Ordo Ad Chao (40k)

[Rye]

As a preface, this is basically a means for me to kill writer's block for my scripts, and so it's a bit low on action (boo, hiss), at least for now, and is written pretty much in a flow of consciousness to tell this guy's story as he saw it. It tells the story of a hopefully likeable character in his desire to find truth in the 40k universe, with how I imagine corruption by Chaos occurs in the more intellectual, moral and scientific mind in such a setting.

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Ordo Ad Chao

My name is Antagonius Thalleus, I used to be a philosopher and theologian in Staliano, the premier city of the Choron system, Segmentum Ultima. I lived in relative luxury in the great monastery. As a youth, I tried to use my position to a more humanitarian end, arguing as best I could in the synods and councils against the Machiavellian and dogmatic factions within the ecclesiarchy. I had some success, mostly it fell on deaf ears. They were generally more receptive to more ivory tower nonsense that had been my strength up till that point, dialectic immaterialism, the exegesis of ancient texts, and so on.

Compared to the myth I’d bought into all my life, the hypocrisy and bureaucracy of the Emperor’s clergy really grinds down your faith, both in His church and His godhood. There were times I would stare at the moons from the monastery’s gardens, the arranged plants and sculptures traced in chalk-like light and I would feel no more substantial than the shadows that surrounded me. I would talk, inside my head, staring at the moon, and I’d wait for the Emperor to respond.

He never did, of course. Long ago, I had realised those voices are just myself, no Emperors involved.

You feel cheated when that sort of realisation dawns on you, let me tell you. Annoyance at the system, annoyance at your own gullibility and then comes the great black fear that you might be discovered and deemed a heretic. That fear is seductive, even now. It reminds you that no matter what the truths of the universe, a simplistic return to the certainties of youth and escaping the wrath of the faithful is an easy way out, so long as you avoid the inquisition and psykers who would see through to your inner absence of belief as easily as one spots a child’s assertion of cake-stealing daemons.

Of course, this cowardly facet of human nature probably explains where all the cultists come from whenever Chaos finally does what Chaos does. Two sides of the same coin, arguably. Herd instincts. If one is confronted with a Chaotic insurgency in one’s own back yard, to remain faithful to the Emperor seems suicidal without a guard or astartes unit behind you (at which point, being faithful to Khorne or Slaanesh becomes decidedly irrational too).

I recall once when the crowd were cheering the death of a heretic who had written a book called “the Chaotic Verses,” essentially a rationalist criticism of faith in the guise of imperial cult fanfiction, and considered how that could’ve been me, if I’d have been stupid enough to get caught doing such thought-exercises in print or in public. I decided after that to avoid evangelism entirely and only indulge my desire for truth without sharing such powerful knowledge. At that moment, of course, Tzeench must’ve felt like I was tempting him (both as fate and lord of all sorcerers).

My private desire to know the truth was undoubtedly what some would say was my undoing. My experiences with the hypocrisy and corruption of the clergy forced apathy upon the values of my upbringing and society. I wanted something else to fill the void in my soul, and I didn’t want to be enslaved to dark gods with poor personal hygiene anymore than I did to a church of hypocrisy and pederasty.

I made enquiries (under a variety of quite witty pseudonyms if you know the local history, I assure you) in regards to the knowledge of the ancient scientists, of Earth and the early colonies. Such material is not easy to come by, as I’m sure you know, due to the loss of such texts over time, but more importantly, because the elite want to keep the proletariat ignorant and because of the insane bleepings of the Adeptus Mechanicus and their desired monopoly on knowledge.

Ahh, the Mechanicus. Even when I was religious, I couldn’t rationalise their crazy clockwork zizshit (if you are an offworlder, a ziz is a gigantic bird from the volcanic ranges, their shit is extremely prodigious, if difficult to obtain) with the cult of the Emperor. It was as clear a case of dishonest, delusional, ad hoc syncretism as one could hope to find, and you couldn’t help but wonder why they weren’t considered heretics by the inquisition. Hell, maybe they were, just not officially.

For months, my covert attempts had failed to retrieve much of worth, and what I had found seemed frequently woefully obsolete or fragmented to the point of futile hilarity. This was until one day, when I was contacted by someone describing himself as a “fellow seeker” and offering me some “shattering prospects” and a date and place. I initially suspected a rouse; perhaps an inquisitor (though the chances of that I realised were pretty small), perhaps a fraud or robber, or worse, some crazed Slaaneshi with a barbed cock the size of my head. Such things have been known to happen (the tentacle rape of Archbishop Fonzarelli is considered a minor heresy on its own).

The day arrived and I had resolved to go, “no guts no glory” as they say. The pun-generator in my mind pointed out also that “no guts, no gory” but disregarding the cowardice (though not entirely), I searched my room for things I could use as a weapon in a pinch.

