THE
WARP STORM

@pawl : Yep, it did! At least as far as the ancient source go, but I see no reason to distrust it. Life is strange. Thank you most kindly!



Wisdom Since Cradle

In a lost age, competence is measured by pedigree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guild Scrip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the Imperial way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You!

Serve your species and lord!

Toil! Pray! Fight! Die!

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

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

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

Such is the depravity that awaits us all.

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

Excellent writing @Karak Norn Clansman !! Really enjoyed it. Sorry I've been abit swamped so any spare time has been on finishing the tallyman but caught up now and ready for new projects.
Hope you had a great xmas and new year!

One away from being caught up again!

@Karak Norn Clansman, have you ever considered using something like Wattpad to try something more long-form? Would be interesting to see something with a narrative in the setting that you build! =]

@James : Thank you kindly, man! Haha, there can never be any obligation to read my ramblings. If you like to, then take it whenever it suits you at leisure. Cheers!

@pawl : Yes, but long-form stories are a long way off and I've no insight into Wattpad and all other new instruments and platforms that have popped up recently. I've dabbled in novel writing before, though the fantasy work which I and a friend had progressed greatly at 10 years ago was wrecked when I lost all drive to continue with it after job failures. The thing is that short pieces can be written in a day, but full length novels take a lot of time. Being able to complete a polished piece in a short time have an enormous benefit: It can be slotted in among other projects, and doesn't bind you for a long time before anything can see fruition. Also, I have a long and growing list of dysfunctionality concepts harvested from real history to turn into 40k pieces, and I want to chew through them all before a longer story can get a chance.

Cheers!

A Vox in the Void

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

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

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

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



Code of Conduct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ave Imperatore Dei, Ave Humanae Imperium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such are the vagaries of descendant degeneration.

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

- - -

Tribute to captain Zedek in WarHams, played by HulkyKrow.

I think this your best artwork yet!! Love it. Looks sacred.

Is the Zediquette based on anything historical?

@James : Thanks a lot! I'm experimenting with backgrounds and balance of shading and light. Winging it as one go along, really.

You bet! Good question. There are of course (boring) etiquette books in the past, but I assume you mean the content itself, the customary rules and the weird anecdotes and entertainment.

I've basically pooled almost all palace and upper class etiquette and party stuff I can remember, from all across the world. Not excusing himself to go to the toilet for the sake of politeness did astronomer Tycho Brahe in, for instance. Tossing grapes into each others' mouths until his beloved suddenly choked happened to a caliph. Leaving some food on the plate as a polite gesture is East Asian. Contest of sleeping with as many men as possible happened between Claudius' wife Empress Messalina and Rome's most famous (but unnamed in the sources) prostitute. Reclining at table and drinking while resting on one elbow is typical of Greeks and Romans in antiquity (you were laughed at for a noob if you failed to drink gracefully in that difficult position), while throwing bones and food scraps at servants show up in a Norse saga. Widow burnings (sari), mentioned in passing, are Indian. Having a quick tryst with servant girls in between meetings was typical of Louis XIV of France. Naked dancers and musicians were a staple of Pharaoh's court in ancient Egypt. Feathers in throats to vomit and stomach more food in one sitting was normal aristocratic stuff in western Europe during the 17th century. The list goes on and on, but almost all of it is based on historical stuff that I have sometimes exaggerated. Some things are all original from my head, as it were, but easily 85% of it is based on something historical.

Cheers!


A Vox in the Void

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

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




Our Daily Bread

In a forsaken future, man starves like a beast.

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

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

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

Such is man's lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ave Imperator.

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

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

Such is the future that await us all.

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

Throw Them Out the Airlock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer not the alien to live.

Cleanse the stars from the monstrosity of the Xeno.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

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

Every single one of them.

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

Ave Imperator.

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

Unmanned

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

War has always been a great danger to mortals, and in this regard nothing has truly changed since primitive man first bashed in the skull of his enemy with a rock, for in a forsaken future of plasma cannons, chainaxes and graviton crushers, foes still maim and slay each other without abandon. All across a seething galaxy teeming with life, the war gods hold sway with supreme power over the fates of lone mortals and great empires alike, and a cycle of endless slaughter is the rule of the day. Interstellar warfare presents enormous challenges, not least logistical ones, and an incessant state of total war mobilization will hollow out and cannibalize the warring society from within. On the sea of stars, navies manned by tens of millions of crewmen clash in bursts of destructive energy sufficient to leave green worlds barren. In the field, armies numbering in the billions face unspeakable horrors as the full might of advanced military technology is brought to bear with little to no inhibition.

