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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 And ever since has man feared the thinking of machine, and Abominable Intelligence has been replaced by the wetware of man turned into machine.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, its cortical augmetics enabling the thrall to monitor all of the vehicle's twentytwo pict feeds, which together provided a full-circle moving panorama that the servitor's old human senses could never have been able to manage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dolmech activated his jump pack and chased the Rhino.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flesh is weak.

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

That machine was malfunctioning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

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

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:

Where there is a whip, there is a way.

We don't wanna go to war today, but the lord of the lash says nay nay nay...
we're gonna march all day all day all day...

-

A really nice story.
It would have been fitting if Dolmech ended up a dreadnought.
Though given the worldbuilding in the story I doubt the Iron Hands would reward him like that after such a humiliating fubar.
And in a way it's fitting considering the characters involved.

Armicus mindlessly fulfilling his duty - rewarded with horrific torment.
Dolmech mindlessly failing in his - spared from the same fate.

Very fitting.

The last one is great. Cool little action sequence. Love the rhino train, kind of want to make a tabletop version

@StaevinTheAeldari: Wonderful! Spot-on. I am quoting your glorious writing here on all sister threads of this on other forums, due linking and credit always a given.

Thank you most kindly. Haha, a Dreadnought would have been a surprising reward for Dolmech, though not impossible given his long service.

@Illumini: Thank you very much. I would love to see a tabletop version! Please link it if you model one.

Cheers


A Vox in the Void

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



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Ivan Espinoza

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



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Asphyxia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

Writing from 2020 A.D. updated with drawing.

Cornered Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uplifting

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold the line.

@StaevinTheAeldari: Glorious writing! Very evocative. Lovely. I'm spreading it to all sister threads on other forums, duly credited and linked to you.

- - -

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

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




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To Eat Bitterness

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

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

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

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

It was not always thus.

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

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

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

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

And all was fell.

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

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

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

Woe!

Woe unto man!

Woe unto sinful man!

Let us take stock of man.

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

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

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

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

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

As one sinspeech whisper joke would have it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Emperor protects!

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

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

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

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

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

Ave Imperator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he succeeded in his quest.

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

Truly, this was the doing of the Imperator.

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

Praise be to our glorious overlord!

Ave Imperatore Dei!

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

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

How depraved is man?

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

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

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

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

Such is the end that awaits us all.

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

- - -

Based on the survival story of Xiao Jiaxi in 1979.