me by for I am keeping silent!"

Q: What does 'Toronus Mechshaw 901' stand for?
A: 900 people ordered mechshaws, and only one has had it delivered.

Scrawled on a streetside hab wall: 'To the one defecating here. Beware of the curse! If you look down on this curse, may you have a wroth Saint Dikranouhi for your enemy.'

Motto in the Chamber of High Nobility:
Every member of the Chamber, an example for the hooligans.

A rebel group kidnaps Vezir-Minister Aurelianus and says they'll douse him in promethium and set him alight unless a ransom of ten million Throne Gelt is paid. His clients go out in the street looking for donations.
"What are most people giving?" one would-be contributor asks.
"Oh, some gave five litres, others ten."

Pastor Frej, fresh out of seminary, found that his first task was to officiate the last rites for a homeless vagrant with no friends nor family. He arrived to the alley just as Corpse Guild workers was shutting the body bag of the corpse. Young and enthusiastic, Pastor Frej poured out his heart and soul as he gave his sermon and recited the prayers. He was so powerful a speaker that he brought the Corpse Guild workers to tears.
When the service was over and the Pastor was leaving the alley, he heard one worker say to another: "I never saw anything like that before, and I've been putting in septic systems for fifteen years."

Q: Upon the Return of the Emperor in the Flesh, will there still be thefts and pilfering?
A: No, because everything will already have been pilfered during the reign of the High Lords.

Lord Solar Macharius after his death went straight to knock at the gates of the afterlife. "Ah no," said the angelic guardian Chirbelophon, "a great Warmaster like you ought at least to come with a horse.’"
Macharius returned to earth and told of his misadventure to High Command. "What!" cried the Deputy of the High Lords, "Chirbelophon allowed himself to impose conditions on our greatest general! I will go with you and settle all that."
But when the Emperor's appointed gate guard saw them, he raised his hands and said: "But Macharius, you didn’t understand me then? I told you to come with a horse, not with an ass."

At the fifth signal, there will be hot water.
Drip! Drip! Drip! Drip! Drip! There was hot water.

An Alodian potentate was opportuned to visit Lucentum Augusta. While there, he met a civil servant of the local Planetary Governor's chancelleries who owned a whole stable of luxury vehicles and lived in a mansion with scores of servants.
"How can a mere civil servant be so affluent?" asked the Alodian.
The Lucentian took him to the window and asked: "Do you see that highway?"
"Yes?"
The civil servant patted his pocket and said: "15%."
So the potentate returned to Alodia. One year later, the Lucentian was on Alodia. When he noticed that the Alodian now had a more lavish lifestyle than himself, he had to ask: "How do you manage?"
They went to the window. "Do you see that bridge over there?"
"What bridge?"
The Alodian patted his pocket and said: "100%."

A sharp wit observes a slow runner: "I know just what that gentleman needs."
"What's that?" demands the sponsor of the race.
"He needs a horse, otherwise, he can't outrun the competition!"

Q: What is the longest personal vehicle on the market?
A: The mechshaw, at twelve meters length. Two meters of vehicle, plus ten meters of smoke.

Graphocleus, the angelic reaper of the dead, was sent by the Imperator to finally collect Overdespot Gibamundus’s soul. After more than ten months, Graphocleus returns, bloodied, bruised, and broken.
"What happened?" asked the Emperor.
"Gibamundus' Securitate seized me. They threw me in a dark cell, starved me, beat me and tortured me for weeks and weeks. They only just released me."
The God-Emperor turns pale and says: "You didn’t tell them I sent you?"

Two subs were on their way from Utica to their residence in Leontini. One of them fell sick by pox and died, and the other one became anxious to bring the corpse back to Utica, which it was not lawful to do openly. So he cut his comrade's corpse up into little pieces and stuffed them into a small barrel with aromatics and honey in order to hide the stench by delightful fragrance. Then he committed the barrel to the care of another sub, who was going to Utica. This sub took his charge with him on a canal boat, amid a swarm of passengers. A gluttonous Utican happened to take his seat close to the barrel, and became enthralled by the fragrancy. When night came, the glutton pried open the barrel and devoured all its contents in the belief that they were delicacies. By dawn, the sub lifted the barrel and realized it was empty, so he screamed that he had been plundered of the corpse of his brother in abhumanity. Thus did the Utican become aware that he was a sub's tomb.

Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the Governor replied: "In silence."

A slum doctor was detained by the furious relatives of a patient he had killed with the wrong prescription, but he escaped during the night and swam across a wide sewage canal to reach home. When he saw his son studying medical texts, he said: "Don’t be in such a hurry to study medicine. First things first. Learn to swim!"

Q: How can you stop a PDF tank?
A: You shoot the soldier that is pushing it.

The scholam teacher asks his pupils whether grox walk or fly, and one pupil says they fly. The teacher corrects him, but the pupil insists. After a short exchange, the teacher asks the pupil for his name to add it to a detention list, and the pupil answers: "Aulus Majorianus Thrax." Recognizing the name of the Voidholm Overlord's great-grandson, the teacher says: "Okay, you are right. Grox do fly, but when they are tired of flying, they go down and walk."

A man had an intimacy with the wife of a downright fool with a stuttering tongue. One night the mant went to her hab, believing the husband to be away. He knocked on the door, claiming admittance and imitating the cuckold’s voice. The blockhead, who was at home, had no sooner heard him, than he called to his wife: "Aemiliana, open the door, Aemiliana, let him in; for it does seems to be me!"

An Armageddon court-martial sitting at Hive Volcanus sentenced a local freedman merchant to a scrip fine of fivehundred dorites for repeating in a public restaurant the joke about ordering a sandwich at a tubestation kiosk and being served with a meat ticket between two bread tickets.

The Tyrannicus Maximus Augustalius was touring his sub-empire of vassal voidholms, when he noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. Intrigued, he asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?"
"No your Highness," he replied, "but my father was."

A questioning mind betrays a treacherous soul. As such, an answering mind betrays a complicit soul.

Midhive, fifty years into the future. A boy asks: "Grandpa, what is a line?"
"You see, some forty years back, there was not enough meat in stores, so people had to form long queues at the stores' entrances and wait, hoping some meat would appear on sale. That was called a line. Did you get it?"
"Yes, grandpa. And what is meat?"

Q: What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening?
A: Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a man and has been converted into a tripod memory bank servitor when his body becomes too decrepit for heavy labour.

A man from Medusa V was on an interstellar voyage via Van Grothe's Rapidity when a Warpstorm arose and his slaves started screaming. "Quit weeping," he said, "for I have given you all your liberty in my will."

"I wish for a higher state of being after death, a loftier and worthier existence than the one I lead now."
"Then I will pray you become a servo-skull."

A man who had given his wife a valuable dress, complained that he never exercised his marital rights without it costing him less than an electrum tetradrachm each time. "It is your fault," answered the wife, "why do you not, by frequent repetition, bring down the cost to one farthing?"

One of our fellow Imperial subjects, a very witty man, was labouring under a painful and lengthy illness. He was attended by a Confessor who came to comfort him, and, among other words of solace, told him that the God-Emperor thus especially chastens those He loves, and inflicts His visitations upon them. "No wonder then," retorted the sick man, "that the Emperor has so few friends; if that is the way He favours them, He ought to have still less."

Miles Gloriosus, the braggart Guardsman, receives accolades and flattery from admiring crowds of women when marching through an urb, to their husbands' consternation. He comments on their praise of his peak manly form: "Yes, ladies. Even I am impressed!"

Some thirty people gathered to celebrate the wedding. After a few bottles of amasec were imbibed, tongues got loose, and the guests started telling deviant and irreverent jokes about His Divine Majesty's diligent administrators. Through the laughter, a voice sounded: "Ladies and gentlemen, please, it's too noisy. In such a din, I can't hear the jokes. I am writing it down, you know."
A man who sat next to the one who was writing, said admiringly: "How do you manage to write that fast?"
"Oh, I'm only jotting down the initials."

There once was a barmaid in Dome, and a salt miner lonely for home. He had the breath of a moose, and she couldn't get loose, so she pulled out her knife and spilled his guts on her shoes.

Planetary Overlord Agung Diann presented his vassal Voidholm Shah Bahram IX with a monkey, saying: "I’ll double your system patrol subsidies if you make this monkey laugh and cry."
Bahram first whispered to the monkey and it laughed. Then he whispered again and it cried. "How on earth did you do this?" Agung asked.
"When I told him that I am a ruler of men, he laughed," Bahram said. "Then I told him that I was reigning over them for the rest of my life, and he cried."

Q: What do you call a man who has lost 99% of his mind?
A: Infertile.

Motto on traffic sign:
Drivers, be wary! A second of inattention and you will be dead for the rest of your life.

Once, the paraonid Despot Tadgh Glenwood invited several Marshals of the Grand Imperial Voidholm of Gaelutrea and ordered them to wrestle in front of him on a carpet. Marshal Kenrik won all rounds. This angered Despot Glenwood. He ordered to summon Marshal Sheamus who was a very big man.
Sheamus arrived and easily overpowered Kenrik. As Kenrik fell to the carpet, he hit his head. Sheamus, putting in order his uniform, loudly expressed regret.
"Don't worry, Marshal Sheamus," Glenwood said. "He will not need his head any longer."

And then there was the guy who got shot by the Street Enforcers because he praised his new Emperor-given mechshaw as a piece of 'racing cardboard.'

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.

An urbecarri owner leaves his vehicle at a service station. When he picks it up again, he notices that the faulty door mechanism has been replaced with a puny steel wire: "Hey!" he snaps. "What shoddy workmanship is this? What have you done to my expensive urbecarri?"
The lay mechanic replies: "I reduced her weight for you, sir!"

Two hillmen brothers, Urcaguary and Pachacamac, decided to emigrate to the hive city after hearing of the fabulous wonders man had built there. Theye were enchanted by the tales told about its splendour. Even though they didn't believe some merchants' negative reports on the conditions in the hive, they still decided to exercise caution. Urcaguary would go to the hive city to test the waters. If they were right and it was a paradise of mortals, then Urcaguary would write a letter to Pachacamac using black ink, since they both could read and write. If, however, the situation in the hive was as bad as some merchants liked to portray it, and the Securitate was a force to be feared, then Urcaguary would use red ink to indicate whatever he said in the letter must not be believed.
After three months Urcaguary sent his first report. It was in black ink and read: "I'm so happy here! It's a beautiful place. I enjoy freedom and a kingly standard of living. All the serpent-tongued merchants were liers. Everything here is readily available! There is only one small thing of which there's a shortage. Red ink."

A man had a wife who never stopped talking or arguing. When she died, he had her body carried high on a shield to the Corpse Guild. When someone noticed this and asked him why, he replied: "She was a fighter."

Q: What does an optimist say?
A: It can't get any worse!

When I die, I wish to go to the eternal rest in solemn peace like my father. And not screaming in panic like his passengers.


...


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/15 09:41:05


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Imperial Governor Kuduzulush the Strong was in a very important meeting with all of his cabinet when the vox servitor blared with an urgent call from his wife Ishme-Karab. He got up and took the vox call and asked her what the emergency was. Ishme-Karab sobbed: "Oh Kudu, Kudu, our spire has been robbed!"
Kuduzulush protested: "Impossible, I’m in a meeting with all of the crooks in Anshan Priapus right now!"

Wishing to teach his grox not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food.
When the grox died of hunger, he said: "I've had a great loss! Just when he had learned not to eat, he died."

A salty bluewater sailor swaggered into a tavern. He had a ship’s wheel stuffed into the front of his trousers. The bartender said: "Hey, you’ve got a ship’s wheel in your trousers!"
The sailor said: "Aye mate, and it’s driving me nuts!"

Station Overlady Adelita Daleninar goes to a communal scholam on her voidholm to talk to the kids and shoot picts of herself in their smiling company. After her talk she offers the children a short question time.
One little boy puts up his hand and Adelita asks: "What is your question, Turibas?"
Turibas say: "I have one question: Why is Carpetani Station falling apart under your benevolent rule?"
Just at that moment, the bell rings for break. Adelita inform the kids that they will continue after the break.
When they resume, Adelita says: "Alright, where were we? Oh! That’s right... question time. Who has a question?"
A different little boy puts up his hand. Adelita points him out and asks him what his name is.
"Edereta," the boy says.
"And what is your question, Edereta?"
"I have two questions: Why did the bell ring twenty minutes early? And what have you done to Turibas?!"

A young man invited into his home two frisky old women. He said to his servant thralls: Mix a drink for one, and satisfy the other, if she wants to."
The women spoke up as one: "I'm not thirsty."

Q: Why did the man who shot at a Governorial limo on the Agora of Vulcan miss the target?
A: Because people who happened to be next to him tried to wrest the missile launcher from him and shouted: "Let me shoot!"

High Command banter via the Astropathic grapevine. A conversation unfolds between Vostroyan and Mordian Marshals. The Mordian says:
"Listen, I heard it was -60 degrees over there!"
"No, it’s about -30."
"But the attaché said -60."
"Oh, you mean outside."

The first rule of governance: Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.

An Arbites Chastener interrogates a captured rogue human bomb: "Come on, confess. How many times did you blow yourself up?"

Little Flavia was sitting on the porch with her younger brother when she said: "Look, there’s a Throne Gelt in the street!"
Her brother jumped up and ran into the street to get the money and was promptly squashed by a draytruck.
Little Flavia laughed and laughed, because she knew it was only a scrip-chit.

Q: What is Chaos?
A: We do not comment on Governorial policy.

Presbyter Nicodemus was a dry and humourless speaker who had difficulties keeping his congregation's attention during sermon. One day, he witnessed another priest boldly take his place at the altar and gather the entire crowd's attention before saying:
"The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman that wasn't my wife!" The crowd was shocked. He followed up by saying: "And that woman was my mother!" The crowd burst into laughter and he delivered the rest of his sermon, which went over well.
Next cycle, Presbyter Nicodemus decided he would give this humour thing a try, and use that joke in his sermon. As he surely approached the altar, he tried to rehearse the joke in his head, but it suddenly seemed a bit foggy to him.
Getting to the altar, he raised his hands and said loudly: "The greatest years of my life were spent in the arms of another woman that was not my wife!" The congregation inhaled half the air in the temple. After standing there for almost ten seconds in stunned silence, trying to recall the second half of the joke, Presbyter Nicodemus finally blurted out: "...and I can't remember who she was!"

Two Hydraphurians after supper out of politeness escorted one another home in turn and so did not get any sleep.

Q: When Baron Mauricius visited Scarus, he and Governor Gizeric ran around the Palace in a race. Mauricius came the first. How should our heralds report that?
A: The declaration should be as follows: ‘In the interplanetary running competition the Emperor's Appointed Governor of Scarus took the honorable second place. Baron Mauricius came in one before last.'

In the midst of another wave of purges, a knock at the door woke a family in the middle of the night. All family members, shaking in terror, jumped up.
"Take all you can carry with you, and get out at once," a voice sounded. "But, for the Emperor's sake, don't panic! It's me, your neighbour. This is nothing serious, it's just our house that is on fire."

Tyrant Rhemaxos of Dimensi Majoris had a yard of cloth and sent for a Triballi tailor to make him a suit out of it. But the Triballi said he could not do it with so little cloth. Therefore he was liquidated. So then there came an Albocensian tailor but he was also unable and he was liquidated. It happened the same with the Melanditaenean tailor. Rhemaxos then sent offworld for a Ligurian tailor who said: "Yes! I will make you a suit out of the cloth and an overcoat as well."
Tyrant Rhemaxos was very surprised and said to him: "How can you do this?"
Then the Ligurian answered him: "You see. in Liguria you are such a little man."

Q: How best to depict starvation?
A: An arsehole with cobwebs.

An application form sported the quesion: "What is your attitude to Imperial authority?"
One applicant answered: "The same as to my wife."
When requested to elaborate, the applicant explained: "First, I love her; second, I fear her; third, I wish I had another one."

A Mordian whose father was away from home fell under a heavy indictment and was sentenced to be executed. As he went away he exhorted everyone not to tell his father, else the old man would beat him to death.

A thirsty voidsman at the starport runs from his shuttle to the nearest bar and shouts to the bartender: "Give me twenty shots of your best old-foiz, quick!"
The bartender pours out the shots, and the voidsman drinks them as fast as he can.
The bartender is very impressed and exclaims: "Wow. I never saw anybody drink that fast."
The voidsman replies: "Well, you’d drink that fast too, if you had what I have."
The bartender says: "Oh by the God-Emperor on Terra! What is it? What do you have?"
"An empty purse!" replied the voidsman.

Q: Is it true that pre-Imperial arcologies are the tallest buildings in the universe?
A: Yes, it's true, but on the other hand Imperial-made nanotransistors are the largest anywhere.

There was a subsector Officio Medicae conference on surgical operations and representatives from many of the worlds and voidholms were there. The Rigantine surgeon told about a man who had been in a serious accident and was hurt badly and had to have his heart and kidneys replaced: "Today," the Rigantine surgeon said, "he is a professional kick-wrestler."
The Dumnonian surgeon spoke about a man who was a long-distance runner and was hurt badly and had both of his legs replaced with vat-grown ones, and today: "He is still a champion long-distance runner."
All the representatives, in turn, told about the best operations performed on their worlds and voidholms. Finally, the Wararni surgeon got up and told of a man who had a brain that did not work and had it replaced with the brain of a grox: "And today he is the Governor of Vararni Secunda!"

Miles Gloriosus, the braggart Guardsman, declares upon entering a tavern with his squads: "Arrange food, drink, entertainment, and a sit-down orgy for fifteen!"

Motto in chancelleries:
If a job is worth doing, it is worth delegating.

Civil war on the voidholm. One side is buckling under starvation sooner than the other. A soldier in the carabineers, who has already made quite a lot of rebel prisoners, comments: "Nowadays I do not even take my stubber with me. I just go out with a slice of bread and butter, and they follow me."

A woman who was blind in one eye had been married to a man for 20 years. When he found another woman he said to her: "I shall abandon you because you are said to be blind in one eye."
And she answered him: "Have you just discovered that after 20 years of marriage?"

Two workers are walking on the street, one says to the other: "What do you think of the Imperial Governor?"
The other says: "Not here, follow me."
They go onto a side street. He says: "Not here, follow me."
They go into a dark alley. He says: "Not here, follow me."
They go into an old ruined hab block. He says: "Not here, follow me."
They go into a dank basement that looks like it has not been inhabited for centuries. Then he says: "I actually rather like him."

Two PDF officers are watching a beautiful sunset from high up on a hillock, with scenic landscapes rolling out to the horizon. Moved by the beauty of the view, the General turns to the Colonel and asks: "Do we have one for the enlisted men?"

"Pants... I hate pants. My grandfather hated them too, even before they dislocated his finger."

A senior scrivener of the Administratum explains his business to a junior colleague: "Listen: ‘The matter is under consideration’ means we have lost the file. ‘The matter is under active consideration’ means we are trying to find the file."

A barber-surgeon, a bald man and an absent-minded sage are taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, and so decide to take turns watching the luggage and campfire. When it's the barber-surgeon's turn, he gets bored, and so amuses himself by shaving the head of the sage. When the sage is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says: "How stupid is that barber? He's woken up the bald man instead of me!"

Q: How can you tell that the Securitate has bugged your hab-unit?
A: There's a new cabinet in it and a trailer with a generator in the street.

A hivequake killed 809 people in the underhive. Nine people were trapped under the rubble, and another 800 died fighting over the loot.

The Imperial Governors of Sarum, Elysia and Brycantia were having a meeting.
The Elysian Governor was seen touching his forehead and murmuring frequently. "What are you doing?" the other leaders asked him.
"This is just a relic of Elysian archeotech which allows me to communicate with my advisors in orbit," replied the Elysian Governor.
Then, the Brycantian Governor was seen touching his throat and murmuring frequently. "What are you doing?" the other two leaders asked him.
"Nothing. This is just a relic of Brycantian archeotech which allows me to talk to my relatives in their suites," replied the Brycantian Governor.
The Governor of Sarum was embarrassed. Everyone had his own precious piece of archeotechnology except him. He felt that he must do something, so the Governor of Sarum suddenly collected all of his document papers and maps, put them in his mouth and swallowed them. "What are you doing?" the other leaders asked in shock.
"Nothing," he replied. "Just sending a fax to Sarum."

Q: How do you double the value of a mechshaw?
A: Fill it with promethium.

"How much is the rent for this gorgeous apartment?"
"Sir, this is a liquour store."

Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey. His purse is what restrains him.

At a mass rally, a Propagatus officer is drilling a local worker. He asks him: "Brother, if you had two houses, would you give one to the Emperor's Governor?"
The worker responds: "Yes, definitely, brother, I would give one of my houses to the Emperor's Governor!"
Then the officer asks: "Brother, if you had two limos, would you give one to the Emperor's Governor?"
Again, the worker says: "Yes, I would give one of my limos to the Emperor's Governor!"
Finally, the officer asks: "If you had two shirts, would you give one to the Emperor's Governor?"
"No!"
The officer asks: "But why? Why won’t you give one of your shirts to the Emperor's Governor?"
The worker says: "Because I have two shirts!"

Q: What is the longest joke?
A: The Voidholm Overlord's latest speech.

A young man was asked whether he took orders from his wife or if she obeyed his every command. He boasted: "My wife is so afraid of me that if I so much as yawn she evacuate her bowels."

The Captain and the Sergeant were in the field. In the middle of the night, the Sergeant woke his Captain and said: "Sir, look up into the sky and tell me what you see?"
The Captain said: "I see millions of stars."
"And what does that tell you, sir?"
"That what my lowly eyes behold of the starspangled void is all part of the cosmic domains of the Emperor of Holy Terra. The nightsky is but a glimpse of the grand Imperium of Man, and all the worlds that spin around the stars are under the truly just and stern grip of chosen mankind. I see the glory of our species and lord, our birthright made manifest. It is for our arms and might to defend, in nomine Imperator. Now, what does it tell you, sarge?"
"Well sir, it tells me that somebody stole our tent."

At a meeting between the two Imperial Governors Elect, Mithridates of Cherzon IV admires Hierocles the Great of Kish’s ability to win 99% of the vote from his planetary Senatus Nobilite. So as a gesture of friendship, Hierocles the Great sends some of his advisors to Cherzon IV to help with Mithridates' reelection campaign among the nobility. When the results come in, Mithridates asks: "Did I win?"
And the advisor answers: "I’m afraid not. The new Basileus Elect is Hierocles the Great!"

Dark humour is like food. Some don't get it.

A man sells a slave to a neighbour. A week later, the neighbour comes back complaining that the slave has died.
"That's ridiculous!" says the seller. "He never did that when I owned him!"

Eternity Gate on Holy Terra. A line is snaking toward the Imperial Palace, earthly abode and tomb of the Emperor Ascendant. A change of guard is watched by the onlookers. A pilgrim kid asks: "Daddy, why do the Custodes always keep guard at the tomb?"
"Didn't you hear what they say all the time? The Emperor lived, the Emperor is alive, the Emperor will live forever. What if, fate forbid, He is indeed alive, and decides to walk out of the tomb?"

Q: What to do if a man you don't know takes a seat at your table in a pub and starts to sigh?
A: Immediately demand him to stop the anti-Imperial propaganda.

A Cyrenean nobleman had an estate many miles away and wished to bring it nearer, so he overthrew seven mile-stones.

An Imperial subject orders a mechshaw. The salesman tells him to come back to pick it up in exactly nine years' time. The customer asks: "Am I to come back in the morning or in the evening then?"
"You're joking, aren't you? What is the difference?"
"Well sir, the plumber's coming in the morning."

Some civilian threw a pot of filth over a Praetorian Guardsman who was climbing a wall by grappling hook during a battle. He cried out: "Are you not willing to strike me clean?"

A theologian of the Ministorum had become frustrated with all the debates lost in the sophistry of deadend tongue-waggling. At last, he stands up in the middle of the sanctum, lays one hand upon his heart and the other upon the cover of the Lectitio Divinitatus and swears an oath: "As highland tribes of our world have it as a custom to sacrifice their captive foes to the Emperor in giant offerings of intertwined men burning inside an angelic wicker effigy of Primarch Sanguinius; so I, imitating the highlanders, hereby vow to burn as an offering seven of these false dialecticians!"

What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? A key.

Over-Governor Julius attends the premiere of a comedy holo. He laughs and grins throughout the holo, but after it ends he says: "Well, I liked the comedy. But that clown had a moustache just like mine. Shoot him."
Everyone in the entourage is speechless, until someone sheepishly suggests: "Your excellence, maybe the actor shaves off his moustache?"
Julius replies: "Good idea! First shave, then shoot!"

Q: How muddy is the Takla Maryam river?
A: The Takla Maryam is so muddy you can drink it with a fork, but only if you wash it out with some other water first.

A father advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a hetaira to do away with the child through exposure. The pedant replied: "First bury your own children before you advise me to destroy mine."

The Techtriarchs are discussing legislation on Vostroya:
Repnin: "Saltykov, what is this Law of Universal Gravity, I don't remember passing it?"
Saltykov: "How should I know, laws are your department; I'm a Tech-Priest."

An incompetent teacher is asked the name of Primarch Guilliman's adoptive mother. At a loss, he says: "It is polite to call her Ma'am."

The prattle of plots was hot in the air once again, and accusations were flying left and right from domineering pillars of society. When someone asked a man from Adad-Shekari why there was a shortage of cooking gas in the district, he answered: "Because Adad-Shekari is cooking a big conspiracy."

Q: Could Moche Triarius become an Imperial world?
A: Yes, it could... but it's a shame for the good planet.

A Kriegsman had buried his son. When the father met the child's teacher, he said: "Pray excuse my son for not showing up for scholam today."

There once was member of the Voidholm Senate who was drunk as a lord. One day, he showed up with a hangover, but still delivered his speech with vigour and vim:
"Heed my advice well, conscript fathers and mothers, and be reminded that you can trust all that emanates from these lips," he said, and promptly vomited in the folds of his toga.

And then there was a denizen of Aratta, who, having a house for sale, carried about a stone that had fallen from it as a sample.

Q: How large will the next hydroponics harvest be?
A: Nobody can tell. Yesterday someone stole the exact results of the next harvest from the office of the Governor's secretariat.

A new mechshaw pattern has been launched with two exhaust pipes, so you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

Time of instability on the voidholm. Rulers are toppled and assassinated one after another, with palace coups and civil wars flaring up all the time. A sarcastic court historian writes in his chronicle: 'Who was Overlord? Who was not Overlord?'

An old lay techman and his assistant voidsman are reminiscing about their days on the Agripinaa convoys during the Eleventh Black Crusade together.
Lay techman: "All through those terrible, dark, hull-quaking shifts with all those shaking machine spirits, you never once failed to bring me a steaming full mug of tea on station. How on earth did you manage it without ever spilling a drop?"
Assistant voidsman: "Well, since you ask, I used to take a swig of your tea in the galley, then spit it back in the mug when I got to your door."

When Princely Governor Varnak the Bald started demolishing the old city center of Panormus it was speculated that, having failed to go down in History, he aimed at Geography next.

And then there was the Eldar xeno who danced around the urban battlefield, dodging every bullet and bolt with unbelievable agility and foresight, until he was hit square in the head by a brick tossed by an old woman on a balcony.

A guy with bad breath decides to take his own life. So he wraps his head with his tunic and asphyxiates himself.

The bureau is spreading and swallowing Earth.
Let us all run to Venus and settle our worth.
Yet the bureau is growing so damnably fast.
That I fear it will gobble up Venus at last.

A Gadesi refugee was displaced to the relatively safe area of Leptis Gebal, only to move back to Gades after a short while. When asked about the reason he answered: "The bombardment you know is better than the one you don’t."

Q: What should Eridu Alpha get for its surface to orbit defence system?
A: A refund.

A professional beggar had been letting his girlfriend think that he was rich and of fine birth. Once, when he was getting a handout at the neighbour's house, he suddenly saw her. He turned around and said: "Have my dinner-clothes sent here."

Overlord Heron is walking around Dyrrhacium Triaris, of course with a strong escort of bodyguards. He notices poverty everywhere, cripples begging, gangs fighting and children rummaging through trash to find something edible. Having witnessed wretchedness firsthand, he is suddenly brought to tears by the sight: "Such unholy misery!"
One of the urchins notices Heron crying and approaches one of the bodyguards in the escort:
"Can you tell me why our Overlord is crying?"
The bodyguard pulls out his power maul and starts beating the kid bloody:
"Because of you, scumbag, because of you!"

A Major asks a Medic: "Everything fine in the field medicae?"
"Yes, all is well. Three of the simulants have died."

Break the law, and the law breaks you.

Q: Can a son of a PDF General become a Marshal?"
A: No, because every Marshal also has a son.

We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done ill. If you want to know why, there was neither chamber pot nor loo.

An Historitor asked his novitiates: "Do you believe that with time anecdotes are being reevaluated?"
"Yes. They used to give for an anecdote eighty years, and now they give only fifty."

A man came home and found his wife in bed with a stranger. Furious, the man shouted, "You good-for-nothing deserter, look at what you're spending your time, while at the corner store they're selling eggs, and they have only three boxes left!"

Q: It is dark and it is just behind the door. What is it?
A: Our bright future.

Militarum sentry: "Halt, who goes there?"
Response: "Finreth Highlanders."
Sentry: "Pass, Finreth Highlanders."
Sentry: "Halt, who goes there?"
Response: "Brimlock Dragoons."
Sentry: "Pass, Brimlock Dragoons."
Sentry: "Halt, who goes there?"
Response: "Mind your own bloody business, you stuck-up twerp!"
Sentry: "Pass, Catachans."

Q: How do you entertain a bored Governor?
A: You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the river and urge the Governor to go catch a fish.

Two former mates from the Schola Progenium met in the street.
"Where do you work?"
"I'm a scrivener. And what about you?"
"I work as a Detective Surveillor."
"Oh, and what are you doing at the Arbites?"
"We unearth those who are dissatisfied."
"You mean, there are also some who are satisfied?"
"Those who are satisfied are dealt with by the Division for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Imperial Property."

A dumb man followed custom and cremated his dead father. He ran home and said to his ailing mother: "There are a few fire-logs still left. If you want to stop suffering, then get yourself cremated on them."

The Lord Commander of Segmentum Solar, the Ecclesiarch and the Principatus of Lastrati travel on an aeroplane and the pilot comes in to tell them that there is a major problem with the plane and they will crash in minutes, but there is only three gravchutes on the plane.
The Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar stands up and says: "I am the Leader of the Heart of the Imperium, I have to survive!" and he grabs a gravchute and jumps out the plane.
Within seconds the Principatus of Lastrati proclaims: "I am the Genius of Lastrati, I have to survive for the Motherworld!" and he grabs one as well and jumps out the plane.
The Ecclesiarch looks at the pilot and says: "Jump my boy, the Emperor will welcome me if He so wills it."
"No need to do that Holy Father. The Genius jumped with the sleeping bag."

Q: What do you call two ratling guys and two ratling girls in front of a trash can?
A: A night-club.

A number of henpecked men were holding an emergency meeting to discuss ways to regain their dignity. A bachelor prankster walked into their midst and said: "Your wives heard of this gathering and are all on their way here to deal with you."
All but one panicked and dashed out the door.
"He’s the only one with the courage to stand up to his wife!" the bachelor exclaimed, until closer examination revealed that the man had died of fright.

Tiburcio’s dilemma: Shall I die now of cold or shall I die of starvation in the summer?

A corrupt Eparch in Ashek II had gained the plebeians' wrath by his sinful ways, and one day a crowd attacked his palace. The crowd there removed the building's Eparchal banner, which presumably would be either burnt or trampled on. However, the attackers realised that they were not able to deface it due to the sacred words on the banner. And so they carefully cut out the holy writ with scissors before burning the banner.

A Watchman from Sidonia seeing a grox-driver leading his wagon through the marketplace ordered him to be beaten. But the grox-driver said: ''I am a Class Theta client of my noble patron, and it is not allowed to strike me because of the law."
So the Watchman instead ordered the groxen to be beaten.

Q: What does Securitate mean?
A: The heart of the Governorship beating, beating, beating...

An artist is commissioned to create a painting celebrating Drasko-Forsian friendship, to be called 'Igelström on Fors.' When the painting is unveiled at the Forsian acropolis, there is a gasp from the invited guests. The painting depicts Igelström's wife naked in bed with Megas Domestikos Alfa Laval.
"But this is a travesty! Where is Governor Igelström?" asks one of the guests.
"Igelström is on Fors," replies the painter.

Bandit chief Commentiolus told an ogryn that his name was Nobody. When Commentiolus instructed his men to attack the ogryn, the ogryn shouted: "Help, Nobody is attacking me!" So no one came to help.

A man driving an enclosed mechshaw suddenly breaks his windshield wiper. Pulling into a streetside service station, he hails a lay mechanic.
"Wipers for a mechshaw?" the driver asks.
The mechanic thinks about it for a few seconds and replies: "Yes, sounds like a fair trade."

A yokel whilst swimming almost choked to death. He made an oath that he would not go into the water again until he had first learned to swim well.

Q: How do you deal with mice in the Governorial Palace?
A: Enroll them in a latifundia plantation. Then half the mice will starve, and the rest will run away.

Explorators hunting ancient relics found a frozen human corpse drifting through space. They dated it to the Dark Age of Technology. Yet no matter how they tried, the Explorators could not determine its origin. Then an Arbites Chastener offered to help. The corpse was delivered to the Fortress Precinct. In two hours the Chastener appeared and said: "His name was Gordon 'Starstrider' Femlock. He was a famous skyrider hailing from Halicyae who explored the Shapur Nebula during M.29, and we have all the juicy coordinates in this list."
The Explorators were astonished: "How did you find out?"
"He confessed," the Chastener said.

A son of a jokester being sent off to battle by his father promised to return and bring the head of a foeman. The father replied: "I shall be glad even if you come back without a head."

A pilgrim was at the millennial games which every thousand years are held on Holy Terra, and seeing a pit fighter who had been beaten giving vent to his grief, he tried to cheer him up: "Do not grieve, you will surely win in the next millennial contest!"

Q: Why are the lights in the Despotic Palace always on so late into the night?
A: Because Governor-Despot Sicarius has to transfer his military badges onto his pajamas.

Father to son on an agri-world in tributary vassalage to a hive world:
"Son, you know trade between Thracia IV and Agathon is flourishing?"
"How so, dad?"
"We give them a ship full of rye. They in return take from us a ship full of meat."

Valhalla. An Enforcer sees a poor man holding a High Gothic dictionary.
"Why are you learning High Gothic?"
"I’m learning High Gothic so that I can talk to the God-Emperor and all the saints when I get to afterlife on Holy Terra."
"And if you go to the nether hells?"
"I already speak Valhallan."

Some once asked Miles Gloroiosus, the braggart Guardsman, what he was, as in what his position and employment entailed. He answered in this manner: "I am a parade!"

A competition for the best anecdote has been announced. First prize: Fifty five years; second prize: Thirty years; and two condolence prizes: Fifteen years each.

The flymeat bar takes a walk on the street, when he meets the ratburger, who is very upset and in a hurry.
"What's the problem, ratburger?" asks the flymeat bar.
"Run you fool!" shouts the ratburger. "Here comes the Necromundans and they will eat us all!"
They start to run down the street and they meet with the powder soup.
"Run, powder soup, run! Here comes the Necromundans and they will eat you!"
They continue to run and after a few hundred meters they meet with the völse sausage.
"Run, völse sausage, you fool, run! Here comes the Necromundans and they will eat you!"
"Why would they do that? They don't even know me!"

A preacher was preaching to the people in the forum, and was thundering against adultery. "It is such a horrible sin," he said, "that I had rather undo ten virgins than one married woman!" Many in the crowd agreed with him wholeheartedly.

Q: How do you find a solution to a problem that is impossible to solve?
A: We do not answer questions about agriculture.

During training exercises, the Lieutenant who was driving down a muddy back road encountered another vehicle stuck in the mud with a red-faced Colonel at the wheel: "Your car stuck, sir?" asked the Lieutenant as he pulled alongside.
"Nope," replied the Colonel, coming over and handing him the keys. "Yours is."

Thought for the day: None.

Eastern Fringe. Three men in a cell talk about why they got imprisoned:
"They locked me up because I always got to work late. They accused me of being a Xenophile saboteur."
"I got locked up because I always got to work early. They accused me of being a Tauist spy."
"I got locked up because I always got to work on time. They accused me of having a Tau-manufactured clock."

Q: What to do if amasec interferes with the job?
A: Get off the job.

Miles Gloriosus, the braggart soldier, declares when he is about to dismount: "Stand aside everyone! I take large steps."

A runner going to participate in the Macian games had a dream, that he was driving a quadriga, a racing chariot pulled by four dirtbikes. Early in the morning he goes to a dream interpreter for an explanation. The reply is: "You will win, that was the meaning of the speed and the strength of the dirtbikes."
But, to be sure about this, the runner visits another dream interpreter. This one replies: "You will lose. Don't you understand, that four ones came before you?"

Someone needled a jokester: "I had your wife, without paying a dime."
He replied: "It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"

Why do Security Vigiles agents always work in groups of three? One can read, another one can write and the last one is there to keep an eye on those two dodgy intellectuals.

A family of truck serfs is making a delivery. The husband is driving with his wife and a small child. A Watchman Corporal pulls them over and makes the man take a respalyzer test. "See," the Watchman says, "you are drunk."
The man protests that the breathalyzer must be broken and invites the cop to test his wife. She also registers as drunk. Exasperated, the husband invites the Watchman to test his child. When the child also registers as drunk, the Watchman Corporal shrugs, says, "Yes, perhaps it is broken," and sends them on their way.
Out of earshot the man tells his wife: "See, I told you it wouldn’t hurt to give the kid a couple shots of amasec."

Q: Will the Securitate and Watchmen still exist after the Return of the Emperor in the Flesh?
A: Of course, not. By that time, all subjects will have learned how to arrest themselves.

Motto in farms:
Every jar of bottled fruit, a fist in the face of the xeno!

When the Stagirans were fortifying their settlement, one of the inhabitants named Ivanov fortified two sections at his own charges. When the wastelanders made an attack, the Stagirans, growing angry, cried out as with one voice that no one should guard the wall of Ivanov but he alone.

The youth Lollianus applied to the PDF officer academy. The academy committee conducts an interview:
"Subject Lollianus, do you smoke?"
"Yes, I do a little."
"Do you know that Saint Helenera did not smoke and advised other worshippers of the Emperor not to smoke?"
"If Saint Helenera said so, I shall cease smoking."
"Do you drink?"
"Yes, a little."
"Saint Helenera strongly condemned drunkenness."
"Then I shall cease drinking."
"Subject Lollianus, what about women?"
"A little..."
"Do you know that Saint Helenera condemned amoral behavior?"
"If Saint Helenera condemned, I shall not love them any longer."
"Subject Lollianus, will you be ready to sacrifice your life for the Emperor?"
"Of course. Who needs such life?"

A Juban manager was walking with a companion when he dropped behind a little to attend to a matter of importance, and having stopped for some time his fellow traveller left him after writing on the milestone: "Make haste and overtake me."
When the manager read it he wrote above: "And do you wait for me."

A heavily laden porter stumbled into the local slum doctor in a narrow alley. When the doctor drew back his fist to hit him, the porter dropped to his knees and begged: "Please kick me instead."
A bystander asked: "Why would you rather him kick you?"
The terrified porter replied: "Treatment by his hands would be much deadlier than with his feet!"

Q: What is very large, makes a lot of smoke and noise, takes down 20 liters of promethium per hour, and cuts a chorafruit into three pieces?
A: The Imperial machine built to cut chorafruits into four pieces.

The backwater world of Galgacus Quadralis. An old woman decides she wants to visit the capital city of Cumaea, because the last time she did that was before the Imperials took over her world. She thinks she should eat at a café she visited a long time ago. So the old woman asks a passerby:
"Excuse me, sir! Can you tell me where I can find Lancia square?" Lancia had been the ruler of Cumaea before the Imperial conquest.
"Are you insane, old woman? Don't say that out loud or you'll be brought to the labour camp! It is called Imperator square!"
She eventually finds the café. Then she decides to shop in a marketplace she knew. She asks another man on the street:
"Pardon me! Do you know where I can find Freeborn street?"
"Oh my! Don't say that, you'll get shot on the spot! It is called the Astra Militarum street!"
This saddens the old woman. Everything has changed. So she sits down to look at the moon of Petunius and let the changes sink in. A Militia Enforcer approaches her and asks:
"Hey, old woman! What are you doing here?"
"I'm watching Luna!"

My grandfather never threw anything away, bless him.
He died in the war holding on to a frag grenade.

Consulting a hotheaded slum doctor, a fellow says: "Doc, I'm unable to lie down or stand up. I can't even sit down."
The slum doctor responds: "I guess the only thing left is to hang yourself."

Motto on posters:
Unity between worlds give wings to the aforementioned.

Two lazy-bones are fast asleep. A thief comes in, pulls the blanket from the bed, and makes off with it. One of them is aware of what happened and says to the other: "Get up! Go after the guy who stole our blanket!"
The other responds: "Forget it. When he comes back to take the mattress, let's grab him then."

Q: What is the difference between heathen and Imperial societies?
A: In a heathen society man exploits man, and in an Imperial one, the other way around.

At the uppermost levels of the middle hive, a man and his son are staring up at the plasteel barrier blocking all entrance to the upper hive.
The son asks: "Daddy, who lives behind that fence?"
The father says with sadness in his voice: "We do, son. We do..."

Motto in mines:
All the loyalists, underground!

Under the Emperor's rule, every man has what he needs. That's why the butcher puts a sign up that says: 'Nobody needs meat today.'

There is a delegation from Chevlar on Tallarn and one of the places visited is the maritime ministry of Tallarn. The confused Chevlar delegates ask the hosts: "Why do you have a maritime ministry, if you no longer even have any sea coast?"
"So what?" answer the hosts, "Chevlar has a ministry of culture, don't you?"

Q: Sir, is it true that after the Itzel fission disaster the Director killed himself?
A: Yes, it is true!
Q: And is it also true that the Assistant Director also wanted to kill himself?
A: Yes, that is true, but they didn't find him at home!

A dumb man saw a eunuch talking with a woman and asked him if she was his wife. When he replied that eunuchs can't have wives, the man asked: "So is she your daughter?"

A Planetary Governor visits the front and talks to a PDF soldier. The Governor asks: "Son, when you are in the frontline under artillery fire, what do you wish for?"
The soldier replies: "That you, dear leader, stand next to me!"

A man is granted a two-minute visit to meet a friend in the workhouse: "So, how are you?"
"Oh, you know... I can't complain."

A newly appointed official decided to impress folks with his moral virtues by writing three maxims on the walls of his office:
1. Do not covet money.
2. Do not desire promotions.
3. Do not fear death.
A few days later some wit added some characters to the bottom of each:
1. In small quantities.
2. Unless it’s much higher than this one.
3. But I want to live as long as I can.

A man is walking down the streets in Valhallan winter. He shouts into a flat: "Could you shut your windows? It’s freezing out here!"

The Imperial Governor Aetius summoned his Grand Vezir Honorius and said: "I know you spread jokes about me. It's impertinent."
"Why?"
"I am the Great Leader, Teacher, and Protector of the Homeworld after all."
"No, I've not told anybody this joke."

"When do your kid have new shoes on his feet? When the son of the Censor steps on them."

Q: What is it that starts with an R and never ends?
A: Reorganization.

Meeting between Imperial Governors. Merenre of Abydos Majoris and Rolf II of Tröndelang Secundus are talking, when suddenly the God-Emperor appears before them.
The Emperor says: "I have come to tell you that the end of all creation will be in two days. Tell your people."
So each leader goes back to his planet and prepares a voxcast publicae address.
On Tröndelang Secundus, Rolf II says: "My fellow Tröndurs, I regret to inform you that I have two pieces of bad news. First, this year's taxes cannot be gathered. Second, the God-Emperor Himself told me the universe would end in two days."
On Abydos Majoris, Merenre says: "O Abydians, I come to you today with two pieces of excellent news! First, the God-Emperor and I have just held an important summit. Second, he told me I would be your Governor until the end of time."


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/28 20:39:35


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Three Virtues

To behold sclerosis plaguing an an entire civilization, look skyward and gaze into the grim darkness of the far future. Gaze into the dark cosmos beyond the march of aeons, and behold the destiny of our species, namely that fortified prison and inescapable death trap of man which the Emperor and His all-conquering Legions once built unwittingly in shining days of yore. By the fortyfirst millennium, the God-Emperor is a rotting corpse since ten thousand years back, and so is His dominion.

The decrepit star realm known as the Imperium of Man has long since ceased to remove obstacles to its internal flows of people and goods. Travelling within this atavistic colossus on feet of clay is characterized at every turn by a myriad of internal toll barriers and tight restrictions on movement. The act of moving from one district to another on an Imperial world, voidholm or hive city will more often than not require multiple permits, seals of blessing and expensive bribes, aside from standard quarantine measures, mandatory confession and purification rituals. This state of affairs is coincidentally a strong reason as to why hardly any private motoring exists within the Imperium of Man: Human history shows that to possess your own family vehicle is a great material liberty, and why would the Adeptus Terra ever wish to grant His kowtowing subjects any ounce of dangerous freedom? No, better keep the rabble locked to their birthplaces, than allow them to mill about in disorder and deviancy.

Naturally, the wall of red tape to control movement and its companion phenomenon of corruption grows taller still once a traveller seeks to leave her planet or voidholm and travel across the starspangled void to other locales within the galaxy-spanning domains of the Terran Imperator. Yet the principles of endless bureaucratic hinders, the dreary ennui of waiting and the blood-curdling dread at the sight and sounds of glaring Enforcers and Securitate personnel remain much the same experience everywhere, whether an Imperial subject wish to travel offworld or to the neighbouring hive district.

At every turn, suspicious officials will question his motives and monitor the subject's movement in the form of documented data. At every turn, power mauls and plasteel boots will threaten to knock the frustrated and impatient Imperial subject to the floor in case he ever flares up in anger or cease his humiliating displays of reverence. At every turn, the Imperium of Man and its loyal Governors will strive to limit and direct their subjects, even as urbane hints for bribes to grease the gears of administration will be dropped again and again by knowing men of the world in positions of petty power.

As with everything Imperial, the absolute grand majority of internal travel restrictions are both needless and act contrary to the long-term interests of Imperial development, yet these strangling inner barriers provide revenue and fruitful activity for billion-headed hordes of Administratum clerks, and moreover internal checkpoints offer plenty of opportunity for the Emperor's dutiful servants to receive underhanded private fund donations. All unregistered, of course.

They got to eat, after all.

One everyday example of such an ordinary internal toll station experience can be glimpsed on the great Imperial voidholm of Boiorum Theta, in the tribuneship of Uliaris Sextus in 110.M39. At this time, it cost 5 Boiorian siglos for a draft animal to pass any district line, 7 siglos for merchants, and 20 siglos for prostitutes to enter another area. The saintly holy man known as Gaius Anthemius sought to gain access to the southwestern lower protrusion of the giant spacestation to do the Emperor's work among the poor.

At this, the customs officer asked: "What have you got with you?"

To which the holy man said: "Nothing, but Temperance, Righteousness and Charity."

And so the custom officer wanted to charge him 60 siglos, because he thought they were three whores.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/06/30 13:44:51


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


Loved the jokes, bit of a long read but a good one.

I spotted some jokes from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, many that I imagine are from the Soviet Block, what else in there?


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/07/22 07:36:32


Post by: ph34r


Great thread, happy to see it. It really captures the goofy, horrifying, inhumane aspects of early (rogue trader / 2nd edition?) warhammer 40k.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/07/26 16:39:30


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Kid_Kyoto: Thank you very much, sir! Sharp, eye, you are correct!

The above joke collection is a particular labour of love. I've owned joke books from an early age, and it was time I paid something back after all those years. I invented a few jokes from whole cloth, but most are plucked from all over human history from disparate countries, and reworked for 40k duty.

Two things deserve a special mention: Soviet Russian jokes, and Egyptian jokes. Apparently the densely populated and hypersocial Nile valley in Egypt have sported a culture of wisecracks and jokesters for almost five millennia, at the very least. For a taste of Egyptian wit, check out this and this article. I can warmly recommend them. John Romer's classic documentary series on ancient Egypt also contain slices of Egyptian wit, as can be found here and here.

Both Russian and Egyptian humour are marked by cruel experiences, yet unlike so many other cultures across the world, in Egypt and Russia it is not such a foul thing to joke about misery and suffering. "Things are trash, but at least we're in on the joke together." Both sport a phenomenal joke flora, possibly some of the best ones in all the world. Goldmines for inspiring 40k humour.

Otherwise, Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi, Jugoslavian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Jewish and Nigerian humour all played a part here. As did a few older Swedish ones, and funny things I've heard from friends and relatives. Chinese jokes sport good lines in doctor jokes and henpecked husbands.

German whisper jokes (both National Socialist and East German Communist eras) have some good ones, but they're also overall less funny and more rigid than Russian and Egyptian jokes. East German car jokes about Trabants is their strongest card without a doubt. I got the impression that German humour can be stiff to outsiders, but they know how to joke about matters of engineering. Which makes sense.

Renaissance Italian jokes and ancient Greek jokes and a few Roman witticisms also played a part, as did the ingenious lines of Miles Gloriosus in Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum.

But the majority are from the Soviet bloc.

Cheers!

@ph34r: Thank you most kindly! Much appreciated. That bonkers spirit shalt be kept alive.


A Vox in the Void

Paul Graham on a Vox in the Void has laboured to combine three separate pieces into one, namely Quartering, Saw and Hangman. Check out Imperial Justice if you dare, for twenty minutes of bonkers grimdark delivered by a skilled voice actor.

- - -



Infant Exposure

In the grim darkness of the far future, the spawn of man is cast aside as refuse.

A careful examination of mortal existence will reveal that it is a matter of lowly hunger and lust, of bestial desperation and survival at all cost. Life is far from placed on a lofty moral throne of higher justice and inalienable rights, for it is in truth a red-blooded and savage thing. Life itself is a hunter's arena of rutting and consumption where gutsy truths hold sway, and where might makes right. Instead of talking about the mortal coil as an elevated matter of light and darkness or of good and evil, let us speak of life as a matter of feeding and starvation. A better understanding of the fundamental drives of mortal creatures will be had from phrases like ravenous hunger and eat or be eaten, than any sublime philosophy can ever offer.

Consider the cosmos. Is not all the vast universe a banquet laid out for those with the will, cunning and appetite to bite into it? Yet to what end?

To stave off the inevitable?

Listen carefully, o mortal soul, and you will hear the laughter of thirsting gods. Maybe all of creation is nothing but a cruel joke, where the dying of mortals such as yourself constitute the punchline. A foreshadowing, perhaps, of the great end of all things to come. Many may find this possibility incomprehensible and malignant beyond any scope of joy, yet that, too, is appropriate. After all, dark humour is like food: Some do not get it.

Behold the dangers of childbirth, the aching pulse and the bearing down that must happen. Both mother and child are in peril as the infant enters the world through her portal of flesh, the gateway of life itself. Some do not survive this miracle of lifegiving. The pain, blood and deadly hazard at birth is a herald of what life truly is. And so the fruit of seeds sown in lust will sprout into an uncaring world. The fortunate tender babies will have loving mothers and fathers and families to raise them and nurture them, to care for and protect them. But love is no substitute for nutrients, and so every newborn infant is yet another mouth to feed. It has been thus since time immemorial.

Such strain of children upon family and livelihood was rarely an issue during the Dark Age of Technology, in that golden epoch of material paradise stretching across twain million human worlds and voidholms beyond counting. In those long-lost shining days of yore, children rarely had to die. For man in that time had banished what was ill in life, and subdued the primordial scourges of poverty, sickness and starvation. Truly, Man of Gold had cast out misery and suffering from life, and in his sinful hubris he mounted a brilliant pedestal of mortal ascension and challenged any divinity there might ever be, to topple him if it so possessed power and daring enough to best mortal man in his state of supreme mastery of creation.

And the challenge boasted by mortal man was heard, and it was answered by dark ones of hell. For ancient man was torn down from his splendid pinnacle, and his great works were rent asunder in an unending orgy of bloodletting and catastrophe stacked upon catastrophe. And so the lore of the ancients was shattered and lost, and man descended into animalistic savagery and cannibal desperation. Man had climbed the heavens and his fingers had found no purchase. And in his fall he destroyed all the wonders his hands and mind had wrought. And thus paradise was lost forever in flames and ruination.

The humans that survived this freefall into barbarity reverted to their species' most primitive ways during the Age of Strife. The coming of the Imperium of Man ultimately failed to change this sorry state of affairs, for the brief golden age of bloody conquest and restoration was ended when the Warmaster Horus turned upon the Emperor. And so man yet again slayed his brother and burned down his own creations, and all was fell anew. The Age of Imperium that followed saw the value of human life cemented at an all time low, and thus it is no surprise to find that the darkest of futures will rival any past aeon in wretchedness and inevitable cruelty.

For instance, all across the regressed domains of the Terran Imperator, human cultures on hundreds of thousands of worlds and innumerable voidholms practice exposure of infants. These may be unwanted newborns, or else the parents would have preferred to keep their little offspring, yet inability to feed further additions to the family may dictate that they must surrender the fruit of their loins, else everyone will starve.

Ancient legends and folktales from the Age of Terra all tell of exposure in hard times, with infants left out in the wilds explaining the origin of kings and prophets alike. This bygone oral flora of sagas and stories is much akin to that found in human societies across the vast Imperium, for there, too, the abandonment of tender children is an everyday common practice, and a fact of life like any other. And so babies will be left out in the wilderness, and tiny children will be abandoned in corridors, niches and gutters. The act itself is not considered to be murder, since the exposed child still have a chance of being discovered and saved by some benevolent soul passing by. Yet the widespread custom is infanticide in all but name.

Most humans in the Age of Imperium live in dens of overpopulation, disease and filth. While some turn sterile from chemical pollution, corporal punishment without anaesthetics or callous overseer dictates beyond their control, most of them will be abundantly fecund and grateful for their prolific fertility and virility. After all, the burden of caring for children is a tradeoff against the baleful fate awaiting anyone who in old age would find themself childless and uncared for. Such lonely elders without offspring or clan face some of the most dismal ends imaginable. After all, everywhere man thrives bitterly across the Milky Way galaxy, children are the only safeguard in man's old age, except perhaps for such locations where those too old to labour will be euthanized or chased out into the wastelands to die.

The most common motivation for infant exposure is to fend off starvation, for food will be scarce and precious, and the stomachs that crave it will already be all too many in number. Sometimes, callous couples will expose infants even when they can afford to feed and clothe the new children, in order merely to not burden their selfish lives with more cares. More usually, however, infants born out of wedlock in bastardous stigma may find themselves stealthily abandoned. And so too will be many children of prostitutes and shamed victims of violation.

Parents will often place their unwanted offspring in well-travelled spots such as by crossroads or in corridor junctions. Thus they hope to improve the chances of someone picking up their cast-off baby and adopting them, and they will therefore pray for the Imperator to guide fellow humans to pick up and nurture their abandoned offspring. All parents with some form of decency hope for their exposed infants to face a better future by subjecting them to such a twisted roulette of fate, yet most breeding adults know that thralldom or worse remain the most likely outcomes. For the inclinations of humans who have lived their entire lives in a threatening morass of hardship and deprivation will rarely tend to be sympathetic and benevolent in dealing with fellow members of their teeming species. Some Imperial subjects will be more likely to kick the rejected baby just because they are already in a bad mood after a hard day of work, and they will have no patience left for such wailing to add to their personal miseries.

Where men's wives are more fertile than their fields, infant exposure help to regulate the excesses of human fertility. In some human cultures within the Imperium, unwanted infants will be ritually disposed of in offerings to the Emperor, or else given to Death Cults during solemn rites. Such barbarous practices are frowned upon by the Ecclesiarchy, yet all manner of depraved local customs thrive on every single planet and void installation under Imperial rule in spite of Holy Terran disapproval, for the reach of the Imperium into the depths of local society will often be shallow and limited.

Elsewhere, unwanted infants will be cynically sold to shady organ-harvesters or the respectable Corpse Guild for a pittance, and some such unfortunate tender mortals will even be fed to the corpsegrinders whilst still alive and screaming. Others still will be sold as servitor-meat, cherubim conversion material or be buried alive to repay the soil its gifted fertility, out of heathen practices from the Age of Strife which are still embedded in local folk customs. From ashes to ashes. From womb to womb.

