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I have seen war at its pitch on one hundred worlds now. I have seen bloodshed on the shifting tides of the warp. I have heard the Red Queen howling in my ears and seen the Blood God's own generals gathering His harvest. Every manner of blade has bitten my flesh, every colour of blood has painted my hands.
I tell you now, war is exaltation. It is the greatest bounty the Blood God can offer you.
Silo Six was hell.
Imagine an entire planet given over to farming. A world with the sole purpose of delivering food to another. They took a dead world near the fortresses of Genevieve Gate and they spent centuries doing what nature had not. The techmeisters and their great cathedral-ships stole water and air from a dozen other worlds to fill it, they blasted the earth from orbit until stone broke into gravel and gravel tumbled into sand. They laid out the sterilized detritus and waste from their teeming spires and wretched hives, and filled it with crawling vermin they hand-picked themselves. They sprinkled it with artificial, man-made grains again and again until they took root, and the moment the air could be breathed they damned more souls than I could count to this galaxy's most wretched existence.
This was Silo Six. One of ten worlds given over to feed the warriors of the Emperor and the metal horrors of the techmeisters and their circuit-god. Even after lifetimes of work, the air was thin and dry, the soil toxic to all but the strains of wheat and livestock their alchymists had made just for this world. Families stuck together, as many generations as could survive at once crouching in hovels of stone and scraps to tend the grain that fed their livestock, allowed to eat neither. My grandfather died soon after I was born, and we barely had time to pray over his body. The day the meisters saw his work was not being done, they came looking for him, and we delivered his body unto them to be rendered into food, my father given ten lashes for not alerting the meisters himself.
In this way, our food came to us. The bodies of our dead mixed with the chaff of our harvests, carefully processed and rendered, doled out in portions the techmeisters had determined were the most efficient for feeding us without undo expense. At the end of our short lives we were taken away, and returned to our families in thin, flaking wafers of hard and ashen material, treated to remove any flavour we might overeat to enjoy, grinding away at our teeth and cutting our gums. We washed it down with daily skins of alchymical slurry, thicker than bile and just as foul. At the end of each harvest, when crop strains were updated, we spent days hooked up to machines that filtered our blood and reintroduced it with missing nutrients and new medicines meant to keep us awake for longer and counteract the poison in the dust and soil. Most of my brothers died on days like these, pale and shivering as ancient devices emptied and refilled them like waterskins. Others died to accidents with machinery, and my sister we lost to the predations of the meisters. There were always more. With little to enjoy but each other's touch and no other way to gain more farmhands, siblings were plentiful. Life was short, and we were only given so many hours a night to rest. The best reprieve one could hope for was the brief medical care given to expectant mothers. Plenty enough were stillborn or mutated by the damned earth and the alchymist's work, and the meisters would take their mothers away for the sin of delivering such foul creations into the Emperor's domain.
We could not eat the plants that withered or the livestock that faltered and died, for that would invite disease and make us heretics for shirking our health and duty. We could not eat the excess chaff, as that would make us fat and indolent, and so we shoveled it into the engines of our harvesters to serve as fuel under the careful watch of our meisters. If quotas were not met, those deemed weak were taken away by the techmeisters and returned as servitors, terrifying flesh-machine mockeries of the person they had been. The servitors would do better work, the techmeisters said, our lives as weak flesh-and-blood were a luxury granted by the Emperor, one they would deny us if not for his eternal beneficence. Livestock were not for us to consume, their flesh and their milk meant for brave warriors, men and women better than our hard-worn souls. We were granted a mercy, allowed to wallow in our cowardice and never see the terrors of the galaxy beyond, to stay in our small and simple world and live short and simple lives. When I was a child, when I could first walk, I was taken to one of the services the priests gave us a handful of times a year. We would pray to the Emperor, then to the Omnissiah, then to both, to thank them for our lives and our freedom from the alien, the witch, and the mutant. There, we were allowed to see a glimpse of the worlds beyond our own, to gaze on the fruits of our labour.
