CW: We're opening with some horrifying descriptions of a canonical Imperial genocide.
That mission had led you here. Not just to this room, of course, but to the shrine world of Eleusis. It had looked, from orbit, like a beautiful blue pearl, its strong magnetic field making the entire world wave with aurora. In a galaxy of ugly things, it was a miracle. Every world was a miracle.
When you'd descended to the surface, you'd landed in the great city-cathedral that served as Eleusis' capital and shared its name, and the beauty had drained before your eyes. Cities were overwhelming, they were filled with
stories, so packed with people that every brick, every grating, every corner held romance and ambition and tragedy and loss. But this city, more than anywhere you'd been since Armageddon, was heavy with it.
Eleusis, like every world in the Jericho Sector, had fallen to the forces of Chaos four thousand of years ago, and had been back in Imperial hands for just two centuries. During that eternity, those loyal to the Imperium had withdrawn into the deepest catacombs of the ancient city, protecting the most sacred artifacts generation after generation. The forces of Chaos had desecrated the surface shrines and temples, hunted down the Imperial survivors, and then…
Four thousand years. The Imperium built things to last, but four thousand years was enough time for every pillar, every brick, every foundation to be remade or paved over a dozen times. The followers of the Dark Gods had made this place theirs. Generations had grown up worshipping them. There had been schools, hospitals,
bureaucracy, the mundane woven in seamlessly with the madness. Children grew up carving profane symbols into their skin and communing with daemons, and beneath their feet others lived in the forgotten darkness, worshipping the ruler of a distant, nearly-mythical Empire.
The Imperium retook the world during the Achilus Crusade. They'd burnt the cities from orbit, their facades torn apart, and then three companies of Novamarines and two covenants of the Soritas and six hundred Imperial Guard regiments had come down to the world to deal with the survivors. The underground civilization had risen up to join their long-lost brethren, and a civil war had been fought over the burnt cinders of the cathedrals.
Then, when the war was won, Imperial forces built an enormous facility on the coast, a factory complex with massive blast furnaces. They'd marched every single survivor they found into them, loyalist and heretic alike, and burnt them alive.
As imported populations rebuilt the shrines and cathedrals, it had snowed ashes for over a decade.
You'd smelt the promethium when the ramp of your transport dropped, and it had taken you several minutes to steady yourself. You'd sped through all the greetings and formalities and retreated to the room set aside for you, and you'd had to spend the rest of the day acclimatizing to it, to the taste of ash in the air. It was almost gone now, the last of it washed away by your shower.
You stepped back out into the room, every bare footfall feeling the path tread by thousands of others. This building was new, as Imperial constructions went; eighty years. It was still a lot of footsteps, bearing the mark of priests and scribes and construction overseers who came and went over the years. They were all honoured guests, not important or noble like Cardinals and needing their own estate, but people deemed too important for spaceport cots.
It was luxury most in the Imperium could barely imagine; a hardwood floor, double bed, the only camera at the doorway to record who came and went. There was a vox-singer in a cabinet next to a small table, a bookshelf with a few lonely volumes, and a hearth (
the smell of promethium, the taste of ashes) set into the wall. A small servant's area connected through a child-sized door, leading to a simple kitchen, storage room, and suspended canvas mattress.
Finally, in the far corner of the room, there was a shrine. Two great golden wings (aluminium wings anodized gold) stretched out from the niche in the wall, and under them was a platform bearing a book, surface for lighting candles and incense, and a discipline of twelve braided cords, with holy symbols worked into it, for those inclined, which you'd carefully placed with the fireplace tongs into a drawer so grief and guilt poured into it was at least a little distant.
Above the book, recessed in, was a preserved skull, one eye glowing red.
You knelt to pray.
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[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is grander than this, who wants His servants to bring things back to the way it should be. (Value: Fix problems and ease suffering, wherever you go.)
[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is disgusted by all this, who finds the evil and hateful people in His Imperium revolting. (Value: Frustrate and bring low the cruel, hateful, and oppressive).
[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is kinder than this, who is horrified at what His Imperium has become, who weeps for every injustice. (Value: Show mercy and kindness, even when it is unwise.)
[ ] You pray to an Emperor who hates you, because you hope to change His mind. (Value: Challenge yourself, prove yourself)
[ ] Write In: Subject to veto.
This is the 42nd Millenium. You worship the Emperor because He is God; He walked among us, it is unquestionable.
But on a million worlds, in a hundred billion churches, there are many Emperors.
24 Hour Vote Moratorium.