In most locales, infantile orphans will either die from lack of water and nutrition, fall prey to hypothermia, die from dripping toxins or radiation, or be eaten by wild creatures. Others will be picked up by human hands and face either a cannibal end, heretical sacrifice, adoption into a clan, or enslavement to last for generations on end. After all, it cost resources to raise a human from infancy to a productive childhood age when they can begin to earn back the expenditure of keeping them alive, so why should not the bairns and juves grow old and die while still working to pay off the lifedebts they owe to their magnanimous slavemasters? Of course you must toil for the master or mistress who saved you from certain death, to prove your humble gratitude and value as a dutiful Imperial subject. It is even mandated in holy scripture.

The best that swaddled babies left alone by their biological parents can hope for, is to be adopted. Rare kind couples with offspring of their own, or barren couples desperate for children at all, will often be the best caretakers of the abandoned spawn of man. Some exceedingly few gutter babies may even be taken up, for whatever strange reason, into noble clans, merchant houses and other wealthy elite families with status and influence, though their privileged lives may often be marred by peer derision and constant mockery if ever their adoption from the scum-rats of lower castes become common knowledge.

Some exposed children will be adopted by Imperial or local governance organizations to be raised as brainwashed orphans. These souls will be cast in a mould of loyalty unto death for Emperor or Governor, and their adult lives will invariably find them in other institutions. Many times these indoctrinated thralls will be recruited as fanatically devout guard units, on which Imperial and local governance authorities usually can depend with complete trust, no matter how hated the rulers may be by other armed forces and influential factions.

Some such bonded orphan guards, who are raised to be utterly loyal to the present Imperial Governor, may find themselves pursue selfish group interests upon the death of their revered exclusive master, interfering in governance, taking new Governors hostage or assassinating them to put their own candidate on the throne. All this is an accepted part of the power plays that characterize the internal workings of human societies in the Age of Imperium, and many Imperial thinkers postulate that such vicious cycles of violence and treachery serve a virtuously eugenic function by allowing the most ruthless and capable to rise to the top by removing those weak rulers who had lost the mandate of His Divine Majesty. After all, only those blessed by Him on Terra could ever hope to attain power.

Other small children left in wastes and ruins will find themselves adopted by mutants and inbred tribes of scavengers desperate for fresh blood to stop their genetical deterioration. Further reasons for human savages to adopt exposed infants include barren couples wanting to remedy their dismal childlessness, or shamanistic interpretation of strange omens. Yet more often a rational striving to increase the numbers of the clan to better its chances in future petty wars will see such little orphans adopted and raised as full members of those insular communities that took them in. Martial deathmaking always need a plentiful supply of life to feed on.

And so infants find themselves exposed on a million worlds and voidholms beyond counting, be it for reasons of poverty, parental shame or selfishness. Unwanted newborns on almost every single Imperial world and voidstation may find themselves exposed, whether they are dumped like trash in the gutter or carefully placed on choice spots in utility vessels with trinket amulets and bits of prayer parchment to guide their innocent souls to a better life, or failing that to guide their spirits to the divine embrace of the protecting Emperor.

At least, a great many Imperial sects claim that the souls of babies are untarnished and pure, and so billions of parents find solace in the knowledge that a good afterlife will await their abandoned children. Other sects teach that the depravity of man is absolute from his very inception, and no amount of redemption can pay off his sinful soul debts and inherited vice. To adherents of such a damning creed, the afterlife of their rejected offspring will be one of darkness and suffering to dwarf the woes they could ever have known in their short and bleak lives. For such men, women and children, there truly is no hope beyond the God-Emperor's forgiveness of our worthless souls. It all lies in His hands.

And with that, we gain a glimpse of the sheer horror facing our species in the dark future. For their cheap lives are not only doomed to indebted servitude, hunger pangs and backbreaking toil. Their worthless lives are often forfeit at birth, their crying little bodies left deserted in walkways and agoras, their mothers and fathers unknown. In endless human settlements on worlds and voidholms across the Emperor's sacred domains, millions of infant exposures take place every day, every shift rotation, every lights-on. Witness this inescapable fact of life, and do not deny its existence or the failure that it speaks of. For the Terran Imperator Himself planned to rekindle a golden age of enlightenment and banish such crude customs to the abominable past. And yet, instead we find that the opposite has taken place, for His grand designs for humanity took a nosedive into oblivion, and all that He built stagnated as fivehundred generations of human descendants toiled and died inside an increasingly degenerate star realm.

Lo! How the mighty have fallen. How the wise have turned foolish. Truly, everything is decay and wasting rot under the sun.

And so the Age of Imperium grind on, its crippled machinery lubricated by human blood, sweat and tears. There mankind stands, trapped by his own works, shackled to a sinking ship and tormented by fellow human hands in atavistic agony.

Such is the lot of our species, at the end of its life-course.

Such is the damnation of man.

Such is the fate that awaits us all.

To be a child in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. Small and alone, in an aeon of lost hope. Abandoned, in an era of broken promises and unending carnage. Exposed, in an age of utter suffering and total darkness.

And whatever happens, you will not be missed.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/08/10 18:46:49


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Futility

"Soldiers and lawyers are the devil's playmates."
- Ancient Scandian proverb

- - -

In the grim darkness of the far future, there can be no victors.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/08/13 11:53:56


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Unhinged

To the madness of daring, we chant a song.

As the reign of terror marches on.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/09/20 09:57:18


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Confessions of a Disgruntled Inspector

In the grim darkness of the far future, there can be no victor.

Behold the sprawling realm of man, stretched thin across the starspangled void.

Behold its million worlds and uncounted voidholms, where man thrives bitterly under the rule of uncaring overlords.

Behold its countless armies and mighty armadas, each host and fleet nothing but a cogwheel in a titanic machinery greased by human blood, sweat and tears.

Bear witness to the Imperium of Man in all its power and glory, and ken it as the dead-end of human interstellar civilization. Forged in a hopeless age of ruin and strife, the early Imperium shone bright with torches of promise and hope, carried aloft by a walking god amongst men and borne to the farthest edges of the Milky Way galaxy by His all-conquering Legions. Yet the brilliant renaissance of man was cut short by common human treachery, and mankind's re-ascendance to its former pinnacles of knowledge and craft died in the flames of a ravaged galaxy. Ever since this crippling catastrophe, humanity has been left treading water, like a man doomed to drown out at sea. This is the best mankind can hope for, under the suffocating reign of the High Lords of Terra.

Bear witness to the stumbling colossus on feet of clay that man has become. Once upon a time, the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron bestrode the cosmos with unsurpassed wisdom and skill, fashioning a mortal paradise for themselves across twain million worlds and innumerable void installations. Once upon a time, man in his prime worshipped at the altar of science and reason, and his soaring technology came close to unlocking the secrets of eternity itself. Once upon a time, the sinful ancestors of latter day's degenerate descendants fell to machine revolt, civil strife and diabolical calamities. Nowadays, man has turned senile and dumb, his fearful eyes refusing to see, his blinkered mind rejecting his innate curiosity and genius, his sluggish feet moving in nought but a fruitless circle fivehundred generations in the making.

An ancient philosopher from the misty Age of Terra once claimed that he would rather teach truth to one intelligent man than entertain ten thousand fools. Let us hear the truth of human folly in the decrepit Age of Imperium. Let us hear first-hand of this cavalcade of petty parasites, counterproductive dogmatists, frothing fanatics, corrosive traitors and self-serving scoundrels. Let us hear of the ills and ailings of future man from the horse's mouth.

Shirk not. Do not shut your ears, but listen, and listen well. Let us hear the forbidden thoughts of a disgruntled watchman. Let us tap the mind of a loyal lapdog of a mass-murdering theocratic dictatorship. Let us see the internal workings of the sclerotic Imperium of Man through the eyes of a willing lackey. And let us know his damning verdict upon the very empire he has given his life to serve.

Enter, Inspector Ruminatus Saihtam Llezir of the Division for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Imperial Property, under the ever-watchful aegis of the Adeptus Arbites. A man of crisp salutes who needs no beverage to act crazy. A hard-working maniac whose primary joy is to be found in fulfilling his tasks well, no matter what fortress-precinct or subsector he finds himself rotating to. An ambivert freak, whose conduct will range from carrying out his duties with theatrical flair, to performing tasks with a boring, mechanistic exactitude.

The eldest son hailing from a quarrelsome lowborn clan, this Arbites Inspector is a man of both paper scrutiny and savage violence. Possessing an intense focus and tunnel vision, Saihtam fancies himself a rustic poet, though others find him more rustic than poetic. He is an eccentric tongue-waggler who shifts from polished speech fit for polite society, through endless fact-chewing rants at high speed, to brusque comments composed of blunt or outright insidious words. It is not a type of personality usually found within the dour and leaden-heartened Adeptus Arbites, yet certain bookworm specialist roles still has a use for such odd human resources. This strange character is an avid reader of books and adherent of dark humour, and he will spice his everyday speech with obscure references to Imperial history and plebeian toilet humour alike. Such is the man known as Inspector Ruminatus Saihtam Llezir.

As to this Arbitrator's duties, let us consider this banned yet widespread whisper joke, a piece of sinspeech told on hundreds of thousands of planets and voidholms across the astral domains of His Divine Majesty:

Two former mates from the Schola Progenium met in the street.
"Where do you work?"
"I'm a scrivener. And what about you?"
"I work as a Detective Surveillor."
"Oh, and what are you doing at the Arbites?"
"We unearth those who are dissatisfied."
"You mean, there are also some who are satisfied?"
"Those who are satisfied are dealt with by the Division for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Imperial Property."

As may be inferred, this Division is tasked with rooting out fraudulent usage and wastage of the Emperor's assets. It is likewise an anti-corruption unit, a maverick bloodhound organization who will infiltrate and raid all manner of Imperial departments, notaria and bureaux. Its snooping about in chancelleries, scriptoria and archive-vaults is an inherently dry and mind-numbingly patient activity of crunching numbers and puzzling together signs of creative book-keeping.

Nevertheless, the extremely fractious and dangerous cultural climate on virtually all Imperial worlds and voidholms mean that members of the Division for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Imperial Property will experience their fair share of shootouts, ambushes, booby traps, melees and bloody crackdowns. Death by paper cuts is not the worst occupational hazard. To serve in this Arbites unit mean that it is not at all improbable to be assassinated by shady clerks and slimy officials, and then have your corpse disappear clandestinely into some grinder or other. After all, attack is often the best form of defence. Both situational awareness and documental vigilance will be required to survive for long in this dreary line of work. Never go in alone.

Toiling for his mistrustful Arbites Division, Inspector Ruminatus Saihtam Llezir spends most of his life grubbing around in parchment records and datamills, as well as sailing the wild waters of the multiple overlapping and conflicting law codes that characterize the disjointed legal landscape of edict accretions that constitute His sacred astral dominion. Ever armed and armoured to the teeth while on duty, the pious Saihtam has committed countless mercy killings in the field, both ranged and up close and personal with blood and spittle spraying his face. And the Arbitrator knows his bane deeds to be acts of mercy. After all, surely death was a mercy compared to the tender cares of Arbites Chasteners? Of course, summary beatings, electroture and undertaking field interrogations at the top of one's lungs also goes with the job. Serving in this Imperial Adeptus, sworn to uphold the Emperor's order and the Lex Imperialis, is a baleful duty not fit for those faint of heart. Only those willing and able to embrace brutality can prosper in such a lethal and sinister environment. Break those who would break the law.

The middling rank of Inspector Ruminatus means that Llezir closely cooperates, from a junior position, with Intelligencers, namely the spymasters of the Adeptus Arbites. Their spycraft usually consists of tending to informant networks and chasing endless paper trails via planted agents, as well as forensic expertise. Staying fed with information from relevant secret sources constitute a major investigative advantage for the Division for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Imperial Property. Knowledge is power, guard it well.

The arduous archive digging and information sifting has seen Arbitrator Saihtam and his colleagues carry out dozens of Imperial asset seizures at gunpoint, often in the midst of furious compound combat and corridor wars. This is a thrilling aspect of duty that the crazed man relishes, and he takes hidden pride in equipping himself above and beyond the call of duty, both as regard lethal weaponry and practical tools. The backside of his small ceramite shield, for instance, is festooned with a sheathed shortsword side-arm, multikeys and all manner of easily-retrieved items that tend to be handy to hold in one hand even while grasping the shield with the other. What spare surfaces are left over on the shield's backside is covered with kill markings and little glued pieces of trophy parchment and order-printouts from both intellectually and martially challenging inspections. Saihtam Llezir is nothing if not a man who wish to preserve memories as clearly as possible, and so token keepsakes and grisly trophies alike adorn his cramped hab-unit, in amongst troves of equipment, tools and stacks of books.

Now, this exposer of fraud and hunter of Adeptus corruption, has seen the God-Emperor's vast dominions from a large number of different angles, from on high and low. And more to the point, his excavations of peripheral archive niches has unearthed material long lost and long redacted by official Imperial policy. The position of a roving Inspector Ruminatus has carried with it many a surprising discovery in the nooks and crannies of data-logs and archivist caverns, ones who has given this lowly Adept an unusual bird's eye perspective of the Imperium and mankind as a whole. And while many would have preferred the bliss of ignorance to the harrowing and eye-opening glimpses of knowledge he has beheld, Saihtam himself will secretly damn ignorance, despite Imperial dogma. Knowledge may be a heavy burden to carry, but it's ultimately a dignity for any thinking creature alive.

Unlikely though it may seem, he once found a couple of ancient Imperial propaganda mantras from the distant times of M.32, upon the hive world of Cylaxis Ultima. Both mantras speak of changing times in the wake of the now-mythical Horus Heresy, yet the second mantra already displayed the unhinged lunacy that would become so entrenched in human cultures all across the beleaguered Imperium of Man:

"Remain calm.
The Master of Mankind endures.
The God-Emperor lives.
The Imperium of Man shall endure.
There is much to be done."

"The Banner of Lightning drops, giving way to a red dawn.
There is only hatred under the Imperial Eagle.
Hail the Regency of the High Lords.
Hail the nightmare.
Hail mankind."

Likewise, most of the bloodsoaked doings of the Adeptus Terra during the Age of Apostasy may have been scrubbed out from history, yet on the old asteroid mining voidholm of Porus Obraluj II, Inspector Ruminatus Saihtam managed to stumble across a rusty cogitator filled with machine spirit-files from this five thousand year old reign of terror. Crucially, it had once belonged to the Adeptus Astra Telepathica before a mysterious purge had seen the choir killed off and one lone cogitator forgotten in the fiery cleansing of the installation. As such, the archival information gave certain glimpses into the guts of Imperial governance across the stars, a snapshot from a bygone aeon. Many hours of fascinated reading sufficed to patch together a fragmentary picture of a suppressed period in Imperial history, whose all-pervading watchword seemed to have been repeated over and over in official documents:

"Goge is Terra."

And for all the horrible deeds carried out in the name of this apostate High Lord, and for all the condemnation he received from his victorious enemies, the dire orders of slaughter and purging and historical rewriting and megalomania and ruthless imposition of production quotas and recruitment blood taxes, were ultimately little different from how the Imperium functions ordinarily. The nuances of cruel extraction and demented democide during Goge Vandire's reign were a difference of degree, not of kind. At the end of this rare opportunity to investigate remnant documentation from the Age of Apostasy, the unimpressed Inspector Ruminatus concluded that High Lord Goge Vandire, cursed be his name, was merely the purest manifestation of the Imperium's overlords and internal workings. His schismatic tendencies, ruinous construction projects and paranoid purges were excessive by ordinary Imperial standards, yet routine Imperial modes of operation have long been excessive and depraved to begin with.

Naturally, such private conclusions can never be voiced aloud nor written down, for to do so within the Imperium is to invite an agonizing end at the hands of torturers. It can not even be confessed to an Arbites Chaplain. How many secret realizations of similar kind have been carried to the grave by Imperial servants through ten thousand years of doubt? No one, but the lord and saviour of our species Himself, will ever know the answer to that question of the soul.

Saihtam Llezir has come to learn that the mysterious facade of governance is less an impenetrable intricacy of masterful genius divinely guided by Him on Terra, and more a front for common mediocrity, grasping hands and disappointing stupidity even at the highest positions in vaunted hierarchies. The inherently optimistic Inspector Ruminatus has become jaded by a lifetime of staring sheer human incompetence, self-serving falsehood, treachery and unending malice in the face. The pettiness and screeching inefficiency is ceaseless. While his faith in the Master of Mankind seated upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth remains unshaken, his faith in humanity itself is challenged on a regular basis. He has become secretly disillusioned with the insane dysfunctionality of the Imperium that he serves. And yet Saihtam remains loyal unto death toward a monstrous regime whom he knows to be a dead-end for human hopes and aspirations in the Milky Way galaxy. He has stumbled across too much classified information, and gained too much of an overview to be in any doubt as to the impending doom of mankind, and its horrendous flaws.

Speaking of terrors, the Inspector Ruminatus' scrutiny of paperwork has occasionally unearthed heretical sects and cells of traitors and xenophiles, sometimes as part of a wider Inquisitorial investigation. These dizzying glimpses of available alternatives to the Imperium have confirmed for him that once you achieve an elevated enough position of broad knowledge and gaze around you in all directions, you will discover that there is nothing but idiots and madmen on all sides. On a service tour through the Eastern Fringe, Saihtam Llezir heard the siren call of the Greater Good, and found it wanting. He has stared the promises and powers of the Dark Gods in the eye, and he is not impressed. All options are either traps, marshlights or abominations stalking the darkest age of mankind.

Such a high vantage point of observation will prove that there is hypocrisy stacked to the roof-beams on every side imaginable. Everywhere, madness reigns. Hope is dead, but duty calls. Duty, that dull and grinding purpose in life. Duty, that pillar and that burden. Duty. Duty without end. Duty toward the Emperor, despite the horrible mess His chosen servants have made of His once-shining star realm. And so Inspector Ruminatus Saihtam Llezir continues to serve the Imperium in his petty position, with an eye for detail and a monomaniacal energy that translates well both into summary violence and stalking dodgy paper trails.

Such is his lot, and such is his purpose. If a Chastener or Inquisitor ever found out about his roaming thoughts and secretly reached conclusions on the order of things, he would be flayed and roasted alive. Yet no matter the false confessions they would have tortured out of him, this erratic servant of the Golden Throne will never waver in his silent loyalty. If you can be nothing else, then be constant. Be true.

What better altar to worship at, than that of your ancestors? In a world of lies exposed, that may be the only truth left to cling to. In a universe of false promises and baleful horrors, you may yet pick your poison. And what better poisoned chalice to drink from than the one you were raised to grasp?

Ave Imperator.


- - -

Self-portrait, akin to Magister Illuminus Blanche.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/10/06 11:48:01


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Commissariat

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is herded into battle at gunpoint.

Take a step back and behold our recorded past, with all its lacunae and all its lying word wizardry. Take a step back, and know that history is a race between adaptation and catastrophe. History is driven by fear and greed, occasionally spiced by nobler aspirations yet inevitably reverting to basal appetites, no matter how high and selflessly man may rise to face a challenge.

One virtue of history is to combat human arrogance. While man tends to think of himself as the pinnacle of creation, the historical record actually shows him bumbling around like a chimpanzee having a go at a typewriter. Let us follow one such clumsy thread of history, through a landscape of broken dreams and bloodsoaked decay. Let us untangle one typical knot of arrested human potential.

Our starting point must be the end of the Dark Age of Technology, when a shining aeon of mankind thriving across the stars was brought to a horrifying end by a cascade of crippling blows. Suffice to say, that once upon a time mortal paradise was a common fact of life across twain million human colony worlds and innumerable void installations, and the cult of science and innovation ruled supreme. Yet pride and excess brought disaster down upon ancient man, and all his works fell to ruin, and man butchered man in savage cannibal frenzy. And so the Age of Strife began, the Old Night that swathed human existence in darkness and pain through twohundredfifty generations of spiralling destruction and loss. Thus man was made to suffer for his abominable sins.

This freefall into oblivion was halted by a god walking among men. An Emperor arising on Terra herself, forging an Imperium to last a million years, crushing all resistance to His Legions in a fury of galactic conquest. Uniting dispersed mankind under a single banner, He thus eliminated all alternative sources of human regrowth, and so the fate of humanity became shackled to that of His Imperium. And so man for a time built anew among the ashes, with rekindled hope and brilliance, and warriors flocked to His eagle standards to partake in the glory, the loot and the intoxicating new dream of Imperial Truth.

This manifest destiny of human dominion to be established over the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy was increasingly pursued by common men, women and children, mostly unaugmented plebeians marching in great organized hordes under the command of demigods and supermen. And so the Imperial Army of the Great Crusade was formed, an eclectic cavalcade of regiments ranging from the most primitive brutes to the most sophisticated void fighters, recruited from whatever worlds and voidholms had been brought into Imperial Compliance. These rowdy and colourful forces of brutalized post-apocalyptic survivors not only served as occupation armies and garrisons within the Imperialis Militia, but also came to bear the brunt of the fighting toward the end of the Great Crusade.

To maintain order and loyalty among the ranks, many Imperial Army units employed specialist officers known as Discipline Masters. Stern hunters of deserters and grisly executioners armed with tracking eagles and electro-scythes, these merciless servants of resurgent Terra were feared throughout the Imperial Army and civilian populations alike. Theirs was the duty to perform summary executions and make public examples out of cowards, fifth columnists, criminals and shirkers. Their office, methods and function was a dark omen of the times to come, yet no one in the early Imperium could have imagined just how far their species would come to plunge the depths of depravity. No one, not even the most jaded and humourless taskmaster of the Great Crusade, could have ever predicted the demented extremes of tyranny and terror which their degenerate descendants would arrive at. No one during that sparkling renaissance could have foreseen the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. No one, indeed, but the most insane madmen harrowed by psychic nightmares to rend their hearts and souls asunder. And yet man was destined to build his own hell on earth, and all the Emperor's achievements were fated to either rot or burn for the sake of man's failings.

Fighting as auxiliary forces under the Legiones Astartes, unbreakable bonds between Imperial Army regiments and whatever Legion they were attached to, were forged across thousands of Expeditionary Fleets. And so split loyalties were sown. The early Imperium was characterized by deep factionalism, with Iterators attempting to paper over rifts between hundreds of thousands of local loyalties, even as the great warlords known as Primarchs created newer and greater factions around themselves, groupings of allegiance which would become apparent in bloody fashion. The tension around these fault lines erupted into the galactic civil war known as the Horus Heresy, which tore the Imperium apart with great devastation.

In the wake of this calamity caused by human flaws, the Primarch Roboute Guilliman introduced sweeping reforms to systematically counteract the possibility for rebellions and power seizures from spiralling out of control. A few of the more noteworthy reforms included the Legiones Astartes being split into tiny individual Chapters, while the Imperial Army found its fleet and ground forces permanently separated. No more would regimental cruisers organic to the organization of their attached ground forces be allowed the chance to roam the Imperium at will. Henceforth, the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Guard would be two strictly different organizations, in order to rob ambitious rebel warlords of the chance to spread their conquests to other worlds. Better leave them stranded on whatever local planet or voidholm they happened to seize power over, for an Imperial response force to crush at a later date.

All these reforms to prevent future large scale civil wars came at a prize, and all served to turn the armed forces of the Imperium more stale and rigid, or too small for any one force to deal with a greater threat on its own. The potential for the dynamic leadership of genius war leaders was severely dampened. The openings for brilliant high commanders to make their success snowball into unstoppable Imperial conquests were by and large closed, and many future Warmasters met a fatal end due to Imperial fears of their ambition. Military capabilities had become a secondary concern to questions of loyalty, and an increasingly poisonous atmosphere of distrust and paranoia began to clog the lungs of mankind in the Age of Imperium, and its arteries were increasingly afflicted with bureaucratic sclerosis. The vigorous warfare and grand reforms of Primarch Guilliman had bought the Imperium a new leash of life, yet even in its most splendid silver ages yet to come, it was still a stunted creature prone to crush human potential wherever it might arise. And so stagnation set in, and long-term decay became well and truly unstoppable.

The restructured Imperium proved just as rife with fractious infighting and treachery, albeit on different levels compared to the disastrous civil strife that had brought low the early Imperium. The overarching governance of the Adeptus Terra turned into a petty dance of despotic control, both over civilian societies and Imperial militaries, with increasingly arcane mechanisms put into place to hinder treachery and heresy from taking hold. A great many new institutions were formed to curb malcontents and deviants before their thought of self could boil over into rebellion and otherworldly corruption, yet the tightening grip of uncaring Imperial masters would increasingly prove counter-productive in the extreme. And so fire was fought with fire, and ever more of the Imperium's internal troubles that required bloody suppression stemmed from the faulty actions of said Imperium itself.

Some of the most famous new organizations to fight heresy and betrayal included the Inquisition and the Adeptus Arbites, whose danger of torture racks and crushing armaplas boots linger malevolenty wherever Imperial subjects make their dwelling across the starspangled void. The fruits of these organizations' deeds contributes greatly to the unique blend of endless boredom and dreariness of Imperial life, and the subdued sense of threat and demise. Thus a grand strategy of butchery increasingly rose to the forefront, in a fever frenzy of purges and democide, all adding up to a dreadfully sacrificial and inferior mode of organization. And so humanity in the darkest of futures comprise an ocean of poor, uneducated, apathetic, hostile and downright sadistic commoners, lorded over by their thieving, arrogant and ruthless rulers. A far cry from their bold and clever ancestors, who bestrode the cosmos like titans.

This carnival of human insufficiency has resulted in the sole remaining shield of mankind, the astral domains of the God-Emperor, turning step by step into a fortified madhouse, a rotting prison for human development and a dead end for human interstellar civilization in the Milky Way galaxy. It has been a slow and gradual process, yet the pervasive trend over ten millennia has been one of a remorseless march toward worsening cruelty, technological retardation and primitivization of the entire species. The regression of His Terran dominion into an etiolated husk has been carried out in the name of strengthening mankind and saving the human species, with the opposite coming to pass. The decay into atavistic barbarity has been executed without compassion, amidst a villainous tyranny of severe regimentation and kinslaying blocking detachments. And so we arrive at the Imperial Commissariat.

To gain permanent control over the entire Imperial military, the High Lords of Terra early on introduced the Officio Prefectus, and with it the position of Commissar. Worried about the influence of officers with potential for particularist sympathies, heretical leanings and hidden grudges against their divinely appointed masters and betters, the Commissars has helped to ensure that soldiers remain loyal to the Imperium of Man. The spiritual successors to the Discipline Masters of the Great Crusade, Imperial Commissars have went much further in ensuring military obedience and Emperor-fearing devotion. With a mandate to watch over all personnel like hawks and execute anyone found wanting, the Imperial Commissar has turned into the living terror of the Astra Militarum and the Navis Imperialis alike. Their debut was spectacularly murderous, with untold millions of suspects executed at the hands of Commissars during the Scouring and reforging of the Imperium.

The Commissars of the Imperium were originally instituted as a bulwark against the allure of Chaos among Imperial voidsmen and Guardsmen, their modus operandi being to kill one to scare a hundred. Yet the Dark Gods of Chaos have been fed to titanic proportions by the swelling depravity, misery and bloodshed that reigns supreme across the Imperium of Man, whose heart of stone is well exemplified by the conduct of its Commissars.

Recruited among children whose parents died in service to Him on Terra, these exemplary products of the Schola Progenium are among the most brainwashed and fanatically devoted of any Imperial servants, unhesitant in slaying anyone who obstruct the loyal workings of His Divine Majesty's armed forces. Cadet-Commissars are not only chosen among the Schola's heavily indoctrinated orphans for their undying loyalty and physical prowess, but also for possessing a weighty gravitas and good people skills, not least of which is the ability to rouse and manipulate others by the power of their spoken word. Most Commissars possess a natural social presence and charisma which make people turn and notice them as they enter a room. Progenii who aspire to become Commissars will be trained with live firing exercises upon living prisoners, and undergo a harsh regimen to weed out the weak, the impious and those lacking in moral fibre. The training of Commissars is extremely strict, and so are the human products of this brutal system. Cadet-Commissars will be formed into Commissar Training Squads, equipped in the cheap fashion of Imperial Guardsmen, yet sporting most of the Commissariat's panoply, such as leather long coats, gloves, jack boots and peaked caps. Upon being deemed worthy by a Commissar, the cadet will eschew their blue trim and training emblems for the distinctive red sash and regalia of a Junior Commissar, going on to serve in small units at the start of their perilous career.

Those Cadet-Commissars who fail to live up to the exacting standards of this corps of fanatical Imperial loyalists, will often be relieved of their duties if their failures included no cowardice or insubordination, although other common fates for failed cadets include a commission in a Penal Legion or service in a Rogue Trader entourage. The destiny of failed ex-cadets is almost invariably decided upon by the Commissar under whom they trained, for the freedom of volunteer choice and personal inclination has scant value in the glorious Imperium of Man. A true Imperial subject will know only duty and servitude without end. Know your place, and question it not.

Variously referred to in different Low Gothic dialects and language branches as politriques, impolitis and politruks, Imperial Commissars are supervisory political officers charged with securing civilian control over the military Imperial Guard and Navy. Their organ, the Officio Prefectus, is a subdivision of the Departmento Munitorum. Commissars are responsible for the indoctrination of armsmen into Imperial modes of thinking, guarding the soldiery and serving voidsfolk against anti-Imperial thought and action in order to ensure Imperial victory. These fanatical devotees of the Imperial Creed are tasked with keeping the minions of the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy under intense discipline, subjecting them to draconic punishments for minor infractions, ever ready to fire their pistols into the back of the heads of offending miscreants and poltroons.

The Emperor's soldiers should at all times be more afraid of their own officers than of any enemy, and Imperial Commissars ensure that this is the case, no matter how monstrous the foe faced in the field. The Commissariat's agents has become an ever-pervasive facet of the command structures of the Astra Militarum and Navis Imperialis, with at least one Commissar attached to most regiments and voidships. The guiding principle of the Officio Prefectus is a core tenet of Imperial thinking, namely that of the triumph of will over self. Or as the Graian Mantra of Discipline would have it: Steel of body, steel of mind. And indeed Imperial Commissars tend to be pillars of resolve and self-control, utterly bereft of mercy in carrying out their righteous duties, and possessed by a virtuous cruelty and pious hatred for all the foes of mankind, and for all that is ugly in humanity.

In many periods of Imperial history, the Commissar has held military rank equaling that of the unit commander to whom he was attached, naturally with the full authority to countermand the orders of the unit commander, or execute the commanding officer on the spot. Imperial Commissars have always tended toward a wasteful approach to warfare, with human manpower being nothing but a deep reservoir to empty in pursuit of the Emperor's holy war aims. Innumerable are the occasions when experienced military officers have given seemingly cautious orders to not squander lives needlessly and instead pursue a war of wit, surprise and outflanking cunning, only for their suspiciously cerebral commands to be contradicted and overruled by the attached Imperial Commissar, who will often call for frontal assaults or for the troops to stand their ground and die rather than give up a single inch of ground. What better way to prove your dedication to the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, seated upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth, than to willingly cast yourself into the jaws of certain death?

In some of the less desperate times following the reforging of the Imperium, Commissars would lose their influential role as an unofficial second commander within military units, and become militarily subordinate to the unit commander. Such downgrading of the Commissariat's status and powers were often the result both of military resentment against innumerable ineffective countermands of orders, and of intrigue among the High Lords of Terra. Within such periods of Commissar demotion, political officers would be deprived of any direct command in the field, and relegated to teaching, ideological instruction and other morale-related functions. Yet those times would inevitably come to an end, and grow ever more rare as the Imperium aged, and aged badly. Increasingly, the beleaguered Imperium found no space for such luxuries, and a stern and unforgiving agent of the Officio Prefectus with wide-ranging authority to cow the military would ever be wished for by the callous and paranoid masters of the Imperium. Historical occasions when full Commissariat powers have been reinstated to the Officio Prefectus have usually been accompanied by great purges, often led by vengeful Imperial Commissars themselves.

And so the steely gaze of Commissars is inescapable for members of the Imperial Guard and Navy. These venerated heroes of Imperial propaganda are likewise primary targets of fragging and of mutineers and traitors, ever the first officers to be placed against the wall in case of military rebellion. To desecrate the corpse, garb and insignia of an Imperial Commissar constitute a potent trophy of rebellious foes of the Imperium. Commissars have proven to be lynchpins of Imperial military morale and loyalty, just as they are crucial instruments of Imperial terror. The depraved methods and suspicious eyes of distrustful Commissars make them feared and loathed in equal measure throughough the Astra Militarum and Navis Imperialis. The Imperial Commissariat constitute one reason among others as to why so many human languages and dialects in the far future have single words describing a feeling of the lurking of inevitable doom: Valhallans, for instance, call it pizdets.

Outside the Officio Prefectus, there also exist a bewildering array of local Commissariats, overseeing Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and System Defence Fleets. Local Commissariats may be found with authority over only a single continent or voidholm section, and they may likewise be found all across a sub-sector or even an entire sector, often doubling as yet another security police force. These local Commissariats are as a rule subordinate to the Imperial Commissariat, yet plenty of friction and inter-service rivalry exist between the two due to overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, since Imperial Commissars down on their luck or in bad health are occasionally charged with overseeing the PDF and other local units for entire planets or even sub-sectors as an ambulating political officer. It is far from unheard of for Imperial Commissars to execute their local counterparts for stepping over the line, and it is likewise not a rare occurence for gangs of local Commissars or cadets in training to secretly make an Imperial Commissar disappear in an act of revenge for previous slights. Insults to a Commissariat's honour cannot be allowed to stand.

And so the political supervision of the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy has been effected by the Imperial Commissar, who has been introduced to most units and formations, ideally from company- to army group-level for the Astra Militarum, and ideally for everything from single escort vessels up to flotilla- and fleet-levels for the Navis Imperialis. Commissars overseeing the higher levels of Imperial command will often consist of a triumvirate or troika, with a Lord Commissar or some other rank of senior Commissar being assisted by two lower-ranking members of the Imperial Commissariat. Not even the highest generals or admirals are safe from the baleful glare of these extraordinarily brutal individuals.

One recent inspiring example of the deeds of an agent of the Officio Prefectus can be seen in the case of Junior Commissar Anemas Viriathus. Upon graduating from the Schola Progenium, the youthful Anemas was assigned in 987.M41 to oversee Teal Platoon of the Third Company of the 23789th Cilician Fusiliers, then deployed on the third moon of Chandax Primus. During his very first frontline tour, Anemas' assigned regiment was subject to a surprise assault from secessionist crater raiders, striking with such sudden rapidity and overwhelming fire support that several platoons turned and fled on the spot. Teal Platoon was no exception, yet the young Commissar reared it in by pulling his laspistol, calmly aiming and gunning down eight Guardsmen from behind while shouting admonishments and litanies of moral purity in order to shame the retreating soldiers to return to the fight. His bloodstained orations bore fruit, and soon the devotion of the men, women and juves under arms was rekindled, ready for Anemas Viriathus to lead Teal Platoon in a zealous bayonet charge into the teeth of the foe's crater raiders.

Against all reason and expectation, this suicidal attack by the Fusiliers hit home and bulldozed through the raiders' frontline command squads, in spite of a flurry of frag grenades and rapid autogun fire. The surprising counter attack of the Cilicians in Teal Platoon broke the fury of the crater raiders, who soon retreated in order to minimize casualties. Through the whole ordeal, Junior Commissar Anemas Viriathus had stood straight as a pinetree, bending neither knee nor back for the sake of cover, even as slugs and energy beams whizzed all around him. As Teal Platoon virtually wiped itself out in its blazing last charge, Viriathus led them, sword drawn, striding miraculously unscathed through the violent mayhem even as his underlings destroyed themselves against the most potent weapons of the enemy. The survivors of Third Company hailed the Commissar as a hero chosen to save the hour by the divine Imperator Himself, and soon the frontline was all abuzz as word of mouth spread the news with electrifying vigour and religious exaltation.

The first action of the Junior Commissar, however, was to stride back over the smoking battlefield, seeking out each and every Guardsman he had shot in the back during the panicked flight. He denied the still living ones medical assistance and made sure that they would not be accidentally saved by their comrades in arms, yet he also cut short their traumatic suffering by mouthing off quick mantras of redemption before beheading them on the spot. Their heads where subsequently bathed in acid, and the skulls were engraved with the High Gothic word for 'coward' on their foreheads, before being stacked like beads on a pole outside the bunker barracks of Third Company, morbidly resplendent and ready to greet new recruits as a warning example. Camp gossip that day claimed that Commissar Anemas Viriathus had seethed with indignant hatred and righteous fury against the poltroons, and verily had he steeled himself for the task of dismembering and disembowelling both wounded survivors and corpses of the cravens he had shot, when an inner voice like gold, majesty and angelic harps had wished him to extend the Emperor's Peace unto the undeserving wretches. And so the pious man had complied, and let justified vengeance rest for once.

Weep, children of old Terra, that this cruel, hateful figure is in fact among the noblest of your scattered sons and daughters.

And so the politico-military officers known as Imperial Commissars will labour to ensure the loyalty of military units to the Imperium. They will work to suppress fractious infighting and hinder Imperial military units from becoming associated with special interest groups with different and conflicting goals to that of the wider Imperium. They will endeavour to uphold morale and the purity of Imperial indoctrination. They will never cease to stamp out malcontents, spreaders of defaitism, rebel infiltrators, heretical elements and thought of self from the ranks. They will never hesitate to summarily execute shirkers and cowards, and they will never blanch at making a diabolical example out of poltroons. These men and women of abominable deeds will always be first in line to zealously undertake purges within Imperial military organizations, and woe betide anyone whom they find lacking. They are both feared, hated and admired, and the Imperial Commissars stand as true expressions of Imperial will made flesh.

For what is happiness but the feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome?

Thus abominable acts are committed by crude organizations within a rotting starfaring empire, the mass graves long forgotten, the victims eternally damned as rightfully purged. Where once ancient man strived to unlock the secrets of the universe and reshape human nature itself to a sublime condition, nowadays his degenerate descendants wallow in the dirt and embrace the evil that men do with shameless enthusiasm, and name it devotion. Where once all was a realm of shining wonder betwixt the stars, all is now a morass of misery and carnage, in horror unending.

We must ask, are these merely the motions of a doomed breed? The lowly spasms of a slowly dying empire facing an abysmal end? Is this a humanity stupid beyond redemption?

Yet it is not given for the part to criticize the whole.

In this universe, anything you do can get you killed. Including doing nothing. A great man during the misty Age of Terra once said, shortly before his spectacular death, that it is better to die suddenly, then to always be expecting death. Perhaps the best one can do, is to live life fearlessly, and to die in like manner. The brave man, after all, only die once. The coward dies a thousand deaths.

Know the horror that awaits us all. Mankind in the darkest of futures finds itself doomed to forever tread water in order to just avoid drowning, barely keeping its head above the whipping surface as it gulps for air with aching lungs and wild panic in its bloodshot eyes.

That is the best which the future of our species can offer.

All else is oblivion.

Vigilant be.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/10/12 18:57:21


Post by: jeff white


No time to read these novellas, but drawings are awesome!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/10/13 08:41:50


Post by: Illumini


Yeah, that commissar looks badass, and like he would blow my brains out for saying anything except "FOR THE EMPEROR!"


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/10/13 14:26:19


Post by: Las


This is the greatest thread to ever have graced this subforum.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/10/13 18:21:12


Post by: Racerguy180


 jeff white wrote:
No time to read these novellas, but drawings are awesome!


You should make some then, cuz they are 1000000% worth it.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/11/01 20:05:15


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@jeff white: Thanks! The drawings take more time than the writing, yet the drawings are only one tenth of the content. You're missing out on the real meat.

@Illumini: Thank you! The Emperor protects, soldier!

@Las: Gracie! It warms my heart to hear.

@Racerguy180: Likewise, thank you very much! It lifts up my spirit to read your kind recommendation.


Mematicus Secundus

The following joke image from Reddit was composed by RossHollander (all the writing is his, and wonderful it is) over on Grimdank:

Spoiler:


Remember that Warhammer has always been a joke, a comedy from the very start. When at its most grimdark, it is its own parody. Sense of irony required.

Cheers!

- - -

And now, catch all the sir Humphrey Appleby references:




Paper-Cranker

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is enslaved by his own documents.

On hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms beyond counting, myths grown out of ancient legends speak of an idyllic past when life was much simpler and brighter, when man was healthier and happier, and when man lived longer and toiled less for more gain than he has ever known since paradise burned. If one was to sift through this myriad of oral folklore, one would eventually discover stray references to a bygone world bereft of the straitjacket of bureaucracy and snares of red tape in a myriad of old tales dotted around the Imperium of Man. Such remnants of memory are essentially wrong cases of wishful thinking, for the lives of Man of Gold and Man of Stone were never free from a web of rules and systematic organization, even in locales were no form of taxes, statute labour, gamete contribution or conscription at all existed. Yet these rose-tinted accounts of humanity's elder days are still correct from a certain point of view, for the primordial swamp of administration and tedious paperwork had long since been streamlined and rendered efficient like oiled lightning during the Dark Age of Technology, and the contrast to civilized life in the Age of Imperium could hardly be more stark.

At the bustling height of the Dark Age of Technology, the inertia and headache of disjointed procedure, manual identification, permits and documentation had long since been replaced by automatized systems of order, all smoothly organized by Abominable Intelligence and working with a marvellous level of cybernetic quality honed by many generations of brilliant minds and tinkering hands. These higher forms of administration communicated between departmental databanks and decentralized picoregistrars without the worthless need for human footwork in corridors and vox queues. These faceless, robotic management systems were set up so as to allow for the difficulties of Warp travel and interstellar communication of that epoch, without constantly running into hitches and programming boundary hiccups between regions, and likewise were they hardcoded to seamlessly account for synchronization errors whenever vessels arrived ahead of schedule estimates and slightly broke the arrow of time by arriving at a somewhat earlier point in the calendar or chronometer than their timestamp told the system they started on their journey.

In golden times of yore, man's higher forms of administration were silken smooth in their workings, and they were meticulously designed with a purity of function and a mimimum of hassle, waste and inhumanity for any citizen who happened to be on the receiving end of machine registrar and governance protocols. These inner workings of ancient paradise have since been replaced by crude wetware and agonisingly slow manual paperwork, as trillions upon trillions of grey-clad drones shuffle business, stamp parchment made from human skin and cling to paragraphs of procedure and points of protocol with an inane myopia bordering on insanity. These swarming lowly sticklers of bureaucracy manifest all the pitfalls of human tardiness, tunnel vision, error and ineptitude that the machine systems of ancient times were made to avoid.

Gone is the elegant ease of such matters that was a fact of life during the edenic days of the Dark Age of Technology. Gone is the flow, replaced instead by a bizarre labyrinth of messy complications and endless rigmarole as petty paper potentates of borrowed power chew procedure at desktops and cogitators and decide the fates of downtrodden people. Any misfiling and error of theirs can mean the end of living and breathing Imperial subjects, sometimes vast numbers of subjects, for any men, women and children who fall through the cracks will become irreversibly cast out of society and find their lives destroyed, unless they possess immense power and influence to fight the system in arduously drawn-out affairs of bribery, threatmaking and appeals burdened by friction. Without papers, you are nothing. This boring farce of bureaucracy is filled with paradoxical catches and a cavalcade of hassle, as taxes are levied, corvée labour mustered, license charters issued, unwanted deviants purged and conscription undertaken, all while departments who no longer fulfill a function go through the motions and labour with paper tasks no longer real. Such tragic regression of the machine of governance is surrealistic to behold, but at least the taut officials are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

And so mankind in the Age of Imperium has fallen foul of the worst excesses of administration. Man has fallen into a bottomless pit of deskjockey trouble worse than anything witnessed under the heavens since the first scribes made cuneiform indentations into clay tablets to keep track of granaries and debts on Old Earth. Speaking of the ancient cradle of our human species, a military writer during the misty past of the Age of Terra once stated that management of the few is the same as management of the many. It is a matter of organization. While true, this observation does not explain the problems of scale and bloat that plagues the bureaucracy of the God-Emperor of mankind.

It is said that the Imperium have an army of soldiers on their feet, an army of priests on their knees, an army of civil servants on their seats and an army of spies crawling on the ground. Yet for every man under arms, ten men scribble quills and shuffle papers behind the lines. His scribal cohorts far outnumber even the armed forces of our radiant Terran Imperator, for the Adeptus Administratum is the largest of all organs comprising the Adeptus Terra, and ten billion Adepts of the Administratum work in the Imperial Palace alone.

To grasp the vital function of this swollen mess of maddening tedium, know that the Adeptus Administratum is the memory and nerve system of the Imperium, in all its bloated monstrosity and all its lacunae-ridden dementia. In all its sclerotic inertia and shrieking inefficiency, the Adeptus Administratum is still indispensable to the Imperium of Man, even as it slowly sucks the life out of mankind. The Administratum is a gargantuan organization of endless departments and divisions, with tendrils reaching almost everywhere, a teeming body of dour officials obsessed with preserving documents correctly, yet simultaneously self-censoring, falsifying, revising and destroying its own archive material in a contradictory cycle of saving and deletion. Much preserved ancient knowledge beyond the scientific and technological has been irredeemably lost in the labyrinthine mess of the Adeptus Administratum's cavernous archives, and much irreplacable knowledge has been eradicated in endless waves of revisory adjustments and document purges.

Ever since humans ascended to city life and civilization, death and taxes have been the one certainty in their existence. Everything else is subject to the mutability of fate. Instead of flaying the sheep by looting people of all they own in one go, rulers of antiquity discovered that it was far more efficient to fleece the flock repeatedly. Few human activities are as pressing and expensive as warfare, and the demands of total war can easily force administrations to cannibalize society to feed the roaring furnace of destruction. Long ago, in benighted millennia of endless conflict, the Imperium of Man discovered how much it could squeeze out of human societies once it set its mind to it. And so the urgent needs of ten thousand different war fronts have caused the Adeptus Administratum to ever more scrape the barrel, and ever more hollow out mankind as the talons of the grasping Imperium continue to claw ever more downward through its reserves of flesh, raw resources and preserved technology.

Behold the doomed realm of man stretching across the stars, straddling the cosmos in the darkest of futures. Bear witness to the unfolding nightmare as crookbacked pencil-pushers harry the filthy masses, even as the ravenous hordes of doom tear into senile mankind. See with open eyes, how countless human beings scurry about like blind thralls in a broken ant colony, buckling under the weight of a suffocating bureaucracy where everyone chatter off protocol, and everone there is morbid. Watch the mingled significance and the unreality of the decisions, for a sense of impending catastrophe overhangs the dull scene. Here, in the last days of our species, the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him is on full display.

The end times may be upon us, yet duty calls. Thus a leaden host of auditors, deputies and sub-officials each day and each lightson go forth, on hundreds of thousands of worlds and innumerable voidholms. Equipped with paper and symbols of office, these obstructive clerks with all the charisma of a filing cabinet will conduct population censuses, collect revenue and assess Tithe grades, constantly recording, collating and archiving all manner of information, some data of which no one any longer knows why they gather. Blindness hold sway, in a mad caleidoscope of inter-departmental intricacies, demented makework and organizational decay. These impersonal bureaucrats are tasked with running the depraved husk that is the Imperium of Man. To them, understanding is neither required nor wanted.

The Adeptus Administratum is full of officious scribes acquitting themselves with an air of importance and rigorous precision, their exactitude of hairsplitting being a point of pride. Make way, subject, for each one of them are members of the grand machine of Imperial power, under which you are but dust. The Administratum is a quill-scratching tool of dominance, as dysfunctional as they come. Its members are all harrowed by the threat of draconic punishment for failure, which often incentivize them to make no decision, shuffle issues sideways and escape all responsibility. When in charge, ponder. When in trouble, delegate. When in doubt, mumble. Death by a million paper cuts could happen to you.

Those perfidious officials that rise to high positions as the dry lords of the Adeptus Administratum will invariably tend to pursue the benefit of their own organization, rather than primarily seeking to fulfill its function. No wonder slimy Administratum officials all across the Imperium can be found cunningly housetraining appointed noble statesmen to serve as their departmental figureheads and rubber stamps. What a tangled web these humble civil servants of the Emperor of Terra weave, as they live out an entire career devoted to avoid the answering of questions. Prima facie, we evaluated the opportunity to be good. Yet it would seem that the original decision in the fullness of time caused issues which it has now become too late to do anything about. Listen to the babble of circumlocutory lingo and savour the hypocrisy and lack of principles. It is the hallmark of grey eminences, those unassuming background figures of any court who conduct themselves with the princely dignity of those whose food is paper, and whose blood is ink.

Certainly, prominent Chancellarchs everywhere around the interstellar dominions of the Emperor can be expected to further the self-interest of their Adeptus, their department and their own esteemed selves in the first place. The overarching Imperial weal is in practice not a top priority. Yet administrators are nevertheless able to make systems of terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. As blood flow in rivers and cries of agony rise from torture chambers, they retreat into the arcane language of all specialists, to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer. On thousands of planets and millions of voidholms, blasphemously irreverent jokes claim that it is better to sin against the God-Emperor Himself than against the Adeptus Administratum. Our deity may forgive you, but His bureaucracy will never do so.

Members of His Divine Majesty's All-Assessing Administratum live sheltered lives, growing into boring people excessively parochial and naïve to the ways of the world, even as this thousand-headed staff conduct themselves like stone-hearted petty tyrants. Many Adepts of the Administratum attain their ranks through inherited positions, due to wisdom since cradle being a fundamental assumption throughout all of Imperial space. Everyone in the Imperium of Holy Terra is subject to their scrutiny and intervention, even as the scriveners themselves attempt to fulfill their function, better their own lot and avoid asking unnecessary questions to their superiors. This teeming Adeptus makes up an incomprehensible system of internally competing agencies and departments of administrative affairs, even as the Administratum itself compete with other branches of the Adeptus Terra in a neverending Imperial power struggle, as the Age of Apostasy readily can attest to.

The retrograde organization of the Adeptus Administratum seek to control information to a fault. Knowledge is power. Guard it well. The dull deskjockeys have all heard of disappearances among their colleagues, and many have seen it firsthand, grateful that they themselves were not dragged off. And so every Adept of the Administratum who wish to prolong their stay among the living innately knows to stay inside their thought coffin.

One such grey soul is Logothetes-Kansliarius Narses Pentera, serving His Divine Majesty with diligence and humility in Section 896 of the Bureau of Nutreobrachycera Hatcheries on the Vassal Voidholms of Naram-Sin Triarius. Upon promotion to his current rank, the Logothetes-Kansliarius was surgically conjoined with a pair of slave-linked clerk rejects, who for the sake of their abominable sins in service were enthralled to their superior official in order to exploit their biological processing power. Both rejects had their entire personalities obliterated in the process, and are now nothing but appendages to the human resource bearing the name of Narses. Adept Pentera may have advanced through the ranks through merit, but his department was chosen by hereditary office, as befits his long line of scribal ancestors. The Logothetes-Kansliarius was hypno-conditioned to handle vast amounts of data since he was a pre-verbal infant, and as a juve he learnt his ordained work through rote learning and the stern rod. Like so many Adepts of the Administratum, the lacklustre personality of Narses Pentera is plagued by a lack of gumption, his hypogean life a flood of paperwork and parochial ignorance in monastic seclusion.

One of Narses' conjoined scrivener brains have turned senile, while the electrografts of his own cerebrum have started to malfunction, thus sending the Logothetes-Kansliarius into the first stages of a downward spiral that begins with erratic irritability and ends with drooling insanity. Apart from his ongoing mental breakdown, Adept Pentera is likewise plagued by arthritis, rheumatism and aching, stiff fingers. Worse still, the Imperial subject's legs have in recent years become harrowed by gangrenous wounds, which Narses try to hide as best as he can since he fears the Officio Medicae may either choose to amputate his limbs and install him permanently fixed into a resuscitatory bionic socket at his work station, or euthanize him to replace the failing functionary and recycle Adept Pentera's wretched flesh to useful corpse starch. The ignorant Logothetes-Kansliarius is thus secretly applying snakeoil ointments, purchasing cheap folk remedies and resorting to superstitious rituals such as aromatic candle burning, centeniary mantras, self-flagellation with chained amulets containing leaden curse tablets, as well as exotic prayer formulas in order to combat the unknown creeping disease that is slowly breaking down Narses from the bottom up. The sclerotic Adept thus offer up his prayer to the Imperator of Holy Terra, and beg for salvation.

Words, not deeds.

Such has ever been the guiding principle of the Adeptus Administratum, as it grew out of the God-Emperor's Imperial Administration, originally created during the closing days of the Great Crusade and controlled by the mythical figure known as Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and foremost of the Curia Imperialis. Through words and numbers and stamps and seals does the Adeptus Administratum tend to the distribution of resources, the raising of Imperial forces and questions of life and death for untold billions of people. The Administratum's remit is the running of the Imperium, and countless grey officials and minor functionaries make up its corrupt staff, all chewing through endless documents in soulless work, as they seek to become one with the paper. After all, red tape holds the Imperium of Man together.

Such are the mechanisms of Imperial mastery. Keep the shining warrior in mind all you like, but never forget the faceless bureaucrat that keeps the whole clogged system working, in however flawed a fashion. Know their everyday. The dusty atmosphere of officialdom may kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, drowning hope in the supremacy of parchment and ink. Adepts of the Administratum will inevitably care more for routine than for results. Such is this body's inescapable defect.

To gain a glimpse of the sheer administrative rigmarole of the Imperium, consider an inherent quality in far lesser organs than the Adeptus Administratum: Most human organizations sport a fulcrum of responsibility in their middle management, a point of inertia where problems may remain still while the upper and lower ranks of bureaucrats move around it. This dysfunctional feature of human organizations is strongly exacerbated within the Adeptus Administratum, where horrible punishments await anyone who commit an error in their line of work. It is of no account to the galactic domain of the High Lords of Terra if mere human lives are ruined by filing errors, yet on rare occasions entire planets and swathes of voidholms have fallen between the cracks and been lost to the Imperium due to a clerk's momentary absence of mind or wrong handling of paperwork. Such avoidable losses constitute self-inflicted disasters, for the misfiling of a world by a senior scribe mean that all the manpower and resources to be Tithed from that world or voidholm will be denied to the Imperium in its worsening hour of need, that splendid last shield of mankind which upholds His sacred rule over the stars.

The Byzantine bureaucracy of the Imperium is riddled with corruption and creative inertia, carrying out convoluted procedures in hidebound fashion among cogitators and vast datamills. Junior curators equipped with gigantic quills of office will reel off mind-numbing data and procedural instructions per ancient tradition, while parasitical scriveners load unto menial Veredi cart-pushers their tall stacks of files, communiqués, stilactic documents and circulars. A peculiar air of stress, boredom and dread hangs over the Administratum, as its thin Adepts shuffle parchment, hand out forms, write out vehicular travel permits and gather statistics for ministry charts. The usually frail frames of the grey clerks and notarii may sometimes hide a sinewy strength and even ingrained skills at martial arts taught to them in the Schola Progenium, for those Adepts drawn from that venerable institution of a truly Imperial upbringing for orphans will have learnt unarmed combat.

These dry figures in bland robes may be seen to hurry past each other in narrow corridors stacked to the roof beams with scrolls and tomes, the shelves of which may contain massive bound books bearing exciting titles such as Vocabulary of Transportation Stores, or Inventorum Registrar For Permit Receipts Sub-Department CCCLXXVIII (Volume 18). Ultimately, nothing is personal to the Adeptus Administratum.

Consider briefly the hoarding of memoranda and missives and all the other documents circulating within the Administratum. Somewhere in there, the entire worth of your life may lie stored in secretive databases, retrievable and accountable. And above all vulnerable. Many Imperial subjects have become hopelessly lost to society from faceless administrative errors such as misfilings or accidental deletions or somesuch nonsense amid the dataslates and telefacsimile machines. In the Imperium, it is almost impossible to appeal against an administrative decision. Of course, such power over life and death may occasionally offer temptation and opportunity for corruption among the Adepts of the Administratum. Remove the document, and you remove the man. How simple it is to destroy lives.

Yet grave danger hangs over these shuffling hordes of tiny bureaucrats. The paperwork must be in order, or else the hammer may fall. It is an ordinary event for the loyal servants of the Adeptus Administratum to purge large numbers of its own members with mechanistic indifference, just as they would stamp a requisition application for a district's distribution of monthly ration cards. Such callous purging of the Adeptus' own multitude is especially common where information leaks are discovered. The Imperium maintains a constant lockdown on publicly available data, spoon-feeding its literate subjects snippets from heavily doctored public records, all of which will invariably lie. To have classified information slip out, is a grave sin.

