5.640.930.M41
The ash of Cindralis Secundus falls like winter without end—grey snow laced with the copper scent of old blood. I crossed its cratered plains beneath a sky cracked by gunfire, the Emperor’s hymns rasping through my vox-beads like prayers whispered from a dying throat.
Commissar Ryn awaited me at the shattered gates of the capital hab. His greatcoat hung in tatters, the red of his sash drowned in soot. Around him stood soldiers with hollow eyes, their lasguns aimed not at Ork lines but at the city’s own huddled civilians. Word had reached me on the troop transports: Ryn intended a purge. He believed the people of Cindralis had welcomed the greenskin tide, and for their imagined betrayal he would salt the earth with their corpses.
“I will not let another ambush rise from these gutters,” he said, voice raw as a flayed wire. “Better a moon of graves than another regiment slaughtered.”
The smell of promethium seeped from fuel barrels stacked like altars to vengeance. Children stared at us through the ribs of bombed-out habs, their eyes too tired to plead. I told him the Emperor demands justice, not blind retribution, but my words fell like sparks on wet stone.
Then the Orks came again, a bellowing storm of rusted cleavers and smoke-belching trukks. The sky screamed with their crude artillery. Ryn and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the choking dust, laspistol and battered staff alike spitting defiance. His fury, which moments before sought only human blood, now turned against the true foe. I watched the change in him as a man might watch iron cool—slow, reluctant, inevitable.
When the last greenskin fell, silence claimed the ruins. Ryn lowered his weapon, gauntleted hands trembling. “I would have slaughtered them,” he murmured, gazing at the frightened civilians who yet lived. “I nearly became the monster I despise.”
“The Enemy rejoices in such wrath,” I said, laying a soot-stained hand upon his arm. “Anger is a torch—bright for a moment, then it burns the bearer.”
He ordered the barrels removed and the civilians given rations from the regiment’s stores. No cheers followed; only the low wind across a battlefield that would never know peace.
Now, as I scratch these words into my journal by the guttering light of a camp-lumen, I taste the grit of Cindralis in every breath. Righteous anger may rouse the faithful, but wrath unbridled is a weapon of the Warp. Guard your heart, traveler, lest the fire you light to drive back darkness consume you first.