Soldiers. Millions of them. Stretched out farther than I could see even from my father's shoulders. Hard-looking men, each of them larger than even the biggest of us. I had thought my father the strongest man in all the world until then, I had even held my own private, heretical thoughts that a man like him had to be stronger than even the Emperor. That day, I saw men with arms thicker than father's legs, I saw men who stood straight-backed under their wargear for hours on end and bellowed with voices that drowned out even the roar of our livestock. Scarred, white-knuckled, terrifying gods of war. They crushed megacres of crop just standing there for us to see, it was so easy to imagine them destroying a world within a day. What then, must they face that was such a threat?
We understood then, why we would not eat our livestock. We were unworthy. We were cowards and slacks, unfit for duty in body and soul. Weakness without, weakness within. Suicides kept us well fed that year. On the feasts of The Emperor's Ascension, the Sanguinala, and Candlemas, families were allowed to butcher an animal screened by the meisters. Not too large to impact quotas, not diseased, not too fatty. Before we had seen the Emperor's Guards it had been cause for celebration each time, now we felt dismal and greedy when we ate.
Still, we ate. We had to. Hunger grew day by day. Children were hungry, their parents were hungry, even the servitors looked haggard and starved. It gnawed at our bellies and left us weak. When families indulged or grew lazy, the meisters would discover the offenders and turn them into servitors. When they grew mad and fought the techmeisters they were effortlessly gunned down and added to our meals. Weaker and weaker, more tired day by day, even my father's pleas for us to remember the sacrifice of the great Emperor and his warriors grew quiet as the bags under his eyes grew deeper. Hunger became a companion, a force that drove me more than anything. If I worked today, I ate tomorrow. If a crop failed, we had even less food. If we had a surplus, we might snag a few grains to fill the holes in our guts before the techmeisters could count the rows. I was tired, my back sagged and my shoulders bowed. My skin burnt in the sun, even blocked by the clouds of dust that made the world a brown haze. I hated myself for my weakness, I loathed every inch of my body and the parasitic ache that lurked within it. I wanted to be one of the Emperor's Guard, I dreamed a heretic's hopes of being more than I was, of being worthy and feasting and growing strong enough to carry my father the way he had carried me. I wanted for one day, one single good day where I did not tremble as I did my work.
I remember the first time I felt strong.
My father had left to check on our neighbors, as he often did, finding time to cross the plots without being spotted and make sure the families near us were doing well. Sometimes we loaned them some of our tools, or he would return with parts and materials the techmeisters had abandoned that we could use to patch up our home. That night, he returned with meat. More meat than we had ever seen! It was fresh and a deep, rich red, nothing like the darker colours of our livestock. The edges were ragged and bloody, and bands of gristle and sinew still ran through it, but we were beyond thankful. There was shame in his eyes, and the weight of fear pushed on his shoulders as he looked over them, but we didn't question anything. With no way to store the meat, we gorged until our bellies bloated. The next day, we feared that the techmeisters would notice, even under our baggy sackcloth robes, but instead they were delighted at how furiously we worked the soil. For the first time I could remember, our backs were straight and proud, our teeth felt sharp, our blood ran hot and our hearts beat with the strength of giants! This was the might the Emperor's warriors knew, this was the power that could drive a knife into the heart of any alien monster! Our newfound energy waned with the coming days, but every few weeks my father would find more meat and we would be strong again. I suspected he was stealing from another megacre's livestock, that some other kraal held a more plentiful strain of beast, but I enjoyed our new strength too much to raise a word about it. My father was as strong as I had dreamed him again, and each time I was weak again I hated myself more for knowing how mighty I could be. Other families were eating better, too. There were less uprisings, less hardworking mothers and fathers turned into horrors for their children to tend. Those who raised trouble were disappearing before our meisters could learn of their mutterings, and livestock were found mauled by beasts for the first time in our history, but we had learned well to eat what was available and leave not a scrap for the techmeisters to have any proof of wrongdoing. What blame could they lay for a despairing man wandering into the stalks to be taken by harvesters as they long had? How could they punish a man for gutting palestock if they could not tell who had done it? The animals we took, we left no trace of. The ones they found had been torn beyond recognition, only their hearts and offal devoured, with great gouges no man could leave in their throats and bellies.