The challenges of war across the stars are staggering, and can easily bleed prosperous economies and their gargantuan population numbers white, inviting chaos and turmoil on the home front as stability plummets. All too many voidfaring empires exerted themselves to the very limit in order to win large conflicts, only to suddenly break apart from inside as the home front collapsed. The internal risks of war exhaustion and demoralization can doom dynasties who have ruled for millennia, and the external risks of enemy invasion can destroy all the fruits of untold generations of toil and ingenuity. Yet such perils must be faced, and crushed underheel, for the ten thousand year old Imperium of Man will let no one foe stand in its way, and it will annihilate any rebels who wish to win independence from its harsh tyranny, as the God-Emperor decreed. After all, an empire that never had any qualms about killing its own taxpayers en masse in peacetime will not shirk away from the harrowing maelstrom of total war.

And so Imperial Tithe is gathered from a million worlds and uncountable voidholms, in a flood of men and materiel, in a barrage of starships and ground vehicles, in an outburst of Imperial might by an interstellar realm that has long since learnt to compensate its decaying technological base and screeching inefficiencies by callously increasing the input in a broken calculation of great numbers which aim to hammer the foe asunder, or at least grind the enemy down through sheer attrition. In such a crude equation, human value becomes a laughable concept. Behold the billions in the armies and the hundreds of billions in the industry and bureaucracy, and know that wretched man is nothing but a cheap and easily replacable component in a vast, faceless system where hands, heads and spines ever more must pick up the slack where ancient machines break down, and the ability to repair or replace them no longer exist among the living.

In the Age of Imperium, man no longer dominates the Milky Way galaxy with such overwhelming force that no foe dare stand against him. Instead, the scavenging survivors of the Age of Strife managed to gather human power anew, armed with a poorly understood patchwork technology salvaged from the wrecks and ruins of the ancients, relying on the copying of old blueprints and schematic guesswork. The Horus Heresy struck the young Imperium hard, and sounded the final death knell for any chance of a renaissance for human science and invention. Ever since, almost all human colonies across the galaxy have been ruled by the smothering iron fist of the Imperium of Man, locked inside a decrepit star dominion of paranoid oppression whose bickering and self-serving factions consistently choke any frail first steps toward a renewed blooming of intellect and worldly curiosity. Knowledge is power: Guard it well.

Bogged down in a dysfunctional morass of its own making, the Imperium of Man masters but few subtle tricks, and its default solution to any problem is to throw more bodies at it. Thus an armed exodus of men, women and child soldiers are shipped out to ten thousand different war fronts, while blinkered hordes of labourers keep the rusting wheels of Imperial industry turning through immense toil and lethal self-sacrice. A plethora of vastly different human cultures exist throughout the million planets and innumerable voidholms of the Imperium, yet all share a narrow-minded fanaticism and intense religious devotion, trusting in the protection of the Holy Terran Emperor. And so zealous barbarians stand shoulder to shoulder with pious peasants and superstitious hive city scum within the Astra Militarum, taking up simple, mass-produced arms and body armour that were chosen both for their dependability, ease of manufacture and cheapness.

Most of the lighter armaments and infantry protection of the Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and Imperial Guard are markedly inferior to the weapon systems and armour suits reserved for the God-Emperor's utterly brainwashed elite corps and enforcers, such the Militarum Tempestus or the Adeptus Arbites. One primary reason for this state of affairs is the need to equip the blindly loyal forces of internal suppression better than the potentially rebellious regiments they may one day have to eradicate, and thus rig the deck in the Imperium's favour. Another head cause for the shoddy equipment of the Astra Militarum is the fact that most infantrymen and vehicles will not survive for long in warzones to begin with, so why waste precious resources on technological bells and whistles and advanced tactical training when both the tank and its crew anyway will be dead within four Terran months after deployment? When your foremost strength is an overwhelming force of numbers, you need to churn out cheap and crude wargear to equip ever new short-lived mass armies numbering in the billions of soldiers, to replace the last set that died out all too quickly. The Imperium needs to play a ravenous numbers game, foregoing any focus on technological sophistication in wargear for sheer mass-production on a gigantic scale. After all, quantity has a quality all of its own.

It is said that one man's death is a tragedy, while the death of one million is a statistic. To better understand the plight of the common Imperial infantryman, let us behold such an instructive tragedy of a mere single death among untold hundreds of millions of casaulties, one victim among many in a distant war under a strange sun.