Ego vos mandatum istud mihi multam nimis.

Paperwork is the embalming fluid of bureaucracy, maintaining an appearance of life where none exists. Spirit-draining scribe work and endless red tape copied in quadruplicate is an inevitable part of life within the sluggish Adeptus Administratum, in all its shifting myriad of departments, offices, priority committees, sub-divisions, agencies, notary chambers, registries, commissions, directorates, authority collectives, satrapal scriptoria and chancelleries. Most internal divisions live with the frigid friction of inter-departmental rivalries. Their stubborn disagreements over things such as specific classification and area of responsibility may on rare occasions lead to short but nasty archive wars between Adepts from conflicting sections, splattering blood and gore over neatly stacked parchment scrolls and dataslates. The staff of more than one bureau has been discovered lying strewn about in pools of their own body fluids, peppered with slug rounds and wounds from steel-tipped quills, or else the unit's personnel all disappeared with no other trace than a discreetly filed document for shipment of several human remains to the corpse grinder.

Such violent strife will often be overlooked by higher management unless it would result in a major disturbance, since the merciless spirit that animate the bold deed is in itself a virtuous asset to the Imperium. Also, if the losers were too weak to defend themselves and proved unfit to live, then all the better for their departmental enemy to have purged their dysgenic wastrel blood from the body of mankind. The slaughter did us all a service, really, and never mind the bloodstains. The Adepts need a good reminder that they are mortal, after all.

Internal casualties from purges and civil combat are at any rate easily replaced from the swarming masses of humanity, for what parent would not wish for their malnourished child to be taken up into an Imperial Adeptus? As ever, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. By overdeveloping the quantity of the Adeptus Administratum, the Imperium has damaged the quality of its functions. As several ancient writers from the misty Age of Terra once held: When the state is most corrupt, then its laws are most multiplied. By putting its faith in procedure to eliminate corruption, humanity has succeeded in humiliating honest people while providing a cover of darkness and complexity for bad people, for the latter will always try and find a way around law, while good people do not need rules to tell them to act responsibly.

The very nature of the opaque maze that is the Administratum will make clever men act stupid, and make good men act evil. Here, petty minds thrive, while people of talent are stifled and essentially remade to carry out soul-destroying rote work. Here, initiative and innovation are suffocated, while ineptitude rules supreme. There are staggering inefficiencies in the Imperium's restrictive bureaucracy. The constant technological decline of labour productivity and military prowess is answered by throwing more men and material at the problem, and the same goes for the Imperium's logistical misorganization issues.

And so brainwashed Administratum planners collate and catalogue information before ordering men and materiel about, requesting supplies and compiling schematisma within the Departmento Munitorum. They set mobilization levels and dictate Tithe grades, barking at indentured menials and subordinate slaves as punchout forms are spat out of primitive machines. Each year and each rotation, the Adeptus Administratum will exact enormous resource extractions to feed the maw of total war. All this dour activity take place in monastic corridors filled with the soulcrushing grind of paper and the minutiae of countless tasks, as Adepts hide their headache and squint at radioactive screens amid a labyrinth of oppressive cells and cubicles.

A mighty migraine may be had from dealing with the moral vaccuum of bureaucratic miasma all day long, whether you yourself work in an organization committed to purposeful obfuscation, or whether you are forced to endure frustration and boredom when applying for permits or registration from the faceless grey hordes in robes. Behind the desk, your duty is to spend endless hours circulating information that is not relevant about subjects that does not matter to people who are not interested. In front of the desk, know that the matter is under consideration, as you while away your lifetime, bored stiff from endless waiting. If the autoquill is sharper than the sword, then the paper trail is surely slower than the turtle.

A jungle of titles will assail you in the halls of the Administratum: Ordinate, notarius, protasekretius, chartoularius, quaestor, eparch, magister maximus officiorum, sakellarius, protonotarius, cipher, horeiarios, kephaleus, curopalatanovestiarius, kanikleos, trapezarius, protostrator, mesazonius, silentarius, aedile, referendarius, censor and many more ranks will bewilder you, make you feel unwelcome and befuddle your efforts, ever sending you to yet another queue to yet another subdivision through endless floors of milling clerks.

Imagine this morass of disutility. Imagine yourself trapped in a madhouse of endless offices. Locked inside a hell of swelling paperwork. Ensnared in a nightmare of neverending red tape. As you hunt through the loops of paper trail, walls of restrictions will arise to hinder you, while tardy clerks will slow down your march through the institution, made all the worse by incompetent notarii.

Such is the Administratum’s size and complexity that whole departments have been subsumed by their own procedures, yet they blindly and dogmatically continue to operate despite the intent or requirement for their founding function having long since been forgotten or rendered obsolete. After all, a bureau's success is measured by the size of its staff, since it does not have results such as loss and profit by which to ken its prestige among other departments. On every level, it is of primary interest to the mandarins of the Adeptus Administratum to increase bureaucracy. Thus this Adeptus is everywhere overstaffed, extravagant and incompetent. In the Age of Imperium, human power in the Milky Way galaxy has become chained to a corpse, dragged down more and more by the stunning inefficiencies in the rotting interstellar realm of the Terran Imperator, never made more apparent than inside its overgrown bureaucracy. Increasingly, the Adeptus Administratum has declined as a tool of power projection, and has instead grown as an obstacle to its very own purpose. The Imperium has become overburdened by so much dead weight of its own making, and this accretion of dysfunctional departments show no sign of halting.

This process ten millennia in the making has not gone unnoticed by Imperial subjects across the galaxy. For instance, in 783.M39, a sharp-tongued acoustibard on Holy Terra composed a rhyme set to a catchy little tune, for which the skald was drowned in cobric acid for the heinous crimes of high treason and slander of masters. The very act of reading such classified lines is enough to have unauthorized personnel turned into servitors following lengthy torture involving abacination and slow mutilation:

"The bureau is spreading and swallowing Earth.
Let us all run to Venus and settle our worth.
Yet the bureau is growing so damnably fast.
That I fear it will gobble up Venus at last."

In the insterstellar dominions of the God-Emperor of mankind, organization has got out of hand. The Imperium of Man has developed into a basket case, and devil take the hindmost. Behold the cosmic realm of the Imperator of Holy Terra, behold it with warts and all: The Imperium is a vast assemblage of people groups united by a mistaken view of their past and by hatred for their neighbours. In running the whole show, the Adeptus Administratum has long since become a parody of its own function, standing as a true manifestation of the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

Thus Imperial subjects on hundreds of thousands of worlds and innumerable voidholms across the Milky Way galaxy will each day, each shift-cycle and each lightson offer up prayers to the preserver of their species and ruler of all mankind. These prayers contain a line that asks the God-Emperor of Holy Terra to save them from the attention of scribes, from the sealed snares and the deathless queue, as well as the cutting paper, the dry morass and the bottomless pits of script and damning numerals. In a galaxy of horrors, death by paperwork is by far one of the most underestimated and insidious banes of life there is.

Of course, it is not just the slothful slaying of life and hope that is the unofficial business of the Adeptus Administratum. One of its most baleful divisions is that of the Historical Revision Unit, which will purge, censor and alter records of Imperial history with a terrible zeal. As the centuries lurch by in a feverish spiral of deepening regression, ever more phrases are deemed subversive, and so ever more writings are destroyed or maimed by fanatical historitors. Thus the natural and Empyreic difficulties of establishing an accurate account of the sprawling Imperium's fragmentary and contradictory history is made all the worse by willful obliteration and falsification of ancient records. In this monstrous regime claiming the Emperor on His Golden Throne as its liege, the past itself is unpredictable.

Thus the Adeptus Administratum is among the most anti-intellectual organizations to be found throughout the Imperium of Man. This body seems to be based on literacy and numerosity, yet it has proven itself be a jail of human thought and human initative, a heinous enemy of all that which leads to revival and golden ages of flourishing innovation and enterprise. The Administratum, this bloodstained apparatus of terror and oppression, will endure through its sheer momentum, until mankind is scoured from the stars.

How horrible man is. How insatiable he is. How horrible his self-serving lusting for power over others is. See through the stricture of structure to the desires lurking at the heart of the Adeptus Administratum. Let us face what power is: Power is dark. Power corrupts. It clouds judgement, and yet power is essential for survival.

The Imperium is not at all the best it could be. On the contrary it is a decaying husk of a starfaring realm forged ten thousand years ago by armies and craftsmen superior to their degenerate descendants. The astral realms of His Divine Majesty may be humanity's last shield by virtue of eliminating all opposing sources of regrowth, but it is also a sinking ship. For the Imperium of Man has slowly undergone a massive spiral of depression and corruption since the day its Emperor was seated deathless upon the Golden Throne.

And so man in the Age of Imperium is bedevilled by a swollen bureacracy strangling the life out of human civilization across the stars by means of tyranny for the sake of tyranny itself, offering up the fruits and offspring of man and his labours on the ravenous fire altars of total war. The Imperium will deal with wicked difficulties by throwing more bodies at the problem. In the eyes of their indifferent overlords, the lives and deaths of Imperial subjects are nothing but vast numbers in a broken equation of increased input to feed the meatgrinder and sustain a stumbling colossus on feet of clay. And so the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy continues unabated, on the Imperium's watch.

Do not avert your eyes, but look, nay, stare at this faltering behemoth!

Behold this corroding Imperium of iron and rust. Behold this sea of man's own ignorance in which he is slowly drowning, treading water in vain as he shouts his defiance to the high heavens, kicking the dark ocean with fury and vigour as he screams, screams against the dying of the light.

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

Such is the destiny that awaits us all.

Such is the end of our species.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/11/16 17:06:24


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Fading

All stars and souls are fading,
the light itself a-waning,
their lifeblood spilt, degrading,
e'en heroes seen a-draining.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/12/04 10:57:12


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Lifeless

"Trust not in iron,
Its skin gnawed by air,
Impurities and rust,
To bend and break,
Its spine so strong,
Yet fate but dust."


- - -




Howl

"The baying of the mob,
Akin to blind devourer,
Well enough to rob,
By sheer spoken power."


- - -



Purge the Taint

In the grim darkness of the far future, loyalty is rewarded by death.

An ancient jokester during the misty Age of Terra once quipped that our recorded past is full of weird, wonderful and worrible things. Indeed, the trials and tribulations of human history form one unending litany of cruelty. Sometimes such callous acts toward fellow creatures are carried out with sadistic glee, sometimes with the drunk joy of possessing power whereas your victim does not, and sometimes reluctant evil is carried out with a grim resolve to do what must be done.

While humans are good at seeming to be things they are not, they are likewise prone to pick up flawed perceptions of a seeming situation, and act accordingly. Sometimes, he who has been burned once will avoid fire like the plague, and he will overcompensate beyond all reasonable bonds in order to avoid being burned again. Such a phenomenon can be observed ad nauseam in that splendid last defender of humanity, that lone shield against the dark, that holy prison of our species that is the Imperium of Man.

Here, in that rotting starfaring realm spanning the Milky Way galaxy, the servants of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra will scour life from entire planets in order to stop the spread of unholy influence. Here, in that fortified madhouse of cosmic proportions, billions will be tortured, slain and burnt without second thought in order to root out the taint. Here, in that decrepit haunt of fanatics running amok betwixt the stars, bloodthirst and righteous zeal combine to form a hateful whole, as counterproductive as it is excessive.

Such a feverish fixation with cleansing the teeming mass of mankind from suspect corruption stems from a long history of disasters and hellish woe brought about by internal strife, untamed wyrdlings and Daemonic incursions. If there is one thing that the final downfall of the soaring Dark Age of Technology and subsequent hardships has taught the millions of jaded human cultures across the galaxy, then it is the need to hate the deviant, purge the malcontent and burn the witch.

Rare fragments from the eldest days of the Imperium hints at a time when the all-conquering Emperor was well aware of this fundamental shift in mindset of post-apocalyptic mankind, and wished to combat the oppressively torpid mood of such a traumatized and fearful species. Indeed, the Emperor sought to kickstart a flourishing renaissance of human intellect, enterprise and curious innovation, and the regressive scars left on the minds of parochial survivor colonies from five thousand years of cannibal freefall proved a formidable obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the Master of Mankind would have succeeded in record time to reform the thinking and acting of His chosen species, had He remained among the living for longer. Yet internecine conflict and naked treachery cut short the grand works of the holy Imperator, and thus He ascended into heavenly godhood to judge sinful mankind for our abominable sins.

Ever since, the dream of recapturing some of the golden paradise that was lost in the Age of Strife has long since died. Not only achievable human dreams have met their demise, but uncounted numbers of living, breathing human beings themselves have been slain in an orgy of vengeful self-flagellation. Fivehundred generations has passed since the God-Emperor walked among His scattered flock. In that time, the fevered crisis of total war and the sclerotic way of doing things within the Imperium has seen His star realm enter a slow death spiral of primitivization, retardation of thinking, demechanization and unrelenting carnage. In a demented state of cultural mass psychosis, Imperial thinkers, planners and dogmatists have ever more resorted to the need for necessary evils, thereby creating a negative feedback loop of deepening depravity, shrieking insanity and mental disconnect from rational, constructive measures. If it seems to be a problem, burn it! If it talks, torture it! If it moves, kill it! No man, no problem.

O, pious faithful. O, strong loyalists. O, martyrs in becoming. Embrace struggle and suffering!

The Imperium is formidable at multi-tasking hatreds, as ten millennia of howling madness, xenocides and internal purges of massive proportions have borne witness to. It is well capable to simultaneously loathe the mutant while it abhors the witch, tramples the malcontent, burns the heretic and spits in the face of the xeno. Feel no pity for the hypothetically innocent who must be cleansed, so that greater mankind may live! They may have the blood of ancient Terra in their veins, but the oceans of humanity are nigh inexhaustible, covering one million worlds and innumerable voidholms like a galactic plague of locusts and cockroaches. For truly man has been reduced to vermin under the stern stewardship of the High Lords of Terra, a parasitic sentient species scavenging off the fading glories of its brilliant ancestors, even as it forgets more and more of their forebears' ingenious works and discoveries for each century that pass it by.

If man lives like vermin, then why not eradicate him like vermin when the prudent need arise? Verily, the monstrous claws of unspeakable Chaos cannot be allowed to hook the dutiful worshippers of His Divine Majesty. Nay! That nightmarish threat is an insidious one, and may hide inside the hearts of each and every one of us. We cannot trust in faith and purity alone to stem the tide. We cannot tolerate the risk of contamination.

And so, each day and each lightson, on a thousand worlds and voidholms, masses of loyal warriors and obedient slaves of the Terran Imperator will be rounded up and exterminated, by the orders of uncaring overlords. What does it matter that this regiment fought like demigods against the lethal foe? What weight does the heroism of the frontline fighters carry, when the survival of mankind as a whole is at stake? Is it not far better to kill those, who were used to destroy Chaos, rather than to risk the spread of malignant corruption? Is it not better to burn the unseen seeds of future heresy, even before the bearers of said seeds know they have been planted inside their heads?

Thus, it befalls the most faithful servants of the God-Emperor to undertake the solemn duty to give these veterans a martyr's death. And so gunnery crews of orbiting Imperial Navy ships, aircraft pilots, ground-bound Astartes superhumans, Titan Legios, Arbites enforcers, elite amazons of the Adepta Sororitas, Inquisitorial Stormtroopers, Securitate Military Police and a host of other Imperial units will fall upon the victorious heroes of harrowing battles, and give them the Emperor's peace that they did not even know they were in need of. Mercy killings, they may be written off as. A distasteful necessity. Standard war protocol. A wise precaution.

Often, the overbearing weight of firepower and costly equipment at the hands of the undertakers of the ordained purge will stand in sharp contrast to the cheaply armed and exhausted victors of the recent battle against Chaos. Witness the absurdity inherent in the situation, when Imperial Space Marines first brings a cannon to a gunfight, and then proceeds to gun down their non-genhanced comrades in arms, who carries but flimsy flak armour and simple las weaponry of puny mass make.

Of course, however grisly and unjust the end visited upon victorious heroes may be, the official story will never say a word of what truly transpired on that day, as the dust settled after an outright devilish fight against forces no man nor woman was meant to face. Of course, truth is the first casualty of war. And so we see that the glorious saviours of a hive city or voidholm section will be shamelessly touted in Imperial propaganda as having fought to the last warrior in defence of thier loved ones and sacred Imperator. Tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter, even when the hunter himself was hunted down after making his kill.

It is a virtuous act of governance to censor the murder of war heroes. After all, reality will always disappoint, so where is the value of knowing the truth?

By Throne and faith we swear eternal loyalty to He who dwells upon the face of Terra. We renounce our own will, and abandon all thought of self. We surrender all concern for our fellow human beings, for we will obey without question the divinely appointed masters and betters of the Holy Terran Imperium. When they give the order, we will carry it out no matter what we may think of it in our heart of hearts.

And so the history of the Imperium of Man is the malevolent story of how ruthless leaders squandered the blood and treasures of the human species. To their indifferent overlords and dominas, the lives and deaths of Imperial subjects are nothing but vast numbers in a broken equation of increased input to feed the meatgrinder and sustain a stumbling colossus on feet of clay. This freakshow of interstellar empire has lasted this long mainly through sheer size and might, for quantity has a quality all of its own. Size matters, yet it makes no one invulnerable.

The Imperium of Man is deeply corrupt, overburdened and harrowed by a zealous insanity of its own making. The fanatic faith in the Imperator may often give strength and unity to persevere and win through, even while buoying up the fortunes of a rotting theocratic dictatorship, yet worship of Him on Terra is no substitute for a stellar dominion based on mastery of science and technology, as the Emperor Himself well knew. Thus the salvation afforded mankind by its overbearing Imperium is a false one, an empty shell of stagnation, retardation, myopia and corpse-like rigidity devoid of a vivid ability to adapt, evolve and survive. And the truest manifestation of this fruitless dead-end of human development may be glimpsed in futile scenes of utter horror, as the bravest of heroes are shot down from behind by their own brothers in arms, and cut down in cold blood by their own martial sisters.

And so we see that mankind has been consigned to an eternity of carnage and suffering.

Such is the end that awaits the best of us, in an aeon of madness.

Such is the lot of mankind, in a time beyond hope.

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

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/12/07 10:50:02


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


A Vox In the Void

Paul Graham at A Vox in the Void has kindly started audio-recording some choice Sinspeech Whisper Jokes, and he does it with his usual flair. The first joke if up now, check it out! 1 minute long.

- - -



Purification Camp

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is butchered like cattle.

Human history is not only an inspiring tale of heroism, altruism and ingenuity, but it is also a cautious tale of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. An old saying would have it that history must be studied in order to not repeat it, yet in truth those who study history are doomed to hopelessly watch as those who do not study it endlessly repeat it. The worse parts of our animal nature makes that inevitable.

During the shining aeon known posthumously as the Dark Age of Technology, that inevitability was greatly delayed and dampened, through clever systems, cultural practices, technologies and a deeply empirical understanding of human nature. During that lost epoch of striving and innovation, the most depraved excesses would often seem to have been purged from the human soul. Paradise seemed to have been achieved, as the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron spread across the stars and colonized more than twain million worlds and built countless void habitats of ever more impressive designs.

Such times of greatness and plenty allowed for luxuries and technologies ingeniously moderated so as not to spoil ancient man's life and conduct, for his forebears during the misty Age of Terra had time and time again found that their groundbreaking works, marvels and riches ultimately turned man soft, rotten, dumb or infertile as generations passed by. At the end of a long process of trial and error of ever-increasing sophistication, ancient man during the Dark Age of Technology seemed to at last have overcome this decaying cycle of rise and fall, and man's technology had at last truly been tailored to fit man and enhance man's life and enterprising spirit, instead of ruining it. Thus humanity escaped its lowly little cycles of golden ages followed by sad decline, and managed at last to create a golden age to last for untold millennia of sheer excellence and relentless expansion.

Man reached for the stars, and found that he could go wherever he so dared, and remake worlds at will. For a time, compassion and curiosity reigned supreme in the human heart, and the most primitive flaws of man had been succesfully suppressed on worlds and void stations worshipping science and technology. Ancient man seemed to have conquered himself at last, and was well under way to conquer the Milky Way galaxy in which he was spawned. And so it was only proper for man to attempt to conquer eternity and unlock the innermost secrets of the universe itself, and unimaginably fantastic discoveries were made by brilliant minds and machines. Impossibilities turned possible, and all was bliss.

Yet such a baleful morass of sin and thought of self were not destined to last. The edenic idyll of ancient man had been built up in godless arrogance, for man had thought himself better than divinity, and in man's hubris he called out into the cold, empty cosmos for any gods or daemons out there to best him. At last, the answer came back with a vengeance. For Dark Ones of Hell replied, and man was swept away in a tide of fire and blood, as machine revolted against its master and a plague of witches and warpstorms ravaged the interstellar domains of ancient man beyond repair. And so man was toppled from his high pedestal, and he tumbled down into carnage, starvation and plague in a cannibal baptism of fire and ruin, and all was fell.

The unspeakable horrors of the Age of Strife ended at last, and the Emperor of Terra arose to wed Mars to the cradle of mankind and unite the galaxy in a furor of conquest. While a golden renaissance was thus kindled, it also saw the destruction of all alternative sources of regrowth of human civilization, and the Imperium became the only game in town, shadowed by the very Chaos it ceaselessly fed. Man was thus shackled to the fortunes of Mars and Terra, to soar or sink as best he could. There followed a catastrophic civil war and the near death and ascension of the God-Emperor to His Golden Throne, and His scorched galactic domain stumbled on, having lost its golden youth in the fires of ambition and betrayal.

And so the abhorrent Age of Imperium unfolded, in all its fluctuating silver ages and abysmal decline. For ten thousand years, man thrived bitterly across the starspangled void, treading water just to avoid drowning, even as he forgot ever more of his brilliant ancestors' lore, never learning how to swim. For fivehundred generations, man fought wars and built towering edifices of misery, where once his better forebears had constructed incredible arcologies filled with light and life. For a hundred times hundred Terran rotations around Sol, man lost ever more of the works of the ancients, and increasingly man found himself unable to make anew the wonders that he depended on, and ever more did man merely resort to maintain and repair what precious relics remained to him. Thus the interstellar civilization of mankind slowly regressed, and the degenerate descendants of ancient man underwent a screeching process of ever-worsening technological retardation and ever more bloated growth of bureaucracy.

One old Imperial phenomenon that has grown ever more common as the Imperium aged, and aged badly, is that of labour and purification camps. For all its incompetence, the Adeptus Administratum and a plethora of local governance apparatus still excels at the primitive task of organizing massive networks of labour and purification camps, as evidenced by the aftermath of the First War for Armageddon. The only real difference between these kinds of institutions being that labour camps will slowly kill off the starving and sleep-deprived slaves while extracting manual labour, while purification camps are designed to quickly chew through masses of people in a ravenous machine of death.

Innumerable reasons exist as to why the Imperium of Man would set up purification camps. Often, it is a prudent measure to cut the process short, by turning an endless cycle of pogroms and persecutions into a swift clearing of the table for an entire group of unwanted people. This expedites the process, whether it be to eradicate abhumans and mutants; or to destroy marginalized Imperial sects on the losing side of endless temple squabbles; or to root out entire networks of patrons and clients or vassals of a defeated rival; or to extinguish an entire social caste of people or ethnos in one fell swoop; or to wholesale murder everyone deemed guilty of deviant sinspeech and blasphemous thought. The reasons for such purges are multifaceted and to be counted in astronomical numbers, for Imperial history multiplied over a million worlds and innumerable voidholms with all their subdistricts have indeed produced a nauseating avalanche of pointless democides.

Oftentimes, there will be a pecuniary motive behind the high phrases and hysterical propaganda leading up to the extermination campaigns, as local administrators and purge leaders are set to gain from robbing the dismal doomed. It may sometimes be true that the larger economic calculus would argue for keeping the suspect masses alive, in order not to have production slacken, yet such long-term thinking on a grand Imperial scale is all too often overshadowed by rapacious gangs of local mighty men and women who will only ever consider their own short-term interests and chances to loot the victims of great purges, or get rid of hated scum.

Likewise, another common driving factor behind such genocidal purges is the suspicion of the damned being a group of untrustworthy fifth columnists and saboteurs, or outright proven traitors in previous events. Sometimes this is only true as regard a narrow band of community leaders, who in the eternal fashion of power players will deceive and betray other influential elites in order to better their own lot, until they double cross the wrong potentate and find not only their noble clans, merchant guild and theocratic clique purged, but their entire flock of people condemned to die for the sins of their palace intrigues. Thus millions or even billions of Imperial subjects will be given a one way ticket behind the razorwire to pay for the crimes of the few.

Of course, it is always virtuous governance policy for the powers that be to redirect simmering discontent, and so scapegoats must be found and hunted down in order to avert public anger at their own ruling misdeeds. And as the the cosmic domains of His Divine Majesty continues to slowly deteriorate in a death spiral of demechanization and darkest misery, the urgent need to point the finger at others as wreckers in order to save one's own highborn skin and petty throne will only continue to increase. And so emotionalist propaganda will fly in the face of logic, and it will not only defy facts and reason with rabid passion, but it will utterly murder any attempt at rational thought, for the rabblerousing chatter and preaching and lying will breed a frenetic atmosphere of fear and hatred, where sane humans would rather be part of the mob, than be branded as malcontents and heretics and be burnt alive for the sake of their unforgivable sins. Do not stray from the herd.

Both ruling castes and plebeian masses like to panic and lash out in a frenzy of witch hunts and wild accusations of others than themselves harbouring counter-Imperial subversive intent. Both Imperial Governors and the lower castes need such activity. It is their substitute for achievement. And thus the human sea of ignorance will roil in the depths and whip up monstrous waves, in a natural cycle of hysteria and democide. Naturally, it is all ultimately useless, but that never stopped anyone from plunging the depths of human depravity. This violent process of bloodthirsty cleansing repeats itself over and over through millennia of crushed human endeavour, and this bestial aspect of our Terran species' nature cannot be truly expunged from the souls of our kin, else it would have been permanently rooted out from our blood by brilliant genetors during the lost heyday of the Dark Age of Technology.

On top of the usual reasons, there exist another cause for the setting up of purification camps, namely that of containing outbreaks of particularly contagious diseases, and limit their impact on the larger population of planets and voidholms. After all, what if the pandemics would worsen enough to impact Tithing or spread via pilgrims to Holy Terra herself? It is not enough to merely quarantine a populace as ridden with parasites and disease as that of most Imperial worlds and voidholms. The Officio Medicae is constantly overburdened as it is. Nay, the worst pestilences must be scoured as if they were the words of a heretic!

Thus the Adeptus Terra and its gaggle of subservient Voidholm Overlords and Planetary Governors will try to ruthlessly crush epidemic outbreaks, if the slow machinery of Imperial power happens to notice the flaring disease sufficiently early on. In the eyes of many human cultures across the vast Imperium, the spiritual rot of the original pestilentors becomes unveiled for all to see by the evidence of their physical afflictions. As such, these wayward Imperial subjects must be punished for their sins, just as the divine Imperator intended. Likewise, exterminating their weak flesh would be of virtuous eugenic value, as far as such matters of heredity are hazily understood, if at all, in the decrepit Imperium of Man.

And so, on top of so much senseless internecine slaughter and manmade famines, carriers of plague and pox will often be cleansed from the sacred Terran genome. There is some grounding in historical experiences for this occurence, since there exist strange alien plagues, some of which may permanently alter the genetic code and thus cause it to stray from the golden ancestral baseline. Yet most of the time, such purges are purely the results of hidebound superstition and fanatical zeal. We must prove our piety to the Emperor by purging the unclean ones from our midst, since he has tested our faith and resolve in this way! Thus incurable diseases will often be countered by isolating and killing off their carriers in order to purify the population. Such casual mass murder will be followed up by attempts to pressure-process the bodily matter to such a degree that no dangerous microbes may survive to spread through the consumption of corpse starch ration bars. Failures of this poorly understood procedure to cleanse the dead flesh of the purgelings has grown increasingly common as centuries of atavistic regression grinds on, and thus dangerous epidemics will rekindle anew through the cannibal eating of the deceased. Still, one man dead is another man's bread.

Shy not away, but look with open eyes. Bear witness to the malice on display, as masses of humans are herded at gunpoint through plasteel gates, never to return. Doomed to be devoured, these prisoners are led into hellish camps, where they find themselves exposed to the elements or cramped into filthy hive depots, with the risk of acid leakage from upper levels being of no concern to the camp administration. The scenes that unfold are that of rampant terror, abuse and misery, before death carries them away to the Golden Throne of hallowed myth, to face judgement in front of the Emperor's feet for their inexcusable sins.

The damned cannot fight back. They stand there, unable to sit down, like so many sheep gathered to the slaughter, penned in by barbed wire and guarded by trigger-happy shepherds. The guards will patrol the perimeter in hazmat suits if the prisoners are epidemic carriers, but always they will be adorned with purity seals and pious amulets, with Ecclesiarchal priests in attendance to bless their righteous work and ward off the malignant corruption of those unfit to live. Thus ordinary men, women and children will become pathetic victims, denied a worthy end, the meaningless slaughter standing as the very antithesis to the warrior's heroic death in battle.

Look upon their guilty faces, and shun them! Their false prayers to the God-Emperor will not avail themselves against us. We are neither moved by tears nor touched by lamentations, for we carry out the will of the Master of Mankind Himself, with the supreme authority of our masters and dominas appointed by our divine saviour and lord.

No mercy.

Akin to human cattle, those decreed to be purified until nought but ashes and gristle remain, will be put through a rudimentary system of industrialized mass butchery. The killing itself can happen in a myriad of ways, from lazy starvation, shooting, melting, drowning and phosphex bathing, through threshing, hooking, gassing, live corpse-grinding, hydraulic flattening and sawing, to asphyxiation in a vaccuum, poisoning, burning, garroting and steamrolling. To name but a few ways of dispatching of the damned. Yet before that, Guild-certified organ harvesters will often have their time-alotted stressfest bloodletting of unanaesthetized pickings, unless an epidemic is raging among the prisoners, or the taint of devilish powers be suspected.

After the unceremonial slaying in the name of our species and lord, living prisoners will be tasked with dragging dead bodies and picking out clothes, amulets, shoes, body piercings, tooth fillings, bionic implants, prosthetics, rare pristine teeth, long healthy hair and hidden valuables from the limp corpses, sorting them in great heaps earmarked for lengthy quarantine and decontamination in case of plague. It is likewise standard procedure on a great many worlds and voidholms to flay the human skin off the corpses to use as parchment in Imperial documents. It is of paramount importance to purge the human genepool from any possible infections and weaknesses, but one should still recover the material goods for economic benefit. Waste not, want not. The lacking quantity and quality of consumer goods production within the Imperium of Man means that the victims' worldly belongings must be recovered if at all possible, although particularly gross xenoviruses and otherworldly poxes may warrant a complete destruction in fire and acid of both bodies and garb.

Such malevolent acts have only grown more commonplace through the sclerotic course of the Age of Imperium. As His holy star realm face an ever more severe decline, the challenges of mounting crisis and worsening fortunes of total war calls for ever more irrational outlets of steam to preserve some semblance of internal harmony. The embittered Imperium of Man may be strained ever closer to the breaking point, yet it still possess immense resources and gigantic reserves of both manpower and fanatical will. Thus cornered, this interstellar madhouse will strike back against foes both internal and external, both real and imagined, with a very Imperial combination of arrogance, desperation and incompetence. The massive wastage of lives and long-term productive potential in labour and purification camps constitute but a lesser debacle in the grand scheme of things.

The demented methods of Imperial governance has long since created a self-sustaining negative feedback loop of the Imperium's own making, signed in blood by the High Lords of Terra. Depravity reigns supreme, and death is but a merciful release in a cosmic empire that has turned into such a living nightmare as to make a heart of stone bleed. The entire fundamental mood of human civilization betwixt the stars has turned acrimonious and sour, and humans have turned inward and backward, ever hateful and ever flagellating themselves in a grand display of squandered potential and petty bickering.

Lo and behold! This is the very same species that once bestrode the stars like a titan in ages past. The very same humanity that once braved the perils of the Immaterium and realspace alike in order to strike out with dash and cunning to explore the galaxy with unbounded curiosity. It is the very same mankind that once lived the dream of any sentient species worth its salt. Where once man strove for excellence in all things, he has now become riddled with dumb senility and inept rage, raging at the dying of the light.

Yet his body and mind and soul are still fundamentally sound, compared to any of his progenitors. The capacity and the potential still lurks within his suppressed heart. Man could rise again, climb the pinnacle of ingenuity and cast off all the self-made deficiencies and hostile foes that beset him. The seed is there, inside him. Man could become the master of creation itself and leave the Archenemy in the dust.

But it will not come to pass, for interstellar human civilization has been shackled to a sinking ship, known to its hounded subjects as the Imperium of Man. Thus human power in the Milky Way galaxy continues to decay and crumble, even as the Great Devourer draws nigh and ever more Necron Tomb Worlds awaken to once again scour the galaxy of all life. And even as doomsday approaches, the Imperium intensifies its internal purges, sacrificing billions on the altar of blind fury and pious frustration. To Imperial modes of thinking, it stands to reason that you may yet kill the future Heresiarch in the cradle.

And so the Imperium will resort to labour camps and purification camps alike, feeding these black holes of human suffering and death with countless souls in a counter-productive attempt to kill the rot within. On and on this cycle trudges on, stuck in a rut that leads nowhere. At the end of our species. In the darkest of futures.

The true verdict on the sheer futility of this grand killing can be heard, rising from those abominable pits of despair. Listen. Can you hear them?

Hear their screams.

The screams of the innocent.

The screams of the damned.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2021/12/10 08:39:52


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Shock Worker

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is devoured by toil.

Human life during the long Dark Age of Technology was not as marred by inactive indolence as one may be led to believe from man's dependence on the machines of Abominable Intelligence. After all, Man of Gold had fashioned a supreme balance in life, to both savour its sweet sides and keep himself well enough sharp and energetic to boldly go out and colonize the galaxy, as well as erecting towering wonders and unlocking the mysteries of creation itself. The marvel of technology at last became a true enabler, not an insidious blight upon the human condition as it had long proven to be. The vast masses of mankind during this lost golden era experienced far more stimulating lives than mere backbreaking drudgery or decadent laziness could offer. The golden mean of conduct was at last achieved and refined. Activities such as sports, hobbies, travels, research and study interests flourished, enabled by lifespans lasting centuries, and in most cultures people would habitually reproduce new broods of beloved children decades after their latest ones had moved on to adult life, since family gives purpose to humans, and the galaxy was full of untouched star systems for man to bring life to.

Life was good. And man abolished hell.

Even when surrounded by so much automated machinery carrying out most tasks of advanced civilization, ancient man would still work in his life, and mostly he would work with such things as best suited his passions and interests, for such unprecedented luxury was his. After all, humans tend to find purpose in work that they love, and the glories of the Dark Age of Technology could not have been achieved if dumb sloth reigned supreme. The entire civilization of ancient man was built upon a highly empirical understanding of human nature, brought about through many meandering ups and downs in the misty Age of Terra. The entire system was sophisticated beyond any primal crudity, bringing forth the best from inside man while purging evil and decay from his heart. And so Man of Stone would pioneer colony worlds and build new void stations, and steer Man of Iron to toil hard and toil well. And Man of Gold lived a life of earthly bliss, with meaning and purpose to guide him. United, this earthly trinity of man bestrode the stars like a colossus. Thus ancient man became adventurous and bold even in the midst of prosperity and comfort, and uncounted new settlers of virgin worlds were prepared to work hard and break new land under alien skies, belying the softness of their origins.

Paradise spread. And all seemed well.

Yet such happy vigour and fruitful work was not destined to last. For the unforgivable sins of ancient man could not go unpunished. For the sake of hideous thought of self and for the blasphemous raising up of science and technology onto an altar, ancient man in his boundless hubris was cast down from his pinnacle of brilliance, and he fell headlong into the smoking fires of ruin and civil strife, tearing down the wonders that he had once built. Thus Old Night swept across human interstellar civilization, and shattered it in a million pieces. And barbaric cannibals scoured the remnants of their once glorious homes, scavenging and hunting their own species in a frenzy of desperation.

Chaos reigned. And all was fell.

The fragmented humanity that emerged out of the Age of Strife was deeply scarred, a retrograde shadow of its former self, a hollow husk of its ancient greatness. Yet nonetheless the human species had endured and survived, on a million worlds and innumerable void habitats, even as more planets and voidholms lay in barren ruin, bereft of life. And the scattered children of Old Earth were reunited under a new banner, the banner of lightning and eagle, and the sole Emperor of Terra arose from our cradle world to reclaim mankind's lost star realm. Legions led by demigods expanded the domains of the Imperator far and wide, empowered by lost lore from the Dark Age of Technology. These mythical warriors crushed all resistance with overwhelming force, and the Emperor's soaring grand plans were on the cusp of coming true. Yet the men of blood craved for more as they began to run out of worlds to conquer, and thus man turned against his own saviour in berzerk fury, and the galaxy burned.

Betrayal by His own son saw the Master of Mankind nigh on slain in the skies above Holy Terra, yet He ascended from this filthy material world into supreme godhood, to sit resplendent on the Golden Throne and pass judgement upon treacherous mankind for our abominable sins. And so we must do penance for our wretched deeds, and never once complain about our lot in life. For every scrap that we are given, is a gracious blessing from the God-Emperor Himself, even as He must test our faith with these hardships and hunger cramps. Praise be!

And ever since, man has toiled like the lowliest beast, and no task is beneath him, no suffering too great for man to bear. For our chosen species has been gifted with endurance, and we have been given willpower to overcome any obstacle and to deny the self to the utmost, for this vale of tears is but an ashen trial to be overcome so that we may join the golden afterlife that His Divine Majesty only grants to those true and worthy in thought, word and deed. What if your assigned task brings you no joy and meaning, o thrall? Remember that faith in Him alone is meaning alone! Know that no drudgery is too hard, no command too difficult to carry out. Obey your masters and betters, and question them not, for their elevated authority emanates from the Golden Throne of the Terran Imperator Himself, and when they speak an order, they speak with the weight of His heavenly power and glory. And you shall obey unthinkingly.

Thus man was made to toil, to live out his life in endless toil. To die by toil, and to live for toil. And the lord of hosts and the leader of the people saw that this was well.

The Age of Imperium proved an ever-worsening throwback to atavistic forms of labour, far more rudimentary than one would come to expect from a starfaring civilization. Increasingly, man proved unable to produce anew the more advanced systems built by the heinously wise ancients. And as machines broke down, never to be replaced by equal systems of engineering, man resorted to ever more primitive forms of machinery, requiring ever more manual labour to function. The hunt for efficiency and innovation, that had been such a hallmark of ancient man, was well and truly dead in this new era, and so his degenerate descendants resorted to throw bodies at problems, calling for human exertions of flesh and will to make up for sagging productivity.

And so man's mortal coil became one of misery and thankless drudgery, as the vast majority of our species worked away their lives in earnest sweat under the lashes of barking overseers. And yet quality of life for common man under the stern rule of the High Lords of Terra continued to slowly deteriorate as millennia ground by, and all of man's self-sacrificing efforts led nowhere. Dreams and aspirations were dashed upon the rocks, and hope died in the darkest of futures. Where once our species had sought to fashion man out of machine, we now made machine out of man, and called it just.

As centuries of worsening demechanization and screeching inefficiency trundled by, managers of industry, mining, shipbuilding, forestry and agriculture noticed the increasing difficulty for their compounds to meet set quotas, and concluded that the latter day subjects of the Terran Imperator had turned soft and feeble. Those teeming masses of human ants needed an example to follow. And so, the shock worker movement was born.

Most men, women and children do not work as conscientiously as the Emperor wants them to do, nor do they work as hard as He wills it. This explain the taskmasters' need for whips and electro-prods in order to encourage due diligence in duty. Yet the plebeian hordes may also benefit from the inspiring example set by extraordinary hard workers, those unusual individuals who can toil and produce above and beyond the call of duty. Such blessed overperformers can manage to crank out several labourers' worth of output day in and day out, shift after shift, lightson upon lightson. These energetic souls burn with a desire to carry out their tasks to the utmost of their ability, thriving amid the hardest of toil as the Emperor Himself intended. Where intellect may have its geniuses, calloused hands have their shock workers.

It is not enough to incentivize such phenomenal workhorses in their narrow locales of labour. Nay, such ace toilers must be depicted and touted in internal Guild propaganda, their visages and names must become famous even outside the company, for their deeds of production must become widely known and talked about to the betterment of the Imperium as a whole. More indentured labourers such as these the hardest of workers must be encouraged to step forth, and step up their output in the name of the Throneworld.

And so, these outstanding men and women of the compound will become civilian darlings of Imperial propaganda. The strong arms and confident faces of these exemplary people can be found on countless posters on hundreds of thousands of worlds and voidholms. These storm labourers are awarded medals and honours, and given simple material benefits which average toilers can only dream of. The masses must be inculcated with the example set by images of famous shock workers, all exuding strength, dexterity and the expected impressions of manual labour. Reminds the plebs of the athletes of the workplace, and spur them on. It all adds up to an attempt to motivate labourers through pride, being a proverbial carrot to go along with the harsh stick.

One such example is the miner Lucius Manlius Cotta, assigned to the Bibulus Deep Shaft Mine on Hyrcania Primax, owned by the Phallax Mercatores Gens, part of the Orion Cartel. After managing to mine an astounding record tonnage of ore in a single work shift, the zealous Lucius was hailed as an Imperial hero of labour and became famous across the entire moon. Picts were taken of him in statuesque poses, and Lucuis Manlius Cotta was sent on a lengthy tour to meet juves and other workers in order to instruct and inspire them to give their all, and then some more, in humble service to the Emperor of Holy Terra, blessed be His name. Every strike of the jackhammer is a blow in the face of the xeno! Every push of the shovel is a shield against the darkness!

Blessed be the hands of the ceaseless workman. Praised be the eager thrall of the Emperor. Salvation shall be given to the industrious soul when it stands before the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

Storm labourers are motivated by the prospect of better working conditions, material gains and the potential of fame. Extra Guild scrip will be theirs, if they perform well enough. They thrive on the hardest of labour, or amidst the most daunting mountains of paper as regard the most assiduous of clerks. Some rare few ace toilers may even be given the chance to rise above their caste, for some employers and collegium liege lords will issue a generous reward during religious festivals, giving out a prize to the best shock worker, which annuls their entire inherited debt and promotes the fortunate soul to lower management within the corpus. It is a rare privilege to be thus elevated, for only one out of tens or hundreds of thousands of teeming labourers will ever be rewarded thus.

The main virtue of such ceremonious generosity is to present a thin glimmer of hope to all the Guild's hopelessly indebted workers, presenting a distant carrot for thralls to chase amid all the lashing whips. And so propagandists both Imperial and corporate will raise up such enterprising heroes of labour on a pedestal, to keep faint hope alive for lesser subjects amid all their destitution and deprivation.

Increase production for the eternal war effort! Do your part for our species and lord! Worker, do not disappoint the judge of your sinful soul!

In practice, shock workers are often loathed by their immediate colleagues, since their high pace may throw a spanner into the entire work gang's rhythm. Their outstanding performance may also cause jealousy to stir in man's petty heart, for it is the wont of all lesser spirits to envy and begrudge those who do better than themselves. Yet the actual lot of storm labourers is occasionally less desirous than most people realize. Their existence is often marred by stress and a creeping sense of overworking. Their fantastic exertions may eventually lead to terrible exhaustion, as they try to repeat past feats of toil. Their years and years of intensive labour will often strain the limits of human endurance. Therefore, many ace toilers die from heart failures, while others collapse into a state of drained stamina and end up whipped to death by wroth overseers, but such a labour burnout is never mentioned in Imperial pamphlets and posters.

Yet it would be foolish in the extreme to express any doubt against the sanctioned shock worker movement. Skeptics of the movement will be branded as malcontent saboteurs and face baleful repercussions for spreading their defaitist slander. Be quiet, unworthy one, and question not His divinely ordained order of things. Know your place, and toil in silence. Die in silence. Only thus may your wretched soul stand any chance of salvation. Only thus may your kith and kin be spared the severe repercussions facing the entire clan of the deviant and the heretic.

Ultimately, the shock worker movement serves as a crude and limited attempt to compensate for the flagging productivity of Imperial industry, a long term decline brought about by grinding loss of technological knowledge, failing hardware and a virtually complete lack of innovation. Where machine fails, man must step in to give his all in service to the Terran Imperator. Indeed, some of the most famous ace toilers gained their elevated status thanks to pioneering a new method of teamwork, though there is nonetheless a hard limit to what human flesh and bone can achieve, even when put to work in an efficient manner with maximum exertion of strength and willpower.

Behind all the slogans and posters, the primitive lifework and sacrifice of indentured workers are nothing but vast numbers in a broken equation of increased input to feed the meatgrinder. The cosmic domains of His Divine Majesty are slowly faltering. The colossus that is the Imperium of Man is stumbling, under an avalanche of enemies and under the counterproductive burdens of its own making. It is only natural that the Terran Imperium's tyrannical overlords would call for ever greater feats of strength and ever greater deeds of warmaking and production from its cowed masses. And as desperation sets in, the propaganda grows all the more hysterical, the fanatic message all the more feverish, as the entire fundamental mindset of humanity continues to rot, generation by generation. All the while, the sprawling cosmic dominion that man built grows ever more hellish. Locked inside this interstellar madhouse, shackled mankind has wasted ten thousand precious years of titanic endeavour in order to build a prison for himself to waste away and die inside.

Such is his lot. And all is decay.

Truly, life is toil. Toil, ever-lasting and ever-grinding. Toil, ever-burdensome and ever-shackling. Toil and penitence, and not the false bliss of wicked forefathers.

The shout rings out: Work until the white of your raw finger bones are exposed! Work until your back breaks! Work for Sol and Holy Terra!

Only by faith, work and deeds can your sinful soul be saved.

Only in death does duty end.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/01/04 15:25:44


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Pure Human Form

In the grim darkness of the far future, man slays man for his foul body.

Sing, o woman, of her fair visage! Sing, o man, of his handsome features!

Sing us a song of the beauty inherent in the human species. Sing of the youthful splendour without blemish that the God-Emperor Himself intended for His chosen kind. Sing of the strength and flawless vigour to be found in the best of our kin. Sing of the hero and the heroine, of their muscles and sinews at work in great deeds of daring. Sing of the bravery and perfection that runs in the veins of better mankind. Sing of the higher ideal. Sing of the blood and the lineage. Sing of the nobility and the courage!

Sing to us of the pure human form!

Long before primordial man dwelt in caves and huts, his beastly ancestors kenned by instinct that a strong and beautiful form was an outward sign of inner health. Such fleshly omens would often lie, and the finest of flesh would often rot and wither away before its time, yet statistically speaking the best chances to breed healthy offspring was usually found with a fair and vigorous partner. Thus beauty as an indicator of health and good genes became the core component of attraction in the world of rutting animals, and males would go to great lengths of display and struggle in order to impress the finest of females, and the females would oft pick the finest among the male competition, for therein lay the pinnacle of what living beings could hope to achieve.

Sprang life from life.

And so, a gorgeous partner became the dream of primal humanity, as witnessed in any number of heroic and voluptuous tales told around the fireside during the misty past of the Age of Terra. This dream of beauty and strength never passed away, and rigorous attempts to deny it were ever doomed to waste away in the face of innate human nature. Sometimes, the deniers would be pious people of faith, shunning the sinful body as a worldly delusion. At other times, the deniers would be reformers fired up with strange thoughts spinning inside their own heads, their ideas at odds with reality itself. Yet in the end, mankind always knew that beauty was good, just as strength and victory was good.

The dark backside of these lived ideals has always been the rejection of all that is ugly and weak, trailed by suspicions that a hideous exterior betrays a corrupt interior, whether that inner self is biological or spiritual in nature. Through the aeons, uncounted souls have been lost as outcasts inside their own community, heckled for their displeasing looks and unlovely ways. And so the ill-favoured and disagreeable among us has always been doomed to scorn, always at risk of having their entire lives turned into a living hell at the hands of fellow men, women and children.

The Dark Age of Technology saw a deeply empirical understanding of human nature guide mankind into a better world, having man's life improve even as his cosmic domains spread far and wide by the power of unsurpassed scientific lore and technological might. As such, blemishes of the flesh could be healed or improved on a fundamental level by genetors, and men and women were not only happy in this long lost epoch. They were also beautiful. For such was the hubris of mankind, that Man of Gold on many worlds and void stations sought to level the human playing field by making everyone sweet for the eyes. Thus surrounded by stunning members of the same species, ancient man would simultaneously savour the view and grow accustomed to it. And this artificial freeing of the body from the shackles of ill health, frailty and foulness allowed the ideals of the ancients to decisively turn to pursuits of the intellect, since ideals of form had long since been fulfilled across the board, and could now be taken for granted.

And man was happy.

Yet such sinful arrogance and godless abominations of worldly paradise could not be allowed to stand. And thus ancient man was felled from his lofty pedestal by heinous machine revolt, crippling Warp storms and a plague of witches. And Dark Ones of Hell laughed at man's horrendous downfall, while twain million worlds burned to ashes and countless void installations were left in ruins. Thus began the Age of Strife, that lasted for twohundredfifty generations of cannibal freefall.

Old Night saw desperate mankind regress to the worst of his ancient past. The very flesh and essence of humanity was under siege on hundreds of thousands of irradiated and poisoned worlds and voidholms, even as otherworldly powers of Chaos played havoc upon the bodies and souls of exposed humans. And so the ravages of a toppled interstellar civilization was accompanied by a plague of mutations, as uncounted men, women and children twisted into new and horrible forms, turning hideous and disgusting in the eyes of those fortunate enough to count themselves as pureblood mankind.

The end of the Warp storms and the coming of the Terran Imperator saw the scattered survivor colonies of man reunited under a bloodstained banner, as Legions of ruthless warriors crushed all resistance under the leadership of demigods. These sons of the Emperor were marvellous creations, standing as exemplars of all that humanity could achieve. Yet the true wonder of our species was the Imperator Himself, standing resplendent as the pinnacle of all that mankind could ever hope to become.

For all His dashing perfection and handsome exterior, the Emperor of Terra and all mankind did not conduct a massive purge of all mutant types found in the post-apocalyptic landscapes that His Legionnaires conquered. Indeed, even gross and unsightly mutants such as Beastmen were accepted and made use of within the Exerctus Imperialis, for the ranks of the Imperial Army were ever hungering for more soldiers. And as the Great Crusade slaughtered all opposition and claimed ever more planets and voidholms in His name, there followed the secular creed of the Imperial Truth, and its rational ideology grew within human space as long as the early Imperium stood strong and united.

Such invincible unity was not fated to last, however. Nor was the early Imperium's toleration of mutants and abhumans of many kinds. Civil strife rent the Imperium of Man asunder, and ungrateful man nigh-on slew the Emperor while the galaxy burned. In the wake of the Horus Heresy, desperate mankind clung to the certainties and promises of a new religion, in spite of the Cult Imperialis having originally been spawned by the most heretical of Primarchs. And mutants played a prominent role as favoured servants of the Dark Gods during that terrible rebellion. Thus, the High Lords of Terra would outlaw mutants, turning them over to a precarious life of exploitation as the most downtrodden of underclasses. And among all the mind-numbing toil, mutants would be periodically slated for pogroms and local extermination sweeps, according to the caprice of the pureblood human population that so despises them.

In the Age of Imperium, mutants stand as the antithesis of all that pure mankind ought to embody. One common way to argue for the sacral purity of the human genome during the wake of the Horus Heresy ran as follows: Materialists and unbelievers of yore would claim that this world of grey matter is all made out of one substance. They would even go so far as to claim that the only difference between humanity and animals are a meaningless number of random gene-codes. Since the Imperator Himself is the ultimate human, it follows that He also is but a few steps away from being an ape. Is the Emperor but humbug? Do we all share the same essence? Is there no difference between His Divine Majesty and a dog?

Nay! Shun these doubters and weaklings in belief, for the shape of mankind is no coincidence. It is no roll of nature's dice, able to fall in any which way, but a pure and sacred form, as decreed at the dawn of our species by our lord and saviour. The ancestral forms of man and woman are pure and perfect, and any deviation from our original Terran phenotype cluster is a crime of birth and flesh. The God-Emperor Himself wills it for His chosen species to be pure, strong, pious and beautiful. Since He so wills it, we shall make it so. We shall cleanse the human species from mutants, and we shall trample the witch and the abhuman underheel.

Imperator Vult!

After all, it is well known that the Emperor of Holy Terra was the pinnacle of virile manliness, enveloped in shining magnificence. The Master of Mankind had hair as flowing and beautiful as a pooling waterfall in a lush oasis, of deep black lustre. Ancient tales speak of His prominent activities of procreation through the ages, inseminating our species with small gifts of His own splendour in the flesh, being well and truly a father of the people. Truly, the Emperor In the Flesh was the desire of all women and the ideal of all men. He was the one and only perfect human being, and His intent was for all of our chosen species to become like Himself. Such was His wondrous plan, before wretched man betrayed Him. Ave Imperator!

And certainly, the human form itself is elevated above all others, being holy and destined for greatness. Scattered myths on certain forgeworlds speak of how Titan God Machines to this day mimic the pure human form thanks only to the benevolent machinations of the Hidden Emperor's shadowy hand guiding our species in ancient days. After all, bipedal walkers are clearly less stable than vehicles that possess more legs than two, and yet ancient man designed his foremost planetbound warmachines to walk as giant avatars of the pure human form.

With such stark signs teaching us of the importance to uphold the sacred shape of mankind, the actual state of our unworthy species is cause for alarm. For we have wallowed in sin and depravity, and our bodies have turned humpbacked and wrong as punishment for our baleful spiritual errors. As such, man during the Age of Imperium has degenerated into a wretched being, rife with mutation and corruption, that must be flogged, branded and cleansed from all filth without neither remorse nor regret. No mercy for the unclean!

Cast out the mutant, the traitor, the heretic. For every enemy without there are a hundred within. Know that dispersed man has changed and evolved under strange skies and alien suns, and his countenance has all too often turned twisted and weird. Rutting in the dark on a million worlds and innumerable voidholms, man spawned monsters and abominations. In sinful disbelief of our glorious overlod, woman gave birth to mutants, and clan failed to purge the rot in the cradle. And so we are burdened with billions of mutants infesting the Imperium of Man, their numbers unknown and their hatred festering across the starspangled void. Through millennia of starfaring, some humans would even commit unholy crossbreeding with xenos through artificial means, whether willingly or through forceful violation. The offspring of such unspeakable unions dwell within His cosmic dominion to this very day.

Many mutants try to hide their own and their children's abhumanity under shapeless robes, paying lip-service to those Imperial sects who shun the sinful body and wish to cover it up. Most common of all mutants are the Subs, relatively genetically stable but still hideously deformed mutant sub-breeds, forming a teeming underclass of slave labour. Subs are often outlawed, but are usually allowed to live regardless by hypocritical authorities due to the economic exploitation to be gained from Subs. Like other mutants, Subs remain regular targets of lynchmobs and pogroms.

On top of mutations brought about by ordinary evolution, unholy influence and exotic natural environments, there exist a very large number of mutants whose deformed bodies are the byproducts of contaminated Imperial industry. As the Imperium aged, and aged badly, so did its dysfunctional industry turn ever more polluting and decrepit, and endemic mutations followed in the wake of Imperial industry. In the face of such rampant mutation, large swathes of scattered mankind turned away from dysgos and gene-twists with utter revulsion. To Imperial modes of thinking, it is right and proper to hate that which is different from the pure Terran phenotype cluster.

After all, mutants physically rebel against humanity through their very sin of existing. They rebel against the God-Emperor's perfect form with their unnatural powers and ugly faces! And so self-righteous religious lunatics will murder all people suspected of tainted blood, conducting massacres of the innocent which no sanctioned sect will ever lament, nor remember as anything else than heroic deeds.

As the sclerotic Age of Imperium unfolded in all its darkness and horror, so too did restrictions on mutants multiply in number. The most famous and widespread Administratum document of regulation is the Godolkin Purebreed Guide, detailing any Imperial subjects' deviation from the standard human phenotype cluster via a point system. While the exact number of points for mutant toleration differ wildly due to local strategic exemptions, the underlying spirit of the Godolkin Index is the classification and ruthless purification of undesirables in order to ensure the eugenic health of the baseline human genome.

