The Emperor stood silent and statuesque, gazing out from the viewport of Imperator Somnium. Below, the Death World of Colchis stretched endlessly, its rugged terrain a testant to the harsh life its inhabitants had endured for millennia. Mountains soared like jagged teeth, and vast deserts sprawled beneath a rciless sun. Civilizations clung desperately to the coastlines, small clusters of human ingenuity that relied on the sparse generosity of the seas and the thin, breathable air. The planet's desolation was matched only by the fervor of its people-a fervor born of countless generations steeped in religious dogma and ritual.
Beside the Emperor stood Franklin Valorian, his perpetual smirk in place, yet his eyes sharp and thoughtful. He watched the world below with a detached interest, sensing the weight of the conversation that was about to unfold.
"Colchis," the Emperor began, his voice deep and resonant, as if it carried the echoes of eternity itself. "A world divided by faith. Its people are shackled by superstition, their potential wasted in servitude to false gods."
Franklin crossed his arms, leaning casually against the railing as he studied the Emperor. "Given the... colorful tapestry of religious fervor down there," he said, gesturing to the planet, "how exactly do you propose we handle Lorgar? You know better than anyone that he's the source of all this."
The Emperor turned to face Franklin, his piercing golden eyes locking onto his son's. For a mont, the air between them was heavy with unspoken thought. Finally, the Emperor spoke, his tone asured. "Tell , Franklin, Could you eliminate the religious culture of Colchis? Thoroughly?"
Franklin's smirk widened, a flash of mischief dancing across his face. "What are we talking about here? Genocide or ethnocide?"
The Emperor's expression remained inscrutable, though the weight of his gaze spoke volus. Franklin chuckled softly, shaking his head.
"Ethnocide it is," Franklin declared, pushing off the railing and standing tall. "I'll burn every last religious book, every scrap of scripture and iconography, every piece of their so-called culture down to its last atom. And then-" his voice grew colder, more deliberate, "I'll build a paradise on the ashes. Sothing so brilliant, so undeniably magnificent, that they'll forget they ever worshiped anything else."
The Emperor nodded, a faint glimr of approval crossing his features. "Good. Then it is decided. You will cleanse Colchis of its falsehoods and elevate its people to the truth of humanity's greatness."
Franklin tilted his head, his smirk softening into sothing more contemplative. "And Lorgar? What's the plan for him? Surely he won't take this sitting down."
For a mont, the Emperor's gaze drifted back to the viewport, as if searching the barren landscapes below for an answer. Then, with a quiet authority that brooked no argunt, he said, "Leave Lorgar to ."
Franklin raised an eyebrow but said nothing, waiting for the Emperor to elaborate. He didn't have to wait long.
"Cleanse Colchis," the Emperor continued, his voice sharper now. "And as for Erebus..." A hint of disdain crept into his tone at the na. "Let him pursue his machinations. Let him whisper to his gods and fumble in the dark. Do not interrupt him. There's an ancient saying, one attributed to a leader of Old Earth-a ruler of a nation called Britain: 'Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.' Erebus will dig his own grave, given ti."
Franklin nodded slowly, processing the plan. "So, we let Erebus play his gas. Watch him, but don't interfere. anwhile, I'll turn Colchis into a shining beacon of secular progress." He grinned, the confidence in his voice unshakable. "Leave it to , Father."
The Emperor placed a hand on Franklin's shoulder. "I trust you, Franklin. You understand what must be done. Go now, and set the stage for humanity's future."
From the edges of the planet, the Ethnocide began.
Under the command of 2nd Captain Armstrong, the Liberty Eagles descended like Death. Colchis' sprawling cities and isolated camps beca targets of systematic eradication. Those who resisted the Imperial truth faced the unrelenting might of the Legion. Religious iconography, painstakingly crafted over millennia, was shattered and burned. Temples that once stood as towering monunts to gods now crumbled into ash and rubble, their ruins buried under the relentless advance of Imperial machinery.