The verdant mining world of Zikaru is the third moon of the teal gas giant Parmashtaq, the seventh planet of the crowded Evar system, within the Gevura sector in southern Ultima Segmentum. At the start of the 8th century of M40, the backwater Tech-Priests on Zikaru watched helplessly as the final breakdown occurred for an advanced continent-spanning lace of piped irrigation systems and largely automated desalination facilities. None of their prayers, meditations and oracular pilgrimages had yielded a working answer to the failing intricacies of the poorly understood agricultural irrigation systems that fed all of Zikaru with huge quantities of foodstuffs. The panicking Tech-Priests on the third moon first erupted in armed hostilities as they blamed each other, and then agreed on a tenuous ceasefire while they scrambled to pool their stunted knowledge and come up with a rudimentary emergency system reliant on primitive tech and massive input of manual corvée labour, which eventually solidified into a permanent feature of Zikaruan agriculture. This process of infighting and amateur engineering took over a decade to hammer out, a waterless decade which saw emerald green fields turn to desert and crop yields plummet on the agri-continent of Caraculum.

Within one year, food prices skyrocketed, leading to upper caste hoarding while mass starvation and cannibalism plagued the very poorest mineworkers. After two years, all of the moon's governatorial granaries were empty, while Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI had found all his efforts to import massive amounts of foodstuff blocked by his personal enemies offworld. On the third year, massive strikes shook the entirety of Zikaru as miners of all castes shouted for free food now to their starving families. This was met by massacres from the local forces of order, which only fuelled the fires of dicontent. On the fourth year, three-fourths of of Zikaru was tearing itself apart in a chaotic mess of civil war and cannibal raids, leading to the ousting and retreat of the Governor's loyal forces to the parched agri-continent of Caraculum, which the Adeptus Mechanicus (and its ration-prioritized press ganged workers numbering twohundredthirthy million) was busy restructuring wholesale with primitive dams, pools and canals, as well as strategic tree and bush planting in order to bind the dusty top soil with roots.

On the fifth year, Zikaru had lost eighteen percent of its population, and all continents and islets oustide Caraculum were in a state of warlord anarchy. Still, a precarious situation of mass worker die-off was stabilized as an old bushwack nomad's trick at last paid off, namely to cake in the seeds of nimsu reed in clay or dung before planting in the desert. This new source of nutrients kept most of the corvée labour force above starvation level, and the staved-off disaster on Caraculum allowed Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI to rebuild his forces. On the sixth year, the Governor ordered his armies to land at the mining moon's two small billion-strong hive cities, yet the expeditions ended in a military catastrophe, and Zakhrut XXI was killed in a palace coup, replaced by a royally incestuous power couple of his eldest son and daughter. The new rulers were in turn branded as obscene heretics and swiftly slain by the patriarch of a cadet branch of the royal dynasty, and thus Yezeri Firee III ascended to the throne in Caraculum, while the most powerful Zikaruan warlords outside the agri-continent started to coalesce into warring cliques, most of which had separatist ambitions toward the Imperium. With the governatorial forces depleted thrice over thanks to inept generalship, the race was on for whom of the magnates would outsmart his opponents and conquer all of devastated Zikaru.

On the seventh year, a much delayed Adeptus Administratum Tithing fleet arrived to the Evar system, and Yezeri Firee III failed in his attempts to make his rump state uncontactable. When the Administratum assessors arrived to the third moon of Parmashtaq, they discovered both its sorry state of civil collapse and the reigning Imperial Governor's clumsy attempts to adopt vox and astropath silence. The Administratum master assessor in orbit around Zikaru was greatly vexed both by the moonside chaos and transparent fake muting of communications, so he thus overreacted and lashed out in petty rage by hiring the services of an Eversor Assassin from the shadowy Officio Assassinorum. One cloudy night, a single drop pod descended toward the crisis capital on the agri-continent of Caraculum. When the people of the city awoke, they found that divine retribution had struck the Governor's temporary palace, with all top officials, ministers and vezirs having been slain, lying in pools of their own blood together with every single member of the household staff, guard force and dynasty members present in the fortified palace. Not a single human being in the temporary palace survived the mysterious rampage. The usurper Yezeri Firee III was found chopped into tiny pieces in the bed of his favourite mistress, and the rest of that year was spent in vicious power struggles within the royal clan.

