I wrote this prologue as a kind of teaser before hashing the rest of the story together. It's turning out to be more of a slog than I expected and now that I've cut and pasted it around a bit, I'm not sure whether what follows fits with the rest of the story. Anyone who's read Better the Daemon You Know will be familiar with the main character, and this is the story of how he ended up on the ice world of Orrax after running away from the sororitas convent in Hive Primus, Necromunda. But be warned, the timeline is not strictly linear and this may lead to confusion, I've tried to keep things as clear as possible by heading the sections up in relation to the events of the final chapter. I hope to have this story finished in the next couple of months.
I'd love to know what you think of it, so please review even if you hated it.
Extartius. (November 13th, '06)
A Necromundan Enterprise - Prologue
Two hard-edged men sit in the back of a beaten up limousine, coasting through the sky-lanes of Hive City. Their destination, unbeknownst to the hapless chauffeur, is the nearest drop-shaft that will give them access to the seedy underbelly of the ancient and decaying culture of Necromunda – the Underhive.
One man turns to the other and asks whether he will tell him what their purpose in going there might be. Why in the universe would they want to go there, of all places?
The second man turns to the first and seemingly misinterprets the question. But then again, perhaps he doesn't. Perhaps he just has a story to tell. A story that he has to impart to some other human being before he commits himself to a course of action that may change his life forever.
What's that you say?
You want to know what it was all about?
Well, that's a good question. One that I'm not sure can be answered without telling you the full story.
At first it was all about freedom, but I soon realised that freedom wasn't all it was cracked up to be. You see, when your liberty is taken away from you, so is your responsibility. Obligation is a far greater burden than any other. I had to learn that the hard way... by carrying it!
After that, when I was malingering at the bottom of the social pile, I came to believe that money might be the answer. That belief was quickly expunged. Money can't always buy you happiness, but it will always buy you grief.
I moved on to other belief systems. I put my faith in reputation – a man with a rep can always make enough money to live on and a lot of people who wouldn't have spit on you if you were on fire start to look up to you. But repute it a fickle thing and can soon turn into notoriety. Notoriety leads to resentment, that's when trouble comes back into the pattern. No one likes a man with airs and graces.
I dabbled with religion, but I'm not given to believing just anything that's shoved under my nose. Received Doctrine is a subtle poison of the mind.
Neither did revenge give me the sense of fulfilment I had thought it would. That long personal war had kept me fighting at times, kept me alive for certain – ironic as that may seem. But when it was done all I felt was that long, dark emptiness of the soul.
And so we come to the reason why I'm here in this civilised wasteland. The real reason for living, or at least I hope so. It's kind of a resurgence of something that happened to me a long time ago. Somewhere in the middle of all that philosophical guff I just spouted.
And that's where the story begins... kind of...
The man sits back and his companion, a man who holds his friend in the greatest of esteem, decides not to enlighten him as to the true nature of his original question.
He sits back and listens as Major Escabar Corgan, the Saviour of Five Rivers and Hero of Gunga IV, tells the story of his beginnings.