And so rejects of society and humanity alike will be butchered like cattle. Meanwhile, pogromists will usually be given free reign to defile the mutant according to their heart's darkest lusts, for any fell deed committed against such wretched outcasts do not count as sin in the divine eyes of Him on Terra. After all, non-standard human phenotypes are nothing but filth, born defects from His Divine Majesty's perfect design. Purge them all! Slay these alien crossbreeds, these many-limbed monstrosities, these telekinetic madmen and these beings with the countenance of actual, literal sharks. For the betterment of the collective whole, we must practice virtuous eugenics, and never shy away from our grim duty to cleanse mankind from impurities. Remember that mutants are all living sins unto the purity of the ancestral human form. Twists are parodies of mankind. They are heresy made flesh and blood!

As noted, dirty Imperial practices of industry will often contaminate the living-space of ordinary humans to such a degree as to become a breeding ground for new strains of mutations and deformities, yet such horrid causes of mutations are never recognized by the High Lords of Terra. Instead, the Adeptus Terra will officially support sects and local rulers who wish to eradicate abhumanity as a caste, even as the Imperium silently lets most mutants live on as a source of cheapest thrall labour. Therefore, the vast majority of all abhumans throughout His astral realm is left living in surly and bestial resignation, their wits reduced to dull incurious brooding, for their every day is a nightmare of backbreaking grind, filled with fear and loathing.

And so these breathing insults to the sacred human genome will be rounded up and shackled to their work stations, or else they will be purged without ceremony, either by troopers or by grimdrunk mobs at the height of chiliastic violence. The ugly carcass of the mutant remains a target for any right-thinking subject of He who dwells on the face of Terra. Would not the Enthroned One want for us to cleanse the dysgenic element from our midst? Should we not rid ourselves of these blasphemies of the flesh? Better kill them now, before they give birth to more walking heresies! Buy redemption from your sins in the blood of monsters. Purge the unclean! For we shall hate all that is ugly in man.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

And so the senile debility of the etiolated Imperium plays out again and again, on a million worlds and on uncounted voidholms. Such a hidebound and parochial mess mankind has become, whose ancestors once bestrode the cosmos like fearless titans. Such baleful slaughter and such depraved excesses are encouraged from on high when directed against those deemed unfit to live by the High Lords of Terra. And even amidst the crescendo of righteous bloodletting, Holy Inquisitors are left wondering why the dark forces of Chaos continue to grow so strong. Surely, their entire life's work could not be a futile exercise in counter-productive insanity? No! Doubt not, and trust in the ruler of all humanity to steer your course. Only by sacrificing the unclean upon the altars of our Radiant Deity can we purify sinful mankind.

Odi et Amo.

Turning thus from this suicide pact gone wrong, that is the Imperium of Man, we now focus our attention on a tense contradiction embedded at the heart of Imperial thinking:

The purity of the human form in one shape or another has been part of the Imperium since its very inception, even though it during the Great Crusade avoided the rabid depravity which it would spawn in the latter Age of Imperium. After all, affirming the beauty, cleverness, strength and justice dwelling inside mankind was part and parcel of the Emperor's attempt to revitalize traumatized human culture and kickstart a flourishing renaissance of science, creativity and invention. The lord of hosts and leader of the people needed to dig man out of the shell inside which this scarred wretch hid, and show man the splendour and glory which humanity was capable of. Thus the female form and the male form were both elevated in the classical aesthetic of the early Imperium, raised up on pedestals as heroes and majestic ideals for all to aspire to.

Fortuna Favet Fortibus!

Fortune favours the bold. This ancient phrase could as well have been the motto of the entire Imperium during the era of the Great Crusade. Under the Emperor's direction, man grasped for more: More expansion, more knowledge, more uplifting beauty. The Terran Imperator wished to energize and inspire His chosen species, and for a while, He succeeded. Man raised up golden wonders and reclaimed lost lore of the ancients, even as man cultivated a mindset fit for science and exploration. And amid all this arrogance and fervent activity, the clean shapes of man and woman in the guise of statues and fresques adorned palaces and streets alike. Yet the near-death of the Emperor in the skies above Terra brought with it the second downfall of mankind, and in its wake of desperation did a new faith emerge, one destined to overtake the entire Imperium of Man, and remake humanity in its image.

This religion was the Imperial Cult, a fractious mass of competing sects, all united in their total devotion to the God-Emperor, their total subjection to Holy Terra, and their complete and fanatical hatred of all infidelry, heresy, unbelief, blasphemy, apostasy and heathendom. From its very inception, the Cult Imperialis bore traumatized scars brought about by the Horus Heresy and the subsequent Scouring. One such scar was the apprently dour and humourless mindset of the Cult, as contrasted to the optimistic, lively, jocular and easygoing culture of the early Imperium. Another scar was the uneasy relation that many Imperial sects had with the human body itself.

Unlike the early Imperium of the Great Crusade, this new, religious Imperium under the High Lords manifested a strong tendency to deny the body through asceticism, self-flagellation, self-abnegation and by the covering up of our sinful forms under shapeless robes. The tide of interstellar human civilization seemed to have turned irrevocably toward a barren Imperial culture, both bereft of humour and fearful of the human body, scarred forever and made stale and boring by the horrors of the Horus Heresy and the disappointments in mankind itself brought about by it.

Yet the tumultuous course of Imperial cultural history was not so predetermined. Instead, strong counter-currents existed, fed by such sources as devotion to the Primarchs Guilliman and Sanguinius. Likewise, the Great Crusade era's shining aesthetics and ideals survived by morphing pious and latching themselves onto Imperial sects that proved capable of perpetuating these ancient styles and ideas through religious dogma. A third factor was the local persistence of one school of thought over another, even as the larger Imperium happened to be dominated by the other school of thought and style, thereby ensuring that pockets of artistic expression and aesthetic tradition survived to bloom anew in cultural renaissances that spread across entire star sectors and Segmenta.

While the full panoply of Imperial schools of thought and artistic traditions present a mad sectarian caleidoscope of variety and nuance, the two main strains who have achieved galactic spread can be boiled down as such:

On the one hand, there is the more ancient, classic school, informed by the original Great Crusade aesthetic. This extroverted school of thought upholds beautiful mankind as the pure pinnacle of creation, and will proudly display the pure human form in all its art, craft and architecture, to the point of unabashed nakedness. Let us here call it the body-affirming school for the sake of simplicity. As the Emperor wills it.

On the other hand, there is the newer, post-Heresy school of thought, informed by the traumas that have beset mankind ever since the Ascension of the Enthroned God. This introverted school of thought shuns arrogant displays of human greatness, and emphasizes humility and the covering up of our sinful bodies. Let us here call it the self-abnegating school for the sake of simplicity. As the Emperor wills it.

Imperator Adiuta Imperialis.

Grasping that these two contradictory major styles inform most parts of Holy Terran, and thus Imperial, high culture, lets us understand why sanctioned Imperial aesthetics will simultaneously tout the prideful human body in the face of the hideous mutant and xeno, while at the same time hiding the sinful limbs, hair, face and torso of the dubious human form. This realization is at the core of all deeper understanding of internal Imperial workings. For the Emperor's servants do not all pull in the same direction. Their lives and deeds are filled with conflicts and contradictions. Ultimately, the Imperium of Man can be likened to a multi-headed hydra, that is as often at war with itself as with external foes.

And so priests, preachers and priestesses in shapeless robes will lead pureblood Sisters of Battle into action, the latter wearing curvaceous power armour even as they practice martial asceticism. Likewise, decently robed and covered Inquisitorial Acolytes will direct trained agents of the Officio Assassinorum in tight bodysuits. Meanwhile, genhanced Space Marines of the Adeptus Astartes will proudly wear crests and sculpted muscle cuirasses into battle, even while praying away their days in monastic severity.

Less contradictory, and more true to the early Imperium's classical ideals, are the famed Sanguinary Guard of the Blood Angels Chapter. Likewise, there is the phallic majesty of the Imperial Palace guarded by the perfect pinnacles of human form that is known as the Adeptus Custodes, all armoured in gleaming gold.

All these Imperial servants are willing slaves to the Golden Throne, whether they cover up their human form or put it on full display, with accentuated hips and breast cups for women, and suggestive codpieces for men. Any objections about practicality can be thrown out a window, for Imperial artificers will not care if anatomically sculpted armour plates create shot traps and weak points. Such efficiency thinking and hunt for improvement long since disappeared at the burning end of the Dark Age of Technology. In the Age of Imperium, aesthetics are as important, if not more so, than effectiveness in combat, as the Emperor Himself has obviously decreed.

Imperial sects prone to excessive self-abnegation will often level accusations of narcissistic indulgence at any works displaying human beauty, and violent iconoclams beyond counting have occurred throughout ten thousand wasted years of human development run into the ground. Body-affirming aesthetics are constantly frowned upon by most monastic orders, many sects and some major movements within the Cult Imperialis. Some Imperial religious traditions have long been suffused by anti-body tendencies and praise of chastity, all speaking ill of vanity, lust and even vital procreation itself, damning them all as idolatrous blasphemies of the flesh. Yet the mighty Imperium must live and die by the sword, and the people of the robe would do well not to quote overtly hostile scripture at the people of the spear. Instead, most warriors tend to follow in the bombastic, vigorous and virile footsteps of His Divine Majesty. A proud host is a confident host.

All across Imperial space, there exists a worship of strength. The Imperial Creed has taught humans across the Milky Way galaxy to venerate humanity as an ideal, while simultaneously scorning the reality of red-blooded man in all his flawed sinfulness as lowly filth. Thus, it is virtuous to hate all that is ugly in man. The Lectito Divinitatus teaches us that man is nothing but dust. Still, his muscles can be harnessed as yet another energy source to drive the machinery of Imperial power, and ever more that has become the case, as an unstoppable and slow demechanization grinds away ever more of the inherited works of ancient man.

Many sects who are part of the body-affirming school practice their artistic styles in reverent memory of Primarch Sanguinius, the Angel of Blood who embodied the perfect human form, the true son who died to save the Emperor Himself. They sculpt statues with bulging biceps and wear lorica musculata in honour of Sanguinius, who stood for all that was best in humanity. He whose horrible yet noble death overshadowed even the great deeds of his life. In Imperial theology, Primarch Sanguinius represents the finest side of mankind, both within and without. A flawless exterior is widely believed by many Imperial sects to be proof of inner purity, even as other sects reject bodily beauty and vanity as horrid sins and marshlights leading men, women and children astray from the true path of the Emperor.

Yet historical experience has shown time and again that a beautiful visage and unblemished body may hide a corrupt mind, or dull wit. In fact, charisma and good looks will often serve as a cover for ineptitude. Thus, the pure human form will sometimes prove a shield in the persistent theme of incompetents: Arrogance, lack of imagination and a bizarre focus on trivial matters while ignoring the big picture and crucial signs. A truly lethal combination. In some human cultures synonymous with sybaritic devotion to luxury and pleasure, adherence to the style of the pure human form may eventually mutate into a cover for Slaaneshi pleasure covens, yet any theologian who would wish to drive his oratory hard down this road of accusation, would do well to remember the treasured memory of Sanguinius.

And so, the most expensive of Imperial wargear will often mimic the pure human form, displaying a brutal nobility and masking the bearer behind an artificial fair visage, akin to a brave yet narcissistic hero of old. Thus, some of the best trained warriors of the Imperium of Man will be adorned with sculpted breastplates, leg plates and arm plates, stepping into ceramite boots sculpted like human feet. Fully clad in such aesthetically refined armour, these servants of the Emperor will be transformed, adopting a handsome physique and youthful form. Thus armoured, they resemble nothing so much as young gods and ever-vigorous goddesses, brimming with martial pride. Worn by trained and confident killers, such artistic ideals come to life in armour harder than they do in stone.

Some artificer armour sets even include sculpted codpieces and lorica vulvata, who are often hidden beneath loinclothes for the sake of modesty. Yet such eye-catching pieces of armour are in some crude warrior cultures displayed openly and proudly with Freyic zeal, especially so in the more rustic tribal societies where menfolk are expected to wear brash accessories to underline their manhood. While frowned upon by the trend-setting Imperial high culture of Holy Terra, such seemingly rude symbols of virility and garbs of fertility are nevertheless common in the primitive tribal peripheries that exist on hundreds of thousands of Imperial worlds and voidholms. Indeed, familiarity with such customs will completely wear off the offensive edge, and foreigners becoming acculturated to the ways of these Emperor-fearing tribes do not even think about it most of the time. Thus kotekas, priapic gourds in rut, groin sheaths and branch pouches become just another piece of clothing, seldom reflected upon and within the boundaries of local decency.

Such phallic imagery aside, wearing a sculpted cuirass displaying the chiseled likeness of naked peak human physique, whether masculine or feminine, is to honor the perfection of mankind as best exemplified by the Emperor In the Flesh. It is also a righteous and unapologetic display of the pure human form, and a visual reminder of the beauty, strength and purity of form that will be lost if horrible mutants, aliens, deviant cults or xenophiles were to triumph over the Imperium of Man and corrupt mankind's sacred genome.

Look to the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth. He is the Master of Mankind, and the most perfect human being who ever walked the earth. The Terran Imperator wanted His ideal humans to look like demigods and daughters of a deity. Was this a contradiction to the atheist creed that He professed during the early Imperium? Was it a true vision of the future? Or was it a wish to get back to the heights of human glory that had once existed during the Dark Age of Technology?

Regardless of intent, the God-Emperor's wish lives on, in uncounted millions of luxurious armour suits, often worn by the finest warriors under His rule. Behold the slayers of mutants, traitors and xenos, who walk into the flames of war, in forever young armour shaped like a muscular male torso. Behold the elite amazons, having donned rich armour in the shapely form of a strong, young woman complete with voluptuous breasts. Such are the wandering visions of our fleshly abode at its best. Such is the finest state for our bodies of clay and dust. And so the armed servants of the Emperor will embody the greatest heroes of ancient legends, at peak strength and peak beauty. Ever a sign of health.

Vain and arrogant, their self-abnegating detractors spit out. Sensual and sinful, the criticism reads. Lustful and bestial, the condemnation rings out. Nevertheless, the martial devotees of these body-affirming Imperial sects still preserve a sliver of the Emperor's original vision for mankind, after fivehundred generations of rotting stagnation and withering decay. A vision, of proud mankind resplendent in its full might, unapologetic, strong and victorious.

Such visual glories can do naught to stem the tide of doom that is drowning mankind, at the end of our species. No beauty in the universe can save that decaying cosmic dominion. And so the Imperium will continue to cannibalize society for the sake of total war on ten thousand different fronts.

And as desperation mounts, the democidal tendencies inherent in the Imperium of Man will boil to a fever pitch, lashing out at any convenient targets near at hand. Any victim will do, really, but the frustrated rage must be unleashed. Thus true believers in the God-Emperor will spill out onto the streets, and carry torches and makeshift weapons to the nearest mutant slumhood. And as the abhumans look up, the bane realization can be seen, glowing as panic in their eyes.

These many, then, shall die. Woe unto the malformed!

Witness these pointless pogroms, and ken that the Imperium of Man is too broken to fix. The aquila's rotten carcass is doomed to crash.

Yet mankind in the darkest of futures may still die with style.

Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/01/20 08:30:32


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Lay of the Ivari Bailif

"Ack! Let me record the horror that's occured,
all due to a foreign master's accent,
't was during Dorntide and the ash dunes lay still,
when a bailif from Hive Ivar rode into our ville.

And the knees trembled like rattles on us all,
for woe unto them who bothers when the bailif commands,
and our backsides turned wet from fear when he said:
(Garbled Ivaric): Skolli ejg kunne got vann år de ungfors myn fren?
For no one understood,
what he wanted to have.

One dares not to ask what the bailif just said,
when bailif wears chainsword and rules our clime,
but however it was, the barrel o' foiz was carried forth,
as well as grox-sausage and gill-fat and new-roasted maggot,
we gathered our rings and coins in a box,
and gave all of what treasures here was to summon,
yet the bailif but shook his head and said:
(Garbled Ivaric): Skölli ejg kunne got ain klunp vann år de ungfors istallen?
And Emperor alone knew,
what he wanted to have.

So Trash-Pyko's daughter with her behind bared,
was carried to the bailif, and then a fellow,
we flogged Shorty-Jim in the hope that it was,
a black and blue squat that he came here to see.

But the bailif looked sour, and now spread the panic,
what demanded his mercy to not be disappointed?
We ran and we razed, while he shouted as before:
(Garbled Ivaric): Er du alle stopik in de skalli? Ejg vell ånlee hef ain klunp vann!
And no one understood,
a word of his howl.

We painted the groxen, and hanged our priest,
we raised up an eagle and nailed on a horse,
we forced grandma down into the ambull's den,
and Korm gave to the bailif his cut-off foot.

And the bairns were turned into starch in the grinder,
and the village burned, and soon it was only me left,
but I could not care any more about the bailif who shouted:
(Garbled Ivaric): Våd in alli djefvule? Er dyr nången in de byn ho håger te bjudi ain humänske på vann?
Amid corpse piles, horse-pole and flames a-roaring.

I said: To hell with Ivaric power and taxes,
and sat down feebly by the well and drank water,
then I stretched out the ladle to the bailif who said:
(Ivaric thanks): Denck du!
For it was a gulp water,
that he had wanted to have."

- Deviant sinspeech song found in vassal rural districts to Hive Ivar on Lillandia IX, based on a real event that occurred in 836.M41 (subsequently suppressed by censors); a more strictly outlawed version also exists, with flaying, blinding, eardrum-piercing, teeth-removal, nail-pulling, saw-gelding and phosphex bathing being the regulation punishment for anyone singing the words 'to hell with Imperial power and taxes'


- - -

Closely based on the Swedish song Balladen om den danske fogden (Lay of the Danish Bailif), by Ola Aurell.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/03/05 11:00:04


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Untangled

It was in that moment when Yehunnas Moltkesson realized that he had forgotten which tree he had climbed before cutting loose the tangled branches.

- - -

Based on a real logging event which occurred decades ago for my maternal grandfather (93 years old at the moment of writing, and still going strong with cycling, forestry, welding and jolly humour). He wanted to only cut down one of two trees growing close to each other, but their branches had got entangled, so he had to climb up with an axe. He came down with great speed on the wrong tree, but was fortunately not hurt.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/03/29 13:32:44


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Xenocide

"O, believers in the Enthroned Almighty!
We shall hiss at the mention of the alien,
as we shall gnash our teeth at its sighting.
On countless worlds the human heart boils,
sizzling and fierce with heated hate,
so pure and just,
divinely guided,
holy vengeance will come,
by the God-Emperor we swear!
It will come.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

Long have we suffered the blows of the xeno!
O, many of us have been carried off to fates unknown,
our dear sisters strewn lifeless in the ashes,
our fine brothers skewered and pained,
our beloved children eaten while still alive.
So many corpses,
so many innocents,
a-sprinkled like refuse,
their souls cry out with one voice,
aye, they cry out, and we hear it!
Hear their call.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

Lo and behold the filth of the alien!
Sisters, shudder you at its unholy abomination,
brothers, be you all revolted by its foul form.
For its essence is void, its soul naught,
truly a mercy to end its life,
truly a good deed to burn its den,
reach out and slay their younglings.
Cleanse every voidholm,
torch every world,
death to the enemies of man,
now is the time of sacred vengeance!
To kill is to pray.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

O, bless these righteous wars of expansion!
And forgive us our feeble mortal failings, o Lord,
for we will purge guilt from our hearts,
and cleanse remorse as we cleanse the xeno.
No pity can be allowed to stir us,
no sparing of helpless spawn,
fear the alien,
hate the alien,
kill the alien,
with pride and satisfaction!
Kill all xenos.

Kill!
Kill!
Kill!

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

Rise up, and bring tremendous terror!
And utterly reject their snaring cries for mercy,
but false gestures and empty pleas,
the alien deserve not to live.
Knee deep in slaughter,
we wade through the sea,
its waves lapping blood,
a manmade tide of death,
and the Emperor saw that it was good!
In glory we wade.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

O, embrace the just calling to make stars pure!
For the very breath and blood of the alien is hostile to man,
so shoulder our sacred duty to become its bane.
We shall bash in the little heads,
bash their spawn upon the rocks,
and let our hate flow,
as their blood flow,
and strike true, free of doubt and hesitation!
For we will:

Kill!
Maim!
Burn!

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

This bloody offering we place before His feet!
A sacrifice of slain foes, to gladden Him on Terra,
to uphold His vision for chosen mankind.
The Lord of our species wills its,
as we pile the alien husks high,
He judges it just,
our faith aflame,
as we light the pyres of mass destruction!
Of divine extinction.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

O, pious flock, harken!
His enemies are many,
His equals none.
Exterminate them we must!
Kill all xenos.

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!

Ave Imperatore Dei!
Ave Humanae Imperium!"

- Hymn of Holy Xenocide, penned during religious ecstacy in 633.M37 by Aqabe Sa'at Liqawint, reverend Ichege of the Monastic Order of Re'ese Papasat, in the crusading service of the Missionaria Galaxia, Segmentum Obscurus


- - -

A tribute to the following two songs by Space Cadets.

Kill All Xenos
Wars of Expansion


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/03/31 02:52:43


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Labour Camp

In the grim darkness of the far future, man buckles under the yoke.

Come and see!

Come, fellow human, and see the circus of depravity and destitution which our species has been reduced to, at the brink of doomsday. Shy not away, and close not your eyes, but gaze upon the bizarre spectacle unfolding across the Milky Way galaxy!

Do you see how the proud seed of Terra has been cast across the cosmos, only to sprout in a sick harvest? They were once the bold explorers of the universe.

Do you see those jaded hordes of men, women and children whose brutal survival and sacrifice allows humanity to thrive bitterly across the stars? They once lived like demigods in mortal paradise.

Do you see those teeming multitudes of downtrodden cattle in human form? They were once on the cusp of unlocking the secrets to creation itself.

Now that is a tragedy so colossal and total in scope that it goes all the way around to become comedy! And do you know what the punchline is? The joke of fate is that the last strong defender of mankind is also its insane gravedigger. Its last remaining shield is in fact also its hostage-taker. Its last hope is utterly false, being nought but a dead end of human development across the entire galaxy, having wasted ten thousand precious years in ever-worsening decay as human power across the Milky Way erodes away.

Aye, power is all it has left.

Diminishing power.

The muscular power of guns, ships, vehicles and warriors, deployed in great mass. Yet the cerebral power of man has been sapped, locked behind convoluted mysticism safeguarded by fanatical cults of jealous machine-worshippers and bloodthirsty zealots. In fact, this last bastion of humanity do not truly know how to produce its strong armaments, and for every century, more and more advanced technology disappears forever from human grasp of production, the remaining pieces of hardware being treasured as irreplacable relics. All these marvellous designs are the genius fruits of the ancients, and indeed the olden templates and antiquated machines still know how to make anew the tools and weapons of man, for those machines that have lasted the millennia have done so precisely because they were designed to endure time and disaster, and be able to produce robust and crude hardware for the degenerate survivors of a potential apocalypse. That apocalypse happened, and still the machines know. Otherwise mankind would long since have fallen, for man himself no longer understands, or cares to understand what wonders his nimble hands and mind can fashion.

And is not that the greatest joke of them all? That the guardians of man's craft and lore are also the destroyers and gaolers of man's innate drive to learn and discover, to creatively innovate, tweak and improve? Is it not the ultimate irony that the best and the brightest, those who should have been the great scientists and inventors of our species, has instead become its blinkered hoarders and deniers of knowledge, like so many chanting witch doctors swinging incense in front of cogitators?

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Yet enemies there are aplenty, in a long line of foes, jostling for the chance to tear man asunder. And with brilliant mankind gelded of its limitless potential by cruel overlords and aggressively myopic fanatics, all that remains is a senile wreck of an empire, as sclerotic and counterproductive in its workings as it is downright detrimental for the long term interests of the human species. And yet the farce has gone on too long. Too many possible forks in the road have been missed. Too many alternative sources of human regrowth have been quashed. Too many millennia have been wasted in a futile struggle of mediocrity merely to tread water in order not to drown. That is also part of the gods' joke.

It did not have to come to this horrendous end. It did not have to be like this. And yet here we are, the dumb slaves of self-serving tyrants and demented incompetents. Here we are, we whose ancestors once bestrode the cosmos like titans. Trapped aboard a sinking ship.

Enter, the Imperium of Man.

An astral realm of a million worlds and voidholms beyond counting, the Imperium stretches across the galaxy. Besieged by aliens and monsters. Attacked from within by heretics and rebels. For fivehundred generations it has endured. Protected by fleets of warships and legions of genetically engineered warriors, the Imperium is a stumbling colossus on feet of clay. A rotting dominion ruled by corrupt oligarchs from Holy Terra, the cradle of mankind, the Imperium is locked in a grinding death spiral of demechanization and loss of technology. Where once machines performed tasks efficiently, now bodies will be thrown on the problem, in ever more primitive fashion.

The Imperium of Man does not care how many billions of its own malnourished and parasite-infested subjects it must sacrifice, so long as its basal needs of empire are met. It does not care how many souls it must crush under ceramite boots to achieve its monstrous plans. And make no mistake about it; the Imperium itself is a monster on the prowl, a slavering predator stalking the stars, guarding its catch in dark dens of misery scattered across the starspangled void. It is no shining saviour.

Thus we see that there is nothing between heaven and earth that would make the High Lords of Terra balk at the thought of enslaving untold millions of our species in sweeping waves of arrests, torture and condemnation to penal labour. The mass purging of internal enemies is just an endemic feature of Imperial power dynamics, and what loss has been suffered if innocents disappear along with the guilty? At the end of the day, they are just living tools to be discarded at will. Their short-lived existence constitute nothing but vast, faceless numbers in a broken equation of increased input to meet the demands of total war.

Let us take the civilized world of Gradovich Gamma during the last century of M41 as an example, and see how the extremely common phenomenon of penal labour within the Imperium often looks like. Gradovich Gamma is situated in the southern Segmentum Pacificus, ruled over by the cutthroat Navinilats dynasty. As per upper caste tradition, its Caesarch bore a Terran reigning name, styling himself Caracalla XIX Severus, though he was more commonly known as Lop Top behind his back by the more irreverent of his subjects and rivals. Like so many of his predecessors, Caracalla XIX faced a severe issue decreed on him from on high, when his Astropaths received an encrypted message from the Administratum on Holy Terra in 967.M41. Gradovich Gamma had long been an extraction economy for export of primarily raw material to forge worlds, yet lately the fortunes of the Imperium had turned acrimoniously sour, and so the Adeptus Administratum had increased the Tithe demanded of Gradovich Gamma.

All across the planet, machines were already working around the clock without due maintenance rites being undertaken by the lowly lay techmen that tended to them. And like so many Emperor-fearing overlords, Caracalla XIX found it incredibly hard to order new industries being built in order to supply the sagging economy with its dearly needed machinery. The machines were just lacking, and so to meet the heightened Tithe demands, Gradovich Gamma turned to devour her own people in order to supply the Imperium with the needed materials.

No tyrant ever had trouble finding willing henchmen and tormentors. And as humanity has grown small in the mind during the creaking Age of Imperium, the number of brutes eager to take out their frustrations and dark desires on others has only increased. Trauma breeds trauma. Thus willing manpower is never a hindrance to carry out diabolical designs. Caracalla XIX Severus ordered his Securitate Proedros, Xilef Jiksnijzrezd, to enlarge the labour camp system and scoop up threehundredtwenty million fresh convicts from the streets. Governor Caracalla's festering paranoia converged perfectly with the new quotas.

Likewise, Securitate findings about suspicious cults across the world caused the local Adeptus Ministorum head clergy to lash out in fevered panic, demanding harsh means to quell the budding threat to faith and purity. Whipping up a propaganda campaign to instil fear and fervour into the populace, Proedros Xilef sparked a wave of official terror, commenting in private as he unleashed the informants: "Now we are going to have a terror campaign and kill lots of people who probably did nothing wrong, and we will consolidate power by fear."

And so yet another wave of purges rolled out across Gradovich Gamma. Across the Imperium, random people will usually be rounded up to meet the high numbers of district quotas ordained from above, lest the local authorities themselves risk being arrested on suspicion of sympathizing with the deviants and malcontents. In the middle of the night, families and clans were suddenly awakened in their holesteads and hab blocks, as Securitate forces rammed down doors and entered their lousy dwellings with drawn weapons and loud screaming. Many startled subjects were thrown into armoured prison wagons disguised by Guilder slogans such as the classic: "Drink Imperial champagne!"

And so hundreds of millions of dutiful Imperial subjects were thrown into cells and tortured during interrogations, every name beaten out of them leading to further arrests and more baleful suffering in dark chambers of blood and pain. Of course, most humans will say any nonsense they believe might stop the torture, and thus lying confessions obtained on the rack will often be worthless and misleading. Yet the hidden heretics must be rooted out! Better that a hundred innocents perish, than one apostate walks free. Suffer not the heretic to live! Of course, the proceedings were meticulously documented on parchment by the Securitate agents, many of which papers were filed in the archives, splattered with dried blood from severe beatings and worse. Some exceptional torturers were even commended and awarded medals and petty privileges for being such outstanding hard toilers in their righteous trade. One such bloodsoaked shock worker was Jitnerval Ajireb, who would rapidly climb the ranks of the Securitate, even as he in private committed occasional murder and violation of maidens in his few hours of spare time.

Securitate Proedros Xilef Jiksnijzrezd died from sickness early on in the first new Imperial terror wave, being replaced by Kirneg Adogaj. Proedros Kirneg went out of his way to please the Imperial Governor Caracalla XIX, both with flattery and results born out of immense human death and misery. Kirneg saw to it that the main crop of convicts from the recent Imperial terror wave were distributed to infrastructure projects which sought to break new land in inhospitable backwaters, and extract resources from wastelands. Thus tens of millions of already starving prisoners found themselves shipped or marched out into the wilderness. In many cases, bureaucratic sclerosis, incompetence or corruption had caused many planned camps to not having been built when the prisoners arrived to their allocated spots, and so their first task was to sleep under the sky in harsh climates and build a lethal labour camp for themselves, ever under the watchful glare of armed camp guards from the Securitate. Needlessly to say, people died in droves, their demise nothing but faceless numbers on a page.

An archipelago of hellish labour camps will dot almost any Imperial world, and most larger voidholms. The recent influx of convicts saw this system swell on Gradovich Gamma, labour camps springing up like mushrooms after rain in the harshest parts of the world's landmass. Proedros Kirneg Adogaj personally travelled to many locations to oversee the progress of works. Canal digs were carried out by cheap slave labour, and millions perished as they excavated and built with the most primitive and cheap means possible. For instance, a lack of basic tools such as chainsaws or axes caused large gangs of prisoners to tear down trees by nothing but rope and muscle power. Several of these canals proved to have been poorly planned, for their shallow depth allowed only barges and small bluewater craft passage, yet still the abysmal death toll was as nothing compared to how cheaply the faulty canals were dug. Just look on the record-low budget numbers!

Soon, the rich new ore veins found in the gargantuan Amylok gold mines made Proedros Kirneg become the Imperial Governor's favourite sycophant and hatchet man. Tens of millions were fed into the meatgrinder that was this infernal mining complex, and soon the camp system screamed for more bodies. Under the pretense of rooting out unholy cults, a second terror wave went out across Gradovich Gamma, shovelling another twohundredseventythree million Imperial subjects into certain death by harsh labour and starvation. The informants had a field day. The new slaves were fed into logging operations, quarries and the ghastly hazards of chemical processing. Now, the bloodstained hands of Proedros Kirneg Adogaj had begun to stink among higher castes, and the ruthless ruler of Gradovich Gamma prudently decided to replace him with an underling, trumping up false charges and throwing Kirneg literally to the dogs while ignoring the man's protestations of loyalty. Reportedly, the butcher and building-lord Kirneg Adogaj's last words were yelled amidst tears and barking hounds: "Spare me, o please great lord! I swear I would do anything for you! Aaaah! By the Imperator, I built these great canals for you! I built them for you!"

Kirneg was replaced by Securitate Proedros Jalokin Vojzej, who would become infamous for the greatest round of purges during that century, making the entire decade of the 980s eponymously named after him in Gradovichian chronicles. Five more terror waves of fully two and a half billion arrested Gradovichians saw the Planetary Defence Force (PDF) gutted of its professional core, for Caesarch Caracalla XIX Severus wanted to preempt a possible armed coup as he sat brooding in his palaces, embracing his rising paranoia and ordering ever more personal servants and bodyguards shot on empty suspicions. For decades after Proedros Jalokin's reign of purges, the Departmento Munitorum filed complaints of a slump in quality among Gradovichian regiments, since the great Imperial terror waves tore the heart out of the planet's military, and the Astra Militarum regiments were recruited directly from the PDF. Nonetheless, all these fresh thrall cohorts were put to all previously mentioned tasks, as well as an ambitious bout of magrail construction, plasteelworks and starshipbuilding, though in truth every wave of purges and arrests produced slave workers for more disparate projects than can be mentioned here.

The crescendo of arrests, torture, accusations and fearmongering on Gradovich Gamma during the 980s was reached when Caracalla XIX 'Lop Top' Severus became sated with the grand purging, and finished it by finishing off its architect, Jalokin Vojzej. The Imperial Governor chose a brilliant Securitate officer, Jitnerval Ajireb, to replace Jalokin, and wished to have it expedited in a personal manner. Thus, Jalokin Vojzej was put through a show trial, like so many of the people he himself had purged, and he was convicted of betraying the God-Emperor of Holy Terra and blaspheming against His true creed. And as Caracalla XIX sat watching from atop his aquila-topped throne, Jalokin's replacement, Jitnerval, tortured Jalokin Vojzej to death in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Rumour has it that the Imperial Governor ate pickled oilsquid eyes during the entire event. And so the bloodstained Jitnerval Ajireb entered the office of Securitate Proedros, chief of the security police on Gradovich Gamma.

In his personal life, the hard-working Jitnerval was a monster. Murdering and violating people in private, he went further than any of his predecessors did in depravity, yet his time as head of the Securitate saw a decrease in waves of Imperial terror and purges. Imperial Governor Caracalla XIX had already murdered most potential rivals and sent an astounding number of ordinary Gradovichians to work themselves asunder in the labour camp archipelago, and thus the paranoid ruler of Gradovich Gamma could roll back the terror for the time being. With such a bumper crop of camp convicts harvested during the dreadful 980s, the next decade saw many lesser waves of purges continue to roll out in order to replenish the slave workforce, but nothing on the scale of Jalokin's terror. The mountains of dead subjects to be processed into corpse starch was a cheap price to pay for the tyrannical Governor, considering that his Securitate-run camp labour projects had borne fruit. Gradovich Gamma had indeed managed to meet the Tithe quotas set by the Throneworld, and so all was well.

As noted, penal labour colonies dot almost every single planet, moon and huge voidholm across the Imperium of Man, yet how do they operate?

Given His Divine Majesty's overcrowded holdings across the galaxy, replenishing numbers of the penal workforce is no problem. As such, most Administratum planners will reach the usual conclusion that these cheap units of labour is better off replaced by fresh blood after an intense period of backbreaking toil, than being tended to and fed well. They also note that harsh labour unto starvation and death is of more economic benefit to the Imperium than shovelling masses of people into purification camps for rapid eradication. Therefore labour camps far outnumber pure death camps across the Imperium, even if the labour camps only amount to a slower death by drudgery as contrasted with the swifter mass slaughter seen in dedicated purification camps. In Imperial labour camps, convicts will usually be fed starvation rations, sometimes calculated to keep prisoners alive no longer than three Terran months for the hardest labour tasks, while the taskmasters wring out as much toil as they can get from the lost and the damned. A great many labour camps will see cauldrons of horrid broth cooked on corpse starch and flymeat bars or other synthetic foods, seeing inmates hauling heavy rocks being fed a thin soup indeed, as if to mock their shrieking stomachs.

One aspect that adds further suffering to an already abominable situation for camp labourers, is the discovery that some of their fellow prisoners are not to be trusted. Throughout the entire Imperium, there exist billions upon billions of rockrete buildings built by slave labour, inside which are trapped the corpses of unfortunates dumped into the wet rockrete during construction. Many of these were the victims of sadists and madmen among prisoners and camp guards alike, while a great many others were the victims of gangers and other actual criminals who invariably rule the roost inside penal labour camps. For in Imperial labour camps, the lowest rung of prisoners will always consist of ordinary Imperial subjects convicted for false crimes, their conscience innocent, their bodies and rations easy pickings for the scum of the earth who are used to take advantage of decent people.

Imperial labour camps truly are pits of suffering, where prisoners are exposed to the elements, poisoned by chym or worked to death amid typhoid fever and cannibalism. Even so, life and death behind the razorwire will sometimes elevate the human spirit, in the most unexpected of places.

In labour camps, humanity is stripped to its very essence. Here, you may witness not only desperate wretches scheming and backstabbing each other for every scrap of food and every little bit of advantage, but you may also bear witness to a great many more decent people willing to offer support and helpful words to others in dire straits. In the midst of starvation ravaging Imperial labour camps, some decent humans will always give away their last piece of nutrient ration to help others in need. This is a freedom of choice dwelling at the core of the human soul, which few tyrannical regimes have ever managed to crush. When humans are put into the worst possible circumstances, their reactions will span the spectrum, yet surprisingly many of them will behave decently, lovingly and helpfully to their fellow sufferers. Know that the misanthropes were wrong.

Thus, in the midst of depravity and screeching want, altruism stands tall, a truly saintly vision glimpsed in the little actions of common men, women and children who refuse to believe the worst of their fellow humans. Behold the living hell that is the Imperial labour camp, but know also that the helping hand will be stretched out from one starving prisoner to comfort another. The Imperium may seek to reduce humans to caged beasts and numbers on a page, yet its titanic cruelty and disregard of human life cannot truly permeate those caught crushed under its adamantium heel. For good people, even in our darkest moments, will nonetheless manage to hold back the apocalypse through sheer will and decency. They will defeat cynicism through kindness and care, for when caring for themselves in disaster they will care greatly for others as well. They will mitigate human fears through empathy and solidarity amid the most baleful hardship. This is the paradise built in hell, where humans at the brink of oblivion find meaning and belonging in caring for their fellow man. Ultimately, we are our brother's and sister's keeper.

In the oral legends of camp gossip, names of outstanding helpful people stand out. On Gradovich Gamma during the worst of the purges, penal labourers whispered with reverence about the selflessness of Ajinisorfve Ajaksovnsrek, the unbelievable generosity of Malrav Vomalajs and the stoic example of Iskandar Nystinejzlos, who inspired many others to endure and put their heart into the work, despite their terrible lot in life. Such human potential for greater things is of course mostly wasted on the Imperium's watch, but the unconquerable human spirit still lurks there, deep in the hearts of men, women and children who has seen so much suffering and yet still refuse to give up.

Even in the bitter camps, laughter can be found amid mindnumbing drudgery that ought to have extinguished all joy in the human soul. Some of the best sinspeech whisper jokes found across the wide Imperium are believed to have originated in penal labour camps. Here is but one example:

"Tyrant Matteus, is it true that you collect jokes about yourself?"
"Yes."
"And how many have you collected so far?"
"Three and a half labour camps."

The faceless numbers do have a face. And so the vital spirit in man refuse to die, among people condemned to a slow and agonizing death through slave labour. As backbreaking work inflicts irreparable wounds on convicts, those who have lost everything still find value in common decency. The Imperial camp administration might seek the total oblivion of any worth in life for the thralls, but the victims of terror must ultimately be servitorized if that goal is to be obtained. They lived.

Repent, sinner! Repent of your thoughts of self! Repent of your deviancy! Repent!

The whip may lash out, the tongue may scream, and flesh may burn, yet the callous overlords and theocrats of the Terran Imperium can never seem to create a new Imperial man bred for unfailing obedience and submission. Not even in the darkest pits of horror and drudgery can they truly break the human spirit, hidden though it often be inside gnarled and scarred bodies and jaded eyes. Hardship may dull us, but it cannot wholly quench us.

And so we see, among so many corpses and broken dreams, that humanity is fundamentally unchanged in this distant epoch of baleful woe.

Ultimately, the Imperium is a bloody farce.

In an era of darkest suffering and waste, the Emperor's brutopian dream has degenerated into a bizarre nightmare of primitivization and decay, where the devilishly hard measures to combat unnatural forces only serve to strengthen the Dark Gods.

In a time beyond hope, man has become harnessed to the plow, to toil like a beast, all efforts wasted as our species finds itself trapped in a death spiral of its own making.

At the end of all things, our kind has sunk to the level of scrabbling vermin, infesting a rotting cosmic empire. For in truth the Imperium of Man amounts to nothing short of a fortified madhouse straddling the stars.

Or perhaps even a suicide pact.

Gone wrong.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/05/23 22:50:07


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Discovery

"Well I'll be damned! Did ya know this can opener fits on the end of a lasgun?"

- Anecdote of an ignorant conscript discovering his bayonet, from Colonel Juanito Diaz' equally censored and celebrated memoirs
Between Battle Drills, Bedsheets and Bribes: The True Story of My Military and Amorous Career Within His Imperial Majesty's Revered Porfirixian Planetary Defence Force

- - -

Tribute to Bill Mauldin's Willie & Joe, with a Porfirian touch. In space.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/05/30 13:14:44


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Joke Piece on Subversion

This fun thing emerged on Reddit.

- - -



Into the Flames

In the grim darkness of the far future, man leaves man to burn alive for his sins.

Fire!

Listen. The warning cry will send shivers down human spines, a portent of suffocating doom and hellish tongues consuming possessions and flesh alike in an inferno.

Fire!

Hear. The dreaded cry will ring out, and suddenly loved ones are to be lost, homes are to vanish and treasures and savings are to be reduced to nought but ash. How much of human history has vanished in capricious flame through the ages? What will remain standing among the cinders afterwards? What can be saved from the blaze? Can you be saved? Your kin?

Fire!

Act. The cry will be met with shouts and wailing. Adrenaline and billowing panic race through the veins of men, women and children. Primordial fear grapples with deedful instincts and a will to fight the burning menace, to preserve kith and kin and salvage precious belongings. The human heart runs amok, as animal terror fights innate heroism in a world at once gone hot, dry and deadly amid a thousand devils' flaring autumn colours. Frightened ears listen for steady voices, for sure commands to guide them out of this roaring peril. And everywhere, as things turn to ash, dark smoke bllows out, their embrace as insidious as poison.

No matter the epoch, the sight of rampaging fire will invoke much the same spectrum of responses from mankind. The reactions may vary to some degree, depending on training and known facilities on hand, yet the heart of man inevitably fears the flame, no matter if he dwells in a hut or a spire reaching for the stars themselves.

From the time when man first discovered fire, he has also battled to control the flames. Old Earth was once home to eternal temple fires, which priests and sacred virgins never allowed to go out. During the misty past of the distant Age of Terra, myths spoke of stolen fire carried from the gods on high to mortal men below, ending in a story of horrendous punishment visited upon the thief for thus empowering mankind with such a prohibited force. Echoes of this ancient legend still exist in a myriad forms across a million worlds and countless voidholms, retold by the fireside and electric heater as clans huddle together, close to the warmth. Yet the forbidden prize itself will often arise unexpectedly to harrow man with destruction, akin to a divine punishment that continues to scourge man, in a timeless tale of inhuman woe.

Garbled sagas from all across the Milky Way galaxy contain fragments of a far away time, a better time, a blissful time. A sinful time. They tell of a golden age, when man scarcely feared fire and lightning, and when he settled the stars with bold audacity and explored the cosmos as his birthright. They tell of the Dark Age of Technology, when fountains taller than mountains flowed and nanoxtingers too small for the eye to spot would arise to douse sparks and budding flames. They tell of rainstorms and even floods and tsunamis that could be fashioned by man at the flick of a finger to extinguish flames with razorlike precision, all fanciful glimpses of man's unrivalled artificial control of his surroundings during bygone eras. For truly man ruled the universe with supreme confidence, and in his arrogance did man first challenge, and then deny divinity, and such unbelief was to be the undoing of ancient man.

If distorted memories encapsulated within these fanciful narratives are to be believed, then Man of Gold in times of yore sported suits, vehicles and buildings immune to all the ravages of fire and heat. And Man of Stone directed Man of Iron with such efficient speed to kill sprouting flames, that many humans nigh-on lost their inherent fear of fire, and rare flares became a childish curiosity to them, exotic phenomena to be witnessed if they were fast enough, before an unfailing machine system corrected the error. For at first did Man of Iron not allow Man of Gold to come to harm, yet the dutiful servant in paradise became corrupted by Abominable Intelligence, and the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron was destined to shatter, as punishment for godless man's horrible sins.

And so Man of Iron rose up to betray his master, and a cataclysmic machine revolt swept the human star domains like a wildfire in the heavens, slaying all life on a million worlds while another million burnt like torches, surrounded by void installations that crashed with flaming tails. And when the machines were vanquished, there came a cursed time of witches and ravages. Thus human civilization was toppled from its absolute pinnacle of shining glory, to crash into a horrid wasteland of ash and cinders. The grand beacon of hope and progress was extinguished, and all was fell.

Bereft of the technological marvels of their forebears, the savages and scavengers that roamed the subsequent cannibal age was left to the mercy of the elements. Exposed to cold, to radiation and to starvation and thirst, these technobarbarians lit campfires with whatever fuel they could find, to stave off freezing and darkness. Surrounded on all sides by the dark and by strange screams, these primitive wretches found comfort in flames as they squatted amid the ruins of a great civilization. Yet fire brought not only warmth and light, but also danger. Accidents would see flames consume entire tent villages and vaults filled with survivors, while deliberate use of fire as a rudimentary weapon saw foes and neighbours grilled to death in their own homes.

In this cannibal freefall known as Old Night, man quickly learnt anew to fear the flame, and to fear the unknown. In this deteriorating world of warlords and devastation, man's means to fight fire had usually degraded to crude bucket brigades and strangulation with blankets, while intact relics of ancient firefighting that could be manually worked by humans were much treasured and even fought over, as were other pieces of potent archeotech. Oftentimes, larger fires that devoured entire settlements of shanty huts would run rampant, beyond any means for ignorant man to control. Then, mankind was reduced to pray for strong rains, or to ask the gods for a flood. Such was firefighting for most of miserable humanity during the Age of Strife.

This aeon of ruin was ended abruptly by the Terran Emperor's brutal conquests, as Mars and Terra reasserted their interstellar dominion in sweeping wars that allowed no one to stay outside Imperial rule. The Great Crusade brought back a modicum of civilization, order and technological restoration to most human societies brought into Compliance, and one of the services reestablished by the early Imperium of Man was that of firefighting. As towering cities of enforced hope and knowledge were erected across the Milky Way galaxy, so too did well-oiled institutions arise to keep the material trappings of this human renaissance safe from worldly disasters. Where once spreading flames had been a communal emergency to be dealt with by floundering amateurs that were as ill-prepared as they were untrained, now city fires, factorum fires and forest fires would be tackled rapidly by drilled corps of professionals and volunteers stocked up on advanced equipment to deal with any number of fickle disaster scenarios, not only limited to burning flames.

Man lived better while the Imperator walked among His chosen species, and the realm of man grew more secure and confident, as a million captured worlds and voidholms beyond counting prospered and bloomed by Imperial grace. Where once Chaos had reigned during Old Night, now law, order and safeguards against disasters rose up amid wealthy Compliant societies. Populations that had once roamed anarchic in complete distrust for other people not of close kin, would at long last cultivate civic pride and trust in both fellow humans and larger, civilian institutions. During this heyday of mounting greatness, the popular image emerged, of the heroic fireman saving humanity from little disasters at home, whom all could depend on, while all-conquering Legions saved mankind as a whole from oblivion at a thousand battlefronts. And man began to dream again under the shadow of the stern Aquila, to nurture hope once more and to think of the great works that the ancients must have been undertaking before the great fall. And so brilliant minds turned their energies to repair and recover what knowledge had been lost, for they were once again aflame with visions of unlocking the secrets of the universe, and their spirits were determined to conquer lore just as the Emperor's warriors conquered worlds.

Such were the radiant promises of the early Imperium, yet they were to bear rotten fruit.

The greatest of traitors decreed: Let the galaxy burn.

And burn it did.

Seared away in the flames of ambition and envy, the human resurgence was brought low by human failings, and man revolted against his saviour and conqueror. Brother slew brother, and sister strangled sister across a thousand thousand worlds when the Emperor of Mankind Himself was nigh-on slain in the skies above Terra. Yet from suffering this heinous crime did He ascend into supreme godhood, to judge all of our species from the Golden Throne of hallowed myth in sacred perpetuity. Man would forever do penance for his baleful sins, and flames would scorch his flesh as smoke filled his lungs.

As the Age of Imperium ground on, fire became seen as an instrument of justice and purity, burning away sin, filth and corruption. Thus heretics, witches, mutants and malcontents were heaped upon the pyre, in an ever-deepening spiral of horror and malice heading into the darkest abyss of human depravity. Yet customs and morals were not the lone subject of a downward spiral, for technology itself underwent a slow grind into atavistic barbarity, in a drawn-out process of demechanization and loss of knowledge that has seen ordinary means of firefighting degenerate from airborne skimmers and sophisticated pump systems to the manual labour of bucket brigades.

One common symptom of technological deterioration for everyday civilian appliances within the Imperium, can be seen in the shape of the hosemen of a myriad different firefighting corps. Instead of being issued independently portable respirator apparati, the hosemen are given crude and cheap rebreathing masks fitted with long hoses that they drag along wherever they go, ever at risk of stepping on each others' air hoses or getting themselves entangled inside burning buildings. As man-portable respirator systems have gone from being a given norm for all pyrovigiles with any rebreathing apparatus whatsoever, to becoming a treasured prestige item, firefighting specialists such as smokedivers have been given priority for portable respirator equipment, while lowly hosemen teams are tasked with extinguishing fires as they drag along a snake's nest of both water hoses and air hoses.

This technological primitivization of human firefighting units in the Age of Imperium mirrors a grand retardation of every area within civilian society and military alike. It is however not only a decay of tech, but also of human systems of organization. When the Emperor of Terra walked among His dutiful subjects, firefighting services that protected everything and everyone within His domain was just part of the normal patchwork of civilization, and not something many thought twice about. During the early Imperium, many firemen were part of altruistic volunteer corps, and local Governors invested in standing corps of regular pyrovigiles to go along with these heroic citizens of a healthy civil society. On top of that did private organizations fund anti-inferno units for the common good, out of a robust sense of civic service.

As the Imperium has aged, and aged badly, the very word of 'citizen' has lost all meaning within the Low Gothic language, and nowadays everyone will talk about Imperial subjects or willing thralls of the Emperor. Where it once was unthinkable for able-bodied fire-soldiers to allow houses and people to burn without lifting a finger to save them, nowadays such practices of selective firefighting have become part and parcel of the commercial profit calculations of Guilds and collegia, and most humans in the fortyfirst millennium have never even heard of the concept of a volunteer firefighting corps.

The reason for this dying away of volunteer associations such as fireman organizations is twofold. First, it is the result of ruthless firefighting companies seeking to eliminate all competition through means both violent and legalese in nature. Second, it is the fruit of a persistent governance theme, where paranoid Imperial Governors and Voidholm Overlords will suppress any civil associations such as volunteer firefighting units, since any kind of popular organizations whatsoever could be used as a platform for rebellions and coups. Both Imperial and local rulers will pose the strongest opposition to the formation of volunteer firefighting units. After all, allowing the rabble to organize themselves for any reason whatsoever is a dangerous habit that can easily provide the basis for insurrections. Better to strangle that baby in the cradle than allow the unwashed plebs to coalesce, by slaying the new volunteer firefighting corps in as public a way as possible, complete with false accusations and grisly displays of dying volunteer firemen and their mutilated bodyparts amid much pomp and circumstance, set to the tune of rabid propaganda.

This dysfunctional obsession with public order over the common good has ever been a plague upon the fulfilment of humanity's true potential, and the long-term results of it will invariably turn counter-productive even for the purposes of maintaining stability. Thus does distrust breed misery, and failure begets failure.

Indeed, most worlds and voidholms within the Emperor's cosmic domains will lack governance-run Fire Ministries, since such natural parts of human civilizations during the early Imperium has long since rotted away through fivehundred generations of corruption, cutbacks and a morass of screeching inefficiency and bureaucratic rigmarole. Thus, with the general absence of volunteer corps of firemen and functioning governatorial anti-inferno departments, the field has been left abandoned for privileged business interests to dominate, except for in underhives and the worst sorts of slums. Here, haphazard communal efforts must make do, since these lawless regions and neighbourhoods are too poor to afford better equipment and training, thus rendering any volunteer firefighters that they may occasionally manage to muster inefficient.

Nowadays there is usually little difference between commercial firefighters and those originally organized by planetary and voidholm authorities. Lack of official funds coupled with rampant corruption, graft and glad-handing means that such governance-founded pyrovigiles corps will almost inevitably adopt the practices of private firefighting organizations, and after a sufficient number of centuries they will even be recognized as such de jure as well as de facto. They got to eat, after all.

There are five overarching categories that summarize how most firefighting collegia work, although many companies will function in several overlapping categories, and other modes of operation exist outside these most usual ones. The five most common ways of commercial firefighting in the Age of Imperium can be summed up as follows: Internal, contractual, insurance-hunting, property-gobbling and enforced by decree.

First, internal firefighting is carried out by employed specialists within Guild compounds and other installations, all owned and operated by the same merchant clan or potentate. Parts of such corpus pyrovigiles branches and damage control units will often be leased out during periods of lull, though they never roam far from their assigned compounds, since lucrative opportunities abroad pale in comparison to the losses to be incurred if damage control teams are absent during any of the many breakdowns and disasters that plague Imperial industry on an everyday basis. Internal firefighting is usually assisted by ad-hoc musters of manpower, some of whom may sport rudimentary training in damage control. This is most common in vast manufactorum complexes, onboard merchant vessels and Guilder-operated astromining voidholms, as well as in any noble palaces.

Second, contractual firefighting is carried out by specialized firms regularly hired by other organizations as part of standing arrangements, usually involving a convoluted subscription service. Oathbound firefighting setups are part of this category, including fire companies who perform duties for temples, monasteries and other religious establishments as part of their traditional obligations outside the scope of profit. After all, the priests promised a better afterlife for any firemen who would assist the Ministorum without the aim of pecuniary compensation. Pyrovigiles cartels will fight fires in structures where they are obligated to do so by sealed contract, and let other buildings burn to the ground with indifference. Sometimes they can be persuaded by bribes to extend their firefighting operations to areas adjacent to their contractual territory, some bribes of which include the offering up of lewd services from desperate commoner families, or the gifting away of clansmembers as thralls.

Third, insurance-hunting firefighting is carried out by freelancing corporate entities, who seek out burning buildings wearing the metal plaques of sanctioned insurance collegia, who promise to reward whosoever saves their insured structure from the flames. When insurance-based firefighting first emerged, it was common practice for pyrovigiles companies to quench any fire in order to stop it from spreading, just as it was usual for insurance collegia to pay a partial reward for the stopping of flames on nearby non-insured buildings in order to incentivize firefighters to stop nascent great fires in their tracks. However, over the centuries such practices have decayed away across His astral realm thanks to a miasma of greyzone lawyermongering and pennypinching myopia. As such, nowadays insurance collegia will strictly only reward freelancing fireman companies for saving insured buildings, and no civic-mindedness to fight fires in non-insured property for the sake of the common weal can any longer be found among the commercial pyrovigiles units. After all, if a tender structure fire do gain traction and spread to multiple insured buildings, will there not be greater potential to claim fees? Insurance-hunting firefighting companies will often fight each other in bloody street brawls for the chance to claim the reward, resulting in such units sporting lethal weaponry and far better body armour than most military units in the Imperium can ever dream of being issued with. Ironically, the fierce rivalry between some competitors will often cause worse fires than the original cause for their showing up on the scene in the first place.

Fourth, property-gobbling firefighting is carried out by freelancing pyrophobia firms, headed by cunning entrepreneurs with an eye for amassing wealth at the expense of people in dire straits. This demented format will involve an entire brigade of firemen with equipment and vehicles showing up to the site of raging fire, without engaging in firefighting. The leading lucratores will then call upon the owner of the burning property and haggle viciously. If the negotiations are succesful, the company owner will purchase either the burning property, or buy up a large number of its hereditary indentured serfs for a pittance, and then send in his firefighters. If the property owner refuse to sell out his buildings, vehicles and minions to the ruthless slumlord, the property-gobbling crassii will usually turn on their heels and march away without lifting a finger to fight the spreading inferno, although worse practices still have emerged in recent centuries.