The master assessor's ostentatious Eversor strike had achieved nothing of value for the Imperium of Man, but it had soothed the bureaucratic potentate's flaring temper. Content with the reports received on the palatial slaughter, this Administratum overlord contacted the Departmento Munitorum and informed them of the sorry situation on Zikaru. In response, Astra Militarum regiments were mustered on nearby worlds and from neighbouring systems, and shipped off to the turbulent mining moon in a remarkably fast flurry of voidfaring activity. On the eighth year, a force of half a billion Imperial Guardsmen had been collected and deployed moonside to begin the pacification of all continents other than Caraculum. A few warlords capitulated and insisted that they had remained loyal toward the Imperium of Man through the whole ordeal, but most warlords banded together in a patriotic coalition for Zikaruan independence, and threw their hardened warriors into a united front against the offworld foreigners. The Imperial suppression force managed to do what no warlord nor Governor had succeded in doing during the previous years of societal freefall: Namely, to unite Zikaru, or most of it anyway.

Warlord coalition resistance toward Imperial forces proved much harder than anticipated, and the Zikaruan freedom fighters managed to galvanize subtantial parts of the reduced population through vigorous propaganda campaigns that painted the Imperator's loyal servants as nothing but leaching oppressors and greedy foreigners seeking to plunder their beloved homeworld. In the great struggle that ensued, Zikaru would see yet more of its populace killed off by war and all its accompanying hardships, until less than half of the mining moon's pre-troubles population remained once the dust had finally settled. Over a course of nine years, great campaigns of mostly blundering grand strategy were conducted by a bickering Astra Militarum general staff, who often contradicted each other and refused cooperation on grounds of personal honour and ancient House feuds, all the while firing up the fighting spirit of their troops by promises of loot, slaves and a fine place in the afterworld for all martyrs of the God-Emperor's righteous hosts.

It was in this brutal environment of bitter war against rebellious native cannibals that the Frejian 5947th infantry regiment of the Astra Militarum landed, as part of a wave of reinforcements during the fourth year of Imperial reconquest, in preparation for the bloody Fascinus offensive. The Frejian 5947th was a young regiment, having yet to earn its colours, and its swaggering soldiers yearned to prove the new unit's mettle with a reckless manly bravado. The infantry regiment was deployed as part of the 803rd Frejian division, commanded by Hostis Legatarch Snorri af Kulsack. This able veteran general found himself slotted into a rigid schedule of frontal human wave attacks, and in this unimaginative position ordained from above, all his skill and experience could amount to little more than directing his division's mortars and rocket launchers toward clearing likely enemy heavy weapon hideouts before the advance began.

Their objective was to capture a hostile fort designated Castra Priapus, and they had readied themselves for the upcoming assault by offering fervent prayers to His Divine Majesty in His guise as the lord of hosts, while their regimental clericus militarii had wandered among this band of brothers and galored the lads with blood-boiling tales of the foe's sins, blasphemy and atrocities. Thus the Frejian Guardsmen cultivated an earnest hatred for their filthy foe, and many vowed to bring home anatomical trophies from at least three slain traitors. It was to be a seminal offensive for the upstart 5947th Frejian infantry regiment, and one of its daring warriors was private Vittur Menelik, of Völse company. Vittur eagerly followed the regimental-wide order to fix bayonets, and he endeavoured to prove his fortitude and courage in the face of death.

And so the Frejian infantry climbed over the top of their trenches as vox-amplifiers rang out litanies of hatred, and these cocky young men charged over no-man's land, into the testing ground of combat where heroes and cravens alike are made through the proof of their deeds. Private Vittur Menelik followed his squad sergeant Rod Böllur and joined in a thousand-throated battlecry. "Freji stands!" the men shouted as they rushed over a lunar landscape of craters, vehicular wrecks and corpses, yet their warcry was soon drowned in a tornado of hostile artillery fire, while a staccato of heavy stubbers and the rapid whiplashes of multilasers opened up from the enemy lines.

Sergeant Rod fell amid the barbed wire in front of the first line of enemy trenches, yet his squad pressed home the attack. Vittur, that gutsy man, cast himself into the jaws of death without deviant thought of self, lasgun blazing as they stormed the first trench line, and then the second, and then the third. Vittur was always at the forefront of the attack, and this loyal son of the Imperium covered himself in glory, slaying half a dozen foes by grenade, las bolts and bayonet. The Frejian soldiers risked life and limb and showed no mercy to any enemy who wished to surrender, but instead cut them down on the spot and charged on through winding trenches and over pockmarked grounds battered by ordnance to win through with their bold assault. They were heedless to their own losses, and a feverish battle rage descended upon the Imperial Guardsmen.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