At the center of this transformation stood the Techno-Seers, masters of the mind and machine. They erected vast platforms in the heart of Colchis' largest cities, where they addressed millions at once. One such Seer, cloaked in shimring robes of electrum and sophisticated technology, stood before a throng of terrified citizens. With a single flash of light, emitted from intricate devices embedded in his staff, he spoke words that rewrote the very essence of their identities.
"You are proud people of humanity," his voice bood, augnted by the machinery at his command. "Under the Emperor of Mankind, we shall return to the Golden Age. Humanity First!"
The crowd, dazed and disoriented, began to chant the mantra in unison. The mory of their gods, their prayers, their rituals-all of it was stripped away in an instant. The flashes of light seared new truths into their minds, replacing centuries of religious indoctrination with unwavering loyalty to the Imperium and its vision of secular progress. Families that had once gathered in reverence around sacred fires now found themselves united in fervent praise of humanity's potential and the Emperor's wisdom.
As the Ethnocide proceeded on the ground, Franklin Valorian's forces turned their attention to the very land itself. From orbit, vast terraforming machines descended upon Colchis, their engines rumbling like the wrath of gods. The dry deserts began to bloom with life as rivers were carved into the earth by seismic lasers and mountains were reshaped to create fertile valleys.
All this happened as the Emperor t Lorgar in Its capital city-state was Vharadesh, the City of Grey Flowers, Lorgar and the Citizens of the Capital were wholly unaware of what is happening for they will be handled by the Emperor of Mankind himself.
Gods, I hated Colchis. I hated the heat, I hated the dust and the thick sweat of it. Even before I knew that other worlds existed, I cursed the gods for making my ho so unbearable. There's a reason why religions prosper in deserts - there's nothing else to do but ponder the misery. I used to sit in the shadow of my father's house, squatting as the air shimred, and wait for scorpions to scuttle out of the glare. I'd catch them in my bare fingers and hold them up, watching them wriggle. I'd pluck their limbs off, one by one. Sotis I'd get stung, sotis I wouldn't. It was a kind of ga, though not a very good one. Once, a sting made feverish for a month, leaving boiling on my mat inside with visions and shaking. I might have died. I didn't care much, either way. Once I'd recovered, I was sitting right back out in the porch, waiting for the next one to scamper into range. Ever since then, I've played the sa ga: get close to the danger, see how long you can last before it bites you.
It doesn't matter which town that was. I can barely rember it myself. They were all the sa - thick with filth and haze and the stink of perspiration and refuse. My parents were exasperated with . They wanted to learn a trade; get ahead, find sothing useful to do. I didn't want any of that. I wanted to be rich without trying. I wanted to have slaves and concubines. I wanted to play my scorpion ga with people. For a long ti, it wasn't clear how I would be able to achieve that, but fate had a way of leading into opportunity.
I had noticed, being an observant sort, that the Covenant had beco the kind of organisation I might do well in. It is fashionable now, among those who still pretend to keep records and tell histories, to think of the Covenant as so wellspring of piety - the precursor to the fundantal religion that ca later. Perhaps it was, in so places. Maybe in Vharadesh they did things properly. Out in the provinces, though, the priests had begun to develop a reputation. They drank. They gambled. They were violent, and they used that violence to gather up riches. Even the devout knew that the tithes they paid didn't all end up embellishing temples. The whole edifice was like a spoiled aquifer, with a cold and oily heart locked away from the searching light of the sun. So you can understand the attraction. I could see myself in those robes, with a palace of my own where a fountain would tinkle in the courtyard and a chamber full of young things would lounge around in silks and count my coins. Getting there was not straightforward, though - for all their decadence, the clerics held on to power with the rictus grip of a fresh corpse. Only the well-connected were sent to the seminaries and taught the rites and shown how to read the old texts. For street-trash like , there was just penury to look forward to. I didn't give up, though. The idea had entered my head, and it stuck there.