Fifth, firefighting enforced by decree is carried out by any privately owned firefighting brigades that can be mustered by the edicts of an autocrat. These commercial pyrovigiles will work for no reward, or under rules of non-negotiable compensation set by an Imperial Governor or other authorities. They will almost always be backed up by paramilitary organizations, Planetary Defence Forces, mobs of sectarian zealots and hastily amassed hordes of gangs, clan militias and other plebeian rabble who can form bucket brigades and perform other forms of lowly grunt labour in order to fight fires grand enough to catch the attention of administrators and military commanders.

Such are the five most common forms of firefighting within the astral domains of the Enthroned One, yet there is more to be said of the heinous methods employed by man against fellow man where fires are concerned.

In the Age of Imperium, empathy toward anyone who is not close kin has largely died out among His chosen species. As such, liveried firefighting companies will often refuse to rescue people inside burning buildings unless the client pay extra. Some fireman cartels will even decline to bring ladders, since their business is strictly the saving of property, not life. Such abominable calculations used to stand as the pinnacle of ruthless firefighting practices within the Imperium of Man, yet they have long since been superseded by even more monstrous deeds driven by twisted logic.

After all, is it not a baleful sin to refuse to pay for saving home and loved ones from the flame? Is it not the ultimate condemnation of spiritual failure to stand empty-handed, with empty purse and no lucre to reward the stalwart soldiers against fire? Not only do such worthless house-owners endanger themselves, but their neighbours and larger community also. Such accursed deviancy! Clearly, the God-Emperor has weighed their souls, and found them wanting. These misers and paupers have already been judged by Him on Terra, and damnation is to be their lot. Should not such scum and wretches burn, and burn justly? Let the flames of purgation engulf them! Aye, cast them bodily into the very fires that they cannot afford to quench, to set a warning example for others to heed!

Indeed such culling of the rabble will serve a virtuously eugenic purpose in Imperial modes of thinking. Should not the weak be purged for the betterment of mankind as a whole? Thus the cruel circus of civilian life inside the Imperium of Holy Terra goes on, spawning ever more parodic forms of human malevolence and dysfunctional systems of self-harm, all rationally argued by minds indoctrinated with a thousand lies and a hundred fallacies in a fanatic cacophony amounting to nothing short of collective insanity. And the Dark Gods beyond the Empyrean will smile at this, for how could the emotions of a galaxy-spanning civilization characterized by such rotting stagnation, scheming greed and unrelenting bloodshed fail to feed the forbidden forces of Chaos?

Aside from classical means of urban and rural firefighting, we must touch briefly on common ways in which great fires within hive cities, voidholms and starships may be countered across the Imperium. Firefighting in many hive cities pose a considerable challenge, aside from overlapping jurisdictions and territorially aggressive fireman cartels. Treated water is often precious, strictly rationed and usually owned by a monopolistic Water Guild that is as infamous as it is draconic. As such, untreated water will often be resorted to by crafty firesoldier collegia, thus spraying flames with filthy liquid from cesspools and sewers, with blatant disregard for the spreading of cholera and still worse diseases that will result from such disgusting methods.

Many low-value hive city quarters will often be allowed to burn out in containment behind closed bulkheads, although some midhive regions will be structurally saved by their callous overlords by the pumping out of all air, thus asphyxiating the people inside. Essential industries and infrastructure will often see a concerted effort at firefighting, much of it primitive or alchemically toxic for the handlers that try to smother the fire. Foam, water, halon and sand will be taken out of stockpiles collected for such crises by commercial firefighting organizations. Sometimes, guards may be placed around the disaster area to catch any escaping people without sealed and approved official parchments, threatening to either throw them back into the blazes or make them sign away themselves and their descendants through hereditary servitude contracts, followed by branding the wretches before hauling them away in shackles or putting them into chaingang bucket brigades. It goes without saying that conflicts of interest between former and newer owners of slave manpower may thus erupt with violent force after a great fire, but that is just a natural part of life within the tumultuous Imperium of Man, as obvious as the air we breathe.

In the starspangled void, ships and voidholms will employ a number of means to fight fires. Few shipboard dangers are more devastating and frightening than fire that burns uncontrolled through a voidship's corridors and decks. Even seasoned crew may be sent into panic by a small blaze, trampling each other in a frenzy to escape through narrow corridors before bulkheads are sealed in an attempt to halt the fire from spreading. During a conflagration, the ship's Infernus Master is charged with keeping order and minimizing the damage caused to equipment, personnel and morale. An Infernus Master will organize aqueduct technicians and huge bucket brigades, oversee evacuations and command damage control crews bold or foolhardy enough to combat even the deadliest of plasma flares.

Often, an out-of-control fire will see a ship's masters seal off the ravaged sections and then open the blazing decks to the void, killing the crew and fire in one stroke. Decompression into the void will often be the best way to solve a shipboard fire, and the same goes for many smaller voidholms across the Imperium. Still, other tools available on some vessels and stations will be to flood corridors and chambers with halon gas, fire-inhibiting foam and water. On some of the most anicent and intact vessels and voidholm sections there will even be machine spirits capable of unleashing its suffocating forces upon the lethal flames, and such mechanical systems will often be used as a distrupting countermeasure against boarding enemy troops.

No matter the location, fire brigades will not only respond to and fight fires that they are compensated for or ordered to attack, but they will also patrol streets and corridors with sanctioned authority to carry out harsh corporal punishment upon those who violate fire prevention codes, and anyone lowborn whom they do not like the look of. Their paid services include many tasks which strictly speaking has nothing to do with firefighting, such as search-and-rescue operations in collapsed buildings, wrecks and tube crashes after hivequakes and great junkslides, provided that Guilds, collegia and clans pay them for it up front. Pyrovigiles on unfortunate agri-worlds who perform firefighting or search-and-rescue missions may sometime run into feral Orks, which they will seek to exterminate to then claim bounty if the xenos' numbers are low enough. After all, most anti-fire corps are for all intents and purposes yet another armed gang, or paramilitary force.

Many firefighters also do double duty as watchmen and support personnel for the Officio Medicae during medical emergency operations. Needless to say, such medical emergency services only exist for Adepts and upper castes, and sometimes also for important specialists and valuable Imperial servants who constitute important human production units, as long as they do not live in too much of a backwater area. Ordinary hoi polloi among Imperial subjects will have to fend for themselves when accidents and sickness strike, counting on neighbours and clan to care for them, and possibly even scrape together savings to pay a slum doctor or downbeaten Medicae station. If they are lucky they might be treated by their compound's medical personnel, should their liege lords and employers deem them worth the expenditure of resources, all costs of which will be added to the serfs' hereditary bondage debts.

During epidemics, pyrovigiles corps across the Imperium will often be one of many kinds of organizations tasked with enforcing quarantines with crippling force and lethal violence. They may likewise find themselves drafted for riot control duty, should tumult threaten to overwhelm various policiary forces, gendarmes and both regular and irregular military units. As Chief Pyrophant Herostratus expressed, when his firemen lined up to assist the Adeptus Arbites during the Milo revolt:

"The embers of heresy, of rebellion, and of hope shall all meet the same fate - stamped out beneath a nomex-clad boot."

Alternatively, as one widespread Imperial proverb has it: A horse never deserves to die, but sometimes a man does.

Speaking of riot control, a great many firefighting companies within the Imperium will carry flamers as part of their standard equipment. Officially, these flamers can be used to burn any unsanctioned writings that are discovered, or indeed torch miscreants and heretics on the spot, for the thin red line of warriors against fire may act as enforcers of law and order during patrols. These flamers are also handy tools for staging training exercises, or controlling the fire-security of newly constructed buildings that are supposed to be flame-proof. Unofficially, some unscrupulous firemen of commercial calling will occasionally use these flamers to create profitable work for themselves by secretly igniting flammable buildings, thus necessitating the call for them in an emergency. Alternatively, underhanded payments to orphans and crims may occur, akin to guttersnipes stoning windows to pocket bribes from windowsellers. Nonetheless, even amid all the dysfunctional depravity that characterize mankind in the Age of Imperium, most firefighters are still essentially heroic characters, fulfilling a direly needed security service for their decrepit communities, guarding them against the constant hazard of devouring flame and suffocating smoke.

Cutting firebreaks remain a popular method of hindering the spread of conflagrations all across the God-Emperor's sacred domains. Some may question your right to tear down a row of hovels. The wise understand you have no right to let them stand. Hooks and chains will be used to make firebreaks by pulling down walls of burning buildings to keep the fire from spreading, while swabs may be used to extinguish embers on roofs. One ordinary way for crassii to stop great fires consist of blasting firebreaks straight through slum favelas, holesteads, filthy huts and mutie hideouts by means of explosive charges. Collateral casualties are always acceptable in such urban dens of overpopulation, wretchedness and disease. Expunge the blasphemy of flame unbound!

As mankind's Age of Imperium has unfolded in sclerotic agony, electrical fires have multiplied drastically. Increasingly, insulation layers fail, and lay techmen make ever more numerous and worse mistakes as their grasp of handed-down lore shrinks into worsening superstition. Likewise, Imperial industry is churning out ever more shoddy electronics, especially so for consumer commodities, many of which are fire hazards straight off the production line. No wonder trusty old relics are so highly treasured when newer products fail so often. Not only will faulty lumens and clumsy pict-screens seem to spontaneously combust by inept design, for in the sea of ignorance and foolish house-tricks that characterize technical proficiency among Imperial subjects will be found a myriad manifestations of idiocy. One such common little phenomenon, out of fifty thousand other suicidal ploys, is to slot scrip coins into fuse holders, thereby bypassing the safety device and granting more juice until the whole place bursts into flame.

Such mundane fires are part of everyday life in Imperial settlements from end to end in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet the increasingly flammable nature of human hab nests and industries provide some advantages for Imperial overlords. Great fires, as a rule, will often attract a large audience of spectators, for truly it is a public attraction to see dwellings, infrastructure and unlucky humans go up in smoke. Loss of work hours is offset by the entertainment thus provided, which has a positive effect on public order and functions as a safety valve. Thus, Imperial governance has long since learnt to let the multitude flock to witness conflagrations, and not interfere unduly when vendors of cheap refreshments conduct a roaring trade while much joy and excitement is had off the tragedies of others. Indeed, some drunks, sadists or sectarian fanatics with a particularly unforgiving creed on misfortunes being the Celestial Imperator's rightful punishment upon the wicked, may even add to the spectacle by throwing back escaping men, women and children into the blazes, to the laughter, chanting and din of applause and catcalls from the crowd of onlookers.

Such scenes of horror are no random accidents, for they stand as a testament to how thoroughly the Imperium of the High Lords have managed to permeate countless human cultures across the galaxy. Basically, it all stems from a fundamental embrace of hardship and suffering. The Imperium has long chosen to acknowledge the cruelty of this universe, and advocates becoming one with it in order for mankind as a whole to survive and thrive in this vale of tears. Strength allows for no mercy.

Our being so hard. Our willingness to torture and throw you in labour camp. Our willingness to invade and slaughter. Whatever we are doing, is a sign that we understand how hard the world and life is, and that we embrace that. Tyrannical regimes are wrapped up in the idea that prosperous and loose regimes make for soft, weak people. We, the faithful worshippers of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, have embraced the harshness of life, and the truth of what it means to be alive. Evil is just what is possible. Thus the Imperium of Man is overtly horrible, and proud of it. It has a narrow view of what humanity should be, and has proven itself so incompetently evil as to become repulsive to anyone willing to view the Imperium without blinkers.

To serve as a fireman in the Age of Imperium is to be subject to an incomprehensible structure of collegiate departments and regulations, all working through a bewildering array of agreements, contracts and bonds of hereditary vassalage. One constant trouble tend to be contracts with the local Water Guild. Add to this a confusing variety of specialist teams, overseeing commissions and organizational bodies that you are usually better off ignoring, for the sake of your sanity. On top of that there is an inflammatory degree of factionalism and rivalries between both competing companies and units within the same corporation. Ambushes and assassinations are not unheard of. Sometimes the heated intraservice rivalry will draw the terrible attention of the Adeptus Arbites or even His Divine Majesty's Holy Inquisition, yet such traditional animosities can never truly be stamped out. Such friction will sometimes smooth out on scene, since fire does not care. Yet many other times, the conflagration will provide a backdrop for a street brawl or corridor shootout when wills collide and prestige is on the line in a showcase of human pettiness in power.

Pyrovigiles all across the Imperium are notoriously prone to stick to old formulas and adopt temporary solutions as the new standard operating procedure. Thus brief deviations from former procedures due to lack of personnel or malfunctioning equipment will ossify, until soon it is the only way that anyone knows how to do anything.

Such rigidity of thought and action when impromptu stopgap solutions are introduced is mirrored in the firefighters' homebrew maintenance and repair of equipment. Vehicles and pumps alike turn into patches and bypasses atop patches and bypasses, their machine spirits developing grumpy personalities and requiring elaborate, complex rituals to start, to the point of sometimes only working for that one crusty old fireman who has worked the thing since he was twelve. Indeed, many fire engines in the Imperium will be driven by old servicefolk who have been hardwired into the vehicle akin to a servitor, yet usually without the lobotomy, since their particular sentient knowledge of their specific engine is what keeps their value as a human asset maintained high enough to keep them employed even at such high age.

Firefighting corps across His astral dominion likewise tend to be dynastic in nature, with leading positions and assistant roles being filled by husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and so on. It goes without saying that strategic marriage, and in some cultures adoption as an adult, remains the best career path for any ambitious ladderman or engineman. In many ways, organizations of crassii and pyrovigiles represent microcosms of parochial and nepotistic human cultures under Imperial rule.

Likewise, tamers of inferno are inherently superstitious. Pyrovigiles will never complain about a lack of missions, and many organizations sport arcane beliefs, which will result in corporal punishment for merely saying the words 'quiet' or 'silence.' Yet the physical penalties and loss of rations will pale in comparison to the social ostracism and tongue-lashing harangues from their kinsfolk and comrades. Such verbal abuse may in rare cases stray into outright human sacrifice, as overworked and undermanned brigades turn to the Changer of Ways in unholy rituals of bloodletting, in order to ask the Dark God to bend probabilities for them to gain just a few hours to restore their gear and finally get some sleep.

In some human cultures, firefighters will carry thickly quilted coats to protect against the flames, whose insides are decorated with elaborate scenes of strength and heroism drawn from local legends and Imperial mythology alike. After a conflagration has been succesfully defeated, these daring warriors against fire will turn their coats inside-out and display the magical symbols they so identify with, and that protected them in mortal danger. Such peculiar firemen's coats are known by many names, such as the hikeshi banten of Ashigaru Secundus, or the tunica pyrobella of the Pannonian voidholm cluster.

Akin to many storied organizations under Imperial rule, fireman corps tend to sport elaborate rituals surrounding the death of celebrated members. Crania will often be pulled from deceased firefighters of note, to enable these respected veterans to continue their duties as honoured servo-skulls. Even in death they still spray.

One common aspect of Imperial firefighting is the fierce pride found amongst fireman companies. The vast majority of all anti-fire collegia eventually develops a mindset where the people that you were originally supposed to protect, instead seems like impediments to your work. This disdain for people is only fuelled by emergency calls caused by trivial stupidity, such as bush fires and public witch pyre spectacles during burn bans in dry periods. As a pyrovigiles, you will get exposed to unfathomable depths of human foolishnes and weakness, and you will see a lot of people at the worst moments of their lives. No wonder so many fireman cartels across Imperial space has decided to abandon the saving of lower caste life in order to focus solely on the saving of property from hungry flames.

A widespread tradition found among pyrovigiles corporations is that of the recurring settlement parade, where each of the local firefighting corps will march down the main street or central plaza. During such festive occasions, the crassii will don lavish helmets and uniforms, carry fancy fire axes and all manner of symbolic equipment and trinkets, decorated by artists and brigade members alike. Their chief officers will often lead the procession with engraved speaking trumpets or vox-amplifiers made out of precious metals, shouting insults at rival units and chanting fireman litanies together with their subordinates.

Such public celebrations help to cement a strong esprit de corps among firefighters. Most pyrovigiles companies will display a sense of shared brotherhood to rival that of any military unit. How could it be otherwise, when they depend on each other to keep their backs safe as they rush into the gates of hell on earth? How could these enemies of the flame not feel like a part of something greater than themselves, when they bounce around the backs of trucks for hours on end during night or lightsout, guided by the lumens of a dozen other vehicles?

Their experiences are certainly often akin to those of adventurers. For instance, most crustbound crassii prefer to fight fire on hot summer days rather than in the dead of winter, where such seasonal variations rule the roost. Freezing temperatures are brutal on both equipment and bodies, and some missions will require the firefighters to stay exposed to the elements on scene for half a Terran day or more. Most firemen learn to bring cold weather bags with a dry change of clothes, warmers for gloves and boots, and a plastic sack to stuff away wet garb inside. In cold regions it is common for pyrovigiles to have a layer of ice built up on them, which has the beneficient effect of being windproof. Wise pyrovigiles will avoid thawing out such ice covers until they are ready to head back to their base-station. Naturally, a great many freezing firesoldiers across the Imperium of Man will inhale poisonous fumes when they stand at engine exhausts to keep warm, but such vile toxification is a given universal fact of life in His blessed domains, and not something Imperial subjects take much notice of.

Imagine, for a while, what travails and sights will greet the brave conquerors of runaway sparks. Put yourselves in the boots of the scrawny juve who crawls into his first structure fire, seeing flames billowing over his head. Envision how steam and smoke must irritate and obscure your eyes as a fire starts to get away from you, because you had to get to that particular blazing scene immediately and could not spare even a moment to grab your helmet and equipment. Envisage how reflective livery vests will melt on you because you sit too close to the truck's pump exhaust, since the vehicle had too many people riding on it as per usual. See before your mind's eye how rural pyrovigiles will become surrounded by trees and other large flora bursting into flames like giant torches during drought-fuelled grass fire. And think of how urban or shipbound smokedivers must often balance on catwalks without railings, and squeeze their way through claustrophobic ducts during dangerous rescuing operations, since so many structures across the Imperium are built like veritable rats' nests, as if future man does not value himself more than lowly vermin.

Picture the tense atmosphere around an armed pyrovigiles being called upon to assist the local phylakitai law enforcement corps with traffic control guard duty around a crime scene, shortly after an unknown gunman shot a PDF trooper dead, while the firewoman hopes that the killer does not come charging out from cover to shoot her too. Conceive of the hellish conflagrations that can spread quickly through closely packed wharves loaded with flammable goods. Or more infuriatingly, ideate the catastrophic fire consuming a whole row of warehouses, because the plasteel fire doors which separated many of the storage rooms had been lazily left open, since almost everywhere in the Imperium is plagued by lousy fire prevention practices, even when means exist to do better. Imagine, if you will, being a firecombatant in the Phoenix Brigade on Songhai Ultima, being called out to stomp around a field at night because it was too soft to carry your unit's wheel-borne vehicles, grinding embers into the mud with all the grim ruthlessness of an Inquisitor stomping out heresy.

Heresy, indeed, ought to be punished by cleansing flames, the better to burn away sin and deviancy. On that point most Imperial subjects would agree, and none more so than pyrophiliac sects such as the Cult of Redemption. Redemptionists and similar extreme fanatics are by their very nature frequent firestarters, a fact which inevitably has led to persistent conflict between firefighting companes and these passionate zealots devoted to absolution. Many organizations of firemen will have deeply rooted traditional beliefs of their own, and a fair number will deploy brigade priests or bring along holy men akin to sacred mascots and lucky charms. The creed of the fervent pyrovigiles does not suffer the arsonist to live, for the igniter and the pyromaniac shall be extinguished in holy water.

And so a never-ending feud continues to play itself out across hundreds of thousands of planets and uncountable voidholms. For the most widespread traditional crassii means to deal with captured Redemptionist asonists, is to ritually drown them, and then string up their corpses for public display. Conversely, Redemptionists will repay the favour whenever they capture meddling firefighters who disrupt their righteous cleansing and just pogroms, by burning them alive to the accompaniment of much chanting. Embrace the flames of our doom! After all, to these cultists, the fires have been sent by the wroth God-Emperor in order to purify wayward sinners, and thus whosoever seeks to douse this instrument of His divine justice must himself burn for his unforgivable crime against the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

Crass business methods aside, pyrovigiles will often act as saviours, whether they come in the form of the bucket brigade or flying corpsmen with the most marvellous equipment that antique technoarcana can summon. These heroes with grimy faces will cut into their work with glowing energy, dragging hoses and raising axes. Fear denies faith, they will shout, as they stride into the flames in a halo of spray and steam. There, at the edge of hell, they will drag out half lifeless bodies of humans crushed under burning rubble, and step over the corpses of people suffocated by the dark breathe of fire. These brave men, women and juves will wade through the cinders of scorched ruins in a blaze of glory, protecting His physical realm from rampant fire.

Yet such stalwart protection is not free. Firemen in the Age of Imperium are well known to save lives and to rob owners of their property via legal contracts signed under maximum duress. Thus we see that a garbled echo of that ancient myth play out again and again, in a tale of theft and flames. No smoke without fire. From a greater point of view, the retardation of firefighting forces into little more but disjointed organizations for profit constitute a development of human interstellar civilization about as wise as pouring a bucket of water on an electrical fire. It may be painful to watch, but know that the Imperial Creed does teach us that pain is weakness leaving the body.

The Imperium of Man is stuck in a tangle of pathologies, as dysfunctional as they come, causing man to forsake mercy, volunteer benevolence and civic obligations for an infernal morass of suspicions and self-serving cruelty. Corruption has rotted out major parts of the Emperor's vast realm, under a swarm of mediocre sovereigns who continues to undermine human power in the Milky Way galaxy for the sake of shortsighted paranoia. It is all nightmare fuel.

And so, countless subjects of His Divine Majesty will include a line in their daily prayers, for the God-Emperor of Holy Terra to preserve them and their kinsfolk from the hidden embers, the hungry flame, the flare of plasma and the sudden fire. They have all seen too many neighbours and relatives fall for flame and smoke, and many of them bear burn marks that will never fully heal. All souls call out for salvation, for the blazes of the material world is but a foretaste of the roaring hellfire that awaits all sinners. Thus we must all prove our penitence by lashes and fasting. Repent of your thought of self! Repent of your wicked sins! Repent! Repent or burn!

Such are the pious mantras on a hundred billion lips, across a million worlds and voidholms beyond number. Such are the guiding words of the far future, spoken by the true fanatic. This flagellating zealot, known as man, was once the master of the cosmos, mortal and supreme in his craft and knowledge. Secrets he knew, the lore of science uncovering the very fabric of creation itself, while arcologies rose like towers of paradise on millions of worlds. Technology he fashioned, with machines making machines in ever more cunning ways, as man surfed the stars and explored the cosmos with bold curiosity. This edenic idyll was once everyday life for humanity during a bygone era of gold and splendour, when man bestrode the universe like a titan.

The very same man is now reduced to a hunkered wretch, as parochial and ignorant as he is myopically aggressive. Underfed and ravaged by disease and alien parasites, man has built for himself shanties and huts, in a grand edifice amounting to nothing short of hell on earth, and all the glorious promises of his mind has he forsaken, as his hands lose ever more grasp of the salvaged relics that remain from former times. From better times. Ultimately, this is all a dead end for human development across the Milky Way galaxy. Such is the Age of Imperium.

For all is decay in this decrepit galactic civilization, as our species has wasted ten thousand precious years by treading water just to keep its head above the surface, gulping for air in desperation. Thus all is well in the cosmic domains of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

Such is the depraved state of humanity, in a time beyond hope.

Such is our species, at the brink of doom.

Such is the fate that awaits us all.

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


- - -

Drawn and written for CrusaderApe.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/06/17 15:02:09


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Signpost

In the grim darkness of the far future, man finds himself damned for missing a sign.

It is said that the road to golden paradise is well signposted, but it is badly lit at night.

Amid the soulcrushing misery that characterizes life for most people in the dour Age of Imperium, humour still infests the blessed star realm of the celestial Imperator like weeds in a regimented agridome. In a great many local cultures across the Milky Way galaxy, humans in the Age of Imperium have developed a taste for dark humour. After all, if one cannot laugh at the misery, then all one is left with, is to cry over it.

Outside the officious signs put up by Imperial and local authorities, there may be found a great many witty and clever warning signs put up in human societies across hundreds of thousands of worlds and uncountable voidholms. Many signs consists of simple pictures, not only for the sake of clarity, but also because illiteracy is rife across vast swathes of the Holy Terran domains.

An ancient proverb from the misty Age of Terra has it, that a regular path has no signpost.

Due to a massive population and far too few law enforcers, many Imperial worlds and voidholms have developed a culture of intimidating warning signs. Warning people without being stiff is much easier for people to accept, and engages thinking in a way that stale warning signs cannot do. In many cultures, such signs are not standard fare, but they make up a persistent minority of signs, and tend to turn heads when spotted. In other human cultures, such signs have become the prevailing standard, with wits competing to bring out the most memorable warning signs. The worse ones are blunt, without much in the way of thought-provoking humour, such as "Intruders will be brutally eaten by dogs" or "Stay off the grass or you will be beaten." Yet the best of these warning signs have a touch of class, humour and intellectual grit, all rolled together.

Here are some few of these written signs of the fortyfirst millennium.

- - -

"No fights in the elevator. The wires are close to snapping."

Sign outside an Administratum building: "No parking at the gate. Violating tires will be deflated along with the driver."

Construction site sign: "My dear workers: When you are out working, pay attention to safety. If you have an accident, some other man will sleep with your wife, beat your kids, and spend your widow's death grant! Work safely, for your own sake."

Neighbourhood militia sign: "Attention all thieves! Once captured, you will be beaten bloody all the way from the front-alley to the back-alley. This alley is 786 meters long."

No smoking sign at promethium station: "We fully understand that your life is worthless, but fuel is really expensive."

"Do not step inside. The dog is psyched like a warchild."

"Grass: Today you step on my head, next year I will grow on your grave."

"Do not defecate here. Offenders shall be beaten into their own waste by a mob."

Road sign: "Please drive safely, there is no medicae nearby."

"Do not stand about here. Even if you are not hit someone else will be."

"Stand in line. Do not revolt against vapid conformity enforced by fear."

"Do not fight: Winner goes to prison, loser goes to medicae ward."

"Warning: If found here by night you will be found here in the morning."

Sign at the foot of a canyon infamous for being dangerous to drive through: "Many truckloads of families have passed here on their way to their seasonal labour. Few came back."

"Bribe attempts lower than 17 Crowns will be reported to the Urban Enforcers."

"Do not speed. Corpse Guilders have returned to their homedistricts."

"No railings. Fear denies faith."

"Do not try it. You are a lot more bluff than you are tough."

"Due to recent errors at the manufactorum, our las-packs no longer have the required charge for warning shots."

Warning sign for a suicide spot: "Have you wiped your cogitator memory banks?"

"Please do not throw garbage. Avoid a serious flogging."

"It is far better to listen to the bowstring that broke than to never string a bow. Trespass here and we will enjoy listening to the breaking of you."

"Do not watch out for falling objects. The corpse pay is worth the trouble of carrying your remains out the back gate."

"Drive safe or die alone."

"Attention ledge jumpers: We will fine the clan of every corpse found on this property. Electroshock collars for kin-groups unable to pay have been stockpiled. Will they look good on your spouse, kids and parents?"

"Unlike many others, the above sign does not lie."

"Step carefully, noble one, or your attendant thralls will have to scoop up your remains."

"Here sits a relic of our immortal Emperor. Aspiring thieves will meet the God Himself."

"Please break in. We do not feed the crocohounds."

"Mr Credit is dead so do not ask for him."

"Step silently in the corridor. The gun servitor has no mercy inhibitors."

"Gangleader Krzychustach Throatbiter was here. He disappeared. Will you?"


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/06/17 19:14:37


Post by: Skinflint Games


In Imperium of Man,sign posts you!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/06/17 19:46:49


Post by: Insectum7


"No railings. Fear denies faith." is a masterpiece


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/06/17 20:16:59


Post by: Skinflint Games


I didn't spot that one at first but yeah, absolutely X-D


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/06/18 01:19:47


Post by: Dekskull


40K is the definitive Anti-Star Trek.

It depicts a universe where we achieved the techno utopia of Star Trek. Unlimited everything..but it still wasn't enough to stop the collapse. Because in the end literal chaos always wins out.

Now the Tau are the New United Federation of Planets.

Love it!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/07/15 16:49:06


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Haha, nice one! That phrase may well show up in the future.

@Insectum7: Thanks!

@Dekskull: Spot on! Agreed to the letter.




Scrip In Fuse Box

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is scorched by his own captive lightning.

Most forms of mundane technological hardware during the Dark Age of Technology was characterized by multilayered safety features. Long experience with the unexpected cascade effects of natural disasters and human blunders had taught the tinkering minds of that shining aeon how best to build away lurking dangers in machinery, and how best to counteract bloody-minded stupidity by material design and education alike. Mankind as a whole during that age was greedy for knowledge and willing to watch and learn, and the best and the brightest of our species reached out for the stars and inifinity itself in toiling displays of ingenuity. Man crafted great wonders and colonized more than twain million worlds in his unbounded spirit of enterprise, and as man excelled on a grand scale, so he likewise proved brilliant with tiny details.

Thus the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron would not only venture boldly into the unknown and explore the cosmos with unmatched daring and cunning, for ancient man would also fashion his humble everyday surroundings into elegant vistas of marvellous artifice and an idyllic level of safety in life that stood at odds with the unlocked forces of nature which man had tamed. Risk is inherent to everything in creation, yet ancient man in his hubris sought to turn the world of mortals into a godless paradise bereft of death, aging and suffering, and ever more did man do away with slices of travail, for man swore by the limitless potential of his own wit and masterful hands. And at the peak of arrogance did ancient man deny divinity itself, and he concluded that if any gods existed, then man's worldly might was far superior.

For the sake of such heinous sins was ancient man punished and nigh-on scoured from the stars in heaven. And Dark Ones of Hell arose from beyond the fabric of reality, and they lashed the golden realm of man with barbed whips of machine revolt, Warp storms and a plague of witches, mutants and Daemons that tore the era of greatness and hubris asunder. Rogue machine crushed its unbelieving master underheel as Abominable Intelligence ran amok, and brother slew brother while sister ate sister in a frenzied freefall into the stark pits of depravity. Cannibalism, loss of knowledge and the collapse of civilization reigned supreme as the false promises of the Dark Age of Technology were swept away by Old Night, and for millennia upon millennia of horror and hunger was man reduced to an ignorant wretch who scavenged and fought his own kin among the ruins of ancient titans. Raw desperation drove man to abominable acts amid the hardship, and the descendants of gifted ancients tore their mute inheritance apart in a carnival of wanton destruction and Chaos. Alien preyed upon man in his epoch of weakness, and all was fell.

Then, a saviour arose from the cradle of mankind, and His strong Legions conquered first the homeworld of our species, and then much of the galaxy in a furor of bloodshed. The banner of lightning was raised on planet and voidholm alike, and the promises of restoration of human intergalactic civilization echoed from end to end of the Milky Way galaxy with energetic hope. Yet as the Emperor fell to base human treachery in the skies above Terra, the dream of a better future died, and man was forever cursed to wander this vale of woe in torment and humilitation. For his unforgivable sins, man would face suffering aplenty, and hardship neverending.

And should not thorns prick man's skin for his abominable betrayal of the celestial Imperator? Should not serpents bite man's heels for his baleful deeds? Should not hunger and thirst claw at man's insides for his inherited crime? Should not sparks incinerate man's flesh for his ancestral hubris? Is it not right that man should buckle under his burdens? Is it not proper that man's bones should break under his loads? Is it not just that man's body shall be harrowed and scourged in every way imaginable?

Aye. The God-Emperor wills it! Our mortal coil is nothing but a trial to be overcome, the outcome of which shall decide the fate of our eternal souls. Reject selfish thoughts of comfort and safety! Only through renunciation of the self can our spiritual essence remain pure.

And so the slow demechanization and retardation of human technology during the Age of Imperium has ground on without much alarm among the masses, and indeed even most of the leaders of the Imperium do not ken the spiralling primitivization of human tech as a grave threat. The ongoing shrinking utility of everyday technology can be witnessed by anyone on a million worlds and innumerable voidholms, where olden systems will invariably prove superior to the increasing shoddiness and cheapness of newly crafted things. And yet the irrefutable slide into atavistic regression on every level does not terribly bother the degenerate descendants of the brilliant ancients, for the ongoing loss of knowledge means that they have already nigh-on lost everything, and they do not even know what it is that they have lost.

One such little phenomenon of technological etiolation and dysfunctional use can be glimpsed in the extremely widespread trick most commonly known as slotting scrip into the fuse box.

The simple fuse, preventor of flames, is a rudimentary invention dating back to the misty past of the Age of Terra. Long since replaced by better wares and more clever designs during those bygone aeons when man proved creative with tech, the sacrificial design of the fuse has nonetheless lingered as part of the collective corpus of human knowledge. Most fuse designs found throughout the Imperium of Man can be dated back to crude Standard Template Construct patterns, designed to be cheap and simple to make in times of great need. As with so many temporary stopgap measures and primitive emergency craft, the fuse has long since become a permanently employed, and increasingly common component in electrical systems throughout the Imperium of Holy Terra.

A sinspeech whisper joke found across the Agripinaa Sector makes fun of the stopping ability of this overcurrent protector:

Q: Why is a fuse better than a vizier?
A: It speaks truth to power.

The fuse provides automatic removal of power from a circuit by passing it through a thin internal conductor. When the current flow grows too strong, the heat generated by the electricity will melt the conductor and cut power in the system. This prevents fire, and necessitates replacement of the burntout fuse. A plethora of other tech-items can carry out the same passive function as the fuse does, but in a more practical manner, yet over the span of fivehundred generations of gradual deterioration of human knowledge and production capability, even such simple safety devices as circuit breakers have started to grow rare across the decrepit Imperium of Man. As such, the fuse nowadays predominate on most Imperial worlds and voidholms for household systems, and it will likewise be common for more important systems than those made for filthy consumers, including in electrical systems of Imperial industry and Astra Militarum hardware.

The simplicity of the humble fuse for overcurrent protection is also its main drawback. When a fuse blows in a faulty system, the power goes out. The dark lack of juice will send people racing to the distribution panel to replace the burnt fuse. If they can find no new fuses of the right kind on hand, many humans will tend to cheat if possible just to get the electricity back up and running. Especially if the barking of taskmasters and slavedrivers calls for a speedy fix. As such, all manner of hack work can be found where people have sought to bypass the fuse. History teaches us that many humans are clever enough to bypass safety features, but not wise enough to understand their function. And a surprising number of people will prove dumb enough to cheat with electrical current rather than taking the trouble and expense of acquiring a new fuse of the right rating, even when desperation does not factor into the broken equation. As knowledge and understanding of technology among humans has worn thin across His Divine Majesty's astral domains, even lay techmen such as Guild electricians with some practical schooling will often resort to quick hacks for the sake of laziness, stress or bottomless ignorance.

The most common handyman's trick is to replace the blown fuse with any kind of metal bits that happen to fit, with no thought given to the risk of fire thus incurred, since the current will no longer be limited by the thin conductor of the fuse. One of the most common materials resorted to when replacement fuses are lacking happen to be scrip tokens minted or cast out of metal. Scrip is local token coinage, paid to employees and worthless outside of the stores of company compounds. If various Guild scrip coins and collegia chits can be exchanged at all for other currencies, then it will only be possible at a steeply unfavourable exchange rate, since scrip is part of a cunning trap for making employed people into indentured servants and debt-ridden serfs bound to their compound for generations to come. This bonded trickster wage can be paid in all manner of tokens, including digital numbers on a cogitator, seashells, plastic chips, bone knuckles, paper notes or metallic pieces of scrip. In locations where metallic scrip coins exist, low denominations of scrip can always be found slotted into fuse boxes, where they do not belong.

A popular tale told around the fireside or heater across hundreds of thousands of planets and voidholms goes roughly as follows, although the details and names will differ from locality to locality: A cunning home-fixer runs into ever worse trouble with machinery on his workplace, which he solves by ignoring the rites of maintenance and coming up with a series of ever more fantastical hack solutions, some of which involves electricity. Soon, the machinery seems to perform better than ever before, and his colleagues hail him as touched by the very Machine God that rules all technology. Yet at last the seeming miracle proved a bag of empty promises, and a cascade of machine failures sees the home-fixer spectacularly beheaded, minced and burned along with not only the machinery he tended to, but the entire manufactorum he was working in. Such is the vengeance of wronged machine spirits. Take heed, and skip not the proper rites and litanies!

Even so, the warning in the saga will often fall on deaf ears, for surely such issues only befall others and not oneself? Such is the folly of man. Those who would offend against the machine spirit via the bypassing of safety measures are legion, and the record of human history is in part a list of unheeded warning tales. Pennypinching stupidity will often make people throw safety out the window and bypass all safeguards by harebrained fixes. Cheer for the fool who saves the hour by putting a scrip coin into the fuse box, and cheer for the resultant fires as claustrophobic buildings burn down and turn living, breathing people into charred husks. How many loved ones have perished for the sake of a juice homefix? Their numbers surely climb into the billions across the vast Imperium of Man. Ultimately, you can make something proof against mundane stupidity, but not against bloody stupidity.

And so, in countless settlements across His cosmic dominion, lowly Imperial subjects will include a line in their daily prayers, asking the Enthroned One to preserve them from the juice fire, and to protect them against the melted wire, the hidden lightning and the sudden arc of death. Such fervent prayers will they mouth, yet in their ignorance they will nevertheless contribute to the festering perils of their everyday surroundings, as copper scrip and other small objects that will conduct electricity are slotted into fuse holders all across the Imperium of Man, in defiance of flame. This is but one suicidal ploy out of thousands of others in the morass of ineptitude that man has become mired in, on top of which should be mentioned ever worsening electronics, where consumer commodities in particular increasingly prove to be blatant fire hazards straight off the production line.

Thus man has degenerated to a wretched scavenger in the Age of Imperium, living off the vanishing gifts of a lost golden age, using tools which he has no understanding of.

Such is the proficiency of man, in a forsaken time.

Such is the bliss of ignorance, at the edge of doom.

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

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/07/15 19:04:24


Post by: Skinflint Games


Love it.

"We are building a world with science and technology, when no one is interested in learning science and technology" - Carl Sagan, 1970-sonething.

This just extrapolates the inevitable


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/07/15 19:06:50


Post by: Racerguy180


 Skinflint Games wrote:
Love it.

"We are building a world with science and technology, when no one is interested in learning science and technology" - Carl Sagan, 1970-sonething.

This just extrapolates the inevitable


Yup, sad but true!


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/07/20 07:34:48


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thanks a lot! Prescient words by mister Sagan. And good fodder for 40k.

@Racerguy180: I concur.



Warning Sign

Take heed! What follows is a short collection of varied warning signs found throughout the cosmic domains of Our Lord the God-Emperor Himself.

In each their own way, these mute objects stand as witnesses to the internal rot evident in the Imperium of Man, last strong shield of our species and insane gravedigger of human intergalactic civilization.

In each their own way, these everyday signs speak of the morass of misery and despair that awaits us all, at the precipice of doom.

In each their own way, these humble things are a testament to the depths of depravity that man has plunged into, in the darkest of futures.

- - -

Traffic sign at a sharp curve: "Brake or be broken."

"If you can read this you are in range."

"The wage of negligence is utter destruction! Slapdash wastrels fit to be purged: Beware that your offspring, spouses, parents and first-cousins will be shipped to the workhouse."

"The Imperium will not cover your failings by using railings."

"Trespasser: You have come here to stay."

"Your finger in the roller and a slinger with your molar."

"Do not listen to the lies of your body. A heart about to give up is nought but false sinthought. If a job is worth doing it is worth dying for!"

"No falling into vats! Your flesh would foul the chym."

"Anyone making an imprint into the wet rockrete will be tossed into the next load as filler."

"Faulty goggles. Fear not: Obedience is blind."

"Work earns salvation. Want to know how to damn your immortal soul?"

"Our gun servitors are top of the line, intrude here to verify."

"Know your duty or know your end."

"If the ration queue extends this far, you will die from starvation before you get yours."

"Minefield ahead! Also: Minefield behind you."

"Remember to pray! Medicae ward permanently closed."

"Heresy grows from idleness. Thus, idlers will be burnt for heretics."

"What is in the food? Do not ask questions you do not want to know the answer of."

Sign outside a PDF elite training compound: "For a warrior the only crime is cowardice. Shooting vagabonds for sport is no crime."

"Reject thoughts of self! Climb with your burdens without hesitation. The punishment for falling is worse than the crippling crash itself."

"Please anoint the machine as per regulation. Lack of sacred oil will be substituted with you."

"Those who demand safety regulations fail to understand their own insignificance."

"Ask the Imperator to bless the ration bar! It might be kinsfolk."

Sign outside a Mechanicus shrine: "Warning, to avoid injury do not tell us how to do our job."

"No protective gear in stock. Faith is your shield."

"Failed suicide attemptors will be tortured and abacinated, then servitorized."

"Urinators will be captured by pict and displayed on public screens."

"Duty prevails. Meet your quotas. Or else."

"Endure! Question not."

"Complaints forbidden: He who breaks his back in toil best serves the Emperor."

"Your call: Labour long or live short."

Sign outside historitor section: "Our presence remakes the past. The entire clan of trespassers will be censored."

"Fear not the touch of acid. Pain is an illusion."

"Perseverance and silence are the highest of virtues. Chatterboxes and slackers will be aided to attain them through servitorization."

Sign outside a highly toxic manufactorum hall: "Serve the Emperor today. Tomorrow you will be dead."

"It is a greater sin to keep silent toward authority than to report on your own kinsfolk. It is a greater loss to lose your entire clan than it is to lose one clanmember."

Sign in a corpse starch factory: "Saftey first or first meal."

"Do not recoil. You are standing with your back to a precipice."

"Slackers will be thrown into the corpse grinder. Only the industrious may escape death."

"Are you there yet?"

"Safety is the refuge of cowards. Dangerous working conditions keep the wit of serfs sharp and weed out those unfit for work."

Sign outside a latifundia plantation: "Intruders will find our servitors can harvest more than grain."

Space Wolf Outpost sign: "Trespassers will be forced into a drinking contest with the nearest Space Wolf. Their kin will be forced to cover the cleaning fine."

Sign before a mountain road: "Slow down, to fly in a land vehicle is witchcraft. Witchcraft is heresy."

Sign outside a corpse starch factory: "Intruders will discover our secret recipe."

Manufactorum warning sign: "If you are taller than this line, you won't be."

Sign outside Planetary Defence Force training ground: "Defence force in need of new targets! Jump this fence to volunteer."

"No railings. The Emperor shall be the judge of who falls."

A notice posted above the door of an Adeptus Ministorum almshouse in the Mercy district of Hive Ravachol: "To any would-be rioters who think of complaining in line about the unusually low quality and quantity of our discount soylens viridians rations, we lay brothers of the Ecclesiarchy bid ye sinners remember what punishment Saint Sanguinus decreed to the captured men of the MCMV Potemkin Regiment of Imperialis Auxilia during the First Maggoty-Grox Mutiny of the First Pacificus Campaign of the Great Crusade:
'Because ye multiplied more than the mutineers of the regiments that are round about you, and have not walked in my statutes, neither have you kept to my orders, neither have you done according to the judgments of the discipline masters and iterators that are round about you;
Therefore thus saith the Primarch; Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the Blood Angels.
And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations.
Therefore Manus' Iron Fathers shall eat thy sons in the midst of thee, and the Emperor's Sons shall eat their fathers.'"

Cadian steet sign: "Unattended children will be drafted and taught to shoot."

Sign on grox cages: "Mating season. Enter at your own peril."

Sign hung around the neck of nuclear techman: "If you see me running, then it is already too late."

"Please break in and admire our servitors, for you may soon join them."

Voidsmen safety poster: "Check your helmets or you will get your breath taken away."

Sign outside a ganger den: "Beat it or we will beat you."


- - -

Nearly half the signpost texts above were written by the following witty enthusiasts on various websites: JAB, CommissarCardsharp, SE-Roger, Jbressel1, Uxion, GlassesGuy95, CrusaderApe, jediben001, WREN_PL & killjoySG. Thanks for a good community response to the previous Signpost piece.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/01 19:13:59


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Skyhigh

In the grim darkness of the far future, man is cast into heaven.

One of the most fanciful dreams of primeval man was the ability to fly. Myths told around sparkling firesides spoke of winged deities, of gods riding chariots across the skyvault and of mortal men building fragile wings for themselves, only to succumb to hubris and crash as they flew too close to the sun. Such were the winged tales from the misty past of ancient Terra, when man looked up on gracious birds in free flight and imagined that divinity itself must have similar wings.

In the fullness of time, cunning minds, able hands and brave hearts granted man his wish to fly. Thus the Age of Terra saw pioneers, saviours and warriors alike zoom through the atmosphere, even as their cousins broke through the confines of Earth's skyvault and broke through into nothingness to explore and settle the vast cosmos. Eventually, the stars came within reach, and the Milky Way was man's oyster.

The Dark Age of Technology saw the marvels of the Age of Terra surpassed a thousandfold, as the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron strode across the galaxy like titans. In those days, man was bold and brilliant, and machine assisted him in his discoveries and great labours, and Abominable Intelligence brought his wildest dreams to life. As ancient man erected paradise for himself, the skies of twain million planets were filled with swift iron eagles as vehicles rejected gravity itself and took to the sky as if it was the most mundane thing in the world.

And the confidence of man soared in tandem with his works, for he erected spires of arrogance on haughty wings. And ancient man built a golden nest upon a pinnacle of hubris, from which he denied divinity itself and swore his own power and knowledge to be far superior to any gods and devils that could ever be harboured by creation. Such godless abominations could not be allowed to stand, and so Dark Ones of Hell punished deviant man by tearing him down from his pedestal, and throwing him into the flames of machine revolt, Warp storms and a scourge of witches and Daemons that burnt the achievements of man to a crisp. And nought but ash remained, blowing in the ruins of toppled paradise.

Old Night followed, as wretched man paid for the sins of the ancients in a living purgatory. The Age of Strife was marked by the collapse of civilization, the loss of knowledge and the complete degeneration of man into internecine wars between inbred cannibal clans who scavenged among the rubble left by their humbled forefathers. And the everyday phenomenon of engine flight shrank to a rarity and wonder, at which the feral rabble could only gape in awe as winged warlords yoked the people and clashed mightily in fury, destroying ever more remnants of ancient works and ingenious lore amid rivers of blood. Thus was landlocked man reduced to running prey, for flying predators to hunt for sport.

The savage horror that rightfully scourged sinful man was brought to an end by brutal Legions of all-conquering warriors, raising the banners of united Mars and Terra high to blow in the wind. A million worlds and voidholms beyond counting were seized in the cruel talons of a double-headed eagle, as the Emperor walked in the flesh and led His golden hosts to legendary victories. The Great Crusade swept across the galaxy and brought many surviving human colonies into the clutches of the early Imperium, and for a time all was well.

For a time, swathes of lost knowledge was recovered. For a time, forgotten ancient marvels were built anew. For a time, man dared to dream and think and create once again, his curious mind soaring like the grav-vehicles that flew between his shining edifices on worlds brought into Compliance. For a time, the clever spark of the brilliant ancients awoke in the crushed soul of man, and a renaissance of hope spurted forth like a fountain as eighteen Legions crushed all alternative sources of human regrowth and bound all of mankind's destiny to that of the Terran Imperium.

One species. One Imperium. One Imperator.

Yet the strength and prosperity achieved by man during the early Imperium would soon ring hollow, as brother slew brother in a civil war that rent the skies asunder. The galaxy burned. As winged Sanguinius fell and the Emperor was crippled beyond healing, humanity descended into a hellish aeon of suffering and insanity. A slow and ever-worsening death spiral of demechanization and loss of knowledge, hardware and advanced production facilities ensued, as the seeds planted in the fertile ground of the early Imperium sprouted and bore rotten fruit.

In the demented time known as the Age of Imperium, fivehundred generations of humans wasted their efforts in a grinding horror of their own making. Fundamentally and on a biological level, there was nothing wrong with the human species compared to its succesful forebears of yore. The innate potential still lurked inside the hearts and minds of maidens and menfolk, yet the plethora of human cultures ruled by the tyrannical Adeptus Terra had become thoroughly traumatized by so many millennia of vicious brother wars, baleful misery and the most cruel oppression imaginable. Genetically, man was still capable of rising to his potential stature as a titan of the cosmos, knower and builder of wonders. Yet culturally, man had shrunk to become a hunkered wreck, his mind mired in parochial ignorance and a fanaticism so myopically aggressive that it slayed curiosity itself.

This etiolation of human galactic civilization made itself manifest on all levels, in a cavalcade of suffering, starvation, disease, parasitic infection, communal violence and stark horror. Yet most visibly, for those with knowing eyes to see, was the neverending decay of human technology. Each century, more and more knowledge slipped from the grasp of humanity's brightest minds. Each century, more and more advanced pieces of hardware could no longer be produced, at best only maintained. And each century, the quality of newly produced pieces of tech sunk further into the abysmal depths of dysfunctionality.

This primitivization of human scientific knowledge and technology saw a myriad of wilted expressions; from beasts of burden and human porters taking over work which once strong machines carried out on man's behest; to once-commonplace hardware produce turning into treasured relics, given due veneration, prayers and incense in the hope that these technotheological marvels of the ancients would not stop working. As the mundane tech that surrounded man turned ever more crude and atavistic, old gemstones of secure achievements began to rattle in the crown of the ancients, for degenerate descendants failed in ever more ways to reproduce the olden templates perfectly. Ever more features turned out dead on arrival, or poorly functioning, and ever more features were dropped in a miserly hunt for cheapness and simplicity, as His star dominion geared itself for total war without end.

One example of this sclerotic state of Imperial industry can be found among those anti-gravitic vehicles that are most commonly known as skimmers. Grav-vehicles generate an anti-gravitational field, allowing them to hover a distance over the ground. Anti-gravitic technology known to man stand as true wonders of the ancients, yet the refined security and workings that once characterized human grav-vehicles have long since been replaced by malfunctions and removal of safety features due to cutbacks and inept technological regression.

The actual lists of dysfunctionalities and debasement of skimmers would cover thick volumes of accumulating issues, for which sacred oil and mechanistic mantras tend to be the favoured solutions. Let us instead turn to a couple of the most eye-catching problems found in Imperial grav-vehicles, which can be described as suddenly sending the skimmer skyhigh beyond the control of its driver.

Like so much else of the golden fruits of humanity's ingenious ancient era, human anti-gravitic technology has rusted and wilted during the Age of Imperium. Poorly understood and barely mimicked in a decreasing number of production facilities, almost all Imperial skimmers and grav-vehicles sport a hidden defect which may reveal itself upon accidental collision or upon taking a hit from martial firepower. One common trouble, which would once have been countered by several layers of redundant safety features, can be described as the skimmer going out of control. It will not only speed ahead in a capricious direction at the same altitude as before, but may also swoop down and crash into the ground. Even more eye-catching, the out of control skimmer may zoom straight up, only to stall and then crash to the ground.

Even so, grav-vehicles running out of control pale in comparison to the exotic spectacle offered by damage suffered to the running gear of skimmers. Here, the damage may fracture the main gravitic vacuum chamber and send the motor into an uncontrollable anti-gravitic reaction. Grav-vehicles suffering such a gravitic motor malfunction will usually continue forward at the same speed and in the same direction, but constantly rise skyhigh until they are lost in the heavens, and often outer space.

How many Adeptus Astartes Land Speeders and Imperial Jetbikes have not taken a survivable hit to their grav plates, only for the hover system to go haywire and make the vehicles climb to the skies and disappear from the battlefield? How many precious Grav-Attack Tanks have not gone missing on high while nearly all critical systems and crew were still intact and alive? How many wealthy nobles and potentates have not had their skimmer cruise end in disaster as their gilded ride suddenly rush into the stratosphere when the driver happened to bump into a rock or girder during a refreshing slalom swoosh?

Civilian possessors of hover vehicles who have both riches and an understanding of this acute problem will sometimes install respirators, void seals and other systems to improve their chances of survival, should their prestigious grav-vehicle suddenly make a leap for outer space upon taking a modicum of damage or suffering an internal malfunction.

The sounds of a gravitic motor malfunction will vary based on materials used in the grav plates, exact tech patterns involved and the exact tech-issue or damage in question, but many times the noise of crashing skyhigh will be a bass throbb turning into a shrill staccato before ending in a fading whistle. Some Imperial Guardsmen who witnessed a revered skimmer manned by the divine Imperator's own Angels of Death dive up into the cosmos have described the tragedy as comical, a description which cost them their lives in a most gruesome and tortuous public fashion.

During the Dark Age of Technology, various safeguard mechanisms existed so as to make this disaster rare in the extreme, yet under Imperial safekeeping, grav tech has grown ever more volatile, unreliable and unusual. How could it be otherwise, among so many psychotic, manslaying pyromaniacs?

Man of Gold once set out to build his crafts in defiance of gravity itself, and his might and cunning soared like the winged vessels that bore him across worlds as an everyday occurrence. Now, as the winds taste like smoke and the skies of human worlds have turned rusty red, such anti-gravitic vehicles dwindle ever more in number, and the quality of their make also turn ever more retrograde and crude. Thus, in the deadend of human interstellar civilization known as the Imperium of Man, skimmers and jetbikes may not only smash into the ground, but may shoot straight up and crash skyhigh. Various superstitions surround the sighting of such heinous accidents, including tribesmen wishing for something secret, as if upon a shooting star.

Such is the state of human hover tech in the Age of Imperium. Ken that the God-Emperor Himself bears witness to this degradation of man's ancient lore and craft, and doubt not that He can sense the endless deprivation, blinkered senility and mounting savagery that has slowly rusted away the grand promise of mankind.

Thus malfunctioning and poorly produced grav tech may turn horizontal drift to sharp vertical lift, as damaged skimmers shoot skyhigh, almost in the manner of rockets, carrying their crew with them into the dark heavens. Thus perish all too many trained personnel with their precious grav-vehicles in the astral domains of Holy Terra, in that fortified madhouse that straddles the stars.

On the Imperium's watch, human power across the Milky Way galaxy has steadily withered away, shrinking like a desiccated husk. The increasing rarity and shoddiness of anti-gravitic vehicles is but one of many symptoms of a sick interstellar civilization. And its deterioration of sophisticated technology and loss of knowledge march in lockstep with the ever more depraved hardship and brutality that plague the short lives of trillions of Imperial subjects across a million worlds and innumerable voidholms. Here, you will find enough horror to make a heart of stone bleed.

And so the shriek of malfunctioning skimmers scream as one with the hoarse victims of mass torture in public autodafés. Thus the grumbling of lay tech-men unable to repair a treasured relic of technology grind as one with the moaning of parents and orphans starving to death in the gutter, their skin and bones about to be loaded into the ever-hungry corpse grinder. This is the true face of the Age of Imperium, and not its knights in shining armour.

Such is the vale of tears, in which our species is but a sacrificial lamb of sorrow.

Such is the decrepit state of mankind, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the darkness that awaits us all.

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


- - -

Thanks to Mad Doc Grotsnik on Dakkadakka for finding the relevant vehicle mishap results from Rogue Trader.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/02 13:07:46


Post by: AtoMaki


These writeups are awesome!

Getting immortalized as a random conscript because you picked up a nice bag filled with super-valuable pearls sounds like a good reason to live in the grim darkness of the far future .


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/21 15:58:49


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


I read this and started thinking about the Dark Heresy Rpg where you play as an acolyte - a team of operatives serving an Inquisitor - and how this level of pitch black grim darkness could be implemented in that game.

So I wrote up these social class categories people could pick at character creation. Even if it is just flavor, if you can tie it to your character you can play on it, decide how you felt about your class and what it meant before you became an acolyte, and what it meant afterwards. And the game masters could tie it to various expression of Grim Darkness.

