6.905.924.M41
Holy Terra. Even now the words feel too large for the mouth of a wandering preacher. I arrived on a transport crammed with pilgrims whose eyes shone with fevered hope, and I stepped onto the cradle of mankind with knees that trembled more from awe than age. Here the very air is incense and iron, each breath a reminder of uncounted millennia of worship and war.
I had not sought this journey. A summons found me in the quiet cloisters of a distant shrine-world: Come to the Conclave of the High Ecclesiarchy. Speak on the state of the faithful. It bore the sigil of the Cardinals themselves—an invitation that is also a command. I obeyed, though my heart muttered that I was no orator, merely a friar who has spent a life walking dust roads and listening to dying men.
The Grand Basilica of the Adeptus Ministorum is less a building than a continent of stone and light. Gilded statues of saints tower like mountains. Choirs of a thousand voices shatter the air. Cardinals draped in cloth-of-gold processed beneath banners of crimson flame. I, in my travel-worn robe, looked like a beggar who had wandered in from some forgotten alley. Perhaps that is all I am.
When my turn came, they led me to a dais carved with the Emperor’s own sigil. I could feel a thousand jeweled eyes upon me, the weight of power and expectation heavy as any relic I have ever lifted. The orators before me had spoken with thunderous eloquence—decrees of purity, grand designs for the spread of the faith. My mouth was dry as old parchment.
I said only this:
“I am a servant of the Emperor. I have walked among the poor, the dying, the heretic and the saint. I have seen the cruelty of zeal and the mercy that hides behind doubt. I offer no decree, only a reminder: we are dust beneath His throne. Our glory is borrowed light. Let every act, whether in cathedral or gutter, be for Him alone—and let us rejoice when no one remembers our names.”
Silence followed, vast and unexpected. No applause, no acclamation—only the slow echo of my own heartbeat against the vaulted dome. Then the next speaker was announced and the machinery of ceremony rolled on, as inexorable as Terra’s tides.
I left by a side passage, unnoticed, my steps swallowed by marble corridors. Outside, among the endless pilgrims thronging the Ecclesiarchal Plaza, I felt a strange lightness. The High Lords would debate policy, the Cardinals would draft new edicts, and my words would scatter like ash in the wind. So be it. The Emperor heard. That is enough.
Now, in a humble cell lent by an Order Hospitaller, I set these thoughts to ink. Humility is not self-contempt; it is the quiet joy of being a single mote in the Emperor’s vast design, content that all praise belongs to Him. I am the dust beneath the Throne—and in that dust, I am free.