Yet our gallant hero met his grisly end while running toward the fourth line of trenches at Castra Priapus. All of a sudden, a heavy stubber bullet from an advanced gunnery nest slammed into private Vittur sideways and went through both groins, as the after-action report of Völse company phrased it. It was the dread of males everywhere, for this gelding hipshot proved to be the bane wound of the valiant Frejian soldier. The flak codpiece that protected the wearer's manhood from front angle hits was of no avail, since the heavy stubber shot had entered the Guardsman's body from the flank of his unarmoured hip, dooming him to an emasculating demise. The agony was almost blinding, yet Vittur Menelik did not fall unconscious, but lived through every moment of it all, until death eventually released him several minutes later. The sideways phallic wound had also shattered both of his hips. This heinous mutilation of the infantryman's membrum virile brought the Frejian intense pain, and like a bull turned into an ox would he never more father children nor know a maiden ever again.

Thus private Vittur Menelik lived a deedful man, yet died a whimpering eunuch. Hardened veterans who saw the gory dying of this strapping young fellow would shudder and twitch forth protective hand gestures whenever they recalled his baleful demise. They said he experienced unimaginable torment, and froth came from his mouth before he started vomiting blood, and all the while perspiration poured from Vittur's face. The agony was so great he could not bear it. No man could. Witnesses described how the eyes of the Frejian Guardsman were wide open from shock as he sat on his knees, swaying backward and forward while pressing his arms around his stomach. They all agreed that the brave warrior suffered more in the short time that he was dying thus nastily, than any other man they ever saw in war. It was dreadful to look upon him, and all the other horror of the battlefield paled in comparison. He sat there in total pain, mouthing a High Gothic mantra over and over in between the vomiting of blood:

"Imperatore Terrae, domine salva animam meam." Emperor of Earth, o please save my soul. It was an unmanning death, yet nevertheless a hero's death. And so Vittur Menelik of the Frejian 5947th passed away on Zikura, devout in his faith and ritual worship to the very last. All mortal men should strive to follow his example. Vittur's departure had been somewhat of a Caesarean death, wounded in his sword, as it were, akin to how one betrayed great leader of men once died most brutally during the bygone Age of Terra. Traitors truly are the lowest forms of scum, wherefore we must hunt them down and slay them all, lest they do unspeakable things to us and our kin. Suffer not the traitor to live!

Behold that fallen stallion of war, fearless and true to his species and lord. He truly knew the meaning of sacrifice, yet it was only his corporeal vessel of dust and clay that bled that day. What suffered on Zikaru was merely the inconsequential matter that make up the flesh of the worthless creature that is man. For wretched man is a sinner who should burn in hellfire, yet the shielding goodness in the heart of our celestial master and saviour allows man to transcend his base nature if his soul is pure and his spirit is strong. Know that the God-Emperor demand the ultimate sacrifice from each man, and nought else but total devotion and submission to His divine will may suffice.

Behold Vittur Menelik, martyr of our cause. He happily met his end with virtues intact and warrior's honour upright. He died bravely in service to the Emperor of mankind, and who could ever wish for anything more in this vale of sorrows we call life? Behold!

Remember the self-sacrifice of those fallen in battle, for in their dying moments can be glimpsed what it means to be human in the glorious Age of Imperium. Remember!

Rejoice in the death of our faithful, for the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium. Rejoice!

Let not their sacrifice be in vain, but follow instead their example and take up arms in the name of His Divine Majesty of Holy Terra. Rise! Join the pure ranks of the martyrs. Rise, mankind! Meet death and destruction, and fear not injury, for the Emperor protects.

Ave Imperator.

And so it is that men, women and children willingly throw themselves unto certain death and mutilation. They do this for the sake of their Emperor. And they all die in service to the sacred hierarchy of the Imperium of Man, that interstellar colossus on feet of clay that will burn through the people with callous disregard, the flesh of man being but yet another expendable resource for the rulers of the Imperium to use as they see fit. And as the lives of trillions are wasted in a doomed effort to stem the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy, the gravely wounded and the dying among these warriors across the stars may hear, as if in a fever dream, the melodious harmony of an angelic choir.

Or the laughter of thirsting gods.

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

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

Corpse Cover

In an eon of insanity, man has become a wall.

