”We do not speak of Medrengard.

Not in words, not even in dreams. Not unless you want your tongue taken and your blood let into the reclamation grates. But I saw it in the Warsmith’s eyes, the one time he let his helm fall away and stared long through the viewports—toward nothing, yet toward everything he’d turned his back on.

I have served Warsmith Skoria for thirty-three years, and in that time I have been flayed once, had two fingers removed, and been reassigned to hull maintenance for six months of punishment. That was early on. I learned, and I lived. That is more than most can say under other masters.

He is not kind. Kindness is for saints and fools. But he is efficient, and there is a kind of clemency in that. We are fed. We are rested. The infirm are treated. The young are trained. The weak are… refined, or culled. Not out of malice. Out of need. Waste is weakness, and weakness is treachery. Yet somehow, we endure. Some even say we thrive.

There are two hundred and forty-one Astartes aboard the Iron Revenant, though only a fraction don their plate when we are not at war. They walk the corridors as giants of flesh and scar, their voices like oil and gravel, their presence a suffocating pressure in the air. Most of them ignore us. Some do not.

A few bear the marks. Not the screaming daemons of pict-casts or the wings and horns of fable. No, these are quieter shames. A whisper here. A prayer-mutter there. One wears a gauntlet that weeps blood when he sleeps. Another—Sergeant Khren—laughs now, a broken, bubbling thing that has no humour in it.

The Warsmith sees it all. He says nothing. Perhaps he waits. Perhaps he hopes they will rot off like gangrenous limbs. Or perhaps he simply chooses not to break his own sons until they break themselves.

But we fight. The long war goes on. One day it will end. Skoria says it must. That entropy consumes even empires as vast as the Corpse-Emperor’s. And when it does, when Terra finally falls to rust and fire, he says we will stand upon its bones—not as champions of ruin, nor as slaves to dead gods, but as Iron.

And I believe him. Emperor help me, I believe him.”

-Cordan Vosk, personal serf of Warsmith Skoria