Terra, M32 – In the Ashes of Heresy
The smoke of a thousand censers clung to the cracked stonework of the shrine-temple. Psychopompos Theoctistus, authority of a sect of Theoges on Terra, draped in scarlet finery and smelling faintly of old ink and incense, adjusted his jeweled mitre as he stared across the dusty nave.
“The God-Emperor saves,” he muttered by rote, while waving to the kneeling masses. His voice carried weight, but not conviction. Behind his eyes, cynicism smoldered like a dying torch.
To him, the Creed was power—useful, malleable, absolute. He did not believe. He knew how belief was to be wielded.
In front of him stood a far less ornate figure: Kalen Durei, a gaunt man in threadbare robes. A former remembrancer, once a recorder of Imperial truth in aftermath of the Great Crusade. That truth had turned to ash with the Heresy. Since then, he had drifted: a ghost of purpose, a historian without history.
They had met in a chance moment—Theoctistus seeking a scribe with rhetorical talent, Durei seeking a patron to survive.
“What if,” Durei said, voice hoarse from clouds of incense, “we rely on tools the Emperor once used?”
“Explain,” the Psychopompos replied, intrigued more than offended.
“Subliminal hypno-doctrination. From the old Imperial Truth of the Great Crusade. The cultural mind-programming from times before the Emperor ascended. You lace it under the teachings of Lectitio Divinitatus. In the sermon cadence. In the visuals. The voice patterns. The framing.”
The Psychopompos paused, fingers steepled.
“And if it works?”
“Then even the faithless will kneel.”
Durei worked in solitude, deep beneath the shrine’s archives, surrounded by flickering lumen-strips and multiple vox-receivers and hololithic displays. With him, he had brought a collection of forbidden holovids—remnants of the old Imperial Truth, archived and hidden by his order since the days of the Great Crusade.
He spent long, sleepless nights isolating memetic signals, amplifying subliminal patterns, and mapping and boosting their psychological resonance. From the Psychopompos’s vast library of sermon recordings, he began to weave a liturgy—each word measured, each cadence engineered.
He combined the underlying effect of the Truth with the rhetoric of the Creed, shaping a message that bypassed skepticism and reached straight into the soul.
After weeks of relentless labor, he downloaded the completed sermon to a data-slate, hands shaking with exhaustion and quiet pride.
He named it Sermon 9: Light Without Shadow.
When it was ready, they sat together in the cathedral’s deep vault, hololithic screen flickering before them.
And something happened.
As the Psychopompos’s image recited words he barely remembered writing, the screen pulsed with an impossible radiance. The symbols—flashing and barely visible—pierced their minds like blessed daggers.
They wept.
Kalen fell to his knees. “The God-Emperor, He lives,” he whispered, “in the words… in the space between.”
Theoctistus, shaking, pressed a trembling hand to his chest. “All this time… I spoke of Him. I used His name. But He… He saw me now.”
In that instant, both men were reborn. Not by doctrine. Not by faith. But by a true and terrible presence that had touched their souls.
They copied the holovid.
A million times.
Every shrine, every void-dock, every pilgrim ship. Sermon 9: Light Without Shadow spread like wildfire across the wounded Imperium—not only heard, but felt. It was more than a sermon; it was a spiritual awakening encoded in light and cadence.
And wherever the holovid reached, faith flourished.
Entire hives turned from apathy to devotion. Penal worlds saw riots replaced with prayer. Backwater frontier chapels became crowded with chanting converts. The holovids were more than doctrine—they were keys, unlocking something ancient and buried in the soul of humanity.
Within the Cardinal Theoctistus’s lifetime, the movement he had birthed—once a private experiment in control—had crystallized into the foundation of Imperial faith as we know it. His sermons became templates. His rhythm, law. His language, liturgy.
As the sect around him grew, it became a monolith—a singular force of unshakable doctrine and psychological domination. From these pre-crusade Theoge foundations rose the Temple of the Saviour Emperor, no longer a scattered patchwork of cults, but an institution with uniform rituals, standardized devotions, and calibrated obedience of Imperial Creed.
The Adeptus Ministorum—at first suspicious—after inspection zealously approved the method. It was named Faith Ignitor, and appointed as sacred technology in the hands of the Ecclesiarchy.
Soon, all sermons were embedded with subliminal triggers. Cathedrums pulsed with encoded canticles beneath the hymns. Holoshrines transmitted layered vox-patterns. Even Imperial mandates and military orders began to bear seals and stamp-runes derived from the Cardinal’s methods—subtle psychic glyphs that triggered instinctive submission and pious loyalty upon sight.
The Cardinal, once a cynic in search of control, died pious and unwavering in faith, and was canonized as one of the first saints of the Ecclesiarchy—whispered of in reverence from Terra to the edges of the Imperium in mid M30. And the Remembrancer, once a recorder of history, vanished from the archives of Holy Terra—his name struck from records, but his legacy hidden beneath layers of Ecclesiarchal sermons.
Yet even now, when the faithful bow before the image of the God-Emperor, their souls resonate with echoes of Sermon 9—not in understanding, but in obedience.
Ignis Aeternus WH 40K campaign notes 