You couldn’t make it up. In the 41st millennium, where the news reports would have you believe there was only war, my room was completely bereft of any usable weaponry. I considered filing the brass Aquila’s edges down to an edge for use as an unwieldy blade and dismissed it just as fast. I was not Aquilaman (a superhero animation from my youth on the system’s children’s channels), after all, I was just a silly priest that had lost his faith. What could I take, then? “The Emperor will provide” a part of my brain mocked, and I left my room. It was just evening and my spirits were sparking with excitement at being privy to new forbidden secrets.

Near the outskirts of the monastery and the rich district, I spotted a janitor, and after the judicious use of some moralising and a well-honed guilt trip, I distracted him long enough to steal his crowbar. Making people willingly close their eyes, to shut themselves off from the world, to pray, so you can steal something from them is a good analogy for religion as a whole, in my view.

“Indeed, the Emperor did provide,” my brain noted, and I grinned in the sultry evening light. To this day I am glad he was a human and not a servitor. Had it been a servitor, I wouldn’t have got the crowbar, and would’ve no doubt died during the course of that night, or otherwise been eminently traceable and died slightly later at the hands of gleeful Hereticus frakkers. A part of me finds it hilarious that the ignorant peasants are better drones in some ways than a maintenance servitor. A friend once told me that servitors have a better union than human janitors.

I felt a pang of guilt for the man, but it soon passed. I hurried off into the still-warm mosaics, pillars and tiles of the rich quarter's back streets, taking care to avoid the observation drones.

I travelled into the poor quarter of town, slugging beggars with the curved end of my crowbar whenever they got too close. I was too committed to my course to turn up dead in a canal somewhere, weeks from now, the result of some poverty-stricken scum picking on some defenceless priest. I don't know what compels these people to think I might have spare change on the fifth time of asking, or what lets them move as fast as me when they claim they're so malnourished. I move on, adrenaline and social fear not letting me get dragged back.

I found the address and was rather disappointed. It wasn’t anything special. Merely a pawn shop, apparently belonging to some fellow named Gideon. I don’t know what I was expecting, but then again, the strangest things turn up in pawn shops, as well as strange people. I tried not to make eye contact with the skinny freak outside in what I can only assume is some sort of monochrome gang war paint, muttering madly about “teebirds” and someone called “Shelley”. Who Shelley was and what he’d done to this guy with teebirds (whatever they are), I wanted no part of.

The interior of the shop was just as drab and uninspiring as the exterior and, as it turned out, the pawnbroker. A dull little man with sunken-verging-on-mutated-amphibian eyes peered at me lecherously from behind a rusty metal mesh. His skin had an oily sheen over its pallid green, warty surface, and the whole place reeked of the fat loathsome cigar he was smoking. The soot from it had assaulted a poor luminescent vid-screen he was keeping one lazy-eye on. The screen was clearly recalcitrant in response to the abuse, however, and wasn’t letting the broker watch his dire pornography without a distorted, static-laden fight.

I tried to make it look like I was browsing a bunch of grimy death’s head rings and then politely teetered on my heels, trying to make him start a conversation. "Wow," the sarcastic part of my mind thought, "these really are shit."

The broker appeared to burp into his smoke. I considered humming a nonchalant tune and then thought better of it.

“If he is an inquisition plant, he was good, right down to the chlorophyll mutations,” the pun part of my brain quipped. I started to smirk.

“Nice place you got here,” I ventured. He didn’t seem convinced as to the niceness of his current place. He had a point, that I grant him.

“I’m looking for a book. A rare one.” His ears should’ve pricked up at that one, and they may have done, for all I knew, perhaps his functional ears were on his legs like a grasshopper or something.

“What’s that then?” he croaked back at me, either down to his somewhat amphibian countenance or perhaps a lifetime of smoking. Or both.

“Finding Something, by Sikh Kerr,” I said. The pun part of my brain cheered at that one, and began giving an acceptance speech for greatest pun of the day to the other parts of my thought processes. They slapped their metaphorical palms into their foreheads in unison.

The pawnbroker toad either laughed or shifted phlegm and pressed a button that glowed red behind his desk. A trap door unlocked with a sudden clack in the corner of the room, and the broker returned to his pornography. I gripped my crowbar like it was my oldest friend in the world and opened the hatch. There was a ladder and darkness and depth. Joy. From the tales I'd read about from heroic guardsmen, I waited for the telltale signifiers, stroking the cold metal crowbar, hoping Chaos wouldn't suddenly turn it into a fire-snake or venomous penis-tentacle or something just to spite me and my minute sense of hope.

I couldn’t hear swarming bugs or inhuman growling, nor could I smell any cryptic stenches. That was probably a good sign. My crowbar was solid, metallic and cold. Definitely a good sign. I lowered myself into the narrow hole and climbed down. I desperately tried to make myself believe that daemons, aliens and inquisitors all have an intense vulnerability to crowbars and steeled myself for what happened next.

[Surlethe]

More, please. I enjoyed that enough that I've no helpful criticism at this point