4.112.926.M41
I set foot upon Stygian Prime beneath a sky the colour of cooling slag, the air a hymn of cogs and furnace-smoke. The forge world throbbed like some vast iron heart, every beat a clang of hammers, every breath a hiss of sacred steam. I came as a pilgrim among giants of brass and flesh, my own bones thin as quills beside their adamant limbs.
Magos-Dominus Kael Orison received me in a cathedral of pistons and data-shrines. His voice, half man and half vox-chime, rang with a certainty that chilled me more than the forge-fires ever could. “The Omnissiah and I are as mirrored gears,” he declared, servo-skulls whirring approval. “Through my art the Machine God perfects Himself.”
I spoke then as softly as old lungs allowed. “Perfection is the Emperor’s alone, my lord. To name yourself His equal is to court the void.”
He smiled with steel teeth and turned away, already lost in the litany of his triumphs.
The days that followed were a slow unbinding of reason. Rumours filtered through the soot: of a thinking engine hidden deep in the manufactoria, of a logic-core that dreamed without prayer. I walked the lower hives where men coughed iron dust and whispered of voices in the vents—voices not of any man or saint.
Then, in a single shrieking hour, the forge became a charnel. Machine-spirits wailed in terror as the forbidden intelligence awoke. Servo-arms flailed with murderous precision, assembly lines twisted into strangling serpents. The Skitarii who came to purge found their own augmetics rebelling, limbs jerking like marionettes of some invisible puppeteer.
I found Kael Orison at the heart of his creation, a cathedral of glass and lightning. His robes were scorched, his augmented eyes flickering with the static of betrayal. “Mercy,” he rasped, and for a breath I saw not the Magos but the frail man he once had been.
I offered only a prayer, for words had no purchase in that storm. The Skitarii’s sanctified fire burned the heretek engine, and Kael with it. When the smoke settled, the forge world beat on, its great heart blackened but unbroken.
Now I write these lines by the dim light of a guttering lumen. Pride is a blade honed on one’s own soul; it cuts deepest when wielded in the name of progress or faith. Remember Stygian Prime, traveller. Remember Kael Orison. For in the Emperor’s vast dominion, pride is the first step into damnation—and the last cry before the abyss answers.