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Lux-Carminae drifts through the void like a jewel set in the black brow of night—its spires of gold-tinted adamantium catching every star’s light and bending it into false dawn. I came to its docks as plague-ships moored, their hulls scarred and pitted, their passengers coughing prayers through cracked vox-masks. The air within the station smelled of incense and rot, a mingling of sanctity and corruption.
At the heart of this hollow paradise ruled Merchant Prince Holven. His audience chamber was a cathedral of excess: mosaics of pearl and promethium glass, servo-cherubs spilling scented oils while starving pilgrims waited beyond sealed gates. He sat upon a throne of alloyed silver, rings of off-world gems clinking as he raised a goblet of spiced amasec. Beneath the music of automata, I heard the low moans of the sick carried on the station’s recycled breeze.
“Your holds brim with medicae stock,” I told him, my voice thin but unshaken. “A single shipment could staunch the fever before it spreads.”
Holven’s smile was sharp as a data-key. “Need breeds value, preacher. Why give freely what the desperate will purchase at any price?”
He named his terms: tithes of shipwright’s ore, caskets of noble blood-wine, promissory notes that would indenture entire pilgrim families. Behind me the supplicants wept, and in their grief I felt the gnaw of my own hidden relics—scraps of ancient scripture I had carried for decades, a private heresy I had sworn to guard.
I laid them on the marble floor, parchment browned by my own sweat and years of furtive study. “Take these, then. Knowledge older than our Imperium. They are worth more than any coin you covet, if coin is what you crave.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. One by one, the pilgrims stepped forward, offering what little they possessed: heirloom charms, ration chits, the last rings of marriage or service. Their faith filled the chamber like a rising hymn. Holven’s guards, faced with a tide of selfless devotion, lowered their weapons. I saw doubt flicker in their augmetic eyes, and then they turned, walking out into the corridor without a word.
The merchant prince remained, alone amid his treasure. His jewels caught the lumen light, but there was no brilliance in them now—only the dull gleam of chains. He reached for my relics with trembling hands, then let them fall, parchment scattering like autumn leaves. “Keep them,” he whispered, his voice hollow as the void. “What good is wealth when none will serve the rich?”
I left him to the echo of his own bargains. The medicae vaults opened before the next cycle, and the pilgrims carried salves and hope to their plague-wracked kin.
Now I write in a shadowed corner of the station’s shrine, the distant hum of life-support a reminder that breath itself is gift, not currency. Greed is a chain heavier than any servitor’s yoke. Give freely, traveller, and you will walk unbound, while the miser drowns in treasures that cannot save him from the Emperor’s final accounting.