Ignatius's Dilemma

 The Imperium cannot be destroyed.

This may sound defeatist, coming from a Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons Legion, a son of the Crimson King. But I am simply stating the truth.

The Imperium is vast. At any given point of time, it is comprised of a million systems, with trillions upon trillions of citizens slaving away to support its rotting carcass. It remains in an undying state, no longer able to prosper, but also unable to truly die. For every world we or the foul xenos take, the Imperium will recover another, through one of their crusades...or because of infighting between the heretic legions. No matter how we nibble away at its bloated body, the Imperium endures. And it survives. The orks are unable to hold any number of worlds at once, inevitably drawn away by the next sector of violence and abandoning their prizes the moment peace sets in. The tyranids move on after devouring each world, only for the genius of Belisarius Cawl and the esoteric devices of the Adeptus Mechanicus to restore these so-called dead worlds. The t'au empire is currently too small to pose a threat, and they constantly lose more worlds than they take, as confined as they are to the Damocles Gulf. The aeldari are a dying race, with their numbers too few to make a dent on the Imperium's inexhaustible army. Only the necrons threaten the Imperium, but their attention is divided between the Imperium, the hive fleets of the tyranids and the legions from the immaterium. The denizens of the warp have realized the danger of these ancient xenos, and are moving to put schemes in motion to halt their...stifling.

But no matter the number of threats attacking the Imperium from within and without, it endures. It survives. It cannot be destroyed. Even sundered in half by the Cicatrix Maledictum, both sides of the Imperium endure, bearing witness to acts of heroism not seen since the Great Crusade. And in this darkest hour, the Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, has returned. Leading the Indomitus Crusade, he has recaptured large swathes of the area they call Imperium Sanctus. My father, Magnus, had attempted to slay his brother on the rocky surface of Luna, only to fail. The Imperium will not die.

Even the warmaster, Ezekyle Abaddon, knows this. For all of his bluster, he knows that we cannot destroy the Imperium. There are many who deride him, who label him a failure or call him "armless" or toothless because he failed to lay low the Imperium even after twelve Black Crusades. Only the thirteenth Black Crusade, they argue, can be considered a success...and even then, the Imperium was not destroyed, only cleaved in half by Abaddon's machinations.

They are fools.

Abaddon is aware that the Imperium cannot be destroyed. He understands the vast scale of the enemy, the sheer magnitude of the task before him. His goals during the twelve Black Crusades had never been to destroy the Imperium. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluded. You can launch a hundred Black Crusades and still the Imperium will endure. It has to survive.

What most of us traitors do not understand is that we depend on our very enemy to survive. If the Imperium ceases to exist, so do we. The traitor legions have lost much of our resources and production ability. The few daemon forge worlds that exist, they do not manufacture on the scale of the Martian forge worlds allied to Terra. And when they do, their ships, weapons and vehicles are not as reliable, chained as their machine-spirits are to volatile daemons, and just as likely to turn on their owners as their targets. We do not have the trillions of citizens we need to recruit into our legions, for many of them do not survive the intercine warfare, betrayals, plagues, mutations and ruthlessness that plague the daemon worlds in the Eye of Terror. If the Imperium falls, we lose a steady supply of recruits and materiel. We would then be vulnerable to each other...and the myriad xenos race.

Even the immaterium cannot survive without the Imperium...without races to corrupt. The warp is enriched by the souls of humans. It thrives on conflict, on corruption. Without the Imperium to corrupt, as paradoxical as it sounds, Chaos cannot survive. They are two sides of the same coin. The Changer of Ways knows this. For what is Tzeentch's goal, if not to corrupt the innocent? The innocent must endure, must remain, must even prosper, for the game ends the moment they have all been corrupted. Even the Dark Prince knows that the sweetest pleasure comes from successfully tempting the purest that the Imperium has to offer. The Plaguefather too needs an inexhaustible population to infect, for those who inhabit the worlds under his thrall do not survive long enough for him to brew new concoctions. As for the Blood God, he cares not where the blood flows from, as long as it flows. And the conflict between the Imperium and the traitors bring about the most amount of bloodshed, even more so than the bitterest wars between us renegades.

This is the greatest paradox of Chaos. While we strive to corrupt and invade the Imperium, we cannot afford to let it die, lest it leads to our own annihilation.

Abaddon realizes this. As much as he hates the Imperium, he will not destroy it. He cannot. He will corrupt the Imperium as much as he can, deliver as many fatal wounds as he can, and then he will withdraw. He will deny as many advantages to the Imperium as possible, such as the Nachmund Gauntlet. His aim is to bring as much suffering to the Imperium as possible, to bring it to its knees and see it humbled. But he will not destroy it, for he recognizes the impossibility of the task.

He is wiser than most of the deluded fools who believe him a failure, who think they would do better in his place, that they would be able to slay the leviathan that is the Imperium.

I contemplate on this wistfully, even as I sit aboard the command throne in my battle barge, Honor of Tizca. I am probably more aware of the indispensability of the Imperium to our existence, which is why I continue to serve it, albeit in a twisted fashion. The Sapphire Drakes that I have recruited to my legion, who now comprise of the majority of my thrallband, believe my claims of loyalty. I have not deceived them. As our survival depends on that of the Imperium, I refuse to allow its destruction.

Yet, this brings about another paradox. If I believe that the Imperium cannot be destroyed, then no matter my actions - or the actions of my brothers and cousins, the actions of the other traitor legions - the Imperium will never be destroyed. Nothing I do matters. There is no need for me to intervene, to either stand in the Imperium's defense or invade its territory. It will endure, with or without my intervention.