On the eve of my twelth harvest, my father took me out into the fields. I had long since learned his ways of hiding from the meisters and their watchful machines, but never before had I dared follow him. To join him now was a rush, the pride of being worth his trust and the blasphemous thrill of creeping through the night like he had for years. Other men joined us, and the great secret was revealed to me. Corpse starch was overprocessed and full of the poisons of the techmeisters. They drained it of the strength of men and their hands and used it to make us weak. There was only one true way to quell our hunger, only one way to regain the lost power of our dead. We had to eat them fresh . Those bent-backed and broken already by our labour were already sick and frail, we could feed on them but we would not gain much. The only way to grow stronger was to feed on those of fiery disposition, those whose strength served us well but whose tongues would see us damned and murdered by our lords. When rumours spread of farmers who began to speak out, the men of these Bloodbound Houses would stalk them through the night and slay them before granting their bodies to those in need.
This revelation shocked me, but deep down it was something I had always known. How could we all have the souls of wretched things when I felt the urge to hunt our foes like the Guard did? How could I feel the weight of a blade in my hand and know its righteous purpose and still think my body was meant only to bend and till until it broke? That night, we killed three men and our families met quotas for two weeks. I began joining their hunts at least once a month, tense with the fear of being caught yet burning with excitement. Had the meisters found and shot me, I think I would have gone up in a great blaze of fire. We saw glimpses of other things stalking the night, of four-legged creatures like the meister's cybermastiffs hunting with us, but they never came close enough for us to tell what they were. More than once, we thought ourselves discovered by the meisters, but we went unmolested, and for a time, it was good.
Too much of a good thing will hurt you. The techmeisters eventually noticed different numbers of workers, even if our newfound vigor more than made up for the losses. Without anyone to blame for these deaths, without any evidence to find and with fear of the shadowy hounds spreading among those who did not know of our hunts, the meisters chose to punish all of us. There had been precious little law protecting us from their whims, and now they broke its sacrosanct terms to frighten us into obedience. If they could not find one of us who was guilty, we had to share in repentance. The head of each household was taken away when we gathered for our blood-screening, and when we returned we brought back brain-dead mockeries of our beloved. My father's mind was taken from him, though I can still see bits of his soul in the one, sad eye they left him. His spine was refurbished to give him the stature that had long since been stolen, his body was flushed with alchymical brews to make him grow until his skin was deformed by the unnatural expanse of muscle. His arms were replaced with mounts for tools, and I was put in his place and told in no gentle terms what would happen to the rest of my family if we failed the Emperor again. Terror ruled my life. I was furious, I gnawed my own tongue until it bled, but every movement saw me shivering with fright. Every beat of my heart was shaky and tenuous. I knew not what the meisters might have judged me for next, or who they would torment for it. I could not sleep at night for my nightmares or the pitiful, pained wails my father made when hooked up to the machines that sustained him. The eldest of my brothers was caught in a harvester the next month, and before it had even finished tearing his arm and spine from his body I was calling the techmeisters, to ensure they could not accuse my family of hiding our dead. It wasn't until the next harvest that I went to check on the other families. They were all diminished, some of them replaced entirely with new workers or abominable machinery. We were weak again, even weaker than we had been before, for now we feared what would happen if we were ever strong again.
Worse still, despite the fact our hunts had ceased, the deaths did not. Livestock screamed out in the middle of the night and only found as skulls and broken bones, with gore smeared across their kraals. Those who worked the farthest edges of the fields or the deepest rows of stalks disappeared, or were found bleeding their last after hours of screaming left trails of blood across trampled crops. The hounds we had seen were killing us now, and we came to the quick conclusion that it had been them that had blessed our hunts, and now they cursed us for rebuking them and rejoining the masses of the weak. We had forayed into sin and heresy, and now gods we did not know were furious that we had not given them everything. What remained of the Bloodbound joined me one night with news of spreading plague, maddened meisters firing upon each other and burning their fields, and hooded men stalking their families with the shadow-wolves. Knowing we had to act, we swore our oaths of secrecy once more, marking the stalks with our blood in sacrifice not to the Emperor but to the spirits that haunted our fields. The hunt began again, but after the suffering the meisters had visited on us, it was hard to find a man worth killing. Inwardly, we began to wonder if we might sacrifice one of our own, if only to appease the beasts for a time. It never came to that, our loyalty to each other was too strong. Instead, we realized that to live this way was worse than dying, and that we had to face the horrors our meisters refused to acknowledge ourselves. We had invited them in, and we would cast them out. With the tools we used to maintain our harvesters we made weapons so terrible as we had only ever seen in our dreams, mimicking the fearsome panoply of the techmeisters. Metal skulls and layer upon layer of leather and discarded rivets armoured us, and we bore spears with wicked edges and chainblades freed of their minuscule safety measures. Each of us whispered our own prayers as we set out to hunt, hushed voices carried over our shoulders by the wind.