I hung around the oratories and watched the aspirants co and go, waddling like fat dogs. I listened at the window when they chanted their songs, and began to learn the patterns of the words. As I got older, I got bolder. I crept into the old scriptoria when the doddering masters had dozed off, and I stole books. Bit by bit, I started to piece together the catechisms and the litanies. It didn't make any sense, of course - they were just words - but I morised a lot of it. It all ca naturally. Of course it did. These were the words I was born to preach, whether or not I believed them. I did believe, later, but back then they were just symbols, like codes on a lock. There was a young man in my settlent, a pious one, who had inked so words of the holy books onto his face and shaven head. Every day before dawn he would apply more henna, re-writing the sacred glyphs with only the aid of a polished silver bowl for reflection. For this, he was considered sothing of an inspiration in our fly-blown township. Even my own mother, a fat and lazy slattern if ever there was one, noticed his diligence. 'Why can't you be more like him?' she would complain, picking at her fingernails and watching sitting idly in the porch. 'Why can't you be more like Erebus?' Now, you see, thoughts like this have a terrible power. I took her words to heart. I pondered them. And I thought to myself: why can't I be more like Erebus? I was thinking the sa thing as I garrotted that young man. I might
even have said the words out loud as I twisted the string and watched his eyes bulge and pop. That was the first ti I killed a living soul, and gods, was it sweet. My heart was pumping and my face was glowing. The more his life ebbed away, the more I felt my own burgeoning. By the ti I let his body drop into the alleyway, I was positively singing inside. The sensation didn't last long. There was all the tedious business of disposing of the body,
then rooting through his belongings to get what I needed, then turning my back on my birthplace and setting off into the great dust - I couldn't stay in a place where he and I were both known. I never once regretted it. I walked out under the southern gate with the stars rising and the heat of the day ebbing, wearing a dead man's robes and with a dead man's script inked neatly on my own shaven head. Ah, there you go. There is the irony. The marks on my flesh, the ones that mark out as , were never really mine. I wore them after that to ensure my stolen na and persona were never questioned. In ti, I half forgot their origins, and I began to care more about what I was writing. By the ti I reached for the tattooist's needle, the words had changed and the act was more than one of disguise. Originally, though, it was all just lies. So what was my original na? Just like the na of the place where I was born, that genuinely doesn't matter. I have beco like a daemon, nurturing a secret moniker that only the empyrean echoes. I certainly will not tell you. So things even the gods don't know.
I was lucky, or fated maybe, to be learning my craft at such a ti I was just a boy, as all the seminary acolytes were. My stolen papers and my lies soon found ensconced at another institution. I studied as little of the genuine theology as I could, but was assiduous in observing the more worldly paths of power. I saw how the priests maintained discipline within the great cathedrals. I saw how fear and ecstasy could cow an entire population. I saw how a whispered word was more powerful than a shouted oration, at least a lot of the ti. These were the last days of the old faith. Already there were panicked rumours of an army sweeping across the desert, one commanded by a golden prophet who would upturn everything and bustle the Powers out of their assud heaven. The hierarchs of the Covenant began to get scared. The sacrifices beca more frequent, protestations of faith and penance for sins were made more heartily. I knew it wouldn't save them. The well was running dry, and
in any case, they had already drawn too much water. I began to speculate on who this prophet was, and wondered if I could sohow align my cause to his. I was growing tired of my withered instructors, and wished to be in the shadow of sothing with a proper sting. And then the strangest thing of all happened. I'd spent so much ti with all those books, and all that chanting, and all those homilies on the old patterns of pain and redemption, that I sohow neglected to be cynical about them. I found myself saying things, and aning them. I found myself studying, not to evade the instructor's scourge, but out of fascination. It was as if I'd been dipped into one of the inscribers' inkwells and co out stained. There was never an epiphany. I never moved from being an unbeliever to a believer, but I began to appreciate, gradually, how much I was aligned to a certain way of being. I was, you might say, a natural. I had been made for this. I rember being in the vaults of that old mud-brick
temple, tending to the tapers and tasting the aroma of hot blood on my lips. I rember looking into the tarnished glass of the altar-mirrors, and seeing not one reflection, but a fractured four. I felt a shiver run through , despite the ever-present heat. I was a petty thief, a minor speck within the iris of eternity, but I knew I could do things for these presences. I felt they had always been there, hanging in my shadow, lingering over my minor cruelties. The Covenant was their plaything. Perhaps other institutions could be used in a similar way.
