Warhammer 40: Shattered Steel Soul

Chapter 425: The Emperor's Offspring - Epilogue

When the Editor-in-Chief of the Memoirs, our legendary - or ghostly - Lord Morse, approached me to write the afterword to the first collection of stories from our Terra Memoirs to be released galaxy-wide, I felt like I had been hit on the head with Vulcan's hammer.

This posed a difficult problem for me, and I returned to my suite in almost panic, praying that when I woke up the next day, the Lord would withdraw his order, a complete postscript granted by the Emperor would appear on my desk, or I would fall asleep and never wake up again.

Then I woke up, all right. I picked up my pen resignedly, thinking about how to summarize our work over the past hundred years. Most of the time was spent chasing the trails of the Primarchs and Legions, and wandering the galaxy in their footsteps.

There is also some unfortunate duplication of work that we have to do over and over again, mainly because some of us have lost our wings and fallen in the process of pursuit. For example, Lloyd Dahl, who recently lost contact with all of Colchis, Joao, who disappeared in Melchior a few years ago, and Cindy, who disappeared on the edge of the Holy Grail Expanse about fifty years ago...

Their precious lives disappeared into the unknown depths of death. I feel sorry for them. If they could all be like Cindy, and send the manuscript back to Terra before disappearing, it might be more joyful.

Lord Morse once told us that you should make these real demigods come alive on paper and make them real "human characters."

We were talking about this in the café that day. After all, how could the Imperials imagine something they didn't know? How could it be possible?

Oleg, who was in charge of the Wild Wolves, patted his chest and said "no problem" on the spot... Oh, maybe the Space Wolves are an exception.

These distant and otherworldly demigods led their unrivalled legions to conquer and annihilate. The numbers brought about by their wars were almost insane, with billions of lives destroyed or saved in the space of a few years. This was a story straight out of a storybook.

For me, my mission was completed happily. We, the few people in charge of the Ultramarines, only needed to stay in Ultramar 500 Worlds most of the time, enjoy the rare comfortable atmosphere in the local world, and record those "Robert's little stories" that everyone talked about with relish. Orlaneus said this was the second best job he could think of, and the first best was to return to his home planet to farm.

We laughed, but the atmosphere of laughter soon turned into an indelible classic conflict - because Fenrich said that the application he filled out at the beginning was clearly for the Olympia Cluster, and he still yearns to go there.

So, we started arguing among ourselves: Which legion’s home planet is the most comfortable place for the human empire?
Is it Nuceria, a place with red sand and the best medical care in the galaxy? Olympia and Macragge, the old-line infrastructure powerhouses? Prospero, the small world with the most difficult pass to obtain in the entire universe and the highest happiness index? Or Colchis, where you have to be able to chant even though you can eat for free? It can't be the original Caliban!

Finally, we laughed and changed the subject and went to the pub to have our dinner together.

In order to write more realistically, I added a lot of Macragge dialect to the paragraphs I was responsible for, and provided corresponding annotations to ensure that readers can fully and accurately understand the culture of the Ultramarines. I found myself enjoying this process more and more, and liking these great people I know.

When I finished my part, I was so lost that, to this day, I often dream of walking the streets of Macragge, with the colorful shadows of the market tarpaulin falling in front of me in the sun, and the shouts of the vendors and the sound of them fanning themselves with their straw hats interweaving into a natural tune, like the rolling of wheat or the waves caused by a waterwheel in a stream.

In order to write this afterword, I read through the stories written by all of us again. It was a delightful process, and I saw that we all described the legends we saw with a considerable degree of affection.

I saw frost and snow blowing across the plains of Fenris, cold clean rain falling from the teeth of gargoyles into the drains of Nostramo, steel gleaming in the light of Medusa, the sands of Colchis shining at noon around the fires, the winds of Chogoria blowing across the vast meadows...

The best of the human empire is encapsulated in these wonderful planets, and the planets bring their stories to readers through our hands.

Well, I hope this is not our boasting and that our readers will equally enjoy these stories of different styles.

But you must know that the reason why the Space Wolves chapters are free of typos is obviously thanks to our few proofreaders. Only the throne knows whether these people did it intentionally or not!

By the way, Lord Morse seems to be planning to promote his homemade war games along with the release of this set of books. "Let those little military strategists who like to talk about politics and history waste their energy on war games in their attics," the Lord said, "so that these self-proclaimed martyrs will not stir up trouble in real wars or get into trouble."

We decided to wish him great success with his wargame, what else could we say?

——Marcel Coronel, 001.M31, written in Terra——

Perturabo rubbed his temple, smoothing back the nerve cables.

On his seat, a servo-mechanical arm automatically stretched out and closed the lids of the paint cans on the table one by one for him, and identified the used pens - each one was made of natural animal hair, not the artificial hair brushes that the upper-class nobles of the hive were qualified to use, and dipped them in the pen holder, waiting to be cleaned later.

"You are here?" Perturabo said. "Any updates on the Imperial arrangements?"

"Or look at what you've been doing lately," Morse replied, pulling out his chair and sitting down. "You've got time to make models. It doesn't look like the murder star is putting too much pressure on you."

"The situation is not bad. Compared to the battles the Iron Warriors have experienced before, dealing with giant spiders is relatively simple. Moreover, they have no air defense capabilities at all." The Iron Lord nodded slightly, as if to emphasize the difficulty of their current battle. "It's just that the Emperor's Children's airdrops and close combat are indeed not conducive to fighting against these monsters."

"Eidolon will be demoted by Fulgrim. He caused the Emperor's Children to ask us for help."

"What about you? Have you finished editing that book recently?"

"There are still a few manuscripts to be completed. The Memoirist in charge of the Word Bearers has just left, and the guy in charge of the Iron Hands has made a mistake in his mechanical modification, so everything he writes now looks like an experimental data report. Finally... maybe I'll find someone to write an afterword. I don't want to write it myself. Writing a preface is boring enough. In this way, we can finish this project."

Morse yawned deliberately, "It's a huge project that took more than a hundred years."

"That's because you are too inefficient." Perturabo shook his head mercilessly and put aside the vehicle he was painting with a brush on his desk.

"Is more than a hundred years still too slow? Then you must not have a deep enough understanding of the Empire's administrative system, great Lord of Iron. Don't use the efficiency of the Olympia Cluster to replace our noble and unusual Imperial Ministry of the Interior..."

Perturabo ignored Morse's sarcasm and chose to move on to the next topic: "If you have time, we-"

An orange message suddenly popped up on the screen in front of him. The source of the signal was very unfamiliar and was not within the Empire's recognition system.

"It's the orbital warning beacon that the Emperor's Children mentioned," Perturabo muttered, and considering that Morse was here, he projected the specific information onto the screen.

"Decoding so quickly?" Morse raised an eyebrow. "Did you update the decoding system?"

"No," Perturabo frowned. "This message is in Gothic. The sender is...Interlex?"

(End of this chapter)