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Calthos Prime still stinks of blood and ash. Even after the warfront moved on, the wind carries a tang of promethium and charred ironwood. The settlers who remain are hard folk, drawn by stubborn hope or the promise of salvage. I came to bless their new chapel—a roof of scavenged plating and prayers—but also to tend the quiet wounds that never show in a medicae’s scan.
While walking the perimeter at dusk I heard a sound like a broken drumbeat. At first I thought it some faulty generator. Then I saw it: an ork, small as its brutal kind ever comes, sprawled against a blackened stump. Its green skin was split and gray where the burns had eaten deep. The beast’s breaths rattled like stones in a tin cup.
The settlers keep their lasguns close. “End it quick, holy man,” one of them muttered. “Before it rallies or calls the rest.”
I knelt instead. The creature’s eyes—yellow as dying coals—met mine without fear. There was no strength left for fear. I remembered every litany of hatred I had ever spoken over the dead of ork raids, every order of extermination I had witnessed in the Guard. They were true enough. And yet—
Duty is the Emperor’s steel. Kindness is His hidden flame.
I drew my blade, the simple monoblade I carry for grim tasks. “In the Emperor’s name,” I whispered, not to the settlers but to the fading spark before me, “I release you from pain.” The ork gave a slow exhale—almost a sigh—and stilled as the blade struck true. I murmured a prayer for the soul it did not have, or perhaps for my own.
The settlers watched in silence. One woman, a former serf with scars like latticework, finally spoke. “You prayed for it?”
“I prayed,” I answered, “because death is a door we all must cross, beast and man alike. The Emperor’s light burns for the righteous, but His mercy shines even on the dying enemy, if only to show us what we must be.”
They buried the ork at the edge of the clearing. No marker, only a small cairn of stones, but they buried it nonetheless. I saw in their faces a new solemnity—not weakness, but a recognition that war need not make us less than human.
Tonight I write by the guttering glow of a recycled lumen. Kindness is not the refusal to fight; it is the strength to temper the blade with mercy, to see dignity even in the foe’s final breath. The Emperor asks for our service, but He also asks that our hearts not be scoured hollow. On this death world, amid the ghosts of endless war, I have learned again that mercy is not surrender.
It is courage.