Holy Terra, the birthpce of Mankind. Amberley had only been to the pnet twice, and while the Imperial Pace and the headquarters of the other great organisations of the Imperium were absolutely majestic, the rest of the pnet … was not so much. It was said that the st drop of water had been stolen and sold on a bck market auction years before the Great Crusade. Of the natural wildlife, pntlife and scenery, nothing remained. Terra was the most densely poputed pnet in the Imperium, the first and greatest of all Hive Worlds. Tens, if not hundreds of billions, lived in the pnet-wide mega-city.

  The pnet was beautiful, on the surface level at least. It was the most sacred pce in the Imperium, a pnet-spanning temple dedicated to the Emperor of Mankind, and all the major Adepta had their headquarters there. But that beauty was only surface deep, and anyone with half a brain knew that Terra was the most dangerous world in the gaxy. Even High Lords and the heads of ancient noble houses could find themselves a head shorter from a single misstep.

  Amberley had been there but twice, spending the vast majority of her life far away from Segmentum Sor. But she had seen enough, read enough about the pnet’s history to know just how … wondrous what she was witnessing truly was.

  Nothing she was seeing was truly novel; she had seen a hundred cities just like the one Echidna called ‘New York’. Maybe the people dressed differently, used queer technology and the architecture wasn’t quite the same, but the simirities were much more numerous than the differences. Everything held an air of familiarity, like the world Echidna was introducing might be out there somewhere, hidden among the stars. If Amberley hadn’t been told it was ancient Terra, she’d have just shrugged and ignored it. Has humanity truly changed so little in 40,000 years?

  What made the sights before her unique was knowing that it was a glimpse into the ancient past, into the cradle of humanity. All of this was gone, turned to dust and ash during the Age of Strife or perhaps long before that.

  “What’s that creature?” Amberley asked, her eyes focusing on a strange feline beast with orange fur covered in bck stripes. It was stalking through the thick jungle in the illusory world surrounding them, while primates swung about in the top branches and birds sang a hundred discordant tunes at once. It was hard to reconcile the Terra she knew with this image, and Amberley still wasn’t certain Echidna wasn’t just making it all up as she went … but there was no harm in believing it.

  “A tiger,” the woman said. “One of the rgest nd-bound apex predators that still walked the pnet during that time. Though this one is of the smaller variety, the Siberian tiger living in the snowy forests far to the north was the rgest subspecies, I think.”

  The world shifted, the jungle giving way to a snowy ndscape and alien, towering trees all around with strange, dark green needle-like leaves. From behind a dark trunk strode a familiar beast, though rger by a fraction and somewhat more menacing than its tropical cousin.

  “Where would this pce be on Terra?” Amberley asked.

  “To the north of the Imperial Pace.” Came the answer, and the world shifted again, leaving the three of them sitting upon the void of space, a blue pnet floating before them. Amberley’s eyes caught on a white mountain range on the rgest ndmass, her gaze drawn to it by the crimson circle around it and the three rge arrows pointing at it. “That’s the Himayas, home to the tallest mountain peak on Earth. That is where the Emperor built his Pace, and this expanse of frigid tundra, a good while northwards from it, is Siberia.”

  Amberley leaned forward, her eyes eagerly devouring the scene. This was all incredibly fascinating. Even if it was all just made-up bullshit on Echidna’s part, it was still quite the experience getting to explore an illusory world like this. Nobles would pay fortunes to have a show like this at their parties.

  “Now let’s see … What else would be fun to show?” The woman mused aloud, tapping her lips in thought. “Oh, I know. History. Y’all have some myths, but even the 20th century must seem like ancient history to you, right?”

  Amberley gave a nod, eyebrow raised curiously as the woman responded with a grin. “What would you consider ancient history?”

  “Hmmm, anything BC, I guess,” Echidna said absently, then blinked, seeing the confused look probably written across both Amberley’s and Ciaphas’ faces. The psyker clicked her fingers. “Right, you guys don’t even know what we are counting our years from. Do you even know what the name of the calendar you still use originally was?”

  “It’s the Imperial Calendar,” Amberley said simply, curious what secret the woman knew about it.

  “Is it still 365.25 days a year, with a bit extra to account for the 11-minute inaccuracy?” Echidna asked, and Amberley gave a slow nod.

  “Huh, the Gregorian calendar was already four centuries old back when I lived, but I guess you can’t really fix it when it’s already perfect … though I would have guessed they’d swap over to the lunar calendar during the age of technology, guess not,” the woman hummed, then shook her head. “Right, Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory the … who the hell knows which one. It was a slightly improved version of the Julian calendar, which was introduced in 45 BC by Julius Caesar. That one didn’t account for the 11-minute inaccuracy, so the extra days started stacking up by the 16th century.”

