Title: The Annual Festival of Terra: A Testament of Devotion and Madness
As the annual Festival of Terror draws near, the canyons of Terra’s world city tremble with anticipation. The looping thorofares and crumbling causeways pulse with life, swelling with a living carpet of supplicants. Their chants echo through the city, their bodies sway in unison, moving with the inexorable purpose of an invading army towards the cavernous moors of the outer Palace itself.
Hovering above this sea of humanity are the attack crafts of the Adeptus Arbites, the black-clad judges more watchful than ever for the bad seeds hidden among the multitudes. Every passing hour witnesses them swooping into the throngs, dragging out a ranting disciple or witch in potentia and bundling them into the crew bay of their hovering scrutiny lifters.
The air is hot, and a frenzy grips the megapolis. Supplicants lose their minds amid the dust, driven to madness by the fervor of the event. The colossal walls of the outer Palace, massive beyond imagination, loom over the lesser towers, waiting for the inundation to crash against their flanks. The Festival honors the sacrifice of the Emperor’s son, Primar Sanguinius, and for Terra, it inevitably turns into a catastrophe.
Billions of pilgrims from all corners of the Imperium arrive on Terra, physically flooding every inch of the already scarce free space. Few achieve their goal, but for the native inhabitants, this Festival signifies more work, as the entire crowd needs to be controlled, requiring almost as many people as the pilgrims themselves.
The pilgrim columns swell into a living ocean of red-robed humanity; teeming millions marching forth in dirty, swaying ranks. They are dying in their droves, suffocated, parched, and withered from months without adequate food or water, bloated with contagion from the passage in stinking void holes. Still, they trudge onwards, crying out for salvation, swinging the regulation blood lanterns they had paid their last coin to obtain.
Hovering high in their Raptor crowd suppression gunships, the arbitrators can only watch the progress, powerless against the current of blind fanaticism. Millions of troops from the Astra Militarum regiments line the high places, standing in ranks five deep. They could empty their las-gun power packs ten times over and make little more than a dent in those numbers.
In the final days of the celebration, even the Inquisition cannot promptly utilize their communication channels, and even the Adeptus Custodes, the personal guards of the emperor, cannot leave this event unattended.
Terra is undoubtedly the center of Imperial power, a planet into which streams of ships from across the galaxy flow and countless people strive to reach. The planet produces absolutely nothing; all its resources have long been exhausted. No new buildings have been constructed on it for thousands of years, as there is simply no room. People here are just as much cogs in a vast machine as on any other planet.
When you receive a gift, always be ready to give something in return. There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal; there is no strength in flesh, only weakness; there is no constancy in flesh, only decay; there is no certainty in flesh but death.
Since the dawn of human civilization, knowledge has been one of the most valuable treasures. From methods of fire-making and ways to hunt wild animals to blueprints of deadly tanks and the secrets of atomic structure, curiosity and ingenuity led humanity to prosperity. However, the machine uprising at the end of the Age of Technology and the subsequent isolation of human worlds managed to shake this unshakeable paradigm. Humanity lost almost all the treasures it had amassed over millennia, finding itself on the brink of survival. The Cult Mechanicus became essentially a monopolist in the field of technological progress.
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