To contemplate the full horror of life in the Age of Imperium, one must first recognize that mankind fell from his sublime pinnacles of worldly wonder and achievement that was the Dark Age of Technology, a heady time when man settled millions of planets and bestrode the galaxy like a colossus thanks to the cunning of his mind and the artifice of his hands. From those lofty heights did man plunge down a precipice of doom known as the Age of Strife, when man in his suffering and desperation devolved into a savage cannibal and wretched scavenger bereft of longevity and innovation, capable only of manhunts, abduction of woman and looting the great works of a bygone golden age in a shocking state of the most primitive cruelty and ignorance. Parent ate child, and all was ruin.

The death spiral of Old Night was eventually halted by the bloodstained coming of the Emperor of Terra, rising the eagle banner on man's birthworld, and for a short while a resurgent spirit of enterprise and ingenuity swept across the surviving human colonies as legions conquered, for the rekindled sparks of brilliance seemed set to lead man back to his former ascendancy. Yet the feeble flesh of mortals are destined to wither and die, and so too must their dreams, for once again the galaxy burned in a monstrous civil war that ravaged man's dominions and tore down any chance of restoring his lost supremacy and soaring quest for immortality. Brother slew brother, and all was fell.

The shining beacon of hope that was the early Imperium, forged in the fires of the Great Crusade, has since sunk together like a failed soufflé. For the might and splendour of the Imperium proved not a bastion of strength to shelter man from a galaxy of horrors, but became instead a prison where the efforts of man amounted to little more than a prolonged waiting for the inevitable end as his powerful vigour and clarity of mind rotted into torpid senility. Thus the Age of Imperium brought not rejuvenation to man, but the decline and misery of old age. And man slid down into a swamp of misery and superstition, and he reverted to a blinkered fanatic capable of the most bloodthirsty acts of depravity imaginable. Hate ruled supreme, as grinding destitution and endless struggle saw trillions ultimately die for nothing. Man trod water, and all was decay.

Twohundredfifty generations of brutal freefall were thus followed by fivehundred generations of total war. Fivehundred generations of sacrifice and suffering. Fivehundred generations of unending carnage and slaughter. Thus wretched man learnt to harness himself to the cart, and he pulled the heavy burden forward through inexorable storms. And as he fought a losing war against impending doom, man again and again made use of an ancient warrior trick until it became second nature to him, for man would seek shelter behind the fallen, and man would pile his dead into a wall of flesh to shield himself from death for a little longer. And thus even the lifeless husks of departed souls were made to serve in the arena of slaughter.

Survival in war has ever favoured quick-thinking soldiers who manage to adapt to their battlefield and use the terrain itself as a weapon to strike back against the enemy. Cunning and luck has ever been crucial when swords are drawn, for victory must be won by any means necessary, and damn all scruples that would betray you to the cruel foe. Thus Imperial Guardsmen with their wits about them instinctively know to take cover when under fire, and anyone who wish to preserve his stay among the living will know to swallow his revulsion and make use of the dead. Such pragmatic solutions to the perils of the moment have always been a regretful fact of life in armed conflicts through the ages, yet never before has a great power betwixt the stars turned such dehumanizing improvization into a systematically ingrained practice among the articles of faith in its military doctrines.

It is better to die for the Emperor, than to live for yourself. It is better to clog up the streets and corridors with your own carcass, than to retreat an inch when faced with mortal danger. It is better to erect barricades out of the fallen warriors of mankind, than to bury them. Not even in death does duty end. Fear not the pox and the plague, for the God-Emperor shields his faithful and devout ritual worshippers from the festering swarms of germs, flies and maggots. Trust in the guidance of the Imperator of Holy Terra to bless you with the grant to think on your feet, and therefore dive for cover behind a fallen comrade. Be pure of heart and strong of will, and lay corpse upon corpse to form a solid wall. Waste not, want not.

One glimpse of an exemplary sharp Imperial footsoldier who found an aegis in so much dead meat, was that of private Dasharatha Kumarya, of the 108108th Rajipur Tech-Guard regiment of the Astra Militarum. During the twelfth battle of Hive Rhea on Perisistratus VII, lunar satellite to Teleklos Tertiarius, this Imperial infantryman followed the rapid advance of his platoon's brave lieutnant Skanda Ramutiskrit, when suddenly the junior officer and most of his platoon were gunned down in a rebel ambush. Dasharatha survived the initial massacre by the will of our lord on Terra, and he was granted a flash of preserving insight from the lord of hosts and leader of the people, wherefore the private quickly took cover behind the corpse of his dead platoon leader, which lay splayed out on the ground with a scorching wound through Skanda's right eye. Dasharatha Kumarya peered through his gasmask lense and proceeded to methodically gun down one treacherous enemy after another, all the while yelling the traditional battlecry of his homeworld: "For the Omnissiah and the Holy Atom!" Thus did an Imperial Guardsman avenge a loyal officer's death by shooting the foe from behind the carcass of his slain martial brother.