  That second name sounded faintly familiar to Amberley. Wasn’t there an Ultramarine by that name? Or was it a Custodian? When she voiced that thought, Echidna smirked.

  “The Emperor really loved naming his favourite toys after famous historical figures,” she said. “Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. Emperor Trajan, who ruled the Roman Empire during its peak. Two of the Adeptus Custodes’ Captain Generals wore their names, didn’t they? Constantine Valdor and Trajan Valoris. Diocletian and Justinian were also Emperors of Rome, all names popur among the Custodes from what I know. Then there was Ra Endymion, named after the King of the Gods from the ancient Egyptian Pantheon. Amon was another Egyptian God, Helios was a Roman God of the Sun, I think, and Hammurabi was a king from a kingdom predating even Rome by centuries, the first king in history to codify ws, in fact.”

  With each word she spoke, the world around them changed. A crimson spot appeared on a small peninsu at first, then spread out to cover the nd surrounding a sea locked between continents. Then they were back on the surface, flickering around an ancient city, watching statues and buildings made of marble.

  “Rome,” the woman said, waving her hand at a half-colpsed colosseum. “I’d only visited the city once, and the Western Roman Empire had fallen more than a thousand years ago by that point. It took nearly a millennium for civilisation to reach the heights Rome reached after it fell. I know it would not seem too impressive to you that buildings they made stood for two millennia when you have ships five times that old, but back then it was.”

  “That’s a lot of religions,” Cain noted, earning a sideways gre from Amberley.

  “Yep.” Echidna shrugged. “Not that most of them stuck around to the 21st century. The Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse Gods all faded into obscurity, reduced to interesting trivia and historical curiosities. Christianity, though, persisted, and from what I know, its st faithful believer died aboard the Vengeful Spirit, sin by Horus himself before the Emperor’s own eyes.”

  Amberley frowned, thoughts churning as she reviewed what she knew of old myths and legends of the Emperor’s fateful duel against the archtraitor, but came up bnk.

  “Olnius Persson was what’s called a Perpetual, much like the Emperor himself, or the Primarch Vulkan, only he was about 7,000 years older than the Master of Mankind,” Echidna said. “He was one of his original warmasters back on Earth, a pious believer of the Christian God, given an exception from the Emperor’s ban on religion. Funny then, how he became one of the founding saints of the Imperial Creed as Olnius Pious, isn’t it?”

  If that was true, then … then, what? Saint Olnius Pious was spoken of in legend as a simple guardsman bravely standing before Horus, protecting the Emperor with his own body and giving him a sliver of a moment needed to turn the tide against his traitorous son.

  That he was neither a believer of the Imperial Creed, nor a simple guardsman … Well, it didn’t really matter. Amberley would be the one to be branded a heretic if she repeated this version of the tale to a member of the Ecclesiarchy. Not that they had any authority over an Inquisitor, but Inquisitors who believed authority all by itself was enough of a shield against the loyal elements of the Imperium tended to turn up dead sooner rather than ter. Authority was good, but it was much better when you had a few well-armed guards to enforce it with good old-fashioned threats of extreme violence.

  “Even the Calendar we spoke of is a remnant of it, ‘Pope’ was the name of the highest office of the Catholic Church,” Echidna said. “And the year that Calendar considers year one was the year when the Christian God’s Son was said to have been born to a mortal woman to ‘spread the word’, take on all the sins of mortals, then absolve them of it with his death. Even the AD, Anno Domini, means ‘in the year of the Lord’, a widespread Christian phrase. I suppose the Imperial Creed just took it and decided to roll with it; it isn’t like the Imperial Cult was that much of a cohesive effort or something, what with the original author of your fancy holy book having decided worshipping the Chaos Gods was cooler after the Emperor burned down his city. Kind of a shit move, but then again, nobody likes Lorgar, so fuck him.”

  The Traitor Primarch Lorgar Aurelian wrote the Lectitio Divinitatus.

  Amberley wisely decided to push … all that, into the furthest corner of her mind, put it in a vault, lock it, then throw away the keys. If she ever repeated those words aloud, she suspected any faithful believer of the Emperor would promptly get a conniption, then shoot her in the head for heresy. How could you even pack so much heresy into so few words? It was a good thing working as an Inquisitor, often undercover, had heavily desensitised her to heresy, so she made no outward reaction, though it didn’t really matter when the woman sitting across from her could read her thoughts like an open book, did it?

  “Anyways, let’s skip ahead a bit and talk about conquerors,” Echidna said, spinning them all around in pce as the illusory world churned and twisted. “Alexander the Great, I’m pretty sure he was one of the Emperor’s earliest aliases. Then we have Genghis Khan, one of the most ruthless conquerors in known history … up until the Emperor, anyway. So! I’d bet my right kidney he is the Daemon Prince of Khorne nowadays known as Doombreed. Cool, right? Oh, if you want to give a go at binding him, his true name should be something like Temüjin.”

