2.789.918.M41
Mud is the first memory. Not the clean soil of a faithful agri-world, but black sludge churned by shells and the iron feet of marching men. It coated the boots of the 17th Verdecan as they staggered across their own fields—fields once green with grain, now cratered and stinking of promethium. Above us the sky burned a constant bruise-red, the Orks’ crude fighta-bombers carving it like carrion birds.
I had been sent merely to bless the harvest silos before the invasion began. I remained because a preacher who flees while the flock bleeds is no preacher at all. So I march.
Each dawn—if that word still means anything—I rise from a few moments’ half-sleep to the sound of distant artillery and closer weeping. I move from trench to trench, laying cracked hands on fevered brows, whispering the Emperor’s benedictions, sometimes only listening when words are ash. My robes are stiff with dried blood, most of it not my own.
There are days when the weight of it bends my spine like an old reliquary door. Once, after thirty hours without pause, I found myself staring at the glow of an evac-shuttle rising far to the west. It was the color of escape. I thought of warmth, of quiet, of the easy sin of letting others finish the work. For a heartbeat I nearly turned my steps toward it.
But a scream broke the thought—young Guardsman, leg severed by shrapnel, alone in the muck. I waded to him through the mud, whispering prayers over the shriek of ordnance. We stayed there together until the medicae arrived, my voice hoarse, his breathing steadying as if the Emperor Himself leaned close. When they carried him away, he gripped my hand and said only, “Don’t stop.”
So I did not.
Night after night the Orks pressed harder, their war-cries rattling the shattered grain silos. The men of the 17th—hollow-eyed, sleepless—began to look to me not for miracles but for the simple certainty that I would appear, hour after hour, with a hymn or a blessing or a rationed sip of water. My body ached like old stone, but I walked the lines until even the officers nodded to me as if I were another piece of necessary machinery.
On the seventh day of siege, the void-ships of the Imperial Navy burned green streaks across the sky. Reinforcements descended like avenging angels. The Orks broke under the sudden hammer of orbital fire, their warbands scattering into the ravaged hills. Only then did I sink to my knees in the same mud where I had stood so long, unable to rise for a great while.
I write these words by the light of a flickering field-lamp while the wounded sleep around me. My bones complain, my lungs burn with the reek of promethium, yet I feel a quiet joy that is not triumph. Diligence, I have learned, is not grand or swift. It is the prayer uttered with every step, the devotion proven by each act that refuses to cease. To serve without rest is itself a liturgy, and the Emperor hears it even when no voice remains to speak.
So ends the march—for now. Tomorrow there will be other worlds, other trenches, and I will walk them while breath remains.