On the first night, we found nothing. Pursuing shadows lead us nowhere, and we returned to our homes tired and bitter, stashing our wargear beneath mounds of soil. The next week, after a neighbor lost his favoured son, we set out again, and this time made good chase after the monsters in the night. They lead us on, their feet pounding the earth and leaving deep gouges. I could hear their panting, their excited snarling and the gnashing of their jaws as they ran just ahead of us, taunting us for our weakness. When we collapsed, too exhausted to run any more, they ate their fill of the weakest of us. I saw glimpses of them then, hunch-backed mastiffs with jaws big enough to swallow my head whole. Their claws were the length of my fingers, their hides as dark as dried blood. They reeked of death, and their eyes burned like fire. I could not run, but they did not kill me. Instead they kicked soil at me and drooled over my body, their hot breath making my skin blister. They mocked us, and in words we could only just understand they called us weak. They would feast on our mothers and our sisters and our sons. They would consume Silo Six, and leave us for last so that we would have to watch. I shuddered and wept as they padded away with bloodied faces and full bellies, the pained cries of the other Bloodbound echoing in my ears. I chewed mouthfuls of dirt, hoping to choke myself on them, but my throat was too dry to swallow. Those of us who were left managed to drag ourselves to our feet and hide the bodies before sunrise, but the heat of the next month's work and the constant fear of the flesh-hounds nearly killed us all.
After our next screening, we set out for a third and final hunt. I had to go around to the homes of the other Bloodbound and cajole them into joining me. Several had to be threatened, or even beaten, men twice my age or more too afraid to do what had to be done. I realized only those who joined out of fear for their families were worth my trust, and so we set a trap. We organized a pincer movement, to pin and ambush the hounds, but in reality those who I could not rely on were bait. Their pursuit of the flesh-hounds quickly turned into a panicked rout and even that did not last long. The other warrior-souled men and I, we found the flesh-hound furthest from the pack and set upon it while it gorged itself on the unworthy. Despite our weapons, despite our advantage, despite the fury of our assault, we had no chance. The creature killed man after man as easily as you or I might swat a fleshfly burrowing into our arm. It was a game to the monster, even when we did not retreat. We surrounded it and answered its roars with our own, we struck as hard as we could and we struck as one but it was not enough. Our weapons would glance off its hide or pass through it as mist, and even those cuts that took hold and spilled hot blood seemed to barely affect it. Within minutes, I was the last man standing, and the hound turned to leave, to let me survive another failed hunt. I howled and lunged for it instead, surprising us both when I knocked it to the ground. Its maw closed immediately over my arm, and I seized its tongue with all I could muster. Bite after bite tore my flesh, and I felt my strength waning and my grip slackening as my blood poured out and filled its gullet. Teeth broke off in my arm, and knowing I would die I cursed the flesh-hound with every scrap of hate I had saved up over my life. I cursed it for the weakness I loathed, for the hunger that gnawed my stomach like a rotroach. I cursed it for my father, who I was too afraid to grant true mercy to. I cursed it for the meisters, who had taken more of my family from me than I had ever gotten to know. With my free hand I drove my chainblade into its heart, and with a final wrench it pulled half my arm away and managed to stumble into the rows before it collapsed and died. Before my eyes, its body turned to ash and embers, and fire spread through the dry earth as my chest swelled with pride, then seized with pain and sent me crashing into a deep sleep.
