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The rain of Verdant’s Rest is a slow and ceaseless thing, a grey veil that slicks the fields to mud and turns the very air to mildew. Grain once tall as a man now lay blackened in the furrows, stalks collapsing like penitents who have forgotten their prayers. I arrived at harvest’s end to find not plenty, but rot.
The planetary priesthood greeted me in their perfumed hall, their robes clean though the workers outside were caked in soil. They spoke of delays in the Administratum tithe, of distant aid that would surely come. “The Emperor provides in His season,” the High Canon said, fingers heavy with unearned rings. Yet his eyes slid from the windows where farmers knelt in fear rather than devotion.
At the edges of the croplands I found the true blight: sigils etched beneath barn eaves, whispers of the Four-Armed Father carried in the dusk. In the dark of a grain silo I uncovered bodies—farmhands whose throats bore the delicate, alien mark of brood-kiss. The cult had taken root while the clergy composed excuses.
I sought the priests again, mud still on my boots. “You have prayed for harvest while vermin feast on the seed,” I told them. “The Emperor’s vigilance is not a distant promise; it is the labour of every hour.”
They demurred, spoke of quarantine writs and proper channels. I left them to their comforts and went instead to the frightened farmers. By torch and hymn we scoured the tainted fields, burning the blackened grain until smoke blotted the sullen moon. We dragged the cult from their warrens beneath the threshing machines, their many-limbed saints shrieking as fire met chitin.
When dawn broke, the priesthood emerged at last, robes singed by the purging pyres. The High Canon knelt in the ashen furrows and swore the Oath of Relentless Vigil, his jewels falling into the mud like so many shed scales. Whether the vow was born of shame or fear I cannot say, but I marked it nonetheless.
Now I write by the dim glow of a barn-lumen, the scent of scorched grain in my lungs. Sloth is not mere idleness—it is the refusal to keep watch when the night is longest. Remember Verdant’s Rest, traveller: the Emperor’s work is endless, and His enemies thrive in every moment we delay.