1.203.914.M41
The sky of Tarsis Magna is a permanent dawn of sparks and smoke. Even before the shuttle’s landing claws kissed the ferrocrete, I tasted ozone on the air, sharp as a blade’s edge. Here the Adeptus Mechanicus tends to its endless engines, and the clang of their labor drowns every softer sound. I came not as master nor scholar but as a weary servant of the Emperor, summoned to bless a new plasma reactor said to outshine a star. They desired my benediction, or perhaps only the Ecclesiarchy’s seal to hurry their acclaim.
Magos Darnath greeted me with the barest nod, his face a lattice of chrome and scar. His voice, half flesh and half vox-hiss, vibrated with impatience.
“Friar,” he said, “the calculus is complete. We will ignite before the next rotation.”
Beside him, Magos Veyra inclined her head with measured grace. Her augmetic eye glowed a cooler blue. “The equations predict stability,” she murmured, “yet the data from the outer coils remains…unsettled.”
I followed them through a cathedral of steel where the reactor loomed like a caged sun, its containment field flickering in colors no human eye should name. Servo-skulls chattered. Liturgies of the Omnissiah echoed from canting priests who moved in circles around the core, each more rapt than the last. I saw hunger there—not for fleshly indulgence, but for triumph, the intoxication of discovery.
When they spoke of immediate ignition my bones ached with a different heat, one I have felt on too many battlefields: the warmth of impending ruin.
“Delay,” I said, my voice carrying across the machinery’s hum. “Pray. The Emperor teaches that to master the flame, one must first master the hand that strikes the spark.”
Darnath’s vox-box rasped a laugh. “Superstition. The machine-spirit is ready.”
“Is it?” I stepped closer to the humming barrier, feeling its pulse against my skin. “I have seen worlds burn not from malice but from haste. A single heartbeat of restraint may spare a millennium of grief.”
For a time only the reactor answered, its thrum like a giant’s breath. Veyra’s augmetic fingers clicked as she reviewed fresh readings. At last she turned, voice soft. “The Friar speaks with caution rare among men. The sub-cores fluctuate still. Another cycle of observation will refine the pattern.”
Darnath’s lenses narrowed, but he lowered his staff. “One cycle,” he conceded, as if the words were alloy ground from his own teeth.
We waited through a long, iron dusk. Within that span the readings spiked and fell, revealing a hidden instability that would have shattered containment and bathed the forge-city in a false dawn of annihilation. The Magi said little. Their mechadendrites twitched like chastened serpents.
When at last the ignition proceeded under new parameters, the reactor sang a steady hymn. The forge-world’s heart beat on, bright but controlled.
I left them with a simple blessing, though in truth the Emperor had already spoken through stillness. As my shuttle lifted from the smoke-choked pad, I wrote these words:
Temperance is the measure of fire. Power unbridled is no gift but a sentence. To master the universe is first to master the self—the hungers for glory, for speed, for the fleeting exultation of unchecked will. In restraint there is strength, and in patient wisdom, survival.
So ends the lesson the Omnissiah and the Emperor together whispered on Tarsis Magna, where men learned that to delay a spark is sometimes the highest act of devotion.