You are standing at the bottom of the forge's soot caked and flaking ramparts. A confusing array of bolted on plating, venting systems, and spine wreathed gothic pillars all slowly fading to the vagaries of time. It goes on up and mixes into toxic clouds of its own making. Here and there you make out epithets bolted onto the wall, shedding rusty tear dust in memory of a fallen Baneblade, or a noted techpriest or some other machine in service of the Omnissiah. Some of the pilgrims anoint blessed oils and waft incense to these memorial plates and rust eaten murals. How could this mountain, stretching many kilometres into the sky, be the work of man? How? That innate existential confusion still brews in you and your eyes often go blurry with tears and your stomach churns. You rest your back on the wall. Now it has been a month of ration paste, idyllic chatter, and a sense of awkwardness and confusion but not boredom.

Against your back is the proof of Man's might and capabilities forged in rock-crete and Adamantium but you look out into the dancing dusts and see the tops of tents jutting out. And slumping figures, their bare bodies bruised with shock mauls and piercing dust grains... such a contrast it all is, yet you do understand that this is the only way mankind has clung to this precipice of corpse strewn galactic rule...

.

.

Your eyes close and dreams flow:

Lively fields of greens... forests with birds of all colours...Oh how different Signicum Tertius was! With continent wide forests and lush fields of crops. The cities, though housing millions, so much more spacious. You recall all your friends and your family... you find yourself thinking that all this is unnecessary brutality... but then you remember the horror you have encountered on your way to Sol's very own light... the green monsters. How they had flung men across the room with just one swipe. How they had blown to cinders one of your ships, killing hundreds of thousands. You remember your brother Dom gasping for air with a head sized hole blown through his chest...

You wake up sweating and soothe yourself by reminding you of your life-long mission. You think of the time you saw the blue green orb of your home as you departed it some 109 years ago as a young man of 17. Two brothers taking oaths to deliver the offering of metal to Holy Mars and secure a trade agreement with the mechanicum to usher in a new age of progress.

Your father, a distant man, had many sons and never knew you so well and you felt no partiality to him. Your sobbing mother knew you wouldn't live long enough to make the return trip and she wouldn't see you again. You remember her frantic kisses and teary hugs... you miss her even now...

And Dom... he had been your mentor and you reminisce about your adventures through the decades. His death is a haunting reminder of how insignificant all that you do is... after so many years of warp-travelling, bribing Imperial transport management stations, and waiting on unremembered worlds for your fleet to refuel, he was the one constant you had accepted. But a single Ork had taken him... and it wasn't your first time fighting off freebooters either... you let words of vengeance escape from your lips and your fist clasps. Your artificial heart feels all out of sync again... but you shrug that cold anger away and the reality of the present condenses. You are here, upon Mars, mere days away from securing agreements and turning your eyes next to Terra and send your progeny back to your home in Segmentum Pacificus to be heralded as angelic Heroes when they are in the 11th decade of life in their turn. You want to live out the last few years of your extended life bathed in Sol's light... and you wish to walk upon Terra's eccumenopolitan surface...

You speak to yourself to calm your angst:

" You are here to ensure prosperity to your people. You must bring honour to your house. You cannot despair. You cannot be selfish. Emperor protects."

A voice calls out with a generic dictat of machine soothing. It's not quite human but not quite like the grainy voice one would expect from a skitarii or red priest.

A young man stands, his face stained with ash and unmarred by machine implants except for a bionic eye and hints of gold ringed wire linked to the sides of his head but mostly hidden by black dreadlocks. His machine eye flickers and expands as he grips his staff with an ornate skull-speaker atop and wires drooping: laden with gear totems and other paraphernalia. Uncoifed he stands, free hand outstretched in praise. His robes flutter to the Martian gales.