i am…

I was just a boy, barely eight years old, growing up in the underbelly of the hives. No father, no mother—only the streets claimed me. A bastard rat, scurrying among the rest. Hunger gnawed at me constantly, sharper than any blade the enforcers carried. One day, I found a large rat, injured and twitching in the filth. I killed it with a shard of rusted metal and ate it raw, bones and all. The taste never left me.

To the people of the Omni-Imperium, I was nothing but a pest. Too weak to work the labor gangs, too small to carry the loads they demanded. Real food was a dream. The only thing the government dispensed was Sacred Pudding—grayish slop served in dented cans. It had the wet, yielding consistency of soft flesh, with crunchy bits scattered throughout and a slick, clear film of discharge floating on top from years in storage. Everyone knew what it was made from. No one spoke of it.

I spent my days wandering the canals, hunting live rats because it was easier than stealing pudding from the ration priests. That was where I found it.

Half-buried in a puddle of someone else’s vomit lay the artifact. Its cover bore a brown, caved-in design, like something ancient and rotten, but the lining inside glowed with a sickly orange light. The moment my fingers brushed it, the thing lunged. It merged with my hand, burrowing into flesh and bone like a living parasite. Pain exploded through me. I screamed, staggered, and fell unconscious into the black water of the canal.

I remember nothing of the fall, only a voice later—low and humming. “The boy has been enlightened.”

When I woke again, I stood in the middle of a busy city walkway on one of the mid-hive levels. My dorsal hand throbbed. The artifact had reshaped itself into a rough stone embedded in my palm. It began to shine. Pus welled around it, boiling and hissing. My body locked in place, paralyzed by confusion and terror. Then the explosion came.

A blinding orange light ripped outward from the stone. The blast erased three entire levels of the hive city in an instant—walkways, hab-blocks, and thousands of lives turned to ash and molten slag.

I regained consciousness among the burned corpses. The air reeked of cooked meat and promethium. A battle raged around me. I saw a cultist drop to his knees in front of me, laughing wildly as he sliced open the skin atop his own skull and ripped it backward like a hood. Blood sprayed across my face. A searing light poured from the exposed cranium, and something monstrous began crawling out—wet, thrashing, demonic. Omni-Imperium soldiers poured las-repeater fire into it, but the thing kept emerging while the cultist laughed in ecstasy.

I ran.

The same cultist found me again. He grabbed me by the collar and dragged me into a nearby warehouse, slamming the door behind us. I fought like a cornered animal, kicking and clawing, but he held me still with surprising strength. Exhausted, I finally went limp. The elderly figure lowered his hood. His mouth had been crudely sewn shut with black thread. He raised a single finger to what remained of his lips in the universal sign for silence. I calmed.

He reached out and touched the stone in my hand. Images flooded my mind—visions of fallen empires, whispering gods, and a path beyond the flesh. I stopped struggling.

After that, I followed him. He fed me real food for the first time in my life: fruits and spiced meats from the royal planets. I became a prophet while still a child. The more I studied, the more I devoted myself to the Hushed Enlightenment, the more my body betrayed me. My hair fell out in clumps. My skin withered and cracked. My eyes clouded and sank deeper into my skull. Year by year I became less a boy and more a walking husk—dry, brittle, barely human. Yet my soul remained intact, burning brighter as the vessel around it decayed.

I grew into a haunting figure, the living embodiment of the cult’s will. I was the solution to the fallen Patriarch—the one who had loved his father yet been disgusted by his ideology, shunned by the very empire he once served. As decades passed, my mind grew more deranged, fractured by the limitations of this failing physiology. The ancient man they now call The Ascended Father Rhok Vale… that is me.

And the stone still burns my mind and provides visions to destroy the Omni-Imperium.