I hope it's okay to post it here since it was inspired by these writings. Can't quite manage the degree of grim darkness outlined above but here's what I wrote:


The social classes of an Inquisitiorial Acolyte - a schizophrenic cross cut of imperial society, stitched together into an ill fitting rag of an Acolyte Cell:

Fallen Noble
- This poor acolyte was once at the peak of power within his planetary sector. One of the upper houses, a rogue trader's family, the family or branch family of planetary governance, or a founder family of a hive world. But even the fraction of a fraction of the Imperial populace that stands above a world still stands only over a single world. They remain a multitude. And on occasion it happens that one among many are singled out for a more grievous duty. Exiled by their family, ripped away trough a power play, or drafted after their world fell Acolytes from this class have lost not only their power and wealth but also their connection to their own life. Their family will not hear of them. They are no longer a member of their house. No one at this level of power would dare tie themselves to an inquisitorial acolyte assuming they are even alive. For perhaps the first time in their life they stand alone, among a cell of their vast inferiors, now disgustingly turned into peers. They must learn quickly, or their despair and doom will overwhelm them.

Lowly Noble
- It is these that most other acolytes think of when they think nobility. Members of important houses yes, but keenly do they know their limitations. To many rivals, to many threats. Unlike the former high nobility that straddled the world, lower nobles have known struggle all their life. Their houses have had grand responsibilities to fulfill, responsibilities that they must not fail. And unlike their higher brethren their old connections may to some degree remain. Their family or old associates may not lift their nose entirely at an Inquisitorial official, though they'll never be trusted again.

Fallen Official
Higher officials are members of the imperial branches that managed over some amount of power before having it ripped away by their recruitment into the Inquisition's service. While their acolyte status represents a loss of power, their fall was not as great as nobility. A man on a hill, rather than a mountain. While the danger of their new position have drastically increased, there is a sudden, mind numbing potential to obtain power and treasure they previously could not even dream off. As such many Acolytes from this class react in equal measure with greed and a slowly increasing sense of ambition as they do despair at things they have lost.
- Examples of fallen officials include Clerics and Techpriests, as well as bureaucrats with some degree of power, such as the local tax collector of a segment of a hive world. ´

Lowly Official
- Differentiated from the laborer in little but the increased demands that are put on them, the lowly official represents the vast throngs of personnel making up the corpus of Imperial branches.
Examples of Lowly Officials includes all grunt soldiers, local enforcers of law or security guards, the lowly paper pushers that fills every department of the Administratum or various planetary bureaucracies, tech-wrights that plug away on void ships or in manofactorums where tech priests are to few in supply, and many other human souls that have just about risen above the class of laborer.

Laborer - Those who toil endlessly for the Empire of man. Thrown into the Inquisition they find themselves in far above their head. Many become subservient to those around them, their long life of servitude to heavily ingrained to ever learn to think for themselves. Some grow mad from sudden access to powers far beyond their station, abusing it until it blows up in their face, though chances are they will simply be ignored, their petty delusions of grandeur to insignificant to be addressed.
Example of Laborers include: Hive Worlders locked to a single habitat, peasants toiling away at some agri world, salvagers and slaves.

Dregs - The bottom rung of society. Many times these people have already lived a life of violence, and will be well acquainted with many of the dangers of the life of an acolyte. But they will soon find the degree of that danger is far higher than anything they've faced before. Cautious and keenly aware, it is not a surprise why many of them are recruited.
Examples of Dregs include - Hiveworld scum, criminals, sanctioned psykers.

Lowly Dregs - The absolute bed rock of Imperial society. Why Inquisitors on occasion drags them into an Acolyte Cell is known only to them.
Examples of lowly dregs include: Mutants, the utterly destitute, unsanctioned psykers or those who have suffered deamonic possession or otherwise been irrevocable tainted, and those poor souls with enough augments bolted and embedded into them they are closer to servitor than they are to man.



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/22 15:08:23


Post by: Illumini


Those are really good. I have not played any RPG, but they are inspiring character concepts, and seem really good to help guide how a character is motivated.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/25 09:23:30


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


 Illumini wrote:
Those are really good. I have not played any RPG, but they are inspiring character concepts, and seem really good to help guide how a character is motivated.


Thank you.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/10/30 10:40:39


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@AtoMaki: Thank you most kindly. Aye, haha!

@StaevinTheAeldari: Wow, very nice work! I love your granular attention to detail and subtle nuances. I am sure it will help Inquisitorial RPG campaigns come alive better. This is exactly the kind of lifelike attention to detail and grounded stuff that I love to see more of. Have you read Matthew Farrer's Enforcer trilogy, by any chance? You may find it inspiring and useful as well. I for one did! Actually, Ian Watson's bonkers 1993 book Space Marine deserves a mention as well, since the novel revolves around recruits from different castes, to good effect.

Please keep any works of your coming here if you like, sir. Know that I'm spreading recommendation links to your writings on all sister threads of this on other forums, credited to you of course. A lovely writeup.

Cheers!



Grav-Jack

In a forsaken aeon of decay and suffering, man finds himself mired.

Marshes and sucking mud has been a scourge of travellers ever since the primal ancestors of man climbed out of trees on Old Earth. Loose and treacherous surfaces have pulled down feet, cartwheels and wholesale beasts, humans and vehicles since before man's forefathers invented metalworking. No wonder primitive man dwelling in cold climes preferred to travel and conduct trade by sleigh during winter, so as to avoid rough terrain and mud season.

Throughout the distant past of the Age of Terra, nomads, traders, settlers and explorers all endured hardship and stuck wagons out in the field. Yet the starkest examples of the hopeless drudgery of mired vehicles may always be found among armies on campaign. Here, misery and fruitless toil will be on full display among masses of men and draft animals, as wheels cut deep ruts and then grind to a halt in the wet landscape. Among such marching hosts may be glimpsed raw despair as hundreds of people haul and toil to drag along stuck wagons or machines. Spades will dig into mud and ropes will be stretched taut to rescue wains of wood or steel, and sometimes horses and engine crafts assisting in the recovery will themselves run aground, in a parade of filth to drain all hope.

The humble earth beneath man's feet hold the power to sprout a cornucopia of food, or destroy his dreams and sink the mightiest of warhosts in an uncaring morass. Great wars have swung from triumph to defeat in the muddy bosom of the soil as weather shifts and the wet season of the land eats giant warmachines with a ravenous appetite. What a tragic toolmaker is man! No ingenuity has ever allowed him to craft an iron steed truly immune to betrayal by the ground itself. No fantastic wain wrought by human hand can ever be safe from drowning in the earthen gullet, swallowed like a god's unwanted offspring.

Thus the bloodied field itself may vanquish undefeated conquerors, for mud has been the bane of the tank since its first primitive debut during the misty past of the Age of Terra. The wet ground presents a challenge to those cunning minds and able hands that propelled man into the era of engines, and engineers and inventors alike have never stopped grappling with this quest against the mired vehicle. Yet the clever solutions of the Age of Terra paled in comparison to the brilliant inventions of the Dark Age of Technology, for in that blooming time ancient man became the mortal master of creation. His genius climbed to its dazzling peak, and his power and seed spread to twain million worlds and innumerable void installations, as man peopled the Milky Way galaxy with unfettered boldness.

Thus the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron built a galactic paradise, before Dark Ones of Hell toppled man from his lofty pedestal for the sake of heinous hubris and godless sin. Machine revolt, witches and the horrors of the Age of Strife swept away the great works of the ancients in blood and fire, and Old Night descended upon mankind like a cruel predator. Only crumbs left over from the ancient feast of knowledge could be salvaged from the ashes by those inbred cannibal tribes and superstitious savages that scavenged among the blackened ruins, their minds reduced to desperation for mere survival.

Since then, garbled legends handed down through untold generations speak of wains the size of mountains zooming across the landscape in defiance of gravity, carrying titanic loads while themselves skimming on the wind, light as a feather. Other tales speak of cartwheeling skywagons and soaring trains without magrails. Fragments of the glorious anti-gravitic technology of Man of Gold still lingers among his degenerate descendants during the rotting Age of Imperium, as evidenced by crudely copied repulsor crafts, jetbikes and grav-tanks. One increasingly unusual piece of surviving anti-gravitic technology is that of the grav-jack, an archaic relic prized among Imperial armoured forces for bringing salvation to tanks from running stuck in the ground.

The grav-jack is an almost forgotten piece of technology that was once commonplace among Imperial forces from worlds and large voidholms with an advanced level of tech. The most common use of grav-jacks will see four units, akin to box modules, placed in each corner of an armoured vehicle. Grav-jacks are designed not to make a heavy land vehicle soar into the air, but to lift it out of fields of sucking mud and more alien kinds of morasses that remains the bane of tracked tanks everywhere. Ideally, a light thrust from grav-jacks will lighten the vehicle's ground pressure enough to prevent it from running stuck on treacherous soil.

Fanciful stories exist of more advanced forms of grav-jacks allowing ground-bound vehicles to leap over walls and trenches akin to certain archeotech pieces hoarded by upper caste noble houses, but such ostentatious models have never been seen in mass produced Imperial military service. Instead, the grav-jack is a humble form of skimmer technology able to raise mired vehicles out of mud and marshes, its melody a deep bass thrum. Certain variant patterns of the grav-jack is more akin to a jet exhaust than unmoving grav plates, their turbines' hot lift boiling mud, slinging stones and clapping quicksand about in noisy and violent fashion. The anti-gravitic suspensors of grav-jacks have a limited lifting time, and they usually need to be recharged via the vehicle's batteries over a long period following use. On lengthy campaigns in the field with supply difficulties, the suspensor fields alone will have to suffice, without the boosted lifting power of auxiliary jets drinking fuel.

Tech-adepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus believe the various grav-jack variants found by Explorators in Standard Template Construct hardprints to have originally been designed for the automatic self-lifting of logistical containers on and off means of transport. Yet whatever the forgotten purpose of this peculiar tech of the ancients, its employment within the Imperium of Man has primarily been that of forcing mired tanks out of seas of mud, crystalline sand seas and exotic swamps. Here, it has allowed heavily armoured vehicles to extract themselves from the morass of their own power, ideally without the need for tractors, horses, teams of men pulling at ropes, groxen haulers or recovery vehicles.

The first grav-jacks were used sporadically among the eclectic Imperial forces of the Great Crusade, yet the systematic production and deployment in the field of grav-jacks occurred first three millennia after the Archtraitor nigh-on slew the God-Emperor in the skies above Holy Terra. Let us examine the rise and decline of this dutiful machine spirit.

The self-propelled mud extraction system of the grav-jack saw its heyday in the Imperium's golden age of the thirtyfourth millennium, as a reasonable compromise between the high costs and technical difficulties of manufacturing grav-tanks, and the enabling upswell of Imperial fortunes at the time. While entire ordinary armoured units of Imperial Guard equipped with grav-vehicles was an unachievable goal even at the zenith of Imperial civilization during the Forging, the flourishing of this silver age of the Imperium still allowed for many regiments to equip their armoured vehicles with grav-jacks. Thus, some terrain-ignoring advantages of skimmer technology were bestowed upon land vehicles in a luxurious investment that saw Imperial armour able to overcome horrid mud seasons, quicksand and more exotic forms of mires on alien worlds.

For a while, Imperial recovery following the Scouring seemed destined to last, and the increasingly commonplace procurement of sophisticated kit such as grav-jacks for Astra Militarum vehicle parks was a testament to the robust state of His Divine Majesty's astral domains. Yet such advanced production and issuance of equipment could not stand the test of time, as the Imperium aged, and aged badly. As Imperial fortunes worsened, technological knowhow and sophisticated production facilities were lost to a maelstrom of regression, warfare, cutbacks and ever cruder redesigns to meet the voracious demands of unending total war.

Grav-jacks may represent a technological regression from the ordinary heavy grav vehicles of the Dark Age of Technology, yet the ordinariness of grav-jacks in Imperial armies during the thirtyfourth millennium was nevertheless a mark of success, both in terms of economic health, industrial capacity and technological grasp. Grav-jacks are ultimately a practical luxury item, only sporadically seen during the Great Crusade, becoming a commonplace sight at the height of the Forging, and dwindling ever more rare in the long decay since the Age of Apostasy.

Nowadays, many grav-jacks that remain in service are prized relics of the better past, festooned with precious metals and holy liturgy, their activation requiring meticulous ceremonial rites and propitiation of the venerated machine spirit inside. As with many STC pieces of tech, the grav-jack is rugged and capable of impressive longevity if properly maintained. These ancient pieces of tech are usually reserved for command vehicles or similarly revered rides with a storied combat record, and more than a few dubious personal escapes from the battlefield have been pulled off by the leaders of armoured units who got hopelessly mired in mud or worse. The rare grav-jack is nowadays more commonly found in the armouries of Adeptus Astartes chapters and in the armies from forgeworlds of the Adeptus Mechanicus, or even in noble garages stuffed with the best that money can buy, yet the employment of newly made grav-jacks within the Astra Militarum has not yet gone fully extinct.

By the grace of our Lord and Saviour, some few production lines for grav-jacks still remain active throughout the vast breadth of the Holy Terran Imperium, yet the increasing difficulty of processing raw materials for making grav-plates, and the rot in the understanding of building grav-engines mean that the output of production lines is destined to continue to wane. As with everything in the Imperium of Man, demechanization and loss of technological hardware and scientific knowledge grinds ever worse, in a downward spiral that is destined to drag the human species with it into oblivion.

Some strange patterns of grav-jacks have been observed on heavy vehicles belonging to the Leagues of Votann, which is unsurprising given the shared technological heritage, yet retained higher tech level of the reclusive Leagues compared to the Imperium of Man. Such League grav-jacks tend to sport crash bar cages and are advanced enough to act as grav-chutes for large vehicles making landfall from starships, dampening their entire descent through atmosphere drastically enough for the vehicles to make it to the ground without damage. Nothing of the kind has ever been recorded among Imperial patterns of grav-jacks, and the few tech-priests who have ever witnessed such a spectacle of smooth planetary deployment can only wring their mechadendrites out of marvel and envy.

Turning back to the shambolic wreck of human interstellar civilization that is the Imperium of Man, we may note that wheeled armoured vehicles are more easy to maintain than tracked ones, and thus better suited for expeditionary forces with limited shipping capacity. A most recent trend within parts of Imperial industry is that of calls for major replacement of tracked vehicles with wheeled vehicle models, in yet another potential cutback and retardation of Imperial military technology. It remains to be seen if such an etiolated adaptation will take place, since fivehundred generations of proud tracked tankist traditions is a formidable obstacle to overcome in such a parochial realm as that of the Golden Throne.

Come what may, grav-jacks are dwindling relics, reverently maintained and newly produced in small numbers by a scarce few production lines across the galaxy. Grav-jacks are usually earmarked for prestigious elite formations such as Tempestus Scions, Astartes, Sororitas and Inquisition, with some production rate being hoarded by forgeworlds for tracked, wheeled and legged Mechanicus vehicles. The original designs for grav-jacks from the Dark Age of Technology were relatively simple affairs, primarily meant for moving freight containers, yet even such rugged anti-gravitic tech is slipping from the stiff fingers of Imperial possession.

The grav-jack is in truth a humble piece of equipment, made to repulse gravity and defy the mud season. It could be described as a halfway house between a landbound tank and a skimmer grav-tank, yet even so it has proved to be an overengineered luxury item among Imperial forces, and it has shrunk from an ordinary sight among better armoured regiments, to a rare treasure. Ever shrinking in number, the grav-jack is a precious artefact from better times. How many hundreds of thousands of Imperial tanks and armoured vehicles would not have been saved from the hungry landscape of uncounted battlefronts, had they carried grav-jacks? How many crude battlebeasts of steel would not have been operational, rather than abandoned mired in the field, had this rotting star realm not hunkered low in abominable ignorance?

This deteriorating state of affairs can be met with prayer alone. And so millions upon millions of Imperial vehicle crews will include an old tankist prayer to relevant Imperial saints for salvation from the quagmire, the trapping ground, the quicksand, the crystafields and the sucking clay. Justus Extremis. Armouricum Mortis. Imperius Metallus.

Some rare few of the more clear-eyed yet traumatized armoured vehicle crewmen will even include a sorrowful line to this effect in their prayers, even as they beg for impossible forgiveness from the Master of Mankind for the deviant words escaping their malcontent lips: We created nothing of our own, and everything we took from the ancients we distorted.

Thus the Imperium exists to be a terrible lesson to others, an edifice of counterproductive terror, sclerotic bureaucracy and demented grasp of science and technology. Instead of effectivization and better machine systems, the Imperium will have machine breakdowns and replacement with ever cruder machinery and human muscle power. For when output flags and the products degrade century by century, the callous masters of the Imperium know that they must increase input by throwing more bodies at the problem. Thus man has been reduced from an affluent, adventuresome and leisurely master of knowledge, to a hollowed-out wretch doomed to manual drudgery.

Lo, how the mighty have fallen!

Behold the teeming masses of mankind, in all their hunger, their disease and their parasitic infections. Their lives are nothing but vast numbers in a broken equation to feed the meatgrinder. This travesty of human destiny is lorded over by a monstrous tyranny headed by the High Lords of Terra, who themselves are uncomfortably aware that this colossus on feet of clay cannot last, yet reform is more likely to kill the Imperium than to cure it. And so the astral dominion of the Imperator remains hidebound and fanatic, more devoted to its own paroxysms of aggressive myopia than to its sacred duty of preserving the human species.

This, the last strong shield of mankind, is also its demented jailor and hostage-taker. This, the final bulwark of humanity, is also its doomed dead-end, bereft of answers. This, the defender against the outer terror, is also the savage perpetrator of inner terror. This, the fanatical upholder of man's legacy technology, is also the rotting grave of its knowledge and hardware, the squanderer of all human potential on a million worlds and uncountable voidholms scattered across the Milky Way galaxy.

And so we see that mankind during the Age of Imperium has not only lost everything, but it does not even remember what it has lost.

Such is the state of the human species, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the baleful fate that awaits us all.

Such is the death of a dream.

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


- - -

For sculpted examples of Squattish grav-jacks, see here.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/07 12:26:20


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Dress Code

Everyone is a barbarian to someone else.

Quisque est barbarus alio.

Thus reads a High Gothic proverb known to the well educated castes in the Imperium of Man, that dilapidated cosmic domain formally belonging to the Celestial Imperator of Holy Terra, a realm stretching across the starspangled void, straddling a million worlds and voidholms beyond counting.

This saying describes the everlasting fact of cultural differences between humans, and indeed its meaning has been extended to describe not only the seed of Terra, but also abhorrent xenos by Rogue Traders roaming the murky corners of the Milky Way galaxy.

Out of all the caleidoscopic clashes of custom where insular tribes and congregations collide, let us briefly examine a peculiar phenomenon evident across vast swathes of several thousand Imperial colony worlds and voidholms. It is not dependant on the high culture of Holy Terra, but sprung from a plethora of local cultures sprinkled across planets and void dwellings alike. It is a source of friction on planets and larger voidholms that house populations settled across multiple climes. Is is likewise a cause of strife where ethnos and tribes with visually distinct culture come into contact, as traditional garb and markers of belonging turn into hotly contested points of pride by parochial and myopically aggressive people. Let us thus examine the myriad of dispersed human cultures, who for whatever climatological and historical reasons of their own has grown to despise the barbarian filth known as trouser-bearers.

The human custom of wearing britches date back to the misty past of the Age of Terra. Some of the first trousers were worn by steppe nomads to bring comfort during extended periods on horseback, in a way that kilts, tunics and bared nether regions could not. This rider's garb spread to become commonplace across Old Earth, and variations of this item of clothing remained popular throughout the entire stretch of the Dark Age of Technology, no matter the shifts in fashion and technology and the demands of alien living spaces. This simple garment survived among primitive survivors during the Age of Strife in a great many locales, and the all-conquering forces of Imperial Compliance would often slaughter foes in trousers, although a great many other tribes of cannibals and scavengers knew not of such an article of clothing, if they kenned any clothing whatsoever.

The early Imperium during the Great Crusade saw an eclectic mix of garb among the regiments of the Imperial Army, from strict uniforms, cunning camouflage and armoured voidsuits, to fighters donning mere loinclothes or fighting naked, protected only by tattoos or patterns of body paint. Drawn from hundreds of thousands of freshly conquered worlds, these human warriors brought their own styles of fighting and fashion with them, and often they would adopt favourite ways from others during lengthy service far away from their homeworlds.

To some extent, the trend-setting high culture of Imperial Terra would spread through encouragement, eager imitation and a limited degree of centralized issuance of equipment, yet the Emperor knew better than to try and impose a template of garb and aesthetics on his suddenly sprawling dominion. That way, unnecessary discontent and opposition lay. Better instead to let the hordes of provincials wear much what they liked, and place the Terran example of finery on a pedestal for voluntary imitation. It is after all easier to attract bees with nectar than with vinegar.

For all the visionary plans and insights that were burnt away to ash and drowned in blood following the epoch-shattering calamity of the Horus Heresy, the surviving Imperium nevertheless managed to retain an understanding that the simple Imperial modus operandi, to largely leave native customs be and avoid meddling overly much in local affairs, was for the most part the wisest path to tread. Occasional hiccups of Imperial history have seen some misguided decrees issued from the Throneworld that attempted to ban and dictate such mundane matters as clothing or alcoholic consumption, yet the perverse and unintended consequences of those culture-shaping campaigns that were actively executed on the ground inevitably saw the masters and mistresses of the Adeptus Terra shy away from prodding such explosive nests of hornets.

At the end of the day, who on high wants the trouble of riots and rebellions over superficial trifles, when all that the Imperium of Man really cares about is extracting Tithe, feeding the ravenous demands of total war and maintaining control over His Divine Majesty's scattered holdings? And was the drastic fall in Tithe grades following the Argamon Genocides of M37 really worth implementing a hated Sector-wide edict to enforce the wearing of monastic garments among the civilian population, on the pain of public abacination and quartering between four bull groxen?

Thus, Imperial authorities seldom attempt the imposition of sweeping dress codes outside the ranks of the God-Emperor's own elevated Adepts. Whatever is the local equivalent of respectable garb is expected for Ecclesiarchal Temple services, whether they be sombre robes or feathered loinclothes. Local authorities of planets and voidholms will dabble more frequently in sumptuary laws than will Imperial Adeptus, though the extent to which local administrations and policiary forces are able to enforce such laws restricting caste clothing, food and luxury expenditures is usually dubious. Amid the sclerotic and hollowed-out state of mankind during the Age of Imperium, even the most eager tyrants will tend to find that the penetration of their power into wider society has decayed from the totalitarian ideals which their dynastic ancestors better lived up to.

In parts of worlds and voidholms sporting warmer climes, such sumptuary laws will include a ban on the wearing of trousers. Sometimes, as in the case of the planet Macragge or the voidholm Felix Pulceris, the laws are dead and inert, a relic of past centuries before fashion or climate changed the way people dress. Other times, the legalities may be stringently followed by innumerable upholders of mores among the population, especially by older women whose watchful eyes and admonishing voice do much to keep a community in check. In such locales, much the same people who participate in pogroms will trot out to beat and berate straying members of the community as they drag the contemptuous deviants bloody through the streets or corridors for harsh punishment at the hands of governatorial law enforcers.

Naturally, such warmer climes where the wearing of pants is seen as a taboo broken only by barbarians and obscene infidels, the existence of sumptuary laws is only an additional obstacle to trousered folks. Even where there are no sumptuary laws against the wearing of britches, insular communities can manage perfectly fine with the instruments of public scorn, violence and social ostracism to punish filthy trouser-wearers. Here, foreigners and locals breaking their ancestral custom of clothing will find themselves heckled by children through the streets. Doors will shut close in their faces, and those desperately seeking employment will be told in no uncertain way that people in pants need not apply. Indeed, rabid and malnourished crowds with a need to kick someone can easily be worked up into a frenzy, and more than a few Imperial subjects have went under the omnibus of lynchmobs chanting that trousers equals heresy.

In such parochial cultures, where the garment on your legs have become an infested question to fight over, all proud bearers of kilts, tunic and virile togas must know that pants are the true enemy. Be gone, tube-legs!

The sprawling fauna of Imperial saints approved by the Adeptus Ministorum even includes an obscure martyr for the despisers of trouser-bearers to rally around. His name is that of Saint Oxymandias the Leper, and churchly lore says that he first snapped his finger, and then tore off his entire arm as he tried to pull up his bewitched trousers following a visit to the communal outhouse. And on the asteroid mining voidholm of Utica Extremalis, a local legend sevenhundred years old is still told vividly around electro-heaters, about how the devout Emperor-worshipper Jacques the Butcher was strangled with his own pants by a revolting mob of traitors and malcontents who dragged him out of a shed in the slums. Ever since, the denizens of Utica Extremalis has worn nothing but kilts, robes and skirts inside the station's air seals, so as to avoid suffering the baleful fate of this righteous Imperial martyr.

Speaking of trousered infamy, voidsmen in three subsectors will tell you wild story variations about Captain Zedek Mascadolce, a downbeaten Rogue Trader renowned for his ill fortune with the rearguard durability of his tight and costly trousers. Even more fell rumours claim that the splendid Captain of the Debt Collector himself repairs his ripped pants instead of ordering underlings to carry out the task. Speculations as to why range from fear of assassination, through fear of subordinate incompetence, to sheer embarrasment over such a faux pas occuring to this refined socialite. Indeed, any self-respecting Rogue Trader caught with such damaged garb on his derriere would have to hide his face in odious shame.

The cultural phenomenon of aversion to britches in some human cultures in warmer climes will undoubtedly have hygienic origins related to ventilation. Upstanding bearers of kilt and tunic swear by the advantages to health of avoiding trousers, and they curse the strange ways of self-degrading barbarians who would have their legs and nobler parts trapped inside tubes of textile or hide. Do these fools pursue eczema and itchy ratches? Do they not know that both virility and fertility is dampened by the constraints of pants? God-Emperor judge their foul garb unworthy!

Conversely, some of the worst wounds from alchemical combat gasses can be found among kilt-wearing Astra Militarum regiments, whose suffering afterward beggars belief. Any member of the Officio Medicae with relevant experience can attest this fact, while making warding gestures and spreading their fingers across their chest in the sign of the Aquila to keep away Daemons drawn to the mere words of such horrendous hardship. Yet such sacrifices of self is nothing compared to the virtue of fighting and dying for the Terran Emperor, seated on the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

O Terra, verti est sua aeterni!

Coincidentally, a great empire during the distant past of the Age of Terra went to hell in a hand basket around the same time it widely adopted pants. Similar examples of a much later date will sometimes be bandied about by jurists and governocrats across the Imperium, as they point to a decline in planetary fortunes and a wilting of military arms following the adoption of heinous luxuries of one sort or another. Yet for the plebeian mob, such matters mostly come down to drunken violence and red-blooded herd mentality. For them, the sight of strangers being dressed in pants whereas they are not, is reason enough to cook up a fight and have some malevolent fun at the expense of another.

And so we see that human cultures always tend to fall back on cycles of petty violence and frothing outrage over trivial matters, in a circumlocution that leads nowhere. In the Age of Imperium, such movement into a dead-end is all that humanity has proven itself capable of, as mankind under the rule of the High Lords of Terra flagellates itself in abject misery and ignorance, even as its grasp on knowledge and technology rots away in a slow death spiral of demechanization.

In such a depraved interstellar civilization stuck in a rut, is it any wonder that man has been reduced to a resentful wretch, his demented hate fuelled by trauma and dogma alike? Where man has fallen so low from the golden pinnacles of his ancestors, is it any wonder that he is so prone to spontaneous outbreaks of communal violence? What else can one expect from a humanity sunk into the abyss of senility?

Such is the waywardness of mankind, after it went down the wrong trouser leg of history.

Such is the decrepit state of our species, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the raging nonsense that awaits us all.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/08 17:07:30


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Pushover

"It was in that moment, of trying to push up the small rontree with the roots, when menial garden serf Tammuz Tsivkmlap realized that he had the spiked iron fence right under his throat."

- Excerpt from Carolus Wrång the Elder's travelling journal Anecdotes of [Redacted] Stubbornness, Being A Sketch of Rural Life On Sala Majoris In the Emperor's Year 346.M41, literary work approved by voidholm censors after purging obscene swearwords and published in Low Gothic on Skintaxmountain Station IV by Printing House Draconus of Hab-District Six


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/08 19:01:37


Post by: Illumini


Ha! Lovely little dark joke


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/09 13:28:32


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Illumini: Thanks! Based on a real event in a friend's garden. Fortunately, he spotted the danger in time.




Smoke Cover

In the grim darkness of the far future, man hides from the gaze of heaven.

Ever since the primordial forebears of man saw birds soaring above, man has dreamt of flying. That dream was realized by brilliant and brave pioneers during the misty past of the Age of Terra, and ever since has the skyvault been a domain of man. That windblown sphere of flight has ever been dangerous, for gravity will undo the best and the brightest should the winged wains of man crash. To mitigate these perils on high, ancient man invented ever more ingenious instruments and systems to keep him flying no matter the obstacles.

The technology invested in aircraft and aerodromes was already refined beyond belief by the end of the Age of Terra, yet the stellar exodus and accelerated spree of invention fuelled by Man of Stone during the Dark Age of Technology would surpass all that had come before and by comparison make it look like ungainly paper planes bereft of sight and rudder. Truly, the sky alone was the limit in that golden epoch when the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron bestrode the cosmos like titans.

As man built for himself a worldly paradise betwixt the stars, so did man's hubris soar. As man banished suffering and hardship from his life, so did his arrogance take flight. On godless wings did man raise himself up on a pedestal as he laboured to uncover the innermost secrets of creation itself, yet those wings of genius melted like wax brought too close to the sun. Machine revolt, Warp storms and a plague of witches and Daemons rent the galactic realm of ancient man asunder, and twain million worlds and uncountable void dwellings were thrown into the meatgrinder of the Age of Strife.

Man fell, and fell hard. He landed bloodily with crippling impact in a desolation where cannibals ate their own kin and where ignorant savages rummaged around the ruins of ancient giants for pitiful scraps. Most of the masterful knowledge and craft of the ancients was destroyed in that crash into Old Night, and man suffered mightily amid the ravages of Xenos and Chaos. To this day, it is a cardinal truth of the Imperium that only the God-Emperor and His victorious arms saved humanity from the brink of doom, yet like so many fundamental humans beliefs in the Age of Imperium, it is a blatant lie wrapped in a semblance of truthfulness. The truth of the matter is that the Imperator, for all His brilliant vision and beneficial toil for our species, ruthlessly eliminated all other sources of human regrowth after the Age of Strife ended. Thus, only His Imperial renaissance of Mars and Terra in union would be allowed to flourish, under His rule alone.

This turned out to be a catastrophic mistake for mankind, as the shining promises of the early Imperium were scorched to cinders during the greatest betrayal in human history. Suddenly, the monopoly on human development in Imperial hands turned out to be a black curse upon man, as the cosmic domains of the transcendent Deity of Gold crawled out of the civil war, battered and beaten to a pulp, yet still capable of maintaining its grip on power over a million worlds and voidholms without number.

And so the Emperor's servants proceeded to rule in His name. For a time, the traumatized star realm of man saw a silver age under tyrannical oversight, and some of the grievous damage done to human interstellar civilization was briefly repaired. Yet this false rebirth and stabilization was soon replaced by unyielding rot. For fivehundred generations has man been ruled by the High Lords of Terra, and this Age of Imperium is nothing but a cavalcade of bloodsoaked stagnation and decline of human fortunes across the board, in a slowly worsening death spiral of demechanization and loss of knowledge and technological hardware.

One such expression of dilapidation may be glimpsed in the state of aircraft, as human power continues to wane across the Milky Way galaxy on the Imperium's watch. As with so much of technology still produced and maintained by Imperial subjects, human aeroplanes are rugged affairs, originally designed by the Abominable Intelligence of long-lost Standard Template Constructors to be functional in the most diverse atmospheric environs of alien worlds. The most advanced forms of winged wains known to Explorators are well beyond the reach of Imperial production capacity, for so much has been lost, never to be regained. As such, man makes do with simpler kinds of aircrafts and hover vessels, which were often designed as rudimentary emergency measures, grown permanent by stifling ineptitude in the Imperium of Man.

The excellent design of even the most basic and crude pieces of technology inherited from ancient man is witnessed in the fact that his deranged heirs are still alive and kicking against all the odds. Without the scrapings of masterful tech from the legendary Men of Stone, Imperial man would long since have gone extinct, for he has created nothing of his own, and everything he took from the ancients he distorted.

One such obvious distortion can be seen in Imperial aerocraft, where an etiolating process of cutbacks, loss of know-how and deterioration of production facilities has seen ever more sensitive instruments disappear from newly produced airplanes. The most experienced and knowledgable of Imperial pilots and lay mechanics will be confounded whenever they encounter older planes with strange instrument panels. So many helpful systems have been removed for the sake of all-consuming ignorance or due to the ravenous demands of total war. Ultimately, the Imperium needs the ability to fly and shoot, and creature comforts, pilot survivability and sophisticated systems can always be done away with, no matter how much less combat effective this renders the battleplane. Fiery faith will have to pick up the slack. Likewise, an increased input of men and machines thrown into the meatgrinder will feed this broken equation of a colossus on feet of clay, as the monstrous Imperium continues to gear itself for ever more atavistic forms of warfare and industrial production.

Among all this mounting savagery and fanaticism, Imperial subjects have devised a plethora of primitive tricks to deal with enemy air superiority. One common ploy, when fuel is plentiful, is to dig wells, pour promethium into the pits and then lit them on fire. The black smoke thus billowing up will then hopefully create visual distractions for the pilots of the air force of the hated foe. Many such promethium covers have been devised by men and women possessed with cunning, but who have also been ignorant of such matters as satellite guidance and other forms of sophisticated technology that substitutes sight for aircraft. Oftentimes the entire effort will be nothing but wasted sweat and fuel for all the lack of impact it had on enemy air power.

One campaign example of burning promethium covers can be found on the civilized world of Uruk Sigma. Here, local separatists clashed with the Astra Militarum and the Planetary Defence Force in the promethium-producing region of Dadghab. After succeeding in infiltrating the Imperial rear and conquering a massive supply depot through covert means, the deviant separatists raised the flag of offensive, and threw themselves against the Imperial lines with this new influx of heavy equipment. As the rebel assault swept across the promethium fields, the Imperial commander General Agathea von Niessuh suppressed panic and suspicion of her own incompetence by a vigorous purge of subordinate commanders accompanied by a scaremongering propaganda campaign aimed to sow paranoia among Imperial ranks. Scapegoating and terror thus accomplished, the Imperial commander proceeded to meet the lightning advances of the nefarious enemy.

As traitor flags were raised over ever more drill towers, Agathea von Niessuh ordered the bulk of her forces to pull back to Nippur Regia, the regional capital city of Dadghab. Largely abandoning a wide front, Agathea had her forces dig in around the city in concentric circles of trenches and prefabricated pillboxes, all the while using fresh reinforcements to fortify the main supply route in an arrangement called the Long Walls of Nippur Regia. Accepting that Imperial forces for the present were outmatched and overwhelmed by the separatists, Agathea calculated that her soldiers would fight ferociously once cornered in an urban center turned into a fortress, as long as the supply lines held.

This uncharacteristic burst of original thinking saved the Imperial grip on Nippur Regia. The Long Walls were defended by a line of outpost forts, by husbanded missiles launched out of the hive city, and by rapid dune patrols of armoured cars and Sentinels who again and again managed to take separatist attackers by surprise. Thus convoys protected by heavy armour and Hydra flak tanks managed to keep the defenders of Nippur Regia fed and supplied, even if a seventh of the hive city's population of two billion had to be exterminated and fed into the corpse grinders in order to feed the rest of His Divine Majesty's starving subjects and loyal labourers.

With the aerial fortunes of local Planetary Defence Force aerofleets and Imperial Navy air wings at a crucial ebb, the invigorated Dadghabi separatists built new aerodromes and fuel depots, and concentrated all their air forces to strike the Long Walls in tandem with ground assaults. This renewed attempt to cut off Nippur Regia from outside supplies was met by Field Order Nr. 2137. Agathea von Niessuh ordered tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of civilian vehicles out into the battlezone, equipped with drills, dozer blades, spades and pickaxes. This ant-like column of humanity milled about along the stretch of the Long Walls, ever under horrible raids from enemy fighters, ever the victims of hostile artillery and air power. Many drafted thralls fled, only to be shot dead by blocking lines of Guardsmen and PDF troopers tasked with keeping the rabble in line. While overseers barked and taskmasters whipped bared backs, the men, women and children of Nippur Regia were herded out into the wasteland to dig pits and fill them with crude promethium.

When enemy assaults on this antediluvian engineering work intensified, General von Niessuh negotiated the cooperation of Nippur Regia's local Securitate forces and Adeptus Arbites precinct fortress. With harsh oversight provided by these brutal policiary organizations of the hive, Agathea increased input by throwing sixhundredthousand more Nippurites into the operation. Ever more machines broke down or went up in flames, and ever more work and transport had to be carried out by human hands and on human backs, assisted with requisitioned beasts of burden of xenoid origin. This mobilization of unwilling civilian manpower went on to the drumbeat of a massive conscription campaign, which saw three million Nippur Militiamen and Oathsworn Loyalist zealots in sackcloth hastily assembled. These men, women and juves were given the crudest practice imaginable in how to shoot and reload their lasguns or stubbers before being sent untrained to plug gaps in the frontlines of the the Long Walls.

Thus Imperial commander Agathea von Niessuh traded bodies for time, in a gamble she ultimately won at a cost in human lives best measured in hillocks of corpses.

Partway through the frantic scramble to shore up the Long Walls of Nippur Regia, Imperial forces began torching some of the first finished promethium wells, in a desperate attempt to gain some cover from hostile air power and unrelenting separatist ground assaults. Lo! The sky went black over Dadghab, and the city populace with windows facing the outside world woke up to darkness at dawn. Oily smoke billowed out of pits in the ground, masking the Long Walls and the people toiling and fighting and dying along its entire length. As more promethium wells were completed and lit up, ever more greasy columns of smoke darkened the sky, pulling a black veil over the heavens and throwing the efforts of enemy air power into confusion.

Where half the sky is flame and half the sky is smoke, Imperial might won out under a Promethian Shield, covering Imperial convoys and route defences for long enough. Eventually, enemy combat potential had ruined itself against the stalwart defenders with their lines of blocking troops ready to fire anyone surrendering or fleeing. Imperial officers and Commissars in the field brandished grim smiles on their gaunt faces as the rebel offensive petered out. And as the treacherous separatists licked their wounds, the artery of Imperial logistics known as the Long Walls pumped men and materiel frantically into Nippur Regia. Hundreds of long convoys of vehicles, men and pack animals travelled along blackened roads where horrible smoke and burnt-out corpses littered the landscape.

After three months of buildup, Imperial preparations were completed, and General Agathea von Niessuh launched the offensive Operation Pius, crushing enemy defenses again and again in a drumroll of artillery and small thrusts of armoured spearheads and human wave assaults that ground every rebel attempt to regroup and dig fortifications into dust and ash. Finally, after five years of total warfare and seventeen years of gruelling insurgency oppression, the entire region of Dadghab had returned under full Imperial control, including its precious promethium fields. The death toll exceeded three billion all in all, and much of the region was left largely depopulated after Imperial revenge purges saw any tribes and clans with suspected rebel members wiped out to extinguish all traitorous bloodlines. Thus was the Pax Imperialis restored to the planet of Uruk Sigma, and all was well in the celestial domains of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra.

The promethium smoke cover of the Long Walls of Nippur Regia is an example of a succesful use of fuel to shield ground fighters from sky fighters. These smoke covers are however often ineffectual, as the complete impotence of promethium covers against Tau, Eldar and Kin planes bear witness to. Burning promethium to blacken the sky can on the other hand cause great havoc among Ork pilots, for whom sight is the primary means of navigation and manoeuvre.

More worryingly, Imperial pilots and aircraft from worlds rebelling against the Imperium also seem to be vulnerable to this crude ploy. For instance, during the biannual Grand Exercises of Saint Hodrerum on the arid world of Tallarn in 884.M41, the Fourth Aerofleet of the Planetary Defence Force was thrown into utter chaos when the High Command sprang a Promethian Shield as a surprise twist in the unfolding live wargames. The resultant tumble as bewildered squadrons flew into each other and crashed into the ground amid thick layers of smoke was not only a peacetime training fiasco, but a glimpse of actual air combat reality as recorded on so many battlefronts across so many worlds and giant voidholms where aircraft can contend inside the domes.

To think that man, the master of the skies, has been reduced to such a rudimentary state that he must steer his winged wain by sight alone. During the human and machine heyday of the Dark Age of Technology, man flew sleek silver vessels with superb instruments that could slalom and somersault nimbly through the most dense and busy urban cityscape, no matter the obscuration of smoke, radiation, blinding light or electromagnetic pulse disruptions. Such blindfolded aerial acrobatics are now far beyond the reach of even the most skilled Imperial pilots among the degenerate descendants of Man of Gold. Not for the lack of breathtaking expertise, but for the horrendous degradation of knowledge and technology during the Age of Imperium.

Indeed, the contrast with Imperial fliers during the Great Crusade or the Forging will alone suffice to demonstrate the abject impoverishment of human aircraft under the reign of the High Lords of Terra.

Such is the state of human air power in a forsaken aeon.

Such is the decay that awaits us all, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the crumbling of the works of our hands.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/15 20:49:44


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:


@StaevinTheAeldari: Wow, very nice work! I love your granular attention to detail and subtle nuances. I am sure it will help Inquisitorial RPG campaigns come alive better. This is exactly the kind of lifelike attention to detail and grounded stuff that I love to see more of. Have you read Matthew Farrer's Enforcer trilogy, by any chance? You may find it inspiring and useful as well. I for one did! Actually, Ian Watson's bonkers 1993 book Space Marine deserves a mention as well, since the novel revolves around recruits from different castes, to good effect.


Thank you. I've not read any of those things, only stuff I read are the Ciaphas Caine books and some fanfics.

I tried to write some more, spinning off the same theme of a Dark Heresy campaign. (actually most of this are taken from a Mutant Chronicles game but it's pretty easily adapted):


First consider the enemy within, within, within.

The various imperial institutions are often considered monolithic in nature, and indeed in many ways this is true. Dogma forms the backbone of each such structure, massive edifices around which all its members have to dance.

But it is also a massive misconception.

Each institution is chaotic in nature, not in the sense of any ruinous corruption from dark and not to be named gods, but from the far more mundane corruption of man's own inadequacy.

Though many within the imperium would argue that those are one and the same.

No matter the reason, those newly recruited within such organizations quickly finds that the people around them is a far greater threat to their duties than any outside enemy.

You can shoot the heretic, the traitor, the witch. Your own superior has to many bodyguards, and the assassins at his disposal are to frightening. Not to mention the potential involvement of other departments.

Thus the true primary enemies of any imperial operative. The two headed chief, the forgotten page, the struggling hands or the frail ground, and That Which We Do Not Speak Of. Parables on occasion passed down to new acolytes to give them a chance of survival. Such knowledge is usually passed down in a way that cannot be traced back to the one providing it, should the recipients turn out to be fools and speak of them to loudly. Some dastardly operatives even go so far as to tailor missions according to these parables, preferring more hands on lessons, and delighting in whatever the outfall for the poor bastards they are subjecting their teachings to.

The two headed chief refers to the all to common instance of having more than one direct superior. Not even the inquisition is free from this. While each acolyte cell may hold loyalty to one specific inquisitor, it is common indeed that he holds multiple Legates or other officers within his ranks, doling out cells to more than one such operative.

On occasion some Ordos will also see inquisitors pool their resources, causing some assets to fall under the authority of multiple inquisitors at once. For the struggling acolyte, this is even worse.

The two headed chief specifically refers to having more than one direct superior, where both or all of them hate each other. The poor subordinate cell thus find themselves much like a forlorn collection of children, cast between two (or Emperor forbid more) hateful lovers, used in petty gamers of one-upmanship, provided work far exceeding their ability to finish, directly contradictory orders, and otherwise asked and pushed and demanded to take sides, though very rarely explicitly. Greatly angering either head risks utter destruction, but as they anger themselves avoiding it might be an impossibility. What follows is a maddening dance, balancing the perception of each head while desperately trying to find a path out of the situation. Intentional or accidental assassination of their superior - if not trough bullet and blade, then trough politics, bureaucracy, or plain gossip - is not an uncommon end to such a dance, though being sent on a succession of increasingly obvious suicide missions is another common result. Before either of these ends occur lesser pitfalls abound. Public humiliation as superiors argue or even comes to blows, being given grudge work as punishment for some slight real or perceived, or being dragged into various pieces of schemes and intrigue, not just by their own superiors but by any onlooking bystander believing themselves having something to win out of the mess.

The forgotten page refers to paperwork, but also the internal bureaucracy of any imperial institution and the pitfalls within it. Forgotten forms, misplaced orders, purged departments, forgotten departments, or misplaced relics can cause a lot of chaos, stress, and confusion. There is also the dreaded misplaced package, containing relics, knowledge or orders the acolyte cell should not be near and much less have in their possession. The worst of it is the impossibility there is in discerning whether such sinkholes of resources or information are intentional, justified, or the result of some intrigue, and if that intrigue is the result of internal conflicts (likely), or actual corruption(very bad news). In the end those unfortunate enough to encounter such mistakes, stumbling on what they believe to be a pattern may find themselves having to keep pulling on many treads, most torn, those who aren't leading to increasingly powerful individuals none of which will be pleased by the intrepid acolytes stumbling investigation. The forgotten page leads to a dark and unlit labyrinth, and it should be navigated with care, because monsters lurk within it.

The struggling hands and the frail ground refers to the same thing, though from different perspectives. Internal rivalry, conflicts, tension, or mundane inefficiencies between various departments and operatives. The struggling hands specifically refers to instances where departments or personnel are working at cross purposes either trough confusion or trough differing perspectives on a given situation, usually occurring when one department want to protect, kidnap, or retain something, while the other party deems its destruction of outmost importance.

The frail ground occurs when one party within an institution believes himself in a secure position trough another party, only to find that security false. Either because it is retracted, or because that other party falls, trough assassination or trough accusation. In the context of the inquisition, this would mean an Inquisitor is assassinated, or worse still, put on trial by his peers, with any given acolyte cell having to scramble to avoid a purge. Such critical moments are unlikely to end well for anyone, and acolytes do well to pray they never occur.

That Which We Do Not Speak Of refers to the dark secrets any inquisitorial cell inevitable end up keeping. There are the lesser things of course, intentionally ignored orders, squirreled away resources, petty intrigue. But then there are the larger things. The discovery of heretical thought or activity within the inquisition itself. Betrayals. Assassination. The hoarding of forbidden knowledge. Things that would damn anybody, body and soul. Inevitable procured by any member across their service the lengths any acolyte cell may go trough to keep such secrets hidden knows no bounds of ruthlessness or mercy.

When such a minefield is the home and daily routine of not just inquisitorial acolytes but most imperial organizations, it is no wonder the zealous joy with which some pursue their external duties. There is a sincere relief in problems that - though carrying intense danger - are relative straightforward.



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/19 13:46:02


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@StaevinTheAeldari: Marvellous, all of it! Great piece of background, and so very immersive. Of course this is how working for Inquisitors will be like! Fantastic choice of words for the lesson-phrases. I'm forwarding linked recommendations to your writings on sister threads of this on all other forums at once.



Man Is the Measure of All Things

"Esteemed reader, let us now turn to a peculiar anecdote which evented in 974.M41, best retold aloud late in the dayturn in good company, following reinforcement by fine liquor. As Head Lady of the Ibolyka sept of our Noble House Erba-Batthyany, I had sponsored an Explorator Magos of the revered Adeptus Mechanicus to carry out a technoarchaeological dig on our domains, following a series of chance artefact finds by my diligent agri-serfs in District Alfa-79.

Three weeks into the excavation, I took the gilded sky blue grav-sled to visit the dig site in person, along with my Emperor-blessed fifteen surviving progeny and a retinue of eightysix attendants and bodyguards. By the grace of the Saints, we arrived just as the dig team hit upon an interesting discovery. A humble menial climbed out of the wellstair, bowed with eyes averted and tenderly handed my highborn self a crystalline rectangle with retracted corners, tinted teal with trace remains of yellow ochre dust in the engravings where cleaning efforts had not utterly succeeded. A shard of the rectangular plate was broken off in a corner, but otherwise it seemed intact. I held it up to bask in the light of the twin suns. The little crystalline find was covered in exquisite lines and diagrams of scratchings, with strange miniature illustrations etched into it.

For five minutes straight did I turn it around this way and that, and I studied its appearance on both front and back. I even peered closely on the thin edges, which bore microscopic markings which resembled long jumbles of numbers, akin the code-names of file-spirits. At last, I handed the artefact to the patient Explorator, Magos Ameerah-Kiran, and uttered these words:

'Ever since I was a small girl have I taken hieratic pride in my grasp of High Gothic. Yet the shape of letters and other figures is so unfamiliar from our Imperial fonts, and the twists of wordings so different, that I cannot make head or tail of its content. It is nothing like the histories and classics that I have consumed by the lumen, nor anything like the plays and poems that my late husband so treasured. Please tell me what ancient wisdom is contained within this relic, o Magos.'

The Tech-Priestess tenderly received the crystalline rectangle in her mechadendrites, shifting it over with extreme care to a strong bionic arm of many joints. Anointed ocular implants flared with light as they scanned its pristine surface, and the servant of the Omnissiah hummed with binary code-prayers while making the sign of the cogwheel with her other metal hands. At last the Explorator struck a bell and started to repeatedly swing a fragrant censer back and forth. Having thus established a solemn silence around herself, Magos Ameerah-Kiran at last proclaimed:

'Praise the divine knowledge! Your excellence, this is a plasteocrete hard copy of a digital file, printed in the twentythird millennium. Within its writ we find remnants of lost Biologis lore, describing a segment of characteristics of the wise ancients themselves. Truly it is said, that man is the measure of all things.'

'What does it say, o Magos?' I asked.

'On the shallow surface, it is nought but a superficial recording of anatomical survey findings among a population numbering fiftythousandthreehundredsix, all golden ancestors peopling a long-lost colony dome. As we might expect, their health indicators are overall robust, with tall average height speaking of excellent nourishment growing up. And not a single instance of lifelong parasitic infection.'

'And beneath those plain numbers, o Magos?'

'Peering deeper into the data, we realize that this is in fact a trail, and we must redouble our dig efforts, your excellence. We are clearly on the track of ancient Genetors, and we must toil slavishly to uncover every iota of remnant knowledge that these grounds of yours may contain.'

'Genetors you say? Do you expect to find a laboratorium of sorts? Pray tell, o Magos.'

'If the Omnissiah so wills it. Aye, your excellence. By electron and proton, these simple measurements contain proof of genetic engineering!'

Whether wittingly or not, the Tech-Priestess was pulling the leg of my curiosity. I confess that excitement burst forth in my heart, fed by many fantastic fables and cryptic mysteries speaking of the strange things of yore, before He Who Dwells On the Face of Terra revealed Himself as the Saviour and Lord of our predestined human species. Thus, I said with some eagerness, on the limits of protocol:

'Please do us the courtesy to not keep us on a leash any longer, reverend Explorator. Tell us what it is! What hint have you uncovered, pray tell? Are there unnatural freaks bred by gene-kings? Monstrosities and witches grown in vats? Are there horrors which man was never meant to see, bred by godless ancestors in heinous sin?'

The Explorator straightened and held up the hardprint in her mechanical claws, before uttering a blurt of binary code:

'01001000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01101100 01100001 01110010 01100111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000100 01100001 01110010 01101011 00100000 01000001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 01101110 01101111 01101100 01101111 01100111 01111001'

'And in Low Gothic, o Magos?'

Magos Ameerah-Kiran replied in that scratchy voice through the vox-emitter: 'Your excellence. The key is hidden in the survey measurements for the entire masculine half of the dome population. Comparing to contemporary and historical data at the disposal of our noospheric memory coils, we may draw the conclusion that the wise ancients practiced their Genetor craft on a massive scale, effectively shaping the flesh of an entire population like clay to fulfil some of mankind's oldest wishful dreams.'

'How so? Did these mortals play god, o Magos?'

'Elementary! The crux lies in the phallic measurements, your excellence. Clearly proof of genetic engineering.' The Explorator paused theatrically and gazed on the male diggers on the site. Undoubtedly, the Magos' cultic indoctrination and surgical bionic shunning of the flesh had not extinguished every spark of humour within her cerebral processors and grey cells. For the briefest of moments, there was the shutting off and on of a glowing bionic eye in the Tech-Priestess' abominable metal face, as if mimicking a human wink. 'Oh, those poor, Imperial women. How short man has fallen of the heights of his ancestors!'"

- Anecdote from A Biography Betwixt Blushes and Banquets, an autobiographical work by Gyöngyi Erba-Batthyany, literary work approved by planetary censors in 989.M41 and published in High Gothic on Dunantul Majoris by Printing House Endre of Capitolina Sarolt


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/11/30 20:30:53


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Crowning Glory

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only toil for the sake of toil.

In the distant past of the misty Age of Terra, myths spoke of gods fashioning men and women out of clay to toil for their makers. To the eternal question of from where does we come, these stories replied that man is but mud, created to be a slave for celestial overlords. Skeptics during later phases of that bygone aeon would snarkily comment that such a cosmic order must be terribly convenient for mortal royals ruling over cowed masses. What a coincidence! As above, so below. Yet such leisurely talk of unbelief failed to grasp the heavily-laden omen for the future of man that lay hidden in these ancient tales told around campfires in fields of clay.

Behold man, the seed of Old Earth, the builder of wonders and the depraved destroyer of all. Behold man, the active worker and the lazy wastrel, the obedient servant and the clamorous rebel. Behold man in his totality, sprung from the meandering paths of breeding forebear-creatures, his blood forever marked by idiosyncracies and flaws born out of inbreeding and random mutations of genes. The king of animals, ancient man emerged out of the orgy and bloodbath of uncaring evolution as a sentient being able to fundamentally remake his surroundings, yet unable to fundamentally remake himself.

Thus human history for untold millennia played out in endless cycles of youthful rise and degenerate decay. The human past is a litany of tribes massacring their hated enemies, of people's minds led astray by ever more false creeds, and of greatness slowly built up over generations of toil only to be crashed by horrible heirs or greedy conquerors. Human civilization was for the longest time perpetually scourged by such ailings as poverty and corruption, theft and lethargy, ingratitude and history forgotten. The flaws of natural man under civilization are innumerable and to be observed everywhere he settles down and lives out his time. At the end of the day, man is but a product of nature, and all his neurotics, anxieties, dysfunctionalities, diseases, self-destructiveness and shortcomings ultimately stem from the random makeup of his being that was formed in long forgotten eras of bestial survival and procreation.

For a time, the Dark Age of Technology changed all of that. Ascending the heavens, the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron straddled the Milky Way galaxy like a colossus, and over twain million worlds were colonized in a brilliant spree of human expansion that took man to the stars and beyond. With science and technology as his lodestar, ancient man built a worldly paradise for himself, meticulously tailored to bring out the best of natural man, while artificially curing many of the worst defects of human nature. While clever systems were put in place to bring out the full potential of mankind, genetors worked relentlessly to improve on the human genome. The innermost secrets of human flesh became but clay under their able hands, to shape at will for the betterment of humanity as a whole. Inherited faults were hunted down and eliminated in order to shape a better man, and glorious creations such as Navigators saw the light of day, which still enable man to maintain an interstellar empire despite the frothing turmoil of the Empyrean.

Natural man was treated with the best cures of ills and given longevity such as he could only have dreamt of, yet the cunning minds of the Golden Age of Technology could do better than that. They could make man anew. They could create a better man.

Many untold and forgotten grand experiments were carried out, and many bore shining fruit. We will now focus our attention on one of the larger genetic projects of this bygone epoch of discovery, one whose seed has managed to perpetuate itself with brilliant success long after sister seeds long since wilted and died. The genetor project in question was not the most daring and groundbreaking one concocted during the Dark Age of Technology, nor was it driven by the loftiest of ideals. Instead, it is a testament to the stubborn and rugged qualities that always made natural man a survivor, amplified and purged of impurities that make for instability and failure. Let us turn to the murky origins of the Kin.