I thought I had died, but instead I woke somewhere cold and dark, with crude staples sealing the ruin of my arm. Hooded men surrounded me, and I thought they might have been the spirits that beckoned the wolves to our world, or agents of the meisters sent to test my loyalty. Despite my injury, my heart still rushed with the thrill of having slain the beast, thundering until my wound bled around its bindings. I seized the nearest of the men as he approached, seeking to crush his throat in my hand, but rather than fight me he wheezed through a manic smile and held out his hand. In his palm, the broken fangs of the flesh-hound that I had fought.
As I learned, these people were my allies. The had long since followed gods of bountiful red harvest, lords of war who promised them strength beyond even that of the Emperor's armies and an endless buffet to stuff themselves on. My father had learned of the hunt and the power found in flesh from them, but he had not found the truth before he was cruelly taken by the techmeisters. The Emperor was a corpse, a long-dead liar's prophet sitting on a throne he had not taken by his own hand and whispering arcane secrets from beyond the grave. There were gods beyond him, gods that actually interacted with the realms of man, gods we had discovered when we hunted. Gods we had fought, gods I had slain . Entire legions of spirits more deserving of my worship. The Imperium was full of worlds like Silo Six, uncounted and uncountable . People like my family who toiled and suffered so that our work could be used to feed those who made us slave away. I had once been flogged for asking why the Emperor's galaxy was so cruel, and now I realized that the cruelty was the point . It was a wheel that stretched across the stars, turning since time immemorial. We suffered to feed those who made us suffer, who needed the fruit of our labour so that they would stay strong enough make us suffer. Keeping us at our weakest was the pillar of their survival, each second of malice against us essential to making sure we could never dream of rising against our false god and the servants of his necromantic empire. Everything slid into place, as though my entire life had been a puzzle and only then had I realized what to do with the pieces. Their war gods were coming to take them to a crimson paradise, a blessed land were meat and gore were plentiful and free to any man who would take it. They sent one of their own to ensure the safety of my family, and I remained with them, letting the meisters think me dead while I trained with this brotherhood and regained my strength. I would have to prove to the war-gods that I was worthy of the freedom they offered.
Salvation came sooner than I had expected, the war-gods entering our warrens before the next harvest was due. I was still not yet fully grown, but even compared to the largest of men and even the meisters, the war-gods were giants. Clad in awe-inspiring armour and dark sigils, bearing weapons I could barely hope to lift, let alone wield, they strode everywhere with even more power and pride than the meisters. I could not begrudge them for it, they had clearly earned it. Every inch of skin I could see was pocked with the scars of battle and devotion, even their most arcane wargear was marked by the hand of war. That they would even dare to gaze upon yes, let alone take us to join them in war was beyond my understanding. I fell to their feet, praying to them for the strength to fell the techmeisters and thanking them for coming to show me what could be. One laughed, the thunder of his mockery crushing my soul. Others looked ready to crush me just for daring to garner their attention. The last, whose helmet sported horns like the largest of our livestock and whose armour wore streaks of red paint above the deep, silvery gouges in it, pushed them aside and took hold of my neck. He dragged me from the ground and looked at the necklace I had made from the flesh-hounds' fangs. With a voice loud enough to make my ears bleed, he declared me worthy. I, the smallest in our dark shelter. I, a mere boy trying to fill in for a mutilated father. I, a one-armed cripple, worthy of this red god's attentions.
We would leave in the morning, to war on the meisters and the corpse-Emperor at the fortress worlds of Genevieve Gate. I asked to bring my family, and was thrown to the ground and told not to be so impertinent as to beg for more gifts. They had no use for those who could not fight. I swore my family would be as strong as me, that we were all of my father's stock, and they shoved me back, forcing the wind from my lungs. With what breath I could muster, I swore I would not leave my people to slave away for men of iron and indolence. My saviour struck me, and teeth flew from my jaw. I thought it might come free with them, and that I would never again see the light of day. As even the other followers of the Blood God jeered at me for daring to speak up, I spat through the blood threatening to choke me and told him it would be better to kill me where I stood than to make me abandon my own. He nearly did, effortlessly pushing me over and placing his boot upon my chest, but I stared defiant into the hateful eyes of his helmet, ready to die. His hand went up to his shoulder, to a scarred emblem of a world disappearing into a hungry maw. It was a gentle motion, something I could not imagine such a being could make, but afterwards he hoisted me into the air and handed me to one of their number who bore a rack of tools more terrifying than anything I had ever seen the meisters bare. Nearly dead for the second time in a harvest, I was pressed into the cold and brutal care of the war-gods' apothecary, a master of alchymy and medicae for both man and god. He saw me to fitness, curing me of the poisons the meisters had flooded my blood with for years and replacing my ruined arm with one of sharp-edged metal. Silo Six fed the world they sought to invade, and so the warband decided they would see this world burn.