Yet the uses for fallen soldiers extend far beyond momentary emergencies in Imperial modes of operation. Warfare for the servants of the God-Emperor is an industrial undertaking waged on a titanic scale, where little room is left over for finesse and efficiency. To win in war, the Imperium knows that it must feed the meatgrinder in a broken calculation of increased input of men and material, heedless of all losses beyond the balancing of very large numbers on available force charts. How else could this sclerotic empire of a million worlds and uncountable voidholms survive? Only by growing a heart of stone can the Imperium of Man do what must be done, blind and deaf to the human suffering its lowly minions must endure.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Effectivization, improvement and innovation were the follies of the Dark Age of Technology, whose glories have long since rusted and faded away. As knowledge and ancient hardware slowly withers away, increasing amounts of processes which were once the domain of machinery and automation have to be salvaged in patchwork manner by throwing bodies at the problem. Literally so, in the case of military engineering and fieldworks.

Thus the Imperium of Man has long since codified standard practices of using the corpses of friend and foe alike as landfill in such inconvenient features of the theatre of operations as enemy trenches, moats, rivers and valleys. What once was only a desperate gambit during better and long since forgotten eras, has now become standard Imperial procedure, as instructed by the Tactica Imperialis and practiced by Imperial forces all across the Milky Way galaxy. In fact, campaign planners within the Departmento Munitorum will always adjust calculations for Imperial Guard sandbag needs and consumption, by including corrective equations compensating for casaulty rates determined by the average volume and density of a malnourished human being, since the Astra Militarum by ancient decree of the High Lords of Terra operates on the thrifty principle of not letting the dead go to waste.

Thus slave labour, military fieldwork detachments and machine cohorts directed by gifted amateur officers, Mensurae Lustrantii or Tech-Priest Enginseers labour day and night to build and reshape the battlefield with plasteel, earth, rockrete, sandbags and the bodies of dead people and beasts alike as primary materials. The dirt of the ground, prefabricated sections and lifeless stalwarts are all combined into field fortifications and strongpoints that may prove decisive in the fickle mutability of military campaigns. When casaulties as usual ramp up in the millions and often also billions, the hard-working soldiers of the Astra Militarum and their harrowed corvée labour gangs will move amid the filth and squalor of the battlefront, scavenging corpses and constructing redoubts of unmoving flesh and bone. These carcass building blocks are not only limited to civilian and military humans alike, but also include all manner of alien and exotic animal cadavers of ridden mounts, draft animals, tracking beasts, attack predators and many other strange creatures. Even the fallen can be put to good use.

Thus the warriors of the Emperor pile dead men, women and children on top of one another for their battlements, using both earth and corpses on top of rockrete fortifications for extra protection. Of course, sometimes acute shortage of building material rear its ugly head when planning or convoying fall foul of reality. Then, nearby settlements may find themselves razed to the ground and plundered to the cellars in order to provide material for the military needs of defence and siegeworks. The banality of evil is such that ordinary people in the uniforms of Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and the Astra Militarum may find themselves committing routine purges of useless eaters in populations close to the front, without even an ounce of regret or gleeful cruelty stirring in their jaded hearts. It's just war, like any other.

And so primitive earthworks reinforced by dead human bodies take shape on ten thousand different warfronts. Even the deceased will have a posthumous chance to serve their species and lord, whether it be in the shape of soldiers with galloping hearts who throw themselves to the ground and find momentary respite behind a fallen brother in arms or martial sister, or in the form of macabre field fortifications deliberately planned and built under the careful supervision of overseers with whips and measuring instruments in hand. Must we not all offer up ourselves and our close kin on the altar of duty? Must we not all sacrifice our lives and limbs for the greater cause of humanity's divine Imperator? There can be no future for man without sons and daughters willing to give all in service to His Divine Majesty, no matter the brutal horror staring them in the eye.

