Museums and Miscreants
By author Baron Steakpuncher
Trazyn the Infinite, Master of the Solemnance Galleries, stared with head tilted at the floating helmet. It was not by any means a unique design. He had had the opportunity to collect a number of Astartes helmets and this one was not especially different from the rest. Older perhaps—a nasty score across its left side which added a certain mystique to the artefact—but it was not functionally different from any of its kin that sat suspended in the plinths along its sides. Then again, that would make the story he would tell to the Galleries' future visitors all the more interesting.
"Well," he humphed with a hiss of core flux, "if any of those brutes can be bothered to appreciate it."
He could understand why his kin might not. Mankind was such an obscure topic to focus on and yet Trazyn had taken the time to add a few of the more interesting artefacts the barbarians had produced to his collection. He had not yet had the chance to collect that psyker warlord of theirs, though he was sure he would find the time if the specimen lived long enough. And he could always collect one of its offspring if it died ahead of time. A final piece for the gallery when that civilisation underwent its eventual implosion and annihilation. A pity really, but the Great Awakening was all but nigh and ten millennia was hardly long enough for them to have a chance of challenging the might of the Infinite Empire.
"Perhaps I could catalogue some of their funerary traditions?" he mused, rubbing his metal chin in a manner much like he had done when he had been alive and… well… Trazyn. "Or maybe I could travel to Ullanor—get a selection of Orks to complete the diorama on Level 42,231."
It was worth considering. Human expansion had cut into Trazyn's intended collection of spare Orkoid subjects. The Ullanor variants might be imperfect but a little bit of falsehood was almost required in a gallery when the original subjects were in large part deceased.
Certainly, he had been forced to make do when it came to his small number of human-centred exhibitions. The fact that it had taken this long to get a full collection of the Astartes was almost an embarrassment in and of itself, but when they were so spread across the galaxy, isolating them was troublesome. He had even been forced to use Scarlet Wave Astartes as a stand in for the Galleries' Thunder Warriors until he had seized one of their cruisers some dozen years prior. But now that problem was solved. He had been able to assemble at least one Astartes and full set of armour from every Legion, which completed the gallery focused on the military pursuits of mankind quite nicely.
Trazyn gazed at his collection for a full solar cycle, gloating internally at his own achievement, until his vision was overlain by a single message which forced him to dial back his chronosense by a full ninety percent. It was not every millennium that one received a summons from the Triarch Praetorians.
Trazyn turned in an instant, striding down the first kilometre of the gallery in mere seconds, mind ablaze with possibilities. "What could the Executioner want with me?" he pondered out loud.
For he had not done anything (that the Praetorians could prove) to warrant such a summons. But he was not truly concerned about a possible death sentence. The Awakened Council would have sent a notification with a great deal more than the paltry nine-hundred pages of gloating, insults and threats that the message had consisted of if they had intended anything untoward.
"No, this is something unexpected. Perhaps that jackal Orikan had another 'prophecy' he gave the council," Trazyn considered.
It was possible, though that did not sit right in his core. It would not explain why they wanted Trazyn either. He had liberated enough artefacts from Council worlds that he was banned from more of them than not, and they had to know that his visual receptors would wander over the course of his visit. Well, he would know soon enough. Perhaps they would send him somewhere with artefacts worth collecting.
As Trazyn left his gallery, staff clacking on the tiled floor as the ancient mechanical monstrosity ambled out, the helmet of the XIII Legion floated silently in its stasis field.