For your consideration:
A plot, a ploy, a story of strife.
A war of worlds to claim of all life.
A stranger from a land of fire and ash.
It takes three to burn but only two to crash.
In the grim darkness of the far future, he finds himself in the blurry greyness of a distant past. For more than ten thousand years, his people have been fighting a never-ending war in the name of the God-Emperor, the Master of Mankind. Blood shed only where He demands, dying only by His will. He was but a single drop in the rolling oceans of His inexhaustible armies to wage battle across His million worlds. A thousand souls a day to keep him sustained and then ten thousand more.
Yet now he finds himself without the comfort of his faith. Once he was a single amongst an infinite many. Now he is singular and out of place. He fights a battle unfamiliar but has become his own. A manipulation by the accursed gods or perhaps simply a twist of fate? How different are the two and how much are they the same?
To be a man in his world is to be one amongst untold trillions. To be a man of their world is to be unique. To be a man in his world is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. To be a man of their world is to live in leisure and sedentary. To be a man of his world is to know all the far reaches of the void and see nothing but carnage and chaos. To be a man of their world is to take their first steps into the unknown. To be a man of his world is to fight for something greater than himself. To be a man of their world is to fight only for themself.
And now he must fight to protect their world. Else, should he fail, forget the power of technology and science, and forget the promise of progress and understanding. For in the grim dark future, there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
And those thirsting gods are coming.