I suppose this sets me apart from the warmaster. Unlike Abaddon, I do not like to cause suffering for its sake. It feels...so petty. Elevated from mortals as we are, such trivial agendas should be beneath us. I work for enlightenment. The Imperium may call it heresy, but they must accept the knowledge of Chaos. For, like us, the Imperium cannot survive without Chaos.

I work not simply for the sake of destruction, but also to save those I have enlightened from the narrow-minded authorities they are beholden to. I must endeavor to protect enlightened populations from the wrath of the Inquisition, who accuse them of heresy, and prevent Exterminatus from scouring them from the Imperium. They must all know...must be privy to the knowledge I hold, whether Inquisitor or menial laborer. For this was the grand dream that my father and the Thousand Sons had been working toward ten millennia ago. An age of enlightenment in the Imperium, where no citizen would ever be barred from knowledge...from the truth.

However, in order to pursue those goals and protect the Imperium from itself, I need materiel. I need to rearm and resupply my fleet. The Sapphire Drakes require more ammunition and daemon engines. And I desire more tomes and ancient relics.

As such, I find my fleet drifting toward Kryptos VIII. I do not know why I have been drawn here. Unlike my brothers of the Corvidae, I do not tend toward the powers of prescience. I excel more in the direct application of power, much like the Pyrae that I used to learn under, before we reformed the cults into the nine we have today, and I declared myself of the Cult of Magic.

But there is something there...a disturbance in the eddies of the warp currents around the system that even I can sense. An event of tremendous magnitude will be occurring in the near future, I am sure of it. Someone from a cousin legion has put his machinations into place...and is instigating an event to swallow the system in a warp storm. To unleash hordes of daemons from the immaterium to swallow this sector.

An intriguing prospect, but one that runs counter to my own agenda.

"Brother." Makhat approached, the servos of his heavy Terminator armor clanking from the motion. "We have arrived."

"Yes, we have." I nodded, my eyes riveted upon the view that the bridge windows offered me. The geller field had powered down, allowing the adamantium shafts to slide from the screen and display the dull yellow rays from the system's star. Given our distance, most of the light was days old.

"What is our purpose here?"

"Did I not already tell you?" I was surprised. I was certain I had briefed the officer cadre of the Sapphire Drakes before we made our translation from the warp. "We are here to...plunder. We are running low on supplies and ammunition. We need...vehicles and weapons. And more ships for our fleet."

The Sapphire Drakes fleet that I had acquired had not been very big. Including the Honor of Tizca, we had two battle barges and three strike cruisers, along with twelve escorts. Most had been destroyed during the flight from the Inquisition and the Adeptus Custodes. Fortunately, I was able to rescue almost the entire Chapter. Most of the renegade Space Marines had been onboard their flagship, the Azure Dragon, a dazzling battle barge produced by the forge world of Draconis IV. A young upstart, ferocious and aggressive, its temperament contrasted against the antiquated beauty and sagely patience of the Honor of Tizca, which had been plying the routes between the Eye and Terror and the Imperium for over ten millennia.

Compared to the raiders of the Red Corsairs, who we had a slight run-in, and the vast armada of the Black Legion, my small fleet was nothing. I do not think the warmaster approves of my self-appointed missions, and we clash against each other more often than we do against Imperial forces.

In order to survive, we had no choice but to expand our fleet.

However, Makhat's lip curled at my use of the word.

"We are to raid an Imperial planet for resources?" He asked, his tone distasteful. I understood his pain. Not long ago, the Sapphire Drakes were loyal, betrayed by the very Imperium they served. Attacking the subjects they were sworn to protect was...difficult for them. They had only gone along with me because I assured them of my loyalty to the Imperium. That, like them, I had simply been misunderstood.

The Inquisition was the true enemy.

"I would prefer to avoid that if necessary, but..." I trailed off, looking away. "Necessity demands for it. If we do not obtain materiel, we will not survive. Then we will not be able to do our duty."

"Isn't our duty to protect the Imperium, and not to rob it?"

"Depends on who we are protecting, doesn't it?" I asked with a sigh. "We will protect the innocent, the unarmed...the enlightened. But when we are staring down the barrels of your brother Astarte Chapters or the Exterminatus fleets of the Inquisition, who will protect us from them?"

Makhat said nothing, his tanned face brooding. But he did not refute my statement.

I turned back to the windows, closing my eyes briefly to savor the warp currents that unfurled from one of the planets like tendrils. There was something familiar about these energies, something...

"Lord." The shipmaster of the Honor of Tizca, a mortal named Tyrone, reported to me. "We are picking up readings from the auspexes."

"What readings, Captain?" I asked, rising from my command throne and toward the console of the communication officer. Commander Carter turned to me, bowing his head when he caught sight of the hulking form of my Terminator armor.

"These signatures...my lord, I believe they belong to the ships of the Iron Warriors...and I believe there are at least three ships from the Word Bearers, with one of them classed as a capital ship at least."

A smile slowly spread across my face as I digested the information. The Word Bearers and Iron Warriors were here. That explained this familiar sensation. The Word Bearers were most likely here to conduct some kind of ritual, to summon a greater daemon from the warp and unleash it upon the luckless Imperials. They probably recruited the Iron Warriors to their cause, though undoubtedly Perturabo's sons would have their own agenda.

What an opportunity. The Iron Warriors would have plenty of materiel, war engines and ammunition. And as I studied the auspex, I could make out at least thirty ships.

"The Emperor provides, brother Makhat," I said, turning toward the former chief Librarian of the Sapphire Drakes. "We have our targets. You can begin organizing boarding parties. We are going to grab some ships."