Since human life is worth nothing, why should the Imperium of Man attach any abstract dignity to the human dead? Better to raise corpse castles and cadaverous bastions, than let such beneficial casaulties go to waste. After all, do we not in truth honour the dead by building with their corporeal vessels? And do not many warlike fallen eventually end up in sacred monuments, on full display for all the congregation to behold and ponder? For after battle has ended, the Adeptus Ministorum in all its pomp and pageantry will vie with local planetary or voidholm authorities over prime ossuary pickings from among the slain. And so corpses will be uncovered and flayed of their wretched flesh, to be bathed in acid until only pure bone and teeth remains. On one million worlds and voidholms without number, both temple and palace will exert strenuous efforts in order to collect the numerous remains of fallen loyalist warriors and martyrs of the faith for processing into skull towers and skeletal decoration for cathedrals and other forms of Imperial architecture. Thus those who fell in the heat of battle and were heaped upon one another at the front, may find a second duty in death by instructing the pious multitude on the thanks owed to those who give their life for the Emperor, as well as serving patriotic propaganda purposes in grand ceremonies enacted by local overlods desperate to shore up popular support.

The evil that men do will never relent, and neither will mortals of any species cease butchering each other across this turbulent galaxy. Death and taxes are said to be the only certainties in life, and so war must harvest its due share of fallen fighters and victims when flames engulf the baleful field of slaughter. We know they will die in battle, so why deny that stark reality by hiding the dead? No, better that their corpses fulfill a greater purpose, than be wasted on selfish burial. Thought of self, after all, is an unforgivable sin, so grab now the limp arms and legs of fallen comrades and heave them on top of the battlement. It is a virtuous toil.

For we will harbour no pity, no remorse, no mercy. We will rise strong to the occasion with fervent prayers on our lips, and we will bear the strains of labour and the rigours of combat without deviation. Without empathy. Without weakness. We all hereby solemnly swear to kill and be killed for the sake of our species and lord, and we likewise forswear our bodies of flesh and blood, and we willingly dedicate them to whatever higher purpose our masters and betters may design for them. We confess our wretched lives to be worth less than ash and clay, for we have sinned, and our ancestors have sinned, and our descendants will sin in the eyes of the God-Emperor of mankind. Please, o mighty lord of men! Please give our flesh and dust value by building out of us a mighty bulwark, to stand against the darkness. Please, we ask of You, o celestial judge of souls, we ask of You to use us, to throw us away or to incinerate us if You so will! Only You on high can grant us meaning. As such we will sacrifice, and be sacrificed in turn. In Your name.

This we pledge, and this we ask, and may our immortal souls burn in eternal hellfire if we break this sacred vow.

Ave Imperator.

And so man carries on, with the most primal stubbornness and will to survive burning valiantly in his heart. His realm across the starspangled void may have shrunk to but a million worlds and a decimated gaggle of voidholms, clinging to what little hope remains against the overwhelming darkness. Trapped as he has been for ten thousand years inside an interstellar madhouse, man will go to the ends of immorality and beyond to fight the grinding erosion of his degenerate Imperium. He will commit any heinous crime imaginable to uphold that corrupt and oppressive tyranny of mass murder and degradation that is his sole remaining shield, and he will fill his lungs with hatred, and he will shout his defiance to the high heavens. And man will rage, rage against the dying of the light, even as the doomed Imperial order that is his shepherd and slavedriver continues the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy.

In the darkest of futures, what is man if not the most wretched of creatures? What is man if not the eager thrall of tyrants and liars? What is man if not the stone of his own wall?

We must build.

See the whole world become our clay. Behold the life and death of wicked man for what it is: But another material substance with which to remould and build anew as the exalted masters of the radiant Imperium sees fit. Be practical of mind and squander not the resources of His Divine Majesty, the protector of our species chosen by all the gods of old, whom He superceded. Learn to erect obstacles and fortifications out of the bloodstained dead themselves. Cover them with earth, and then cover the earth with human cadavers. Stake rods through inert earth and dead men alike to strengthen the structure. Display the remains of your deceased heroes proudly on the parapet, and follow their valiant example. Defy your abominable foe with blackest contempt and fiery scorn, and show that every casaulty of yours is but another brick in the wall of the Imperium. As we die in this vale of anguish, that wall will rise higher and stronger than before, by the celestial grace of the Emperor, enthroned in heavenly light upon the Golden Throne of Holy Terra. Remember that Throne ruling over all mankind, and remember the merciless judgement that awaits us all. Remember the sacrifice you have been called upon to make, and do not flinch in the performance of your Imperial duty, soldier.

Glory to the first man to die!

Praise be unto the lord and saviour of our species! Praise be unto the Master of Mankind! Behold His manifold blessings, for even in death may the martyrs of the Imperium continue to protect the living.

Such is the demented state of a regressed mankind in service to the rotting stellar dominions of Holy Terra and Mars, locked in an unspoken suicide pact.

Such is the future that awaits us all.

Such is the grave of our species.

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