  Amberley felt a shiver crawl up her spine, a surge of impossible bloodlust and an air of death curling through the gaps in the weave of reality. It was stifling, suffocating, and she could feel her concealed daemonic wards burning against her skin, trying to keep her mind intact- and it was gone.

  Echidna scoffed. “Annoying twat, interrupting my story time. I’ll go beat your ass ter. Didn’t even have the decency to wait for me to finish … well, now he went for a swim. So! Where was I? Right! Alexander the Great, I think. So there was this pce called Greece … “

  Amberley slowly regained her wits, swallowing a thick lump in her throat. She’d felt the presence of Bloodthirsters before, and that thing had been a league above the run-of-the-mill Greater Daemons of the Blood God. Did Echidna just swat it aside? Send it for a ‘swim’? … Emperor protect us.

  Mostly, it was her sanity that needed protecting, considering this ridiculous psyker could apparently put a monster that could raze well-defended Imperial worlds to the ground into timeout. No, her physical safety was all but assured while she was Echidna’s guest. Unfortunately, the woman made a sport out of giving her a headache. She probably considered giving people an existential crisis a fun way to pass the time.

  Well, Amberley had seen some things over the years. She wouldn’t make for an easy target, but perhaps that would only make Echidna want to shatter her worldview all the more. That could be … useful. Attachment of any kind, she could use.

  She gave Ciaphas a subtle gnce, then grimaced at the empty look in his eyes as he absently scratched his palm. Well, if he gets through this without getting an existential crisis, nothing in the world will ever surprise him again. That’s … something at least.

  *****

  In a perfect world, all the Imperium’s military assets would have packed up and fucked all the way off through the Warp Gate, leaving me with an undefended nascent empire beset on all sides by a thousand enemies. Yes, that would have been my preferred result … but I could work with this.

  I had read Octavian’s memo, memorised it even, so I was not at all surprised when vast swathes of the Imperium’s disparate forces were either ignored, outright disobeyed, or called into question the veracity of the orders they’d received. The less politically savvy, like some Adepta Sororitas leaders, called Octavian all sorts of nasty things and told him to shove a psma grenade up his cowardly ass, in far more words than that. Others called into doubt whether the orders truly came from a Custodian, others yet questioned how he had the authority to give those orders, questioned the new figurehead of a Lord Militant, and Lord Commander. There were a thousand and one reasons given, though most didn’t outright tell Octavian to eat a bag of dicks, most dithered, acted ignorant, or pretended their Astropaths didn’t get the orders.

  The Imperial Navy and the Astra Militarum from the Canis Salient obeyed at least, so that was something. They’d been indoctrinated to be unquestioningly obedient to higher authority, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.

  That still left me with Mechanicus forces, holdout Deathwatch kill teams, watch stations, watch fortresses, and of course some very loudly angry Adepta Sororitas companies. The Deathwatch was also far from the only Astartes Chapter having a presence in the Reach, and I was already getting news of 5 Companies of the Storm Wardens Chapter settling in for a siege on the Fortress World of Spite, once the main stronghold and the seat of Lord Commander Ebongrave’s power. They’d also sent out rallying cries to the other Astartes Chapters within the Reach, spouting a whole bunch of bullshit about treachery and heretics. The nearest Sororitas force quickly flocked to their banner, adding two commanderies from the Order of the Bloody Rose and an entire preceptory from the Order of the Argent Shroud.

  I hadn’t the faintest clue what those needlessly flowery names the Sororitas used to describe their army detachments meant, so I looked it up. Essentially, a Mission was a ptoon, a Commandery was a force of about 200 of those harlots, and a Preceptory was an entire convent of up to a 1000 overly zealous tramps.

  If it hadn’t become obvious long ago, I had an ever so slight dislike for zealots and fanatics, and you won’t find a force dedicated to not having a single original thought as the Adepta Sororitas. Excluding combat servitor corps and the cybernetic legions of the Adeptus Mechanicum, of course, but they didn’t really do much thinking at all, so they didn’t count.

  I hadn’t even met a single one, and I already loathed them wholeheartedly, just from what I’d heard of them both in this life and in the one before. Luckily for me, they were just regur humans wearing power armour, so I wouldn’t have to open dialogue with them. I could just poke them in the brain with a bit of telepathy, and they’d die, and I’d be saved from having to listen to their inane prattling.

  Well, I guess it’s time to pack up and solve this little issue. We can’t have them squatting on such an important world.

  P3t1