Over the next few days, my people were rounded up, those of us willing to fight pushed to the front with weapons pressed into our arms. Most of us had never fought before, even those of us who had were untrained, starved, and shaking with fright. The red champion stirred the hearts of even those most fearful, though, calling on how we had suffered for generations. Embers that had lain dormant since our father's fathers roared into great infernos, our passions alight with our blood. Even as the meisters cut us down in the hundreds, then the thousands, we poured over them, one with the war-gods and their other mortal servants. Every fallen body was the promise of another meal, each one of us they killed died a free man, more than they'd ever dared to dream. The ground was soaked in blood and the air filled with smoke and iron, and though we did not breach the final bastion of the techmeisters before their cathedral-ships appeared in the skies to bomb us from a coward's safety, we slew more of their number than I had ever known existed. The world burned, decades' worth of stored crops and raised livestock ruined and every machine we could find burned to scrap or turned into more armour and weapons. We filed onto our new lords' ships with full bellies and proud hearts, knowing we had finally broken the curse the techmeisters had saddled our ancestors with.
Next came the fortresses of Genevieve Gate. World after world with entire cities of ringed or star-patterned walls and orbital shields. Armies with more soldiers than there had been farmers on Silo Six joined us, painted with all the signs and sigils of the four dark gods and their pantheons of servants. I learned the lore of one thousand different gods just on the 'small' ship our warband moved on, and so many conflicted that I realized they must all have been lies. There was just one truth, the truth I had experienced for myself. The Blood God would lead me unto harvest, and see me grow strong. All else were distractions or liars, cruelly trying to see me grow weak so that they could abuse me as the Omnissiah's meisters had. Our allies and their servants had all suffered, too, and they had the same fury and tribulations as the rest of us, but they were misguided and none carried the spirit that we did. It was nothing of consequence to let them break themselves on the void-stations of our enemy or pour out into the killboxes of the world below. Lead by our esteemed war-gods, we fought as men possessed, pouring into the places where the Emperor's lackeys thought themselves safest. The Guards I had once worshipped as heroes, the men I thought of as greater than anything I could ever be, fled before our assaults. Though their weapons carved our flesh and burned our eyes, we bit into them with renewed hunger and tossed their ruined bodies over the walls of their castles. We painted their bunkers with their own blood, and offered their skulls up to the Lord of The Red Harvest.
Though I would have loved to see each of those worlds broken in turn, our gods had their own mysterious goals, and so after each glorious victory we would return to the skies to lick our wounds and descend upon another world. It was at the final world that our hated foe struck a deep blow to the red giant that had chosen me. His name was Khalgaeron, and he had fought the corpse-god's armies since before they had worshiped him. Few of his brothers remained, their minds claimed by a hunger they could not sate and thirsts they could not quench. Their bodies broke like waves against the shore as they threw themselves against every challenge the galaxy faced them with, and he could not have been more proud of them. Blood poured from the holes our foe had put through his chest, and the remains of his face smoked as he put his hand on me. The apothecary had ceased his desperate attempts to save him, accepting that his brother was going to die. I did not want to believe what I was seeing, I had thought the war-gods immortal, the red giant the most invincible of them all. Though the apothecary looked ready to kill me for being so near his brother at so holy a time, I put my metal hand, the one they had given me, over Khalgaeron's. There, on that dreary and accursed ship, before one of the last survivors of the World-Eaters of Bodt, I was made to promise that I would carry on Khalgaeron's legacy. I swore on my soul that I would take his geneseed and continue the fight against the Imperium, and that I would see my people to the strength he knew they had. He made me promise not to cry for him, and with the help of the apothecary, I took Khalgaeron's head from his shoulders and offered his skull to the Blood God.