So when the prophet eventually made it to our city, and I saw his impeccable profile shine out across a weeping and grateful nation of newly enlightened slaves, I was neither elated nor despondent. All I had to do was wait. I was still a child, then. I would not be one forever. And of course I t my prophet in the end, up close. I saw him pass through the gates with his army of swivel-eyed faithful and recognised what it ant for at once. He was a bigger scorpion, and I needed to get closer. He was with Kor Phaeron. That raddled old sack of skin and esoteric drugs, he hung around like the stench of cut at rotting in the sun. I rember that our eyes t, briefly, as the two of them made their triumphal procession through the taken city, although I suppose he won't recall it now. Back then, I was nothing, and he was everything. I was the grub in the dirt and he was the master of a world's zealous armies, standing at the side of the anointed and sucking up his sloughed-off incense.
It is commonly supposed that I must hate Kor Phaeron. We have beco rivals, that's true,
and within this grand coalition of blackguards and renegades that generally engenders bad blood, but he really doesn't make angry. I find him amusing. He's worked so hard to keep up, to beco one of us, and all he's done is made himself ridiculous. His flesh hangs within his armour like a strung-up corpse. He's kept around out of a maudlin kind of pity. I'd miss him, if he were sohow taken away from us now, for our Legion is not blessed with many jesters, and we can't afford to lose the few we have.
Once the prophet had co, though, that was the end for the Covenant, at least in the open. We went underground, those of us who understood what things were really about. We gathered what we needed, and stored it away, out of sight. And, such is the way of things, it all
beca stronger through secrecy. Old words were hissed through locked doors, and we would mouth the ossified canticles under the ostensibly ardent singing of the new ones. They were the best days, if I'm honest, full of promise and guile and silent murders in the dark. We knew,
of course, that He would co soon after that. The prophet kept telling us, and every augur and flesh-sacrifice scread it out. I wanted to see this Master of Mankind so very much, since I knew more than most what it would an for the universe. I wanted to witness the creature I was destined to bring low. I wanted to see Him dragged before like a lowing ox before the sickle knife. I was never, ever taken in by Him, not like so many who afterwards
claid they had sohow been wronged or misled.
I knew, right from the start.
I knew, before He even set foot on my dry-as-bones ho world.
I knew all this because I've never aspired to be anything other than what I am - an eavesdropper, a sneak, a fertile soakaway for lies and poison. Judge if you will, and plenty do, but we all have our places within this far-from-ideal creation.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
However, Colchis began to lose its religious culture. With the arrival of the so-called Master
of Mankind ca the God of Freedom itself, the Great Eagle. If it weren't so obvious, every
flap of the Eagle's wings caused trouble for the Gods themselves. Under His watch, Colchis was turned into a paradise world. With its transformation, the people of Colchis knew no longer religion but materialism and the greatness of mankind. Ti and again, religion was brought down and proven false. There was no salvation in religion, but there was in the greatness of mankind, and the current paradise world of Colchis was a testant to that. The sheer speed of it - the change - still boggles my mind. It was then, when I beca a
Space Marine, that I saw the extent of the threat He posed to my goals. If the Master of Mankind is the ultimate goal to bring down, Franklin Valorian, the Great Eagle, was the greatest hurdle to overco. Ever since the Prophet was reunited with the Imperium of Man and I was introduced into the ranks of the Word Bearers, I felt as though I was under surveillance. I could not put my finger on it, but I believed I was under watch. Yet, who was watching , I have yet to know.
A/N: So we're leaving Morocco soon so here's a chapter, I do not know when I can update but hopefully soon, next stop is Pakistan.
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