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The tiles were cold on his face. Back again.
He stood up. Better now.
'Terror's the certainty', the Commissar whispered to himself, 'Evil the putrid excess of self-conscious and self-justifying goodness'. He removed the glass from his hands with a tweezers and washed them in Amsec, watching red blood swirl down a white porcelain bowl. He bound his hands in bandages and resolved to escape the room that he had made his prison.
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The Commissar poked his head out of the door. The quarters were empty, 200 people employed elsewhere. By design? The Anomiens were insubstantial and could seemingly dissapear at will. The pressure of unseen eyes weighed down on the Commissar as he walked up the corridor, up and out to the surface. Ventilation pulses, lights hum, heart beats. Anxiety crept into his mind, doubts a Commissar should not have. Fragments of unwarranted dreams surfaced, with accompanying text from the Uplifting Primer:
'...more likely to crack...feel unwell...visions...'
The Taint. Warp psychosis. Unsanctioned psyker.
Bile rose as he increased pace, taking steps two at a time, like a man starved of oxygen struggling towards light from dark depths, less control, more frantic now '...a grave risk to those around them...mindless killers'. He laughed as the images intensified, the same horrible screaming blankness. 'If you note any strange behaviour, inform your Commissar immediately.' The Commissar, the cold, unthinking, killing machine. That was someone else, not the man who tripped on a step, but continued scrambling to the surface, for release, to respire, to see something beyond grey concrete and antithesis.
The images changed quality. An agri-world. Oceans of grass. A pale boy, son of a military man. Two soldier boys, who grew up together, mirror images of each other. Words he would never forget, promises that he broke, shattered into ten million pieces, that he smashed and threw up into the sky where they came to rest as stars. The Commissar broke through the final door at the top of the stairs, tears washing away blood.
He broke through to the balcony, out to the very edge and felt the embrace of cold, dead stars.
He had thrown it all away. There was nothing here. Endless brutal rock reflected who he had become and what he had lost. There was no life here. He broke down and hung from the rail, everything at last too much, 10 years of conditioning and atrocity washed away in bitter drops.
Footsteps.
The Commissar raised his head, breathing raggedly, his breath catching in his throat. Unshaven, in tears and bleeding, he was a mess.
Mono walked to the rail, clean and inhuman.
They stood.
'You're beginning to understand.'
He stared over the planets' surface, it's mysteries known only to him.
Mono, a name of monumental etched glass, clear, clean, brilliant.
Mono, the One, this great man.
How he hated him.
Before the Commissar could rail against the Commander, he was gone, leaving the Commissar bereft and standing on the edge. Everything fell inwards, despair filling the vacuum. Astropath contact with the outside was impossible, some quirk of the planet. He had been unconscious, slumped from excess and pain while the last shuttle for 3 months had left. There was no escape. Rage turned against the self, the Commissar fingering the trigger of his bolt pistol. He was filthy and corrupt. He would give himself absolution, self-administer the Emperor's Justice to one corrupted by the Ruinous Powers.
Another crate of Amsec waited in his quarters, and a suicide pact with himself.
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