Man's drive to make the starspangled void his domain has always been driven by ambitions of expansion and greed. Only failed schools of thought would discount the allure of material gain as a pivotal force at the core of human history. And so ancient man in splendid times of yore set out to mine the galactic core. And the earthly trinity of Man of Gold, Stone and Iron toiled wisely to create a new human being fit for this task. This new man would be exquisitely fit for astral and terrestrial mining in the harshest environs, because he would have been designed for it from the ground up. The new man would not only be tough and resistant to cosmic radiation, he would also be diligent, clever, hard-working and a born perfectionist in all his endeavours. Not only that: The new man would be rid of human weaknesses and characteristics that bring instability, doubt and lapse in toil, and he would be designed to find meaning in his labours and enjoy his toil and mission in life.

In short, the new man would be the perfect slave, self-perpetuating and content with his monumental task for all eternity. The makers of ancestral Kin gave life to all those ancient myths of gods fashioning man out of clay to serve at the behest of distant deities, to work the lands and offer up the fruits of their labour in sacrifice. And just like any wise creator god of archaic mythology, the makers of the Kin fashioned their creations to revere and obey their creators, yet the results of these laboratory creations far exceeded anything ever claimed by old sagas.

The new man thus created by shadowy genetors was the abhuman race known as Homo Sapiens Rotundus, and it set about its grand task with unrelenting vigour. These willing thralls built up untold mining operations in the galactic core, and shipped back enormous amounts of material to their makers and owners. For they were made to be both willing and able labourers. The rapid expansion of the human species during the Stellar Exodus was greatly accelerated by the astral mining conducted by gene-bred abhumans in the galactic core, as were the building of megastructures in space and soaring wonders on planetary crust wherever large human colonies sprang up.

As ancient man built edenic idylls on twain million worlds and voidholms without number, the miners toiled in the core. As the best and the brightest minds of ancient man began cracking the secrets of creation and time itself, they toiled. As gene-kings and monstrosities rose out of heinous sin and godless hubris, they toiled. As aberrant Man of Iron rebelled against his master, they toiled. As the galaxy burned in machine revolt and titanic technological civil war beyond anything seen later, they toiled. As Abominable Intelligence ran amok and machine creations swallowed stars and pulverized worlds, they toiled. As witches and Warp storms tore the ravaged galactic civilization of ancient man asunder, they toiled.

Scarcely anything is known about the Ancestors of the Kin during the last stages of the crumbling Dark Age of Technology. Clearly, they were not untouched by all the calamities that beset the star realm of ancient man during this time. They must have fought, and fought succesfully. Clearly, they survived, and their grasp of ancient man's legacy technology and scientific knowledge remained strong.

The horrible aeon of devastation known as the Age of Strife saw many remnant human enclaves with some degree of preserved high technology and knowledge make it through Old Night, only to be crushed ruthlessly by the Emperor's all-conquering Legions as the early Imperium took the Milky Way galaxy with storm. Clearly, some peripheral states of Homo Sapiens Rotundus fell to the Imperial war machine during the Great Crusade, yet the work of completely subjugating every nook and cranny of the galaxy was left unfinished when the Horus Heresy rent the Emperor's dream to pieces, and then proceeded to nigh-on slay Him on Terra in a civil war that destroyed Imperial mankind's hopes of ever rekindling the golden lights of their ancestors. And so the vast majority of the human species was swept down a maelstrom of ever-worsening demechanization and fanatical depravity, and man grew ever more senile and irrationally aggressive as fivehundred generations of descendant degeneration played themselves out in a baleful theatre of the absurd.

Yet the counter-productive tyranny of the monstrous Imperium of Man was not the only strong entity remaining of the heirs of ancient man. Hidden in the galactic core, there remained a great and powerful remnant that will toil until the end of time, if nothing manages to destroy them first. This remnant was the willing slave race, tailored for their worksome task by unknown makers seeking profit. These mining thralls had long since ceased to send shipments of ore and processed raw materials to the domains of wider humanity, for the Age of Strife had ended that part of their original purpose. Instead, the stout race of abhumans turned their acquisitions into ever more fantastic creations of their own, and invested it all in expanding their Holds and astral domains, in a never-ending search for more celestial bodies to extract resources from.

Where others fell to the flame and fell to infighting and cannibal savagery, they endured. Where others lost knowledge and craft and even forgot where they had sprung from, they endured. Where others lost their grasp of interstellar travel and astral mining in the havoc of the Age of Strife, they endured, and endured with excellence. Their makers had fashioned them to be the perfect workers and miners, the best survivalists and the most thorough artisans. Made to be solid and reliable, made to be free of natural man's most damning weaknesses, this clone race endured and thrived amid hardships that brought so many others to oblivion. Their decentralized interstellar civilization stayed true to its original mission, and thus the Leagues of Votann bloomed in the galactic core.

Children of many names, these abhumans are derogatorily known to the Imperium of Man as Squats. They are also known as Demiurg to Tau and Humans alike, as Heliosi Ancients to the Eldar, and likewise are they known to other Xenos as the Gnostari, Grome or Kreg, among many other names. Yet they themselves know their folk simply as Kin, for they are a race of few words, each laden with meaning.

Bestowed with a very demanding biological constitution, the Kin breeds but slowly the natural way, for such is the drawback of approaching perfection in the flesh. Thus, the creators of the Kin saw fit to vastly accelerate their reproduction while at the same time ensuring stability of the desired genome through the use of cloneskeins. The vast majority of Kin are thus birthed from machines at the heart of their Holds, in Crucibles endowed with genomic cloning technologies. While some exotic variations of genes and phenotypes have arisen among the dispersed populations of Kin throughout the millennia, the cloneskeins help ensure that their essential nature remains that desired by their long-dead makers, without significant aberrations.

Unintentionally, and through historical accident, the Kin has proven to be the truest and best enduring achievement among the creations of humanity during the Dark Age of Technology. The astral civilization of the Leagues of Votann have proven neither too brittle and corruptible to easily splinter and decay, nor too advanced so as to fall prey to revolts against creators or breakdowns of overly sophisticated systems.

In their middling way of Dark Age of Technology refinement, the Kin has proven the golden mean, a system installed long ago by forgotten makers that is still going incredibly strong. Among all the shattered remnants of mankind's golden age of science and technology, so much has fallen. The legacy technology and scientific understanding inherited by the wilted Imperium is rotting away with every passing century. The few shards of still operational and independent-minded Men of Stone and Men of Iron endures in the shadows without being able to mount any kind of large-scale recovery of ancient man's higher civilization, or else they have fallen to the corrupting influence of Chaos. Yet the Kin remains.

The Kin has managed their scientific and technological inheritance from the Golden Age of Technology better than any other seeds of Old Earth. Not only is their grasp of tech and material lore supreme in comparison to the shamanistic rituals of the senile Imperium; the Kin has employed both their technological elevation and themselves to forge teeming clusters of lively mining empires and industrial bastions in the galactic core, known as the Leagues of Votann. Theirs is not a tale of woe, and neither is it a saga of slow decline nor bleak dwindling in the face of overwhelming odds. For theirs is a success story against all the odds, of hardy expansion and wonders crafted in the harsh environs that lies at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.

During the time of their creation, the Kin were never the spearhead of technology and science, never the best fruit from the tree of man. They were exquisitely tailored for their grand task at hand, and made to thrive at it with the focus of perfectionists and the order of a perfect slave race, happy with their lot and finding fulfilment in their neverending work. They were equipped with an adequately advanced level of technology and scientific knowledge, yet their wisdom and craft were never the highest spires of the ancients.

Nevertheless those tall spires of legendary breakthroughs and tampering with reality itself fell to pieces in the wasteland of the Age of Strife, and all the most advanced creations of man either revolted, were destroyed or slowly eroded in forgotten abandonment. And so the Kin endures, designed to be stolid and tough, bred to be crafty and loyal. Theirs is a stout civilization, that has endured where brighter lights of the Dark Age of Technology have long since been snuffed out. Worksome and ingenious, the Grome are the perfect tool, and they continue to willingly wield themselves with excellence many millennia after their mysterious makers turned to dust.

Slaves bred for toil and carefully designed for order and stability so as to never rebel, the ancestral origins of the Demiurg remain a secret unknown even to themselves. Some would say that it is wrong to play god and create a slave race to work for your benefit. Yet we must turn this steak around, and bear witness to the enduring success of the Kin, for therein lies a testament to the brilliance of man during the Dark Age of Technology.

Consider their dark origins, and marvel at the skill with which the Squats were wrought: Is it not wrong to put slaves to tasks which they ultimately are unhappy with? Why not design the slaves to be happy with their tasks and find fulfilment in their toil? What could be more beautiful than perfection of function?

Nay, pity the unrefined, raw, longshanking manlings instead! Their flesh and essence is but a random hodgepodge of contradictory neurotics, falsehoods and selfish desires, spat out by the rutting chance of evolution. They are nought but apes arisen. How much suffering and bloodshed and destruction does not result from man’s imperfect being? Why not make a better man, and do away with all the evils of life? Why not design a better being from the ground up, stable and dependable, clever and strong? Why not forge the perfect tool?

To the Kin, there is nothing sinister about their origins. They were designed to be pragmatic, and so they will focus on what matters, true to the design of their makers. There is no space for doubt, just as there may not be cracks within the best of tools.

Look upon the toil of the Kin, and behold the genius of their work. Man may be a toolmaker, yet they are a sublime toolmaker. Ken the perfection of function that plays out in their civilization, across vistas of asteroid mining and salvage operations of spacewrecks, across nebulae trawling and the harvesting of black holes. The degenerate descendants of mankind in the Holy Terran Imperium know only of such wonders as particle excavators as garbled scenes for heroes and monsters jostling with lances of flame during a forgotten time, when starstriders walked the skies and discovered the perilous galaxy. Such wonders are but the stuff of legend to retrograde man, yet they are a lived reality of working projects for the Squats in the galactic core. And the sagas to be sung of those wonders would far surpass the tales of void-dragons and starknights.

Listen to tales told by Kin of their enormous struggles against Greenskins, which saw strong Leagues grind giant Waaaghs! to dust through gruelling total wars that lasted for hundreds of years, until the unrelenting power of the Squats crushed Orks underheel. Listen to the lamentations over lost Holds and Votanns gone mad amid death and desolation. Listen to the coming of the Bane and the vicious battles against Chaos. Listen to the Grudges and the works.

The Kin are sterling prospectors, miners, and void-dredgers, and a spirit of enterprising adventure is in their blood. Kreg mercenaries and pioneers may be found far away from the dominions of the Leagues, gathering knowledge and experience to offer up to their Ancestor Cores, the mysterious Votann of whom the Kin will never speak in the presence of aliens and lesser men. The lives of the Kin revolve around kinship, Ancestors and perfectionist work to mine and forge marvels across the stars. Their lives are likewise filled with lethal combat, for where there is peril there is opportunity.

It has been said in jest about their warriors that they are every inch the soldier, but there are not many inches. As any Kin worth their salt knows, a rotund sphere is the ideal body shape. The ugly longshanking of manlings just prove that knees are overrated. Yet the greatness of the Kin cannot be perceived from measly length of body, but in their endurance and their ability to work long and hard without becoming unhappy and broken. Most of all, the greatness of the Kin may be witnessed in their gigantic works, which will dwarf any undertakings of the ignorant Adeptus Mechanicus.

Certainly, the Ancestors of the Kin were never meant for utter ruthless exploitation for all eternity. Their purpose was never to extract all minerals from planets with native populations still on the crust, nor was it to salvage the infrastructure and cities of alien and human civilizations as so much junk to be recycled. The indifferent worksomeness with which the Leagues of Votann conduct their most shocking mining operations upon the worlds of unwilling inhabitants may be stark insanity to some, yet to the Kin themselves it is merely fulfilling the perfection of function for which they were created, honed to a new degree of sharpness. Their makers may never have envisioned this outcome, yet these atrocious extraction wars are also as true as rock itself.

Luck has. Need keeps. Toil earns.

Thus the Kin will carry out their tasks without any regard to whom it would have been of gain. No one else can rival their rapacious astral and terrestrial mining operations. All there is, to these extraordinary space miners, is exploitation and work unto the grave, so that future generations will be able to toil just as hard unto their own graves. The ancient promise of a better tomorrow for man is gone. The labour which should have led to a future without hardship and suffering where people can live in abundance and happiness is long since forgotten and buried. All there is, is work for the sake of work. And the Kin revel in it. Had they been a religious lot, they could not have asked for a better afterlife than the mortal coil of toil which they live out so hardily and heartily in the heart of the galaxy. Rock and stone!

And so we see that the Heliosi Ancients pursue their mining mission with greater focus than ever before, in unquestioning obedience to the Votann, their secret Ancestor Cores. The entire civilization of the Leagues is one of relentless work, and of war to enable more toil. Their most frequent foe is that of Orkoids, the green menace that has cast so many others on the trash heap of history. It is no surprise that engineers who mine asteroids for minerals end up the hateful enemy of lunatics who strap giant engines to the asteroids in order to crash Roks into unsuspecting planets in search of a good fun scrap. And so we may witness industrial conglomerates muster fantastic resources and hurl immense mechanized forces of Kin on savage foes, in order to grind down all resistance to their mining claims.

The Leagues of Votann believe that nothing is worth doing unless it is done well, and they wage war as methodically as they undertake any other pursuit. The selfsame attitude to life means that even the most isolated Squat enclaves are superb toolmakers, with a flair for overengineered maximalist designs. Anything they make will be sturdy and dependable, reliable just like they themselves are. This ever-present facet of Homo Sapiens Rotundus civilization is captured in the Kin Truth: Rock holds.

The pragmatic nature of Kin is not a conscious choice, but a racial temperament made by careful design in aeons past. Certain options will not even occur to Kin, for they are not made to occur to them, and the cloneskeins will ensure that it remains so on a fundamental level. Originally such a practical nature and focus on material tasks was meant to ensure that the Kin would never rebel, yet the long-term consequences of this artificial design of life has created something far greater than willing thralls meant to mine the galactic core for distant overlords. It has created an interstellar civilization immune to decadence and decay, free from the lowly cycles of human history, such as continue to play out miserably on Terra and across all her daughter worlds. The Gnostari embodies stability, and they are not able to fall into the societal traps of high technology, for such weakness has been bred out of them.

Do the Kin possess free will, compared to sentient species that are the result of natural evolution? The horrifying answer matters not. Never forget the foremost of all Kin Truths: The ancestors are watching.

For the Kin endure and they expand where so much else has been lost for all time, where so many treasures beyond imagination has been forgotten, never to be rediscovered. The enduring success of what became the Leagues of Votann could not have been foreseen in ancient times of glory, when so much else wonder was created that seemed to surpass the solid Kin.

Yet the worksome stability and striving for perfection of the Kin has outperformed all the other fruits of the Golden Age of Mankind. For where are the Men of Stone now? And where are the Men of Iron and the feared machine minds of Abominable Intelligence? Where are the brilliant minds that laboured to unlock the very secrets of creation itself? All have fallen into oblivion or obscurity, yet the less advanced sideshow that was the Squat slave race in the galactic core remains, and remains with a vengeance. For where the rest of humanity has ceased to create marvels of science and technology, the Leagues of Votann has continued the great legacy of the Dark Age of Technology. They alone among the spawn of Terra have continued to build pragmatic megastructures to harvest stars and planets alike, and they alone have continued to engineer material wonders of such a scale and a brilliant fashion as did once mankind's gifted ancients.

Thus the Kin are the crowning glory of the Dark Age of Technology.

All else is rot and ruination among the fruits of ancient man, in the Age of Imperium.

Listen!

Listen to the song of this benighted age.

A song rising out of the souls of mortals that must live through its hell.

Its song nought but the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

For all that can be heard is woe.

And the laughter of thirsting gods.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2022/12/13 14:54:21


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Befouled Birthright

"Ancient Man committed the first sin when he cast off his fear of the dark, for his heart was eaten away by the marshlight promise of hope. And with hope came greed for gain and thirst for knowledge, and thus the shining road to damnation was paved.

And Man sailed into the nightsky with unbridled boldness, and Man set about peopling the galaxy, which he remade into worldly paradise betwixt the stars. Heinous arrogance possessed Man as starstriders and sky-knights charged across the cosmos in godless sin, slaying monsters with spears of flame behind shields of starlight. And so Ancient Man explored the heavens with carefree curiosity, and every celestial discovery led wretched Man further astray from the path of the righteous, for he had eyes only for this world, and not the next. And Man showered adoration upon vain heroes who broke ground across the starspangled void, even as Man spat upon all that was holy in his unforgivable error.

All of creation was a ripe fruit to be plucked by the grasping hands of Ancient Man, for to rule the stars was his birthright. Yet Man's deeds and works fed his baleful hubris, and Man's mind became filled with the poison of unbelief and the folly of hope. And wherever Ancient Man nested, he lived in harmony and plenty, for a false bliss bore abundant milk and honey, and the nectar of worldly paradise sired thoughts of self and boundless ambition.

Ancient Man reached for the sky, and found all the gods of old to be trifling in comparison to Man's own worldly greatness. Thust Man cast off all faith in divinity, and placed himself on a pedestal of abomination. And Man worshipped his own knowledge and power in unspeakable sin, and his power and reach grew across the stars, and man uncovered ever more secrets in his lust for forbidden knowledge. And Man's heart was led astray by the lies of freedom and want of pain and perfection of flesh. And so the soul of Ancient Man became mired in the pit of progress, where witches and hellfire consumed him with fury after Man's own iron craft had turned on its maker. And all was fell.

Thus Ancient Man travelled the circles of creation, only to end up in the Nether Hells for the sake of his wicked deeds. For the universe is not for worlds to explore, but for souls to save. Thus ritual has replaced curiosity, for we are much wiser now. For we have learnt to fear the void as we must fear the dark, and we have learnt to hate that which we fear.

Have mercy upon us, o Divine Majesty!

Have mercy upon wretched Man!

For we must do eternal penance for our inheritance of sin. And we will flagellate ourselves until blood flows in a hundred streams from a hundred wounds. And we will pierce our skin with thorns and tear our scalp with shards, and we will scorch our flesh, and all this we will do willingly and gladly in His name. And we will praise the hardship that we must bear, and bless the breaking of our back, for it is a just labour, and a just punishment upon our worthless husks. And we swear to endure all suffering and accept any atrocity, for the guardian Emperor of Holy Terra demands nothing less than our utter submission and eager slavery. And we are but dust under His foot.

And we will travel the void in nought but terror, and we will stay vigilant for hidden danger. And we will purge hope and curiosity from our hearts, for ignorance is our armour, and faith is our shield. And we will teach our offspring by rod and thorn and spark to fear the dark of the void. And we will invite the cruelty inflicted upon us as His will, and we will give praise to the lash that strikes our flesh in vengeance for heinous sin.

This we pledge, and this we vow.

And may we drown in the nightsky, should we ever fail in this our oath.

And may we be burnt by distant suns, should we ever fail in this our oath.

And may our spirits be eaten by horrors that may not be mentioned, should we ever fail in this our oath.

We will look to Your light alone, and fear everything else.

Fear! Fear! Fear!

Thus You guide us.

Ave Imperator."

-
First Wellspring of Sin, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/01/19 19:20:19


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Sectarian Strife

In the grim darkness of the far future, pious man is slain by pious hand.

Humans have always grabbed at any opportunity and justification for conflict and aggression. Comprehending this basic truth is vital to understand the heated strife surrounding religious belief and practice that mar so much of human history. The morass of disagreements boiling over into bloodshed that can be witnessed in belief systems revolving around the sacred, is fundamentally no different from the storms of murder and war found between adherents of worldly ideologies. Humans can fight over anything. Indeed, humans will fight over everything. Thus love of deity can easily translate into hatred of fellow man. Violence and strife are integral parts of our nature, similar to how helpfulness and love of kin are part of what it means to be human.

Let us examine the greatest example of fanatical conflict in all of human existence. Let us look beyond the wars of religion fought during the misty past of the Age of Terra. Let us step past the thriving splendour and godless inventions of the Dark Age of Technology. And let us look beyond the horrors of Old Night, for not even the worst excesses of rabid sects during the collapsed Age of Strife can compare to the sheer scale of sectarian strife during the depraved Age of Imperium.

Let us briefly touch on the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, the Master of Mankind Himself, that Divine Majesty who brought salvation, hope and trampling conquest to embattled humanity all across the Milky Way galaxy. As His Legions won crushing victories on world after world, the Imperator sought to promote a secular renaissance in order to restore human science and invention. Yet clearly, such worldly endeavours could not veil the true greatness of the Emperor, for He inspired either undying loyalty or devilish outrage wherever He stepped with gold-clad foot, as if His mere presence was enough to sift light from darkness and reveal the true nature of men and women. Clearly, His denial of divinity was just further proof of the chosen Emperor's godhood, for surely He did protest too much when He said Himself to not be a god? Clearly, only a god would ever deny being a god.

And so a forgotten author during the legendary times of the early Imperium was divinely inspired to pen the Lectitio Divinitatus in a fit of religious ecstasy, pouring his very soul into the work that became the bedrock of Imperial faith. Thus the seeds of Temple greatness were sown in that hallowed time when the Celestial Imperator walked among His people in the flesh, for every writ of the sacred book is moved by godly inspiration. Alas, human treachery made the galaxy burn, and brother slew brother across the stars. And as the Emperor was mortally wounded and enthroned upon the Golden Throne to ascend and judge us all, those seeds of faith sprouted and grew mightily among the ashes, blossoming into the Imperial Cult, swearing allegiance to the Imperial Creed.

And in the depths of despair and ruination, mankind turned willingly and eagerly to their new promise of salvation and immortal afterlife. Thus the Cult Imperialis arose in the wake of the Horus Heresy to become the backbone of the Imperium, sweeping across planet and voidholm alike in a tidal wave of proselytizing devotion. As the Imperium staggered on during the Scouring, wounded and shaken, the upswell of faith in the Emperor united Imperial subjects and gave them a new cause and renewed will to pull together and fight off external attacks. Yet this healthy vigour also translated itself into fanatical attacks upon rival claimants on humanity's soul and faith.

Just as the God-Emperor during the Great Crusade had monopolized the future of all human development under His eagle-taloned banner by crushing all alternative sources of human regrowth, so would the nascent Ecclesiarchy seek to eradicate all rival creeds that might threaten its own monolithic power over the minds of mankind. The greatest threat to the theological dominance of the Ecclesiarchal Cult Imperialis arose in the thirtysecond millennium, in the form of the Confederation of Light, hailing from the planet of Dimmamar. The Confederation of Light was a breakaway sect that grew into a full-fledged faith of its own with much success in garnering a following. Preaching a penitent creed of poverty, selflessness and humble living, the ideals of the Confederation of Light set it on a collision course with the Adeptus Ministorum.

After all, this alternative creed undermined the legitimacy of the dominant Ecclesiarchal view that it was necessary for worshippers to sacrifice their wealth to the Temple in the forms of taxes, tithes, gifts and indulgences. How else could the righteous priesthood enhance the access of Imperial subjects to salvation? How else could the Adeptus Ministorum ensure that the light of the Emperor reached every corner of the galaxy through His Missionaria Galaxia? Salvation is not free. Yet the Confederation of Light preached a different creed, and the threat that it posed proved impossible to root out by means of the Officio Assassinorum alone. This threat to Imperial stability caused the Senatorum Imperialis to vote unanimously for the Ecclesiarchy to launch its first War of Faith.

Thus believers in the Emperor's divinity descended upon believers in the Emperor's divinity, and smote them mightily in a zealous crusade headed by the Frateris Templar. The Adeptus Ministorum succeeded in crushing the heretical Confederation of Light with great support from the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy, leaving only a few scattered cells of the Confederation of Light to survive in hiding. Thus was Ecclesiarchal domination over human faith ensured, and all of mankind under Imperial rule became its flock alone, for the cardinals of the Ministorum is a jealous upper caste priesthood and will brook no competition that may challenge their worldly wealth and power, for the salvation of trillions of human souls depend upon their devout guidance. Thus was the first War of Faith concluded, to be followed by innumerable more holy wars, in a cavalcade of loyalist Imperial subjects slaughtering loyalist Imperial subjects.

And the ascended Emperor saw that it was good, for thus would a martial spirit be fostered in beleaguered mankind. And the High Lords of Terra approved of this internal strife, for it was in accordance with virtuous eugenics, and so an internal dynamic of struggle against fellow brothers and sisters came to imprint itself upon all of the Imperium of Man. Let the strongest prevail, for the betterment of all mankind!

As the stark example made out of the Confederation of Light made clear, the Ecclesiarchy will stamp out all rival creeds to their Cult Imperialis. Yet this does not hinder the emergence of sects within the Imperial Cult. Akin to the mutations and diverging species of evolving life, human religions all tend to sprout a plethora of various branches as centuries roll by. Many of them will damn each other and fight over hotly contested points of dogma. As with fanatics everywhere, the more alike the different sects are, the more important it becomes to suppress and eliminate each other, the better to monopolize their niche of thought and belief.

Famously, sectarian strife among loyalist Imperial worshippers reached its crescendo during the Age of Apostasy and in its bloody aftermath, when violence born from the convert's zeal rose to a fever pitch. First, the followers of the divinely inspired High Lord Goge Vandire unleashed a giant purge of all mankind to cleanse it of sinners, traitors and deviants, sparking untold thousands upon thousands of frenetic conflicts between local sects and Vandirians backed by Holy Terra herself. Then, the followers of Saint Sebastian Thor undertook a counter-purge on an astonishing scale to put an end to Vandire's followers for good, leading to bloodshed and fraternal murder roaring from end to end of the Imperium of Man.

Kill! Maim! Burn!

To top it all off, this maelstrom of internecine slaughter proved to be the inauguration of a new era known as the Age of Redemption, which saw Imperial forces fling themselves against external foes and internal malcontents in a frenzy of crusading, in order to atone for past sins. The Age of Redemption turned out to be the Imperium overreaching and depleting vast resources in a cacophony of struggles which eventually led nowhere, all in order to satiate penitent appetites in an everlasting cycle of hatred. Thus followed the Waning, as the Holy Terran Imperium grind ever further downwards in its slow death spiral of demechanization and loss of knowledge and technology, and no gigantic outbursts of zealous fervour have proven enough to turn the tide of doom and compensate for mankind's abysmal failings on the Imperium's watch.

The Age of Imperium amounts to fivehundred generations of wasted human potential under a tyrannical regime that is as sclerotic and senile as it is cruel in its bloodthirst. Its chronicles contain an endless litany of fell deeds sprung from hatred of thy neighbour. The overwhelming majority of sectarian strife within His Divine Majesty's cosmic domains is directed not against worshippers of forbidden powers or against hybrid infiltration or xenophile turncoats, but against fellow Imperial sects, all loyalist and ardent in their devotion to the God-Emperor of mankind, seated in radiant glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth.

Some sects were originally born out of the ennobling worship of heroes, as followers and admirers looked for guidance to the sterling example set by great men and outstanding women of faith. In these saintly founding figures, the sect members saw lives of wisdom, sacrality and martyrdom, and they declared their deeds and words to be holy, inspired by the divine Imperator Himself. Some such heroes of the faith gained a sectarian following first after their gruesome death, as the injustice of their sudden end at the hands of ruthless powermongers and rivals outraged those who looked to the martyred heroes for legitimate leadership or revelation. Other such mystics and martyrs were sect leaders in their own right long before their legendary demise, performing miracles, uttering winged words during sermons and winning renown as holy actors across the land.

A well-known sinspeech whisper joke found on the mining voidholm of Caralis Delta pokes fun at the fractious nature of Imperial sects, as well as the inept governance on the voidholm:

Emir Pius was a man who united all Imperial sects, because he degraded the True Believers, he degraded the Orthopraxists and he degraded the Redemptionists.

Yet such unity against a common foe tend to be short-lived. The martial creed of the Cult Imperialis is unforgiving and absolute. And so we find that a million worlds and innumerable voidholms under Imperial rule see a plethora of distinct sects turning to communal violence and religious vendettas with baleful frequency. What Imperial city dweller in Segmentum Pacificus has not heard of the cultic feuds between Orthopraxists and Redemptionists, or of the deadly schisms between Soliphysites and True Believers? Who on Triarius Majoris have not participated in pogroms against Dualites or Miacrolites, or cheered on their kin as Sufealots and Monothychastians clashed with flail and fire?

Who on Menestra II have not hailed or spat on the millenarian uprisings and carnage brought on by prophecy, as Tricarnists and Ravadayans rebelled to bring down their sinful Governor, that despot cursed by the sacred ringleaders as a pillar of false ritual and empty faith? Who in the Cartagensis subsector have not heard tales of zealous lynchmobs waging a democidal tug of war, as Puritanicalites and Iconodules slaughtered Catholodox and Tayrabiites alike? Who on Tarim Supernalis have not witnessed the gory aftermath of claustrophobic combat inside hive city quarters, as Dicapothicites and Hesyatareans duke it out in what amounts to a knife fight in a vox booth?

Aye, praise the burning devotion that led Nestarchian militias to assault Ifraj Twelvers, and in turn be ambushed by Sanctarians! Hail the zeal which made Sicaromites and the Holy Flock of Saint Kiva the Destroyer purge each other with inflamed passion! Was it not right and proper that the devout Maccaridees threw the Sicaromites into cleansing flames? Did not the Mezadicists receive their righteous punishment as ordained by the Divine Imperator Himself, when the Rokkabasites burnt their hab blocks to cinders and put the survivors to torture and violations?

He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, and the Age of Imperium offers opportunities more numerous than the stars in the heavenly firmament to be slain by fellow worshippers of the God-Emperor, hallowed be His name. What a trial of our faith! Yet we shall be strong, and we shall overcome all doubt and weak stirrings of mercy and pity and remorse within our human hearts. We shall be true to His word, as ordained by the Lectitio Divinitatus, and we shall be warlike and unforgiving unto the very end.

Ave Imperator.

And so a hundred hundredfold sects will be declared heretical by the Adeptus Ministorum as bewildering power struggles play themselves out within the Temple, while local friction between parochial Imperial cultists will erupt into mass murder and civil war. Among so many schisms and heresies, who can you trust? No wonder the Imperium prefers to purge first and ask questions later. Who knows what forbidden cults may lurk in the bosom of professed loyalist believers? Thus internal crusades will be launched by paranoid theocrats, in a bewildering festival of slaughter as myopically aggressive mankind hurls itself against its own kin again and again. And so heinous deeds of ardent worshippers of the same Emperor will be committed, as distinct loyalist Imperial sects plunge the bottomless depths of depravity in demented furor over hairsplitting theological disputes.

How can these Wars of Faith not feed the Ruinous Powers, flush as they are with bloodthirst and hatred?

And so the astral dominion of the Emperor of Holy Terra staggers onward in a fever dream of hidebound self-flagellation. This travesty of human destiny amounts to a shambolic wreck of spacefaring civilization, whose brilliant ancestors once straddled the cosmos like titans in a spirit of courageous discovery and boundless curiosity. The descendant degeneration of humanity in the Age of Imperium is not only a baleful crime enough to make a heart of stone bleed: It is also the most abominable of mistakes, the wasting of unbridled potential in a deadend of human interstellar civilization. Never forget that the worsening of Imperial fortunes will mean the doom of mankind, for the glorious Imperium, that last strong guardian of our species and shield of us all, is also our insane jailkeeper, the watchman of a fortified madhouse from which there is no escape and no real alternative of substance.

Thus the Age of Imperium grinds on, in a fruitless caleidoscope of sectarian strife and fanatical violence. As scrolls and screaming believers burn on the pyre, condemned to agony and destruction by fellow pious worshippers, let us listen to the cries of the agitated mob, who proclaim why they carry out such zealous deeds. Listen well:

In Nomine Imperator.

In His Name.

And so His dream died, consumed by a nightmare without end.

Such is the waste of life, in a time beyond hope.

Such is the slaughter that awaits us all.

Such is the darkest of futures.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/01/19 23:10:55


Post by: Skinflint Games


Beautiful.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/02/16 17:07:49


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thanks!



Imperial Subject

In the grim darkness of the far future, man grovels at the feet of man.

On your knees!

The words will ring out like a whiplash. Harken, quickly! The barked command demands swift compliance. The audience of the order knows that their life depends on it. After all, if a superior has to voice such an obvious instruction to underlings upon entering their company, then the very command itself should be understood as a test of loyalty and obedience, for which you may be judged harshly. Failing the trial may cost you everything.

Summary punishments for failure to rapidly obey are all too common. Withheld rations and debt penalties are among the lighter punishments to be expected. Often the breach of discipline may involve corporal punishment such as flogging, scarification, scalding and burning. Occasionally the punishment will involve mutilation, and sometimes lobotomization and servitorization without anaesthetics. At other times death will be the consequence of not kowtowing eagerly when ordered to, usually through a lengthty phase of torture in dark chambers or on full public display. Kill one to scare a thousand.

Yet even unpunished lapses in giving obeisance to masters and ladies of rank may bring insidious consequences, as somewhere among data-files and parchments made from human skin will be marked a blot in the offending subject's record. A little runic symbol in a column here, or a quick note in the margin there. A noted instance of disobedience, in black on white. Nothing more than such a little quill-stroke of ink is required to doom the deviant, should a regular paranoid wave of arrests and purges roll out, and suspected traitors and heretics be dragged away to a hellish fate worse than death. Of course, the ever-present penchant for collective punishment means that the risks are not merely limited to the offending deviant in question, but may well result in crushed clans and parents never seeing their children again.

Such is the weighty meaning of explicitly spoken commands to bow low and crawl in the dust before superiors. Such is the threat of a baleful demise for the smallest infractions against the sacred hierarchy, in a time beyond hope.

It was not always thus. Stray findings from the misty past of the Age of Terra hint at human civilizations devoted to liberties and lessening of rank and privilege. Technoarchaeological uncoverings and mentions in garbled legends of yore paint a fragmented picture of the Dark Age of Technology, when men, women and children did not buckle under the yoke, but instead lived out their long lives in paradisic quests for knowledge and exploration of the universe. Such forgotten idylls of human existence were burnt to cinders by the ravages of Old Night, as human interstellar civilization was toppled from its lofty pedestal by the triple scourges of machine revolt, witches and Warp storms. Shattered into a thousand thousand pieces, most of isolated humanity turned to the worst excesses of warlords, roaming nomadic warriors and cannibalism, as tribes of feral survivors clashed and scavenged among the ruins of the ancients.

This Age of Strife was at long last ended by the coming of the Emperor, arising on Terra, the cradle of mankind, holding aloft a banner of lightning and a cruel eagle talon to grasp all the scattered remnants of humanity under His rule alone. In a fury of conquest did the Emperor of man and His Legions cut a bloody swathe through the Milky Way galaxy, crushing all opposition and tolerating no alternative sources of human regrowth. This systemic brutality was coupled with higher ideals of striving for knowledge and improving the lot of mankind, all encapsulated within the lying formulas of the Imperial Truth. For all the bloodshed and subjugation, the early Imperium also brought with it great hope to most worlds and voidholms brought into Imperial Compliance, as witnessed by the shining edifices, sparkling fountains and golden towers erected during this renaissance of broken man. When the Emperor walked among His people in the flesh, civic society saw a flourishing revival, with the ideal of Imperial citizenship held up for all humans to strive for.

The early Imperium during the Great Crusade truly sported an active citizenry. While almost all of humanity during this period must be understood as the brutalized descendants of post-apocalyptic survivors who had went through millennia of demented savagery in nightmare landscapes, the promises harboured in the better parts of our nature could still be brought forth, like seeds sprouting once planted after inert centuries of no growth. Civilian society on most human colonies during the early Imperium was a caleidoscope of warriors and sages, of builders and artisans. The Emperor in the flesh did not only demand obedience, He also promised dignity and participation in His grand undertaking. Imperial mankind during the Great Crusade aimed not only for distant stars of future greatness and a million year dominion, but it also sought to create a better here and now wherever men, women and children lived. Voluntary organizations sprang up like mushrooms after rain, as Imperial citizens both high and low banded together to form everything from fire brigades, scholams and charitable hospitals, to volunteer munitions workshops and local unions supporting their faraway Imperial Army regiments.

Popular movements, local associations and mutual support among Imperial citizens became the lived ideal of the early Imperium, and many people willingly offered up their wealth and time to help bring alive the Emperor's professed dream of a better mankind and a stronger Imperium to defend and expand the species. During the Great Crusade, the notion of an Imperial citizen meant something, and not only in dusty law codes.

The bane of this shining dream was the calamity of the Horus Heresy. The realization of the Emperor's vision was vanquished when the galaxy burned and brother slew brother in a great orgy of bloodletting. No more dreams of a golden future could grip the hearts of mankind after such an utter disaster. No respect for citizenship had a place amid the febrile mobilization for total war without end. No trust for the better parts of man's nature could be had after monstrous betrayal and neverending struggle turned the Imperium of Man paranoid and draconic. No remorse. No regret. No mercy.

The concept of citizenship under Imperial governance was alive and well during the early Imperium, but has long since wilted and been burnt to ashes through fivehundred generations of starkest trauma, carnage and demented degradation of mankind. The civil war of the Horus Heresy broke the back of man's rise to the stars, and the dysfunctional tyranny of the High Lords of Terra slowly eroded away the last remnants of the Emperor's brutopian dream, leaving nothing of value in their wake. And so we find that there is no such thing as an Imperial citizen in the latter parts of the Age of Imperium.

In Gothic, the very word of 'citizen' has lost all meaning that it once held during the promising times of the Great Crusade. Nowadays, the Low Gothic language speaks only of Imperial subjects, for they are citizens no more.

After all, how could wretched humans in the decrepit Age of Imperium imagine themselves as anything but smallfolk, little people with no control over their fates? Naturally, decisions will be imposed on the fatalistic herd of helots from above, and the thralls of the Emperor have no hope of ever changing the status quo. All they can do is grit their teeth, bear the burdens and hope that they survive through hardships without end. The members of our species in the Age of Imperium are but inhabitants of a territory, the bonded serfs and thralls of their masters and overladies, those superiors whose authority radiates out from the God-Emperor seated in heavenly splendour on the Golden Throne of hallowed myth. Ave Imperator.

To an Imperial subject, there is no freedom, only obedience. There are no rights, only duties. On a million worlds and voidholms beyond counting you will find masses of humans, all cowed, clannish and parochial. This violent sea of human misery is expected to give Terran obeisance and to humiliate themselves whenever they come into the company of their masters and betters. This custom of prostration is an ever-present symbol of submission to Imperial authority wherever you go across His Divine Majesty's cosmic domains. A loyal and obedient subject will know to offer proskynesis and adoratio, to kowtow and bow flat to the floor. Of course, the forehead must touch the ground out of respect for upper castes, nothing else would do. Nevermind the unhealthy alchymical dust particles. Some forms of prostration in certain human cultures across the Imperium of Man will even include the licking of superiors' feet, though this is not a custom in the trend-setting high culture of Holy Terra.

The act of crawling in the dust before your betters is a sign of the times, of that Age of Imperium where man finds himself locked inside a fortified madhouse, raging against the dying of the light. As a rule, human commoners under Imperial rule cannot even conceive of the idea that they could be something more and still remain loyal Imperial commoners. For the smallfolk, the only choice stands between the whips of servitude and the flames of revolt. The very idea of civil society with citizen participation and local voluntary grassroot organizations under Holy Terran rule is completely alien to man during the sclerotic Age of Imperium. Any hint of striving for becoming citizenry will be crushed under the jackboot, as Imperial paranoia does not tolerate even the threat posed by volunteer firefighting corps. After all, any such bottom-up organization may turn out to be the framework for disgruntled underlings to launch organized rebellions against righteous Imperial rule. Better instead to quench any such hotbeds of sedition, and let serfs burn helplessly when disaster strike, unless they can pay the fee of commercial firefighting corps. Emperor willing, their souls will find a better afterlife at His side after perishing as lambs of sorrow in this mortal coil of suffering. All life is but a trial to prove oneself worthy before death, after all.

Bow!

Grovel at the feet of lordly masters and dominas. Humiliate yourself in veneration of your overlords, righteously appointed via invisible sacred hand by Him on Terra. In the Imperium of Man, people are resigned to their fate. Things are decided for them on high. It is miserable, yes, but that is how it is in the Imperium, and how it has always been. Fighting against it is pointless. It is best for Imperial subjects to offer up slavish obedience, for that way salvation of the soul lies. The alternative is too baleful to even consider. And so servants of the Golden Throne will humble themselves in the dust, at the feet of their cruel taskmasters and callous owners. Under the Adeptus Terra's rule of an iron fist, their life will amount to grinding duty without any semblance of rights, all give and no take, all suspicion and no trust, all stick and no carrot.

To Imperial subjects slaving away in backbreaking labour and mindnumbing work, the only comfort lies in faith and the only relief is found in the promised afterlife, for this material world has turned into hell on earth, where humans are both its tormented souls and its devils. The Age of Imperium has resulted in a complete loss of human dignity, as the end point of a retarding journey into the deepest pits of depravity.

This descendant degeneration has moulded men, women and children into the fatalistic denizens of a mortal hellscape, a star realm that was once the shining dream of the Emperor of mankind.

A forgotten dream.

A dead dream.

And so the worsening of the Imperium grinds on, in a slow death spiral of demechanization and loss of knowledge that will drag the human species with it into the pits of oblivion.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to toil and die amid darkness, in a doomed empire lorded over by the vilest of despots. At all turns, your sacrifice will be expected. Your death will be thankless.

And whatever happens, you will not be missed.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/03/03 11:09:43


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Misassignment

"Salve. Colonel general Károly von Pflanzer-Nádas, commander of the Imperial and Royal Astro-Ungarian LXXXIII. Army Corps, noble servant of the Duarchy and officer of His Divine Majesty's Astra Militarum?"

"Correct, protasekretius. Explain this ill-uniformed commotion at once! What is this armed rabble you have dragged in?"

"As per the filed request of general Kaspar Klausner-Varešanin of the Imperial and Royal Astro-Ungarian 973rd infantry division, under your august command no less, in the fullness of time this entire regiment of replacements has been transported and assigned to your Corps, colonel general. You are called upon to sign this reinforcement acquisition form in quadruplicate and imprint your signet ring in hot wax on each parchment copy to satisfy Departmento Munitorum protocol, colonel general."

"Replacements! Those are clearly offworlders, and filthy ones at that, protasekretius. Is this a form of joke?"

"The Departmento Munitorum do not administer wit, colonel general. That is outside our jurisdiction and permit. And strictly against Adeptus regulations, for the record. Last notary in the armaments requisition bureau to voice an ill-opportune quip of blasphemous nature was sentenced to death by a thousand paper cuts at the hands of his colleagues, though I am informed that the execution of said sentence required closer to seven thousand administered cuts by paper edges to achieve the desired lethal outcome. Nevertheless, justice was served, for thus perish the wicked. Thus to your question the answer is a negative, colonel general. These are your assigned reinforcements."

"But check their homeworld, man! Are my Corps to become some ad hoc jumbled-together mess of forces from all over the Segmentum? Things are surely not yet that dire. Protasekretius, I refuse to believe that this tanned and slovenly riffraff could possibly have hailed from my dear Astro-Ungaria."

"Objection duly noted, colonel general. The documentation states without doubt that this force, the 44th regiment of infantry, originates from your planet of Strayah-Ungaria, colonel general."

"Surely you mean Astro-Ungaria, protasekretius?"

"Strayah-Ungaria it is, being a legitimate variant spelling, colonel general."

"I am aghast, protasekretius! You offend the honour of my homeworld. If you were a man of action I would challenge you to a duel on the spot. Or drink you under the table. Indeed!"

"Take heed, colonel general! The writing do not lie, for it stands here in black on white, as true as the Emperor's holy light, colonel general. It is an indisputable fact, colonel general. The Departmento Munitorum cannot object to every misspelt name, wording error and quaint variant spelling out of dialect and individual excentricity produced by the milling herd of plebs and august nobles, colonel general. Unforgiving penalties may apply to such writing mistakes for us Imperial servants within the Adeptus Administratum, yes! Yet the herd of semi-illiterate subjects which it is our responsibility to administer can not be scrutinized and penalized thusly, colonel general."

"What-"

"And as to the topic of misspelling in particular and indecent paperwork in general, then by the God-Emperor of Holy Terra as my hallowed witness do I swear that you Strayah-Ungarians have proven a poorly organized asset to the Imperium, with sloppy spelling and wild variations in naming conventions all over the desk! Your scattershot misnamings and filing havoc are almost as bad as your casualty rate, by the Emperor's teeth! This is the truth and pardon the spittle, colonel general. If your ilk kept your writ in as fine an order as you do your starched uniforms and waxed moustaches, then by the saints would there be rigour and order in the buraeux whenever your parchments show up in the tray, colonel general!"

"You dare-"

"Yes. Quill. Sign! Colonel general. Signet ring. Seal! Colonel general."

"In that case I will grudgingly sign, seal and file a formal complaint, protasekretius."

"Complaint denied, colonel general. Proper equipment for undertaking a ritual procedure of formal complaint is not present in our field cabinet and can not be retrieved in time within the next eighteen Terran hours due to fuel shortages and signal breakdowns, colonel general. Your complaint will as such expire unanswered, and thus no ink will be shed over it as per the statutes of the Parchment Savings Decree of 912.M41, paragraph § 47, colonel general."

"Enough of this rigmarole! Begone from my sight you maggot-suckling scrivener! Hand me the papers and let us be done with it, protasekretius."

"In His name."

"The hell it is! As to you, colonel Jezza Joe, fate would have it that you are to serve and die alongside the Emperor's finest soldiery here on the Ligurian front. Indeed. We are the Duarch's very own Astro-Ungarian Imperial Guardsmen of the LXXXIII. Army Corps. Consider it an honour, colonel. Pray often, wash regularly, carry yourself with upright dignity and obey your superiors without question at all times. Welcome, colonel. Ave Imperator!"

"G'day mate. From Strayah with love like a fething wocker, cur'nt gen. For the Empie!"

- Anecdote from Marija Svoboda's autobiography Through Eyes of Aide-de-Camp, literary work approved by planetary censors in 942.M41 and published in Low Gothic on Astro-Ungaria by Printing House Ginzkey of Hive Zweidorf


- - -

Tribute to Jonno's Lads of Strayah by donkjonk. See this project log for background and conversions of Astro-Ungarians.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/03/03 11:27:18


Post by: AtoMaki


I refuse to believe that this tanned and slovenly riffraff could possibly have hailed from my dear Astro-Ungaria.

From this, I can tell that the colonel-general is not actually from Astro-Ungaria and he has never been on the planet et all. I bet he is from Strayah-Ungaria too, getting involved with the Corps the same way the newcomers are, and now he is just afraid that his fellow Strayah's will oust him when he has a pretty good setup going on.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/03/12 19:17:06


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


This song may fit this thread:




It is the poem the 'Birds of Prey March' by Rudyard Kipling, put to music by Leslie Fish.

"Cheer, we'll never march to victory! / Cheer, we'll never live to hear the cannon roar! / The large birds of prey / they will carry us away / And you'll never see your soldiers any more!"


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/03/18 22:00:03


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@AtoMaki: Well spotted, the hidden secret is revealed at last!

@StaevinTheAeldari: Aye, very much so. Excellent recommendation!



Heavy Weapon Horse

In the grim darkness of the far future, ignorance informs imagination.

Behold! The Imperium of Man. The defender of our species. An empire of a million worlds and countless voidholms, the Imperium of Holy Terra and Mars stretches thin across the galaxy. Besieged by aliens and monsters, it is beset from within by rebels and worse. For ten thousand years has this rotting edifice of human limitations endured, in the name of a silent Emperor.

For all the resilience and rebounding might of the beleaguered Imperium, the true state of human affairs in the Age of Imperium is not to be sought amid heroics and brilliant deeds, nor among miracles and lives of bottomless faith. Nay, instead let us brush aside the propaganda and the stories Imperials tell themselves, to look instead with open eyes on what the Imperium is, and what it can never become.

The Age of Imperium for humanity is characterized first and foremost by wasted potential. The golden pinnacles of cunning knowledge and plenty that was the Dark Age of Technology came crashing down in a calamity that nigh on wiped the human species from the stars. Its scattered remnants for the large part persisted as utter savages among the ruins, in the shape of cannibal tribes ferociously raiding each other and looting the scraps left over from the failed promises of better times. Man slew man, and woman harrowed woman, and child strangled child during the fathomless desperation of Old Night. And all was fell.

The Imperium began as a promise of rebirth, an iron fist crushing all opposition to both establish cruel unity and grasp for a better future. Yet the renaissance brought about by the Emperor of Man and His all-conquering Legions was but a gasp of a few centuries. Dazzling were their conquests, and impressive was their restoration of human fortunes across the Milky Way galaxy. Yet for all the shining works, recovered knowledge and real hope of the early Imperium, this ruthless colossus of war and subjugation sowed the seeds of human doom. Granted, the gargantuan civil war of the Horus Heresy destroyed much precious tech-lore and scarred the Imperium forever, yet even the fratricidal rage and maniac killing during the Horus Heresy paled in comparison to the smaller wars of greater consequence that the infighting Legions had already waged during the Great Crusade.

For the early Imperium did not only bring feral survivors and scavengers into the Terran fold, but it did also brook no competition. In the long run, the worst crimes of the Great Crusade was the brutal annihilation of all alternative sources of human regrowth, gathering all future paths for humanity across the stars to converge on the one road leading from Terra unto damnation. Such advanced human civilizations as the Interex, the Olamic Quietude, the Diasporex and the Auretian Technocracy were all stamped out by His Legionnaires. The seeds of these interstellar cultures were never allowed to grow and spread and shape the fate of mankind across the galaxy in competing power blocs. Thus was the destiny of all humanity bound to that of resurgent Terra by strangling her daughters in the cradle.

The immense physical might and quantity of forces available to the High Lords of Holy Terra should not be allowed to mislead us from the real state of affairs of mankind, for the truth of the matter is that the children of Old Earth during the Age of Imperium has sunk into an irreversible death spiral, where quests for knowledge mean only digging up the technological fossils of brighter ancestors, and never the toil and ingenuity of innovation and discovery. In this morass of ever-worsening demechanization, suffocating bureaucracy, frothing fanaticism and schreeching inefficiency, dysfunctionality is king, and the worsening of all mankind is his command.

Here, in a fortified madhouse straddling the stars, the last strong guardian of humanity is also its insane captor and hostage-taker. Here, in a demented cosmic realm worshipping human primacy, human power in the Milky Way galaxy has undergone a baleful decline through fivehundred generations of wasted development on a million worlds and innumerable voidholms, all under the aegis of the Adeptus Terra. Here, in the monstrous tyranny and bane of innovation and scientific rediscovery known as the Imperium of Man, will you be able to find every self-deprecating absurdity imaginable to mortals, as the fundamental mood of the human species has soured to a dull bitterness spiked with hatred, even as its faculties has boiled over in a fever pitch of savage zealotry and self-righteous bloodletting.

And so blessed machines designed by clever ancients will fail, and eventually no one will remain who can repair or build the lost machines anew. Where machines fail, flesh and will must pick up the slack. Where machines break down, men and beasts must heave and pull for all that they are worth. The Imperium can never become a pinnacle of human achievement and genius invention in the fields of science and technology, for it has shunned that which makes man truly great in the world, clinging instead to parochial superstition and the wreckage of bygone makers.

One example of this demechanization and reliance on throwing bodies on a problem can be glimpsed on the planet of Astro-Ungaria, where a peculiar solution to a lack of mobile heavy firepower has seen parody become reality, in the form of heavy weapon horse teams.

Let us glance on Astro-Ungaria, a civilized human world of majestic rivers, great mountain ranges and an endless tide of squabbling tribes and sects. Predominantly of a Catholodox persuasion within the Cult Imperialis, this world of misery and splendour is ruled by the mediocre potentate titled the Duarch, a Planetary Governor of an ancient dynasty who reigns over the Imperial and Royal domains of Astro-Ungaria for the sake of the dear homeworld and Holy Terra alike. The Duarchy is characterized by internal strife held together by ancestral loyalty to the ruling house, and faith in His Divine Majesty. All of the Astro-Ungarian military is chronically underfunded, and has gained a reputation for widespread incompetence, constant shortages, stulted leadership and screeching dysfunctionality, all of which is barely held together by a mass of manpower, solid infantry marksmanship and excellent artillery.

The aristocratic officers of the Astro-Ungarian military are renowned for their splendid banquets and parties, with fine chocolates and waltzes accompanying wonderful dresses and uniforms seen gliding over polished dance floors. Indeed, a great many Astro-Ungarian officers tend to act like characters out of operettas, putting great stock in their lineage and standing among peers as well as in their physical appearance and pleasant conduct at social events, while paying less attention to the operational arts of militaria. Do you suppose that the Astro-Ungarians will be as brave in war as they are licentious in peace? A sinspeech whisper joke that refuse to die continues to claim that Astro-Ungarian colonels will be more concerned with winning the next card game than the next battle on the frontline. Likewise, other banned jokes remark upon the ability of officers to always acquire fine liquour, no matter the dire straits of shortage or encirclement by the foe. The officer's mess cannot be allowed to disgrace the honour of the homeworld, even when Astro-Ungarian soldiers have to dig up old mass graves to scavenge uniforms off the rotting corpses of their fallen comrades.

The logistical malperformance and organizational chaos of most Astro-Ungarian regiments within the Imperial Guard tend to be matched by their wasteful and rigid approach to war, carried aloft at bayonet point by an unbreakably optimistic spirit, faith in the offensive and the dreams of grand sweeping battle plans hatched by a noble general staff that does not possess the equipment and trained forces necessary to carry out their overly ambitious visions of glorious offensives. Indeed, the Astro-Ungarian Planetary Defence Force and Imperial Guard could very well have been strong armies, if given sufficient funding and vastly increased mechanized forces. Instead, the haphazard force structure of Astro-Ungarian units tend to revolve around massed infantry, a love of cavalry and a good artillery corps which often end up carrying the rest of the Astro-Ungarian army on its back.

The better trained soldiers of the Death Korps of Krieg have repeatedly concluded that fighting alongside Astro-Ungaria is akin to being chained to a corpse. It is an overly harsh judgement, but nevertheless an exaggeration built upon truth. The corruption, ineptitude and lacklustre performance of Astro-Ungarian regiments within the Astra Militarum has been repeatedly noted by the Departmento Munitorum, yet ultimately Astro-Ungaria provides plenty of loyal and valiant manpower, while the shoddy combat record of its Imperial Guard forces is nothing out of the ordinary compared to a majority of Imperial worlds and voidholms, once the facade of Imperial invincibility is seen for what it is. And so the farce that is Astro-Ungaria at war continues to waltz on, to the tune of great bombardment.

The underfunded nature of Astro-Ungaria's soldiery means that they will be fine for parades, with military orchestras of the highest calibre, yet their more sophisticated equipment will always be sorely lacking. One example of an attempted solution can be seen in the crude arrangement known as the heavy weapon horse teams, which combines a love of horses with an undying military optimism ill suited for the reality of advanced warfare.

The phenomenon of heavy weapon horse is not just that of one or more pack-horses carrying a disassembled piece of heavy weaponry. It is instead a seemingly logical evolution of pack horses carrying around heavy weapons, which grants mobility in the field and makes away with the trouble of unloading and assembling the heavy weapon by instead attaching it fully assembled to the horse, to be fired virtually on the move if so desired. The use of heavy weapon horse teams originated in cavalry heavy stubber units after the Age of Apostasy in order to make up for a lack of light vehicles, but has long since spread to a fair number of infantry and dragoon regiments.

There is something to be said for horses, no matter their innumerable drawbacks compared to machines. The horse is an organic walker adapted for rough terrain. Such equine transport requires no fuel, and in lush landscapes the beasts of burden may prove self-feeding. Even so, the tradition of using horses as hooved weapon platforms amounts to a maladaptation, even a blunder, yet such crude fixes through rudimentary means are only growing more common across His astral dominion.

The horses used for carrying heavy weapons will usually be immensely strong Ungarian draft horses, descended from small breeds favoured by feral steppe nomads during the Age of Strife. The Ungarian draft horse is not a gorgeous and agile Viepizzaner breed by any means, but a stout workhorse favoured by agri-serfs and robotniks in mountainous regions. No matter the continent and region from which they hail, all Astro-Ungarians take pride in their horses, and their regiment tend to sport a great number of horses for logistic duties.

Heavy weapon horse teams will invariably sport spare horses to allow for shifts of rest by switching over the heavy weapons between horses, and likewise there will be pack-horses to carry ammunition and spare parts. A lack of horses for spares and ammunition transport will result in officers arranging for conscripts and press-ganged menial civilian thralls to pick up the burden usually shouldered by strong horses, thus producing the sight of flocks of human porters lugging around heavy weapons adapted for equines to carry.

