But maybe that is too much. Too wide. It would take too long to tell all of it. Let us work at a scale comprehensible to human minds. You may think that means starting at the conception of our Messiah. But that holds little interest for me: Are we not programmed to want the exciting parts right away? Since you have mandated me as storyteller, I shall choose where we begin as it suits my fancy. Let us start at the center of the Empire of the Faithful, not too long before our current point in time. There is a ship, coming through a portal. Its name is Wolf at the Door. A narrow blade of a thing, half metal and half holystone, polished to reflect starlight. It arrives around midday standard universal time, nestled in a loose flotilla of travelers from the duchy of Apis. This ship belongs to the seventeenth Duke of Apis, Lord Bichap Amran Argan, he/him pronouns, and it is his personal ship, part pleasure cruiser and part diplomatic vessel. Its destination is the Imperial Capital, a gloriously jeweled confabulation of structures: domes and arches and turrets fused into a floating shape, thick in the center and tapering to glittering minarets at either pole. A colony suspended in an inky sea, filled with nobility and scientists and magnates of industry. A locus of power, in fact the locus of power in the Empire of the Faithful, to which those seeking power are also drawn. This is what The Cause of Labour has become, hundreds of years after its engines were stilled. The body of the original ship lies at the core of the Capital as a seed lies in a fruit. You are familiar with this, I do believe. Yet that fact is often obscured in the books of the Faithful. I wonder how many know?

Wolf at the Door, then. It has come to the Capital for a very specific purpose. It carries in its decks the nixen believed to be the Last Savior of the Faithful, who not a week prior had saved a far-flung colony from annihilation by the Heretics. Or so it was said. Misery Nomaki, they/she pronouns, newly twenty and newly thrust into a world they have no understanding of, a world so far removed from their upbringing it might as well be a different society altogether. Brought to the Imperial Capital at behest of the Church, to seek an audience with a skeptical Emperor. A herald of trouble, this Misery Nomaki. Into the pretty, fragile shells of empire they come like a wrecking ball. Let us make a beginning here, where there is none.

In a steel-walled room encysted in the Capital’s guts, the Last Savior of the Faithful is trying to turn a door to jelly. Misery Nomaki, chosen of the Forge, presses herself against the flat glossy surface, cold as dead marble, and says, “Come the fuck on.”