At the orbital unloading depots, penal serfs were worked to death. But the continent-wide subterranean warehouses on the planet’s surface had long since surpassed capacity. There were towering silos of blood plasma, columns of Baneblades, mountains of munitions, millions of troopers stuffed into increasingly cramped and foetid conditions.

There was nowhere to unload and no way shipmasters could go back to their homeworlds with their tithes unfulfilled. And yet more freight-craft were arriving, their hangars packed full of war materiel for a battlefront that had already been lost.

Until a few years earlier, Malouri had been a critical hub in the web of supply routes that equipped the eternal warzone of the Cadian Gate. But Cadia had fallen. It was as if a drainage pipe deep in some hive had been blocked. Sewage was backing up by the hour while the arthritic wheels of the Imperium of Man ground on regardless, trapped in ruts worn ten thousand years deep.

There was no official news, of course. No word of the calamity that had befallen the worlds of the Cadian Gate. But there were always rumours. They spoke of the rout of whole sectors of Imperial control. An Imperium both rotten and decayed. The abject failure of their masters.

The truth of these rumours meant they had to be suppressed mercilessly. There were draconian punishments for even knowing someone who might have heard such dreadful whispers. Each morning, more offenders were strung up along the lines of barrack gibbets. But, as pus seeps from a wound, the truth was getting out.

The Cadian Gate had fallen. Malouri was a depot world without a war to supply.

Father Eris Bellona, a short, bearded priest attached to an Imperial Guard regiment of Elnaur Chasseurs, changed all that.

It should be clear: Father Bellona was no heretic seduced by whispers and lies. He was a veteran of many years and many battlefields. He had bled many times for the Emperor of Mankind. He knew enough of the Imperium to know that what he was being told was a lie.

The scale of the catastrophe froze his blood. The future of humanity hung by a fraying thread.

Sometimes, isolation from the madness brought clear thought. He withdrew to his cell, meditating on the perilous state of the Imperium of Man. A solution began to make itself clear to him. Nebulous ideas solidified. The logic of his reasoning led him to a cold understanding.

He spent a further fortnight in bouts of extreme fasting and devout prayer. On the last night, a glowing yellow light appeared in the air above his head. It was a golden skull, gleaming as if brightly polished, the inset diamond eyes radiant with an inner light. It spoke to him with words of sublime portent and meaning.