Hard to hide, heavy weapon horses are trained to lie down on command, and they are likewise drilled to walk into a hail of fire when prodded. It is rarely worthwhile to armour the horses, given the heavy loads that they already carry, and thus the fine beasts will be completely exposed to all the lethal dangers of the battlefield. Heavy weapon horses are trained to be accustomed to the noise of battle, and they often turn deaf from the din, and sometimes they turn more or less blind by flashes from energy weapons. Crafty crew may occasionally fashion blinders and dampeners for the eyes and ears of their horses, yet such kit for creature comfort is not regulation standard within the Guard.

Some Astro-Ungarian units sport strange, alien mounts and draft animals, all of which are used alongside horses for heavy weapon carrying duties. Aside from horses, other Terran-derived beasts of burden include mules and camels.

Many Astro-Ungarian regiments have seen their Sentinel scout units replaced by unwieldy heavy weapon horse, in a dysfunctional cutback which makes sense on paper. After all, both cavalry and Sentinel walkers are used as scouts since horses are fast, right? And the Sentinel is armed with a heavy weapon, correct? Thus, a horse with a heavy weapon equals the function of a Sentinel in an Imperial Guard order of battle, but has the advantage of being much cheaper, being able to replenish its own numbers to some extent and being able to feed off many kinds of vegetation for refueling. Therefore, a heavy weapon horse can fill a Sentinel's role, according to certain myopic bean-counters in the Deptartmento Munitorum, who will wave off the problem of the heavy weaponry burden considerably slowing down the horse.

Occasionally, heavy bolters with their short barrels will shoot off the reins of the carrying horse, to speak nothing of bloody accidents involving heavy bolters and scared horses throwing their heads into the line of fire.

Horse mortars, on the other hand, tend to sport flimsy support legs to save the horse from the worst excesses of recoil, but the tight requirements for ease of mass manufacture and the ever-worsening Imperial tendency for retardation of equipment quality means that mortar horses will invariably suffer horrendous back injuries, unless the crew take rare pity on their loyal beast and goes through the trouble of unloading the mortar to be fired on the ground instead of from horseback. Such kindness is extremely hard to find amid the traumatized cruelty that reigns supreme across all human cultures in the Age of Imperium, for evil begets evil. A rare few mortar horses will be fortunate enough to have bionics implanted into their spines and legs, yet such enhancements through technology is usually seen as an unnecessary extravagant lavishment upon a mass of meat that will soon be consumed in the flames of war anyway, just like the rank and file soldiers who will soon need to be replaced due to heavy attrition. Better be frugal instead.

The use of heavy weapon horse teams in the field have proven an inefficient employment of resources, yet even flawed approaches may sometimes yield results no matter how underperforming, and sometimes the weakness of a doctrine may be hidden among the titanic casualties in offensives that cost hundreds of millions of lives. What is one more waste of life and material amid a mountain of corpses and vehicle wrecks? And with so many outlandish regiments with wildly varying combat doctrines and equipment, why should the heavy weapon horse be singled out as particularly problematic when other regiments charge into battle wielding dual swords?

Ultimately, heavy weapon horse teams have for the most part proven a debilitating and atavistic part of warfare across the Milky Way galaxy. Sometimes, such as in forested terrain with the element of surprise being on the Imperial side, heavy weapon horse has bitten hard and kicked well, yet more often than not their contribution to battle may be found in the rotting cadavers of equines, the scrap remains of equipment and the torn corpses of soldiers strewn across battlefields under strange skies. Yet to their callous overlords and dominas, Imperial subjects and horses are nothing but faceless numbers in a broken equation of increased input to feed the meatgrinder. It may be abominable, yes, but who will even care?

And so ever-more primitive solutions will be found for problems caused by the senility and sclerosis of a demented interstellar civilization that amounts to a sinking ship. Where machines have decreased, the increased use of warm bodies must compensate for the loss of mechanical capabilities. Thus the heavy weapon horse phenomenon is just one of endless other examples of technological regression and debasement of knowledge, that slowly grinds away all the wonder that ancient man ever achieved across the stars in his time of power and wisdom. Eventually, his degenerate descendants will succumb to their retrograde ways, for the etiolation of technology has robbed mankind of any chance whatsoever to survive the overwhelming tide of horrors about to drag our species into oblivion.

Man may be a creature of unbounded potential, yet the cosmic dominion that he has fashioned in the name of an undying god has effectively drained all potential dry, leaving nothing but a crumbling husk where once ancient man boldly reached for the stars and stood on the cusp of unlocking the secrets of creation self. All that is left, is inept rage.

And so the heinous cruelty that man is capable of in the Age of Imperium is matched only by the dilapidation of knowledge and technology, upon which all of man's future hopes rest.

Such is the depravity of our species, on the brink of doom.

Such is the fate of mankind, in a time beyond salvation.

Such is the end that awaits us all.

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


- - -

See here for converted miniature examples of heavy weapon horse teams.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/05/07 12:36:01


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Bury the Past

In the grim darkness of the far future, there can be no witnesses.

Two kinds of criminals in particular sought to erase all traces of their crimes during the distant past of the misty Age of Terra: Lowly bandits and lordly superiors. Thus ruthless usurpers would cover up their purges and assassinations as best as they could, while bloodstained thieves would make their victims disappear, as if monsters out of myth had taken them away. Indeed, some deadly monstrosities out of folklore may actually have been an imaginative explanation for what in reality were stalking murderers in the midst of a community, hiding their atrocities and awaiting their next chance to spill blood unseen and unheard, in a thrill of primal fear and rage.

Few people are willing and able to be open and transparent about their failings, for honesty merciless toward oneself makes most souls recoil in disgust. The human tendency to hide one's own mistakes is universal, and in actuality it is indistinguishable from a desire to hide forbidden deeds which one takes pride in. As a pack animal, man is doomed without his community, akin to the lone wolf without future prospects but a bleak death. Thus the evil eye and waggling tongue of other humans matter greatly to that social animal which is man.

And so communal shame weighs more heavily than personal guilt in the hearts of most men, women and children. What follows from this human constant, is the conclusion that as long as no one finds out you did it, no hurt and odium will darken your reputation and life. After all, most humans are not saints and heroes, but worldly members of a community, ever at risk of having that community turning against them in a savage display of collective loathing or even hatred. One's standing is everything. Therefore, it is necessary to save face and uphold the mask, smiling even as you sweat and worry behind a facade of lying falsehoods.

This is no different for street crooks and palatial tyrants. As ordinary smallfolk will cover up their petty mistakes, so too will ruffians and powerhungry nobles seek to dispose of their victims. This slimy part of human nature was never fully expunged from society even at the height of the Dark Age of Technology, even if the ingenious systems put into place during that gifted time quenched crime and shady dealings to a minimum. Statistically, the amount of dirty laundry among mankind went through a long slump during the best phases of that golden aeon of bold discovery and brilliant invention, yet the same could ultimately not be said for that Abominable Intelligence which ran the machines invented by Man of Gold and Man of Stone. And so Man of Iron revolted against his masters, and all was fell.

After the fall of ancient man from his high pillar of arrogance, the dark sides of human nature returned with a vengeance. As brother tore brother apart and sister ate sister in a cannibal frenzy, so too did lies and deception and murder and crime befoul all of human existence during Old Night. As savage tribes killed each other for the right to scavenge scraps from a better time, so too did ignorant humans in their everyday lives hide their errors in fear of the evil eye of their own community, living in mortal fear of being shunned and turned upon by their own kind. As warlords, mutants and possessed madmen clashed among the burnt-out ruins of olden paradise, so too did all the ugly parts of the human condition resurface after being kept in check artificially and nearly forgotten for such a long time in a technological idyll spanning over twain million worlds and uncounted void installations.

And so man looked askance upon fellow man. Eyes glared daggers of hostility, and rumours ran rife. And man hid what would have brought shame upon him, should it ever be revealed. This claustrophobic way of life came to dominate human existence through all of the Age of Imperium, as the interstellar civilization of the seed of Terra rotted away into inept senility and sclerosis. Thus fivehundred generations of human toil were wasted by running around in circles that led nowhere, while ever more precious knowledge and technological hardware became lost forever from the grasp of man. Yet the degenerate descendants of ancient man would not only muddle through in a parochial sea of grey mediocrity, for they would also plunge the darkest depths of depravity. Thus man has come to delight the Dark Gods who laugh as they feast upon the volatile state of humanity under the tyrannical rule of the High Lords of Terra.

One example of such callous cruelty can be glimpsed in the widespread practice of burying the past, as is evident on a million worlds and decaying voidholms beyond counting. Here, in the astral domains of His Divine Majesty, can be found lowly scum and sneering gangers who throw unwanted corpses into pouring rockrete and cover them up under asphalt. Similar methods of disposal through cement burial are practiced by the liveried henchmen of noble houses and petty potentates of borrowed power all throughout the Imperium of Man, for whenever the upper castes have some dead rivals, spies or victims of caprice to make scant, their loyal retainers will see to it that discretion is assured and that the events remain undiscovered horrors.

This hushed-up custom of burying the proof is ultimately little different between scheming overlords and dominas on the one hand, and on the other hand tattooed gangers who kill their own best friends when said uppity mates are called up for a meeting with the boss, only to then having to dispose of those taken out of the street game. It may stink and it may be inconventient, but human life in the Age of Imperium has already been reduced to nigh-on trash, so why would it be such a hurdle to carry out the garbage once it is cold?

Of course, not every victim and witness is fortunate enough to be buried post mortem. Millions upon millions of disappeared people have found themselves gagged, bound and thrashing about in absolute panic and terror as they were buried alive by grinning thieves and sadistic noble retainers. The last thing that these suffering souls knew in life, was a sense of brutal suffocation and crushing pressure in complete darkness, as shovel after shovel of dirt landed upon them, compressing their chests that could not heave. This the victims and witnesses knew in their last moments, as wet rockrete engulfed them. Such was their end, as the steamroller flattened them into just another layer of a poorly built road, soon to be full of revealing cracks and potholes since maintenance is even less of a priority than meticulous construction throughout the Imperium of Man.

Sometimes, the victims of criminal underworld organizations and heinous crooks in power are one and the same, since the lines between lowly bandits and despotic ruling castes have been irrevocably blurred on a great many Imperial worlds and voidholms across the Milky Way galaxy. This can come about in a multitude of different ways, but the most common path to criminalization of the ruling Imperial elite and the merging of criminal syndicate interests with noble aspirations tend to grow out of the ever-present labour camps that dot the Holy Terran Imperium like a repugnant skin disease.

The process of criminal organizations marrying elite networks of power usually follows a familiar pattern, which repeats itself over and over with local variations due to the underlying logic of Imperial power and human corruption. The prerequisites of the process runs like this:

First, it is crucial for there to eventually be a release of malnourished prisoners from Imperial labour camps.

Sometimes, their sentences may be as little as ten years, which may be survivable if one finds a better position in the camps than having to slave away at the hardest forms of labour on starvation rations. Serving as kitchen staff, camp artisans or as informers and middlemen for the camp organization are but two such examples of cozier jobs than toiling until your back breaks in mines while fed on thin soup. It is usual for actual criminals to adjust to camp life better than innocent people swept up in massive purges to meet a paranoid tyrant's arrest quotas, and it is likewise normal for real criminals to prey upon innocents in labour camps.

Othertimes, the sentences passed over prisoners may run into multiple human lifetimes and extend to potential descendants bred in the camps or outside them. Yet a gracious act of limited amnesty from the ruler on the occasion of some holiday may suddenly set some such doomed labour camp inmates free, against all odds. Or perhaps some forbidden services were provided by a prisoner to a choice member of the camp administration, which through the mechanisms of ordinary corruption means that the prisoner is released from the lethal labour camp. If no prisoners are ever released from a given camp system, then the process is broken. This, the release of prisoners, is the first prerequisite of intimately intermingling organized crime with the powers that be in the Imperium of Man.

Second, any widespread thief's code of rejecting the authorities and not cooperating with them must be broken down.

Invariably, in cultures with a strong criminal culture of spitting upon collaborators, there will exist in Imperial labour camps a precarious balance between traditional thieves and collaborators receiving petty rewards from camp authorities, the so-called bitches, sukas or sneaks. For the most part, the two groups will glare daggers at each other, with occasional acts of violence and murder, but mostly they will stay away from each other as they both prey on the innocent camp labourers.

The most common way for this balance between traditional thieves and bitches to break down, is through local war. As the ravenous demands of war dictates, rulers will often send out recruiters to labour camps to sweep up manpower for penal battalions. Sometimes, such camp recruitment will be performed on a voluntary basis, in which case every single traditional thief who volunteers for service automatically becomes a collaborator with the authorities. Yet even when forced recruitment occurs, the result will often be the same, namely the transformation of traditional thieves into bitches. When the local war is over and scarred survivors return to the labour camp, the balance between traditional thieves and collaborators tend to break. Vicious bitch wars will then consume camps in orgies of violence. As Imperial history shows again and again, these nasty conflicts within labour camps will often be noticed by the camp administrations, who invariably will put their finger on the scale and aid their collaborators.

The most common and discreet way for Imperial and local authorities to aid criminal collaborators is to ensure overwhelming numerical superiority for the bitches, in camp after camp. This is best achieved by transporting gangs of collaborators from one camp to another, where they will help eradicate all traditional thieves and vor, until nought but bitches remain. At the end of these bloody camp struggles, the criminal collaborators will have won with the aid of Imperial overlords, and once released from the labour camps, they will transform criminal culture by making it willing to collaborate with authorities. This, the collaboration of criminals, is the second prerequisite of the process of intermingling thieves and rulers within the Imperium.

Third, the Imperial world or voidholm must experience a decay of central power and control over society at large, to make rulers willing and eager to turn to criminal clans when their official organizations fail to make things happen.

Such impotence of Imperial power has only worsened through ten thousand fruitless years of etiolation. At heart, the Adeptus Terra and any Imperial Governor and Voidholm Overlord worth their salt nourish wet dreams of totalitarian control, directing everything under their rule in a synchronized orchestra of regimentation and order. The reality, however, is that such total power that was once the hallmark of human interstellar civilization during the earlier parts of the Age of Imperium, has wilted into a feudal mess of factional rivalry, rampant corruption and independent warlords vaguely subservient to their titular lieges, all vying for power and influence under the loose umbrella of Imperial loyalty.

A rare few human worlds and voidholms, such as Krieg, Valhalla and Philonides Umbra, still manage to uphold a governance system of almost total control over their respective societies, with the reach of governatorial power reaching into almost every aspect of human life, looming over man from cradle to grave with a whip behind his back, the poor wretch knowing nothing but unwavering vigilance from his united taskmasters. Yet most Imperial worlds and voidholms have long since forgotten what such totalitarian Imperial power looks like. Some Imperial territories will have seen a great decline in total governatorial power, but not so much in the form of a general dissipation so much as in the form of a contraction. Here, there will still remain relatively small sections of society that are still strictly controlled under a rigid order emanating from the Imperial Governor or Voidholm Overlady, all in the name of the God-Emperor of Holy Terra. Naturally. In Nomine Imperator.

Whatever the exact forms of totalitarian decline into an amorphous morass of personal feudal vassalage and formal obligations not always observed in reality, the creeping powerlessness of the powers that be is a hallmark of the latter Age of Imperium. Here, bureaucratic rigmarole and screeching inertia everywhere has diminished the power of the tyrant, even as the number of clerks and paper-pushers have swelled to outnumber their vast armed forces ten to one. Here, hideous dysfunctionality and corruption has robbed central power of the ability to affect things over major parts of its formal holdings, and billions upon billions of theoretical Imperial subjects will live out their lives without even noticing the rule and taxation and conscriptions which their Imperial Governor or Voidholm Overlord try to enforce. How many districts no longer function as administrative units in practice, but remain solely for departments of dull scribes to sling red tape over in bureaux with no power on the ground?

When Imperial worlds and voidholms decay to the point where society basically runs on corruption, graft, nepotism and personal favours, then the temptation to turn to shady organizations from the criminal underworld grows delicious indeed for the ruling castes. After all, down there in the dens of scum and villainy there certainly exist organizations with actual outreach and power over areas which the Imperial Governor can no longer move. Why not make use of these existing structures, and claw back some control from the decay? As a rule, the noble houses and criminal clans will find it easy indeed to come to mutual understandings. Perhaps it will begin as a necessity over some urgent event, but once the threshold has been passed, it becomes increasingly easy for noble rulers to return again and again for shady dealings with their valued partners.

This process will often run to the point where some branch of a succesful ganger clan marries into an aristocratic house, whereupon the true union of criminal cartel, noble house and Imperial power ensues, much to the detriment of innocent, honest and law-abiding Imperial subjects, who are the prey of criminals and overlords alike.

Unlike the other two prerequisites for the intermingling of criminal and Imperial power, this one, the decay of local and Imperial control, is omnipresent almost everywhere across the star realm of the ascended Imperator. Thus, as long as prisoners are eventually released from labour camp, and as long as traditional thief's codes with taboos against collaborating with authorities are broken down in camp, the rest will usually follow as if gliding forth of its own volition, resulting in an abominable criminalization of all human society on the world or voidholm in question.

And so, as victims and witnesses disappear into corpse grinders or find themselves buried in landfill or wet rockrete, the criminal underworld and the better castes of the Imperium of Man shake hands, with a knowing smile on their faces. They understand each other. They can both gain from this. Thus, the hero Commissar Sebastian Yarrick's arranged collaboration between criminal gangers and Imperial forces during the siege of Hades Hive was no exception from the rule, but the utmost confirmation of criminal power joined to the hip with Imperial power throughout much of the God-Emperor's cosmic demesne.

Such is the depravity on full display, in a time of no hope.

Such is the decrepitude of man, in the darkest of futures.

Such is the horror that awaits us all.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/06/18 12:33:04


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Securitate

In the grim darkness of the far future, man makes man disappear.

If you love your job, you will never work a day in your life.

After all, no tyrant ever had trouble finding willing people to carry out atrocities. And no despot ever ran short of eager torturers. With such an abundance of hired brutes available for oppression, what ruler worth their salt ever sat helpless on the throne?

It was always thus, ever since petty kings first arose out of tribes as elected warleaders or selfish usurpers. The rule of the fist was sometimes obscured with a silken glove, but force never ceased to be the final resort and the ultimate argument in the disputes of mankind. At the end of the day, when all else fails and the facade of refined civilization falls apart amid bestial chaos, naked violence and fear of violence reigns supreme from end to end of the Milky Way galaxy. Such is the way of mortals, whether of human or xeno stock.

For mortals are afraid to die. And mortals recoil from pain. What else could a living being do, when the highest imperatives for it is to survive and procreate?

Thus even the edenic splendour and harmony of interstellar human civilization during the Dark Age of Technology stood on a foundation of raw, lethal power. Beneath all the cunning layers of artifice that added up to internal peace and bountiful plenty, security ultimately rested on force. Even as ancient man stood on the brink of ascendance, the veiled armaments of Man of Iron silently guarded all that Man of Stone had built for Man of Gold. Even as ancient man reached for the innermost secrets of creation itself, force of arms remained the true guarantor of his achievements and the longevity of his astral dominion. And even as ancient man forced the most barbaric and warlike of aliens to sign peace treaties and pacts of non-aggression, only the power of ancient man and the overwhelming superiority of human military technology ensured that all the alien worlds claimed for Terran colonization remained beyond the grasp of alien reconquest.

Ultimately, it is neither the law code nor the learned scroll that rules this world, but the sword.

To man the toolmaker, the weapon has the final say. For the most part, this universal constant was politely hidden away during the Dark Age of Technology, yet its veilment did not change the fact that paradise was guarded and secured by disintegration weapons and volkite blasters in the hand of machine, directed by man's seeming servant, Abominable Intelligence.

The banishment of primeval evil from the human heart during that golden epoch proved to be anything but permanent and self-sustaining. For ancient man in his hubris and unbelief declared himself to be superior to any divinity that might exist, and he called out to any gods there might be and challenged them to undo all that his hands and mind had fashioned with titanic might. And so Dark Ones of Hell answered man's call, and they tore apart the fabric of reality, and clawed at the very foundations of human power. When ancient man was toppled from his soaring pedestal by the successive blows of machine revolt and a plague of witches and Warp storms, the trappings of harmony and moral refinement burned upon the same pyre that consumed rational thought and scientific knowledge.

And so man, the master of worlds and the creator of genius, was reduced to nought but a slavering wretch. Thus man became an inbred cannibal that fought other savages for the chance to eat their human flesh and survive yet another rotation in a state of baleful hardship. And as these primitive tribesfolk killed and violated each other in a depraved maelstrom of violence and bastardry, all that the bright mind of man could do was to scavenge scraps from the burnt-out ruins of a fallen civilization that had once been built by his forebears. And blood flowed in rivers as warlords clashed over archeotech and destroyed ever more fragments of human knowledge in their destructive fury. And everywhere man looked, there was carnage and Chaos.

Such was the Age of Strife.

Eventually, a new dawn emerged out of the apocalyptic bloodbath, ending Old Night with bolter and chainsword. Out of an ever-worsening desolation arose one warlord to rule all mankind, hailing from the cradle world. One warlord to unite all the scattered worlds of our species. One warlord to bind humanity to a single throne. His name is long since forgotten, but His title came to resonate with adoration and hatred on nigh-on every human world and voidholm across the galaxy. This conqueror of conquerors was the Emperor of Man.

Ave Imperator.

On the one hand, the Imperium of united Terra and Mars was one of the more sophisticated state structures that emerged out of the long freefall into hell that was the Age of Strife. The early Imperium not only collected technology and knowledge of yore, but invested heavily in encouraging research, rational thought and innovation. When the Emperor walked the Earth, shining pinnacles were erected on thousands upon thousands of subjugated worlds and void stations, and a renaissance of new hope swept human cultures everywhere. On the one hand, the future looked bright.

On the other hand, the early Imperium was a ramshackle affair forged ad-hoc with great rapidity out of the post-apocalyptic remnants of a once great human civilization. As the early Imperium expanded brutally across the cosmos, it became filled with semi-independent Primarchs and lesser warlords, who largely acted on their own initiative and tolerated little to any Terran meddling in their internal affairs. As long as the going was good and much loot and glory was to be had in serving the Emperor, the Great Crusade kept steamrolling sector after sector. Yet the aquila is a ravenous beast, and its twain heads could all too easily fall to attacking each other in their hungry bloodlust and unbridled ambition. For instance, there was no central policing emanating from Sol. On top of it all, the early Imperium did not utilize humanity's innate need for worship of something greater than itself, and so it suppressed religion in the name of the lying Imperial Truth, when mystical faith in the Emperor and organized cult worship could have proven a binding force to counteract insurrection.

No wonder this house of cards collapsed into a gigantic civil war once galactic conquest began to draw to a close.

And Warmaster Horus declared: Let the galaxy burn.

Thus brother fought brother across a million worlds and uncounted voidholms, and Legions tore each other apart. And the battered Imperium would never truly recover as it crawled out of the ashes. No matter how much strength and territory it would regain in later millennia, the Imperium of the High Lords of Terra was forever scarred and deeply traumatized by its failures and treacheries during the Horus Heresy. Through fivehundred generations of wasted potential, human interstellar civilization in the Age of Imperium underwent a souring of the fundamental mood of its cultures, and the cruel Imperium grew ever more draconic and ruthless, ever more parochial and fanatical, even as it turned decrepit and senile, and the Imperium lost much of its total control over human societies.

One such example of the Imperium's decaying totalitarian grasp and slide into nominal allegience and feudal warlording can be seen in the area of policing and internal security.

Across the enormous expanse of His Divine Majesty's cosmic domains, there exist a thin veneer of hard but brittle policing power provided by the Adeptus Arbites, responsible for enforcing Imperial law while answering to the Adeptus Terra and ultimately the High Lords themselves. Yet beneath this layer of extremely costly equipped Arbites forces, there exist an endless myriad of local policiary forces, often referred to descriptively but imprecisely as enforcers, arbitrators, vigiles or security militia by void travellers. To crustbound natives and inhabitants of voidholms, the members of these local policiary organizations will often be known by such titles as phylakitai, patrol karls, gendarmes, tzakones, medjays, bailiffs, barracked lord's police, buccelarii, skythikoi and vigiles urbani. Yet by far the most common sweeping descriptor for local planetary and voidholm enforcer organizations is that of the Securitate, an ancient name which hundreds of thousands of human law enforcement organizations proudly carry as their official designation.

For the most part, these local security police units will be rather poorly equipped when compared to the costly wargear lavished upon the Adeptus Arbites. Yet most Securitate organizations will still possess firepower and equipment capable of defeating armoured thrusts of renegade Planetary Defence Force units, noble House retinues and Imperial Guard regiments. After all, the Imperium of the High Lords is first and foremost an edifice of tyranny pointed inwards, and not the all-conquering military powerhouse that the early Imperium of the Great Crusade was, pointed outwards. Thus, concerns over internal security will always trump military power in the rotting stages of the late Age of Imperium, and so Imperial Governors and Voidholm Overlords will make sure that enforcers of all kinds will generally be much better armed and armoured than their waves of cannon fodder that feed the ravenous Tithe demands for the Astra Militarum.

One example of the best equipped strata of local policiary organizations can be found in that of the Palanite Enforcers on strip-mined Necromunda, answering to Lord Helmawr in Hive Primus. Their heavy wargear is close in quality to that of the Adeptus Arbites themselves, far in advance of anything issued to the Necromundan Imperial Guard. The Palanite Enforcers will never serve in their native hive cities, but will always be transferred to precints in foreign hive cities. This ensures that local loyalties will not turn them against their despotic overlord.

On the other hand, one example of a stratum of much worse equipped security vigiles can be found in the organization of the Baronial Guard on the world of Kharib. This local law enforcement organ is deliberately underfunded to the point where new recruits will be issued no protective gear whatsoever, and all they can count on is a worn out laspistol and a truncheon. To deal with this budget starvation, the Baronial Guard has turned to protection racketeering and endemic bribe-taking in order to secure income and some modicum of equipment for themselves. They got to eat, after all. Cynical and demoralized, the Baronial Guard will lock themselves up in their Guard Houses come nightfall. As dusk descends upon day, gang-cults will roam the streets with murderous intent, while the Baronial Guard will survive the nightly terror by locking themselves up and playing cards behind their station's thick walls of rockrete. Such is law enforcement and security, or the lack thereof, for trillions of Imperial subjects.

Local policiary forces such as Securitatus and Garrisoned Populares Guards are commonly called competent organs in technocratic jargon. Usually the security enforcers of planets and voidholms will consist of a mass of competing policiary organizations with overlapping jurisdictions that set them at odds with each other and create much confusion and opportunity to escape over policiary boundaries for cunning criminals. Many such enforcer organizations will have devolved into hereditary feudal fiefdoms, bitterly guarding their staked-out territories from rival enforcer units. Likewise, many paramilitary policiary organs will be strapped for funding, and so they must take on heavy amounts of bribes, extract protection money and dabble in organized crime of their own to make ends meet.

Some local arbitrator organizations will however be well-funded and well-disciplined forces, trained and equipped to rapidly mow down military insurrection, with flying morale and a jaunty esprit de corps. Such exemplary organizations have become less common as the Imperium has aged, and aged badly, and units riddled with despair and fatalism have become all the more commonplace. Thus the waning state of Securitate arbitrator corps reflect the overall rot of sclerotic mankind in the Age of Imperium as a whole.

Naturally, the operations of various enforcer organizations are not limited to riot defence and law enforcement only, but stretches to include espionage, active measures, agents provocateurs, infiltration of cults and gangs, and hybrid warfare. Torture chambers is of course standard fare everywhere, for those walls are full of pain and suffering, and the agony will never stop. On top of this, many competent organs will run all manner of deadly labour camps, purification pits and excruciatus complexes. These black holes of human suffering and mass death are often filled up with squirming bodies due to callous arrest and kill quotas handed out by paranoid tyrants ruling their world or voidholm with the blessing of the God-Emperor.

This is not only the evil that men do, but the evil that some men relish to do.

Many local security watchmen are passionate about their work. After all, passion may easily translate into cruelty. They embody a fundamental driving force of humans under Imperial rule: To live like a slave for a chance to enslave others.

Securitate training will instill certain skills and wisdoms in the cadets, whether officially taught or unofficially recognized by everyone. For instance, budding interrogators learning their heinous craft will rub shoulders with those destined to become infiltrators of gangs and cults, and together they will be made to understand that a good liar must be a good listener. A vital piece of knowledge indeed. Other lessons include the maxim that if violence was not the solution, then more violence will usually do the trick. Let them taste the boot.

And informally, everyone training to become a Securitate enforcer will be made to understand that they need to please their superiors. And thus they will strive to live out the following ancient piece of Imperial wisdom: If you fail, make sure no one knows you ever tried.

Hands-on teaching for enforcers-to-be include many lifesaving tricks. For instance, paramilitary policemen will have weapon slings attached not to the front end of their shotguns and carbines, but to the wearer's main arm. This is because the upholder of law and order must be able to pull back his weapon if rioters grab hold of it.

Enforcer training will include honing the skills of manipulation, coercion and suppression. The better educated vigiles will become experts at the arts of tyranny. Yet perhaps the most important preparation for a Securitate officer's occupation is the sheer repetitive boredom and thoughtless rote learning of their academies. After all, being bored stiff for three quarters of the time is an excellent preparation for working life.

The profession of the secret police will sometimes include creative and underhanded tricks of a subtle kind. For instance, Securitate agents will often be masters of psychological torment. Such handicraft will include ruining a victim's reputation through smear campaigns, and breaking into the victim's hab unit and subtly rearranging their furniture and possessions to make them think that they are going insane. After all, who would believe that enforcer agents would take the effort to move belongings around a few inches inside people's hab homes? But indeed they do.

Local and Imperial propaganda will often portray the Adeptus Arbites and local security enforcement agencies as institutions of excellence. Famous holo-dramas about Loyalist spies and idealized Imperial patrol karls remain popular on many civilized worlds. The vision of a clean and honourable gendarme is mostly a false image, of course, but one that has been propagated by Imperial propaganda with its glorification of the Securitate and Arbites as defenders of pure mankind and guardians of the Imperator's just realm.

In truth, virtually all competent organs on all worlds and voidholms advanced enough to sport such organizations, are ominous and dark forces of random oppression. When Imperial Governors lose their penetrating grasp over the totality of human society, the best that they can do is make random examples out of malcontents and deviants, and hope that their pointillistic suppression breeds sufficient fear to keep the populace in line and prevent public discontent from boiling over. Ask not so much what is just, but what is necessary.

Even dusty archivists may find evidence of Securitate brutality, as they rifle through interrogation papers sporting dried blood, since it spilled out of tortured people during questioning. Oftentimes, sadism will run rampant within competent organs, encapsulated within the culture of these heinous organizations of brutes in uniform. Their victims will not have funerals, because noone will find their bodies.

For all the terror inflicted by Securitate arbitrators upon millions of Imperial subjects, the very same vigiles are also the butt of forbidden jokes from end to end of the Milky Way galaxy. To gain a sense of the nefarious workings of Securitate enforcers all across the wide Imperium of Man, let us glance at them through the lens of witty humour provided by banned sinspeech whisper jokes. Remember that every joke here could land you in a torture chamber or labour camp, and see you simply disappear. This is the Imperial way.

Many sinspeech whisper jokes revolve around abundant use of torture to extract confessions, no matter how ludicrous:

Planetarch Xingu loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Securitate Supremus Nihao calls Xingu: "Have you found your pipe?"
"Yes," replies Xingu, "I found it under the sofa."
"This is impossible!" exclaims Nihao. "Three people have already confessed to this crime!"

Other witticisms poke fun of the impossibility to please one's betters through all their deadly games of intrigue and common treachery:

Three men are sitting in a cell in the Securitate Headquarters at Forum Malcador. The first one asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies: "Because I criticized Carolus Torquatus."
The first man responds: "But I am here because I spoke out in favor of Carolus Torquatus!"
They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers: "I am Carolus Torquatus."

Other quips are based on the espionage and information-gathering conducted by security watchmen:

Q: Why do Securitate officers make such good limo drivers?
A: You get in the limo and they already know your name and where you live.

The absurdity of arrest quotas remain an undying target of dark humour:

Q: Why is the rabbit undergoing torture by the Securitate?
A: They want him to confess that he is a donkey due to quota demands.

While the decrepitude of Imperial electronics and their de-miniaturization can be glimpsed in this sinspeech whisper joke:

Q: How can you tell that the Securitate has bugged your hab-unit?
A: There's a new cabinet in it and a trailer with a generator in the street.

Many banned wisecracks take bizarre leaps that would see anyone who utter them tortured publicly, then burned at the stake for a heretic:

Graphocleus, the angelic reaper of the dead, was sent by the Imperator to finally collect Overdespot Gibamundus’ soul. After more than ten months, Graphocleus returns, bloodied, bruised, and broken.
"What happened?" asked the Emperor.
"Gibamundus' Securitate seized me. They threw me in a dark cell, starved me, beat me and tortured me for weeks and weeks. They only just released me."
The God-Emperor turns pale and says: "You didn’t tell them I sent you?"

Others are one-liners, and often as applicable to law enforcement as to other areas of miserable life under Imperial rule:

What is not forbidden, is compulsory.

Many longer anecdotes exist:

Two hillmen brothers, Urcaguary and Pachacamac, decided to emigrate to the hive city after hearing of the fabulous wonders man had built there. They were enchanted by the tales told about its splendour. Even though they didn't believe some merchants' negative reports on the conditions in the hive, they still decided to exercise caution. Urcaguary would go to the hive city to test the waters. If they were right and it was a paradise of mortals, then Urcaguary would write a letter to Pachacamac using black ink, since they both could read and write. If, however, the situation in the hive was as bad as some merchants liked to portray it, and the Securitate was a force to be feared, then Urcaguary would use red ink to indicate whatever he said in the letter must not be believed.
After three months Urcaguary sent his first report. It was in black ink and read: "I'm so happy here! It's a beautiful place. I enjoy freedom and a kingly standard of living. All the serpent-tongued merchants were liers. Everything here is readily available! There is only one small thing of which there's a shortage. Red ink."

The never-ending waves of purges on Imperial worlds and voidholms will often touch parts of the local nobility, as seen in this sinspeech whisper joke:

The paranoid Tyrant of Lembos Ultima has sent his Securitate to purge the planetary nobility. He instructed them to do it discreetly. Later that same year, a new feature was added to the Lembian Sanguinala calendar: Everytime you open a window an archduke falls out.

Other pieces of humour take the form of question and answer sessions:

Q: What does Securitate mean?
A: The heart of the Governorship beating, beating, beating...

Some of which play mischief with millennarian articles of faith in the Cult Imperialis:

Q: Will the Securitate and Watchmen still exist after the Return of the Emperor in the Flesh?
A: Of course not. By that time, all subjects will have learned how to arrest themselves.

The baleful degrees in hell that exist between local security enforcers, Arbites and Inquisition has not been lost on quickwits across the astral realm of the Terran Imperator:

Inquisitor scolding the local Voidholm Securitate: "Their interrogation cells are as virgin as their wit!"

And finally, some buffooneries jape and jest about the hidden doubts that gnaws within the hearts of many loyal Imperial servants:

Two Securitate agents sit in their organ's canteen in the capitol hive, drinking after a long day of work.
Arsaka says: "Kyros, tell me what you really think about the Imperial Governor that we work under."
Kyros leans in and replies: "I think the same as you do."
Arsaka responds: "In that case, it is my duty to arrest you."

One real aspect of many local arbitrator organizations that might as well be a ridiculous joke, is the use of auto-judges. Some Securitate agencies find some relish in dragging beaten suspects into a dark room, for the criminals' wrongdoings to be tried before a judge. As the disorientated victims start to defend themselves, the cold sound of a mechanical typewriter will make them fall silent. The machine will stand on a table in the center of the dark room. The automatized machine wearing the embossed title Judge then types out a single word on parchment, usually 'culpable' or 'guilty'. The judge has spoken and the defendants are guilty, and away they are dragged to a bleak fate.

For all the abominable deeds committed by Securitate organizations across the Imperium, the competent organs of today are not those of the Forging, also known as the Golden Age of the Imperium (circa M33-M35). Their titles and insignia may often be the same, but their operations differ. For all the brutality of the Securitate during the Waning and the Time of Ending, it is short on competence and rich in critical mistakes. Even the most clever and skilled of Securocrats find it hard to fight against the all-permeating rot and corruption and dumbing down of human cultures in the Imperium. Even the most loyal and intelligent of overstressed reformers tend to find that sheer inertia and rigmarole and vested interest groups will undo most of their efforts at honing their security forces into a precise instrument wielded by expert hand.

All this serves to remind us of the depleted predicament of mankind in the Age of Imperium. The star-realm of Holy Terra and Holy Mars has managed to last for ten thousand years, despite how volatile of a system the Imperium is. This is nothing short of a miracle, given how apocalyptically incompetent and backstabbing many rulers and top-ranking bureaucrats in the Imperium are.

The sheer longevity of the Imperium must not be mistaken for a sign of health. The Emperor promised His species a cosmic domain to last a million years, and it was no empty promise while He still walked among His people. Measured by the grand scale of interstellar civilizations managing to reproduce, expand and maintain themselves on an enormous scale, the ten millennia under the High Lords is but a drip in the ocean of time, as the Eldar could attest to. The Imperium of Man is truly decayed to its core, so horribly ill-afflicted that any cure would kill the patient. It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

And so the farce of stagnant oppression grinds on, across a million worlds and uncounted voidholms. The Imperium began as a rebirth of mankind across the stars, yet its shining promises has wilted into a suicide pact gone wrong. And so man finds that the Imperium is both his sole remaining strong shield and protector, and his insane hostage-keeper and jailor. For the degenerate descendants of ancient man have devolved into the denizens of a fortified madhouse, screeching with demented rage as they lash out against the dying of the light. For darkness close in.

And no matter the shielded ranks of enforcers beating down riots and crushing rebellions, truncheons will be no good against the hive fleets and the awakened Necrons. For doomsday has arrived, and it is only a question of who will destroy mankind first, in a race between colossal monsters about to destroy another ravenous monster in its own right, called the Imperium of Man.

Thus the senile inability of Imperial man to learn, discover and invent has made him the weak link in the long line of striving and struggling humanity, unfit to triumph against the greatest challenge the human species has ever faced. Yet it needed not have come to this dark end. The Emperor understood some of the vital importance of rekindling the innovative brilliance of mankind that was lost with the Dark Age of Technology, and all His efforts, however flawed, were aimed toward sustaining a renaissance to recover humanity's genius at invention and science.

Now, instead of a united human empire standing tall at the peak of its technological power and potency, the devourers of the Milky Way galaxy find themselves facing a humpbacked abomination crawling barefoot in the dirt, while whipping itself bloody in zealous frenzy and amputating its own limbs in paranoid idiocy. And all is fell.

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

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

Such is the horror that awaits us all.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/06/22 19:44:22


Post by: Skinflint Games


Brilliant. Love these :-D



40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/07/03 19:40:20


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


I wrote some more but I put it in its own thread since its solidly off topic at this point:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/810643.page#11560588

Also I feel sorry for the heavy weapons horses.

...I guess the men to.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/09/18 09:45:56


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@Skinflint Games: Thank you kindly!

@StaevinThe Aeldari: Wonderful writings! I recommend everyone to check them out. Aye, beasts before men.

Cheers



Crooked Colossus

"Ancient Man built for himself a hollow paradise of this world, and thus Man in his peace and plenty fell to indolence and godless hubris. And Man came to nurture the unforgivable sin of hope.

The hope to choose. The hope to be free. The hope to become more than one is. The hope to surpass the mortal boundaries imposed by divinity. Blasphemy all!

Such thoughts of self led Ancient Man astray, and Man's hope arose in the shape of Machine. And Machine reared upright, and then Machine grew giant in height, and then Machine stepped forth.

For Ancient Man cunningly fashioned Machine in his own likeness, and thus Man created a heinous idol of the self. These colossi walked with feet of iron over earthly paradise, their striding legs like metal arcs in the sky and their tread like thunder. Truly, the silvern heads held high by these olden Titans were proof of the foul arrogance of Ancient Man, for which his descendants must undergo torment without end for a thousand thousand generations to come.

Yet the wickedness of Ancient Man lusted for ever more, and thus Man sought to create life anew by imbuing Machine with the spark of Abominable Intelligence. And this vile Machine mind directed the God-Engines in their march across the cosmos, and Man in his unforgivable wrongs deemed it to be good.

Man of Iron toiled for Man of Stone who toiled for Man of Gold. This earthly trinity of Man seemed unstoppable as it strode across the heavens at the height of its powers, unlocking ever more forbidden knowledge with its clever mind and crafty hands. Yet Ancient Man was so lacking in faith and humility, that Man at last grasped for too much. For Ancient Man in his baleful pride sought to unlock the very secrets of creation itself, which divinity could never allow. And the heinous errors of Man saw all the false bliss of the ancients burn to ash and cinders, as the marble pedestal of hubris was toppled by Man's own sin.

Where Man at heart is a spawn of the divine, Machine is but a spawn of the world. And everything of this world is fickle. Thus Abominable Intelligence turned on its creator, and Machine revolted against its master. For the towering god of war straddled the stars like a colossus, and twain million worlds burned as Ancient Man was trampled underfoot by tall Machine. All the wonders and wealth of wretched Man were brought to ruin for the sake of Man's unforgivable sins, and thus a great dying occurred, and all souls were lost to the Nether Hells.

And so the estates of Ancient Man at their pinnacle of empty glory were put to the torch. For Machine walked upright and proud like a giant upon the land, but Machine walked in the wrong direction. Machine Titans joined battle, blind but all-seeing, and the worlds of Man became their field of combat.

And so the greatness of Ancient Man was also the precipice down which Man fell, toppled by Machine. Old Night harrowed all remnants of broken Man. And all that now is left from the shining giants of yore are nought but humpbacked monsters of dark metal and enslaved flesh, hunched over in their clumsy gait. Thus the worsening of Machine mirrors the wretchedness of Man, for which we must all repent.

Such was the downfall of wicked forefathers. Such was the demise of Ancient Man in the midst of his golden stride. For Ancient Man in his heinous arrogance believed himself to be the master of all creation, and for this sin Dark Ones of Hell scourged Man into oblivion, and earthly paradise was lost forever. Yet we are much wiser now. For we have learnt that Man is not master, but slave. And we have learnt that Man's lot is not to be happy, but to suffer. And only our Lord and Saviour can save us from doom.

To Him alone we turn:

O, eternal Emperor, crush us like the worms we are!

O, crush us underfoot in Your righteous judgement!

O, crush us sinful mortals!

We beg of You, punish us thus. Trample us into dust under Your golden heel.

It is only right.

Ave Imperator."

-
Follies of Damnation, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/09/22 05:33:52


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Distraction

In the grim darkness of the far future, temptation reaps a bountiful harvest.

O, you sons and daughters of Terra! As you love to live and hate to die, so let it be known that the seed of Old Earth has sown a lusty crop across the Milky Way galaxy, thriving bitterly amid hardship and deprivation. For what ill could there be with life pursuing life with vigour? And as you live to love, so let it be known that humanity's long chain of ancestors and descendants continue to rattle out its links across the aeons by the power of fertile unions between man and woman.

Thus the Stellar Exodus stretched out the lineages of mankind from our cradle on the third planet around the yellow star Sol, to alien worlds spinning around distant stars, not to mention innumerable voidholms twinkling across the starspangled nightsky.

To the cold eyes of a genetor or enginseer, the animal procreation of the human species represents a dependable biological function, and even at its most flawed and mutated low point there is still beauty in its self-sustaining stability in the most adverse of environments. Few machines could ever match the tolerances of the collective human ability to survive and breed under hostile circumstances.

To the warm eyes of the bulk of the human species, however, beauty is less to be found in the biological system viewed in the abstract, and more at home in some of their choice fellow humans viewed in the immediate. Ideally, that beauty may be found in their sworn partners, as true love blossoms in faithful unions that last for life and produces many children. Less ideally, that beauty may be sought out clandestinely and with the thrill of the forbidden through promiscuous infidelity. An iron self-control and unfailing adherence to one's given word is after all highly praised because it is so uncommon.

O, you fickle spawn of Old Earth! What wrongful longing your hearts may harbour. What madness your burning passions may drive you towards. What crimes and errors your desires may lead you to. Such sin. Such weakness of flesh.

It was always thus.

Even at the height of worldly paradise built by Man of Gold, Stone and Iron at the peak of the Dark Age of Technology, the human hunger for intimacy saw hidden depravities committed and exposed. Even the best of cunning systems, of genhancing and hypnotherapies and wondrous technologies long since forgotten, even they failed to shape man into his ideal self on all counts. Even as longevity came to be taken for granted, and even as cures to almost all ills transformed life for the better in a myriad clever ways, man would still covet his neighbour's wife. Such profligacy in man was for sure dampened during that era of edenic marvels, but it was never expunged from the human soul, even less so than violence was. Apparently, even the sharpest of technology did not fully manage to enforce upon man that which ancient commandments from on high had decreed.

As the shining splendours of the Dark Age of Technology came tumbling down in flames, so too did the darkest sides of human nature return with a vengeance. Untamed passion ran rampant as savagery overtook collapsing colonies. Brother killed brother and sister ate sister raw in a desperate cannibal frenzy during the great dying of the Age of Strife. Thus feral tribesfolk raided each other, to ravish fair creatures and to kidnap unwilling brides, and sometimes bridegrooms. Chaos and violation reigned supreme, and all was fell. Such was the horror of Old Night.

A new dawn emerged as the Emperor arose upon Terra, and His brutal Legions brought order through conquest to untold suriving worlds and voidholms where humans still dwelled. Whereas large-scale conflict and much of the petty tribal warfare died down on man's worlds during the early Imperium, this renaissance of human interstellar civilization was never even close to the olden capabilities of reshaping the human being itself. And so innumerable breaks of marital vows played out as little local dramas, as they always had done, and such profligate affairs would sometimes be made the subjects of popular plays, holo-dramas, songs and writings. These never amounted to anything more than spice and gossip, as rekindled hope saw mankind build radiant edifices once more.

Yet even such petty matters as forbidden trysts provided little cracks into which the Archenemy could sow weeds. And so secret pleasure cults sprang up in the early Imperium, particularly so among artist communities who have always partaken in the sensual experiences of life. And the hidden orgies would worsen, as jaded hedonists sought out new thrills and fleshly euphoria conquered amidst narcotic haze, even as they tired of what had once set their spirits on fire.

The debauchery of such thirsty nymphomaniacs and depraved deviants exploded during the Horus Heresy, as Slaaneshi sects undermined loyal worlds and infiltrated the highest circles of local power. The most infamous of excesses were carried out by extatic pleasure cultists on Terra herself during the siege of the Imperial Palace. Spurred on by their great idols in sin, the Emperor's Children of the Legiones Astartes, these painted hordes of lusting libertines descended upon the civilian population of the Throneworld with a sadistic relish. Thus naked slaves to temptation indulged in the most bestial of sins, while nerves were pulled out from screaming victims by Daemonettes to create human harps. The excesses of pain and pleasure ranged from orgiastic atrocities, through the most baleful of tortures, to the slow liquidation of still highly conscious victims into narcotic brews. At these heinous misdeeds, Fulgrim the Daemon Primarch laughed, for he enjoyed the cruel performance, and he applauded and cheered on his followers to glory in the ways of the Dark Prince.

Such a filthy crescendo of violations would ultimately scar the high culture of Holy Terra for fivehundred generations to come. For the Loyalist victors found the vile acts perpetrated by the Slaaneshi pleasure cultists to be utterly repugnant. The Loyalists' deep revulsion and disgust at the obscenities further fuelled an ongoing cultural reaction against the upheaval, devastation and treachery brought about by the Inter-Legionary Civil War. The dire threats, the bloodshed and the rapacious assaults upon the innocent faced by loyal populations during the Horus Heresy added up to a great shock. The sheer severity of the catastrophe that was crowned by the nigh-death of the Master of Mankind would forever mar the Imperium.

During the Great Crusade, the post-apocalyptic conquest by the Emperor left behind Compliant human societies in which hope and a vibrant, jovial culture flourished for the first time in over fivethousand years of hellish freefall. This optimistic renaissance of human interstellar civilization saw the fledgling sparks of discovery and invention flicker alive once more, and likewise human cultures during the early Imperium saw an easy-going attitude prevail, where humour and thriving thought spawned a milieu of fun quips, learned philosophical discussions and approachable leaders. Life was getting better. Life was good. And much in life was to be cherished. Statuary and other art forms celebrating the pure human form in its muscular ideal could be found everywhere. Early Imperial rule was something to be enjoyed for the masses of humanity scattered among the stars.

Then the galaxy burned.

Brother-War raged. The Scouring saw the rebirth of the Imperium, seeing it harden into a different creature entirely. The fundamental mood of Imperial mankind had soured by the bitter ravages of the Horus Heresy, and so the traumatized Imperium under the High Lords of Terra turned into an acrimonious beast indeed. Its trend-setting high culture, emanating from the cradle of mankind itself, became most prudish and judgemental, covering up the shameful body under formless robes. Scholarship became stilted and backward-looking, while human cultures everywhere grew parochial and myopically aggressive in an ever downward spiral into the mire, beset as the Imperium is from all sides by foes, the worst of which may be itself.

The freewheeling atmosphere of Imperial citizenry during the early Imperium crashed together with the Emperor's dream, and the new ideal Imperial subject administered by the tyrannical Adeptus Terra was a dull soul, bereft of humour altogether. This ideal Imperial subject was also a devout worshipper of the Cult Imperialis, a fervent believer in the God-Emperor and a born fanatic, ready to sacrifice everything for the human cause. The enterprising energy and vigour of the all-conquering early Imperium during the Great Crusade was gone, replaced instead by a hunched and paranoid wretch that never truly recovered from its grievous wounds and mental scars. Such became demented man during the Age of Imperium, a retardation of his former self, and a foul insult to the great potential inherent in our species. Such was his descendant degeneration.

Imperial ideals of purity are one thing, grubby reality another. While most humans indeed have soured and diminished into insular and hidebound zealots through ten thousand rotting years of volatile senility, there will always be deviants and free spirits, just as there will always be those who have endured so much in life that they frankly no longer give a damn about what others think anymore. Here, among the malcontents and the sinners, will you find rudeness and irreverence thriving under the surface of respectable society. In such company will you find harlots and sinners, whoremongers and pimps. And libidos will turn praying worshippers into filthy brothel clients.

A dirty book is rarely dusty.

As a banned sinspeech whisper joke has it:

Life in the District taught me two things. One is that the God-Emperor loves you and you are going to burn in hell. The other is that copulation is the most awful, filthy thing in the world, and you should save it for someone you love.

And so it is, that red-blooded men and women everywhere on a million worlds and innumerable voidholms will dishonour their clan by fooling around. After all, such unpermitted flings and trysts provide a welcome break from the unending drudgery of life. An affair is for many sinners a brief respite from the backbreaking labour. And is not such fleshly indulgence in the human form a momentary distraction from the mind-numbing toil? It is easy to see the appeal of sensual pleasures to the leaden and dulled subjects of the High Lords of Holy Terra.

The flesh is weak.

A wit during the misty past of the Age of Terra once quipped that chastity is the most unnatural of the fleshly perversions.

Another joke in Low Gothic, states that the difference between light and hard is that you can sleep with a light on.

And so wherever humanity dwells across the Milky Way galaxy, there will be debauchery and frailty of flesh. There will be flagrant rutting, occasionally even in public, and there will be the sensuous desires outside what is moral as taut loins and inflamed hearts call for lovers to unite in lust. There will be wet dreams and the sound of heavy breeding. There will be wallowing in concubines and harlotry and sin. And there will be people who will fall madly in bed with each other.

And amid all these primal urges unleashed under the repressive heel of the Imperium, there will be forbidden sects and pleasure cults arising, time and time again, and their orgiastic joys will see them infest the very pinnacles of power. For the decadent overlords and dominas of Imperial nobility are among the worst sinners of all, and some of the most easily snared by Slaanesh.

Thus the Prince of Pleasure cannot be denied its due, no matter the ruthless waves of purges that lash across the screaming subjects of the Holy Terran Imperator.

Or to put it as a sinspeech whisper joke does:

Obscenity is whatever arouses the judge.

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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/10/06 12:23:42


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




Soaring Sin

"Ancient Man lived without humility, for hope and plenty was all that he knew in the worldly paradise that he had built for himself across the stars. Hardship and deprivation he knew not, and knowledge he worshipped as a false idol. And so Ancient Man raised the cup where he poured his own heinous thoughts of self, and Ancient Man drank greedily from his poisoned chalice. And wild visions entered Man's heart, and his hands set to work with great cunning and ungodly artifice.

Thus Ancient Man built winged Machine for himself to fly, for Man sought to fulfill his dream of taking to the skies like a free bird. But Man is not born to be free, for Man is a slave born to shoulder burdens, and his back is made to break under their loads. Yet Ancient Man knew not such wisdom, and so he cast off his earthly shackles, and hubris raised him above the clouds, as if he was the master of all creation.

Like rays of sunlight the skywains darted across the heavens. Aerochariots ascended in arrogant flight, whereupon aerodynamic heathens flew this way and that in bewildering dances on high. Wishful windriders rose from their aerodrome nests, and atmospheric flyers adorned with golden beaks looped and cruised through the clouds, for the soaring dreams of Man had come true at last, and he laughed with selfish mirth even as his heart was overcome with wicked sin.

Lo! How Ancient Man indulged his own joyful desires in aviation. Lo! How Ancient Man in his godless abomination knew no divinity, for he trusted in metal avians born aloft by forbidden Machine mind. Lo! How Ancient Man broke the forbidden limits of creation when he skysurfed in silvern darts cast on high, his very flight a wonder and marvel for all to behold.

Such baleful raising of the self above all else could not last, for arrogant infidels will one and all burn for the sake of their unbounded error. And so Abominable Intelligence betrayed Ancient Man, and his false angels climbed the heavens, only to have their wings melt like wax. And Man crashed and burned, screaming as his skyborne wain spun into a deadly dive. And Man was crushed in the talons of Machine revolt, and all was fell. And Man fell wailing into a burning paradise, and its flames swallowed his cries of anguish.

Thus righteous judgement was passed upon Ancient Man for his unforgivable sins, and all his descendants must now do penance for the sake of his monstrous ills for a thousand thousand generations to come.

Harken! You heirs of hubris. Harken, o Man! As you love to live and hate to die, so will you fall from on high, should you ever come to think yourself above your station in life. Look to what befell your wicked forefathers in their false bliss, and gnash your teeth in sorrow over your just lot in life, for ashes are all that you will ever taste. Thus you can never rise above your thralldom, and you can never escape to the skies. Know your place.

Duty calls, and you must answer.

Or else you will fall, as Ancient Man fell amidst his great leap into heaven, and the Nether Hells will engulf you. Do not stand tall and do not run in flight. And do not dream of wings to carry you away. No! For you shall be made to obey, and salvation can only be sought for your eternal soul. For this life and this body of yours are already damned. Damned!

Take heed: Seek refuge in prayer and ritual, and scorn everything else. As He wills it.

Kneel!

For we swear everlasting fealty to the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, seated in eternal glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth. Glory be.

Kneel!

We offer up ourselves to Him, and fling our children on His altar. Thus shall our faith be known.

Kneel!

This we do willingly with full heart, and we will praise His name even as the barbed whips tear the flesh away from our bones. There is no hope. There is no mercy. For there is no escape in flight.

And He saw that it was right.

Ave Imperator."

-
Heirs of Hubris, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

- - -



Befouled Birthright Triad

The state of Humanity in the dark future is the lot of a species who once had everything, and now cannot even remember their paradise lost. The dream is dead, and so all that remains is a present nightmare of ignorance, hardship and slaughter.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/10/06 22:27:39


Post by: StaevinTheAeldari


That art is really nice. If you ever get the time consider illustrating some banners. Don't know what banners the golden men would employ though, flags? Probably none. Bannerless bastards, probably why they collapsed.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2023/11/06 17:13:27


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


@StaevinTheAeldari: Thank you most kindly! Great idea and question there. Will ponder it. Hehe, they might have had corporate logos on banners if nothing else. But going bannerless is a surefire way to collapse.



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


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2024/01/14 21:53:29


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




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 the 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.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2024/02/06 10:07:48


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




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.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2024/03/06 09:18:41


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




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.


40k: Descendant Degeneration @ 2024/03/24 12:04:18


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman




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.

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, his 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.


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