The First Heretic

Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it. Existence is cold and arbitrary in a godless galaxy – faith shapes us, raises us above all other life, defines us as perfect in our sentience.

In eras where faith was choked, weakness and decay infested the species, withering its innards. That is something the Emperor, beloved by all, has always known, but never admits.

Yet he knows, and he forges his empire accordingly. A god need not be named a god in order to stand in supremacy. Names are meaningless. Supremacy matters – and my father stands ascendant over all mortal life in the galaxy: a god in power, a god in wrath, a god in vision.

A god in all but name.

The Old Faith of Colchis is one that shares roots in thousands of human cultures, across thousands of worlds. That alone is evidence that somewhere within its meandering parables, and the unsubtle blending of myth into history and history into myth, there exists a core of absolute truth.

The loveliest legend is that of the empyrean, the Primordial Truth.

It is known by countless names, of course. The empyrean is the name we spoke on Colchis. Others named it heaven – a means of existing into eternity, long after the death of the mortal form. A realm of infinite possibility: a paradise of potential where the souls of every mortal in history coil around one another.

Even I know such things are myths, stories spoken and passed down imperfectly through countless generations.

But... imagine it. Imagine the reality behind the myths. Imagine a place in the universe where gods and mortals meet. Imagine the miracles of power that could be performed.

Imagine a state of utter chaos, utter purity, where anything is possible. Life ends in death, but existence does not.

If there is truth to the Old Faith, I will find it.

He turns the third card. A haze of heat makes the sky shimmer above a skyline of towers and domes. Colchis. The City of Grey Flowers. Home.

The people of Colchis have always looked to the stars for answers. The Legion born on that world, the Bearers of the Word, is no exception. Many Chapters within the Legion are named for the constellations that brighten the night sky. Even the name they bestowed upon me, the name spoken by no one outside the Legion, has its foundations in antiquity. ‘Aurelian’, they call out as they wage war. ‘The golden’.

Yet its linguistic roots go further back, to a truer meaning, created by those ancestors that forever stared skyward for inspiration.

Aurelian. The sun.