The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,6

were His counsellors, we were His artisans. We were the first glimpse at what the species could become, if shepherded aright and unshackled from its vicious weaknesses.

Of course, we were taught to fight. He knew that war would come. It was a necessary part of the ascension, though it was never destined to last for eternity. We were the guardians of a new age, and had to be strong enough to keep it secure.

We failed in that, and now wear the mark of that failure in the black robes that cover our auramite. It is a permanent reminder, replacing the cloaks of blood-red that once adorned our battleplate. It weighs heavy with every one of us, for we know more of the nature of the fall than most. We still recite the old stories, and we study in the lost archives where we alone are suffered to tread, and so do not have the comforting illusions of ignorance to salve the wound. In a galaxy defined by ignorance, we remember. We cultivate the shards of the thing that was broken, and remain aware of what would have been.

I think sometimes that this knowledge is the most severe of our many burdens. Any brutal soul may fight if he has the goal ahead of him. We fight knowing that our truest purpose lies behind us, and all that remains is faithfulness to an extinguished vision.

But still we preserve. We tend the things of value that have survived. We seek to embody His will in all things. We cleave to His light as the darkness gathers. We interpret, we study, we delve into the philosophy of the ages.

We have many duties. But that is just as it should be, for we are not simple creations. The aeons have changed us in many ways, but not in that.

We were a thousand things to a thousand souls, but we were never soldiers.

I am Valerian, Shield-Captain of the Palaiologian Chamber of the Hykanatoi. Like all my brothers, I have many other names, carved in a long trail one after the other along the inside of my breastplate. Some names were earned in combat, many more were earned after contemplation of the mysteries. We cleave to this old practice, though I do not know for certain if we observe the rituals correctly. So much has been lost as the millennia unwind, and most significant of all is certainty.

In our theology, we talk of the speculum certus and the speculum obscurus. The first of these is the study of what is already known. If this strikes you as pointless, allow me to respectfully demur, for it is one thing to know what the Emperor said, and quite another to know what He meant.

He left no written testimony. The entirety of what we know of Him is revealed either through the records of remembrancers or the ecstatic visions gifted to the faithful. And thus, when a thing is placed in the canon of the certus, the intention behind it can never be fixed with surety. There are arguments nearly ten thousand years old concerning single utterances committed to parchment a hundred years after He spoke last from mortal lips. There are savants in the Tower of Hegemon who have devoted their entire lives to the interpretation of such fragments, and we do not scorn them, for their study is the study of fate’s weft itself. Even now, it is possible to gain enlightenment through meditation on the words of those who lived then.

But if the matter of the certus provokes debate, then that is nothing to the controversy of the obscurus, for the Emperor left much unsaid that He would doubtless have made clear in time. There were things He would have wished us to know, had there only been the opportunity to place it on record. We look out from our spires at the realm of mankind as it exists now, and we can only speculate what His intention is towards it. This is the study of the Emperor’s Will, revealed in dreams and the patient scrutiny of arcane logic.

If such matters bore or baffle you, then forgive me, for they are the objects of my very existence. I am named philologus by my ­brothers – the scholar. If I did not have my many other duties, I could imagine a life immersed in the minutiae of such philosophy. That may appear as indulgent, and a waste of the gifts given to me, but such would be