 The ship breaches the warp, emerging from the roiling un-nothing of the Imitarium into the Sol system. It will have arrived at one of two Mandeville points at the system's edge, the only stable points where re-entry to reality is permitted by law's universal. The Elysian Gate, near the blue hazed sphere of Uranus, or the cathonic gate at the very edge of Sol's light by Pluto. Both are possibly the most heavily fortified volumes of Mandeville space in the entire galaxy. Gun platforms, monitor sloops and frigates, artillery barks, spatial mines, and other, more esoteric defences, all beyond number, beyond counting, await any who would attempt to breach the sky and enter the heart of the Imperium of Man. And yet they do, in their millions and billions. To the innumerable masses of humanity, Holy Terra, the seat of the God Emperor, the foundation rock of the entire species, is effectively a myth, akin perhaps to the ancient heavenly domains of dead gods. The priests tell them it exists, and the adepts of the Ministorum extolling the glories of its spires and monuments, commending the sheer devotion of its inhabitants to the Lord their Emperor, exalting their flocks to further and greater productivity so that they may be akin to those who dwell within the Imperial Palace's own shadow. For of course, those gifted souls must surely be the truest mortal servants of he upon the throne. In their heart of hearts, do they believe it? Do they know that Terra is real, a clouded orb set amongst the void? Do they cast their eyes to the night sky, scrying the pinpricks of light for the one they have been told is Saul, the star that birthed their species from its cradle? They do. Millions and billions, in fact, and with such a burning devotion to the God Emperor that they leave the worlds that bore them and embark upon whatever passage they can in order to reach that same planet. It is the greatest pilgrimage humankind has ever known, and every single day it flows like a human tide towards Terra, streaming through the warp routes of the Imperium in a never-ending chain of devotion. Some organize their whole lives around the grand pilgrimage, threading the route from the holiest shrines of the Imperium, from Ophelia VII to Chyros, then Gathalamor, then finally Terra, and others may simply make straight for the throne world with a singular focus. It matters not, for the destination is always the same. The eternity gate to the sanctum imperialis itself. Know then that this is a record of the experiences of those lucky few to reach the heart of humanity, to set foot upon that world and live the life of a pilgrim on Terra. The first step into the volume of Sol for the pilgrim craft is a dangerous one, and those that follow more dangerous still. They are entering the most heavily fortified region of space in a galaxy of a billion stars. There is no fortress like it. There has never been one like it, and there will never be one of its ilk again. It is the slow beating heart of the mightiest empire the galaxy has ever known, and it will brook no threat, nor even the suggestion of one. From the moment reality reasserts its will around the cocoon of the ship's dissipating geller field, it is locked onto by a thousand thousand gun barrels. All speck sweeps penetrate it to its core, scrying the ship for anything that fits within pre-assigned threat parameters. Should the slightest deviation be discovered, the ship will simply be blown apart in the void, its hull shattered under a torrent of macro cannon shots and stitching lasfire. This is pure overkill, yes. The pilgrim vessels that arrive every minute to Sol's light are of every size, shape and age imaginable. Mass conveyers carrying a planetary population vie for passage with tiny ramshackle brigs. The pleasure craft of distant aristocracy compete with dilapidated, retrofitted cargo craft that are barely even space worthy. And these, mind, are the ones that have been lucky enough to arrive. The passage to Terra, as passage anywhere within the galaxy, is fraught with peril, for the warp is capricious and hungry. Many a pilgrim ship is simply devoured in its depths, its fractious geller field failing to hold back the tides of pure cannot be, and popping like a tiny blister amid the crashing cacophony of that hellish dimension. Many take far longer to travel than anticipated, limping along warp corridors thought stable for centuries, their crews and passengers living and dying without ever seeing the comforting certainty of reality again, leaving their void-born offspring striving to fulfill a goal now barely remembered, seemingly impossible. Yet more still violate the carefully cordoned approaches to the system in a mad rush to achieve the most ardent goal, and are destroyed by the prowling monitor craft of the Imperial Navy's Battlefleet Solar, ever vigilant for the slightest breach of inviolate protocol. Ships of that same fleet watch the Elysian and Catholic gates with the same attention, augmented ospex fields ever vigilant. Drop ships swarm from their launch base, carrying out a wave after wave of randomized boarding actions to sweep the ships of anything aberrant amongst their human gargos that the scanner fields cannot pick up. Yet more ships are purged this way, with their holds being discovered to harbor mutants, proscribed abhumans or even recidivist cults. For many innocents aboard these ships, there is never a reprieve. But once, as the maxim of the Inquisition states, proves nothing. The boarding parties execute those deemed in fragrant violation and withdraw, only for their host ship to finish the task by lance or shell once they are within safe distance from the blast radius. But if a thousand ships a day were destroyed by the defences of the outer system, it would barely put a dent in the tide that flows into Sol from the warp. For every vessel seared in the void, a hundred more take their place in the vast flotilla's burning in-system, and the eyes of their most devoted crew weeping to behold the light of humanity's first sun, distant though it yet may be. The outer and inner system gulfs swarm with intra-system traffic, and the pilgrim ships must take their place in the shipping and transit lanes of the haulers plying the outer planetary routes, threading their graceful paths between the shipyards of Jupiter, the void arcologies of Saturn, and the watch stations and fortress platforms of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Despite their relative remoteness from Terra, every single moon of the outer planets is swarming with star forts, docking rings, and space stations, and their surfaces clogged with void-hardened hab units, manufactoria, and defense emplacements. The forces of the Imperium are everywhere, from Battlefleet Solar to specialized space-worn regiments of the Astra Militarum to the sinister and near-invisible ships of the Inquisition. Rarer still, though present even here in the outer darkness, are the eyes of the Adeptus Custodis themselves, for no corner of the Sol system can ever be spared the gaze of the Emperor's own golden life-wards. As the flotillas burn closer and closer in from the outer gulf, their paltry aspectes fill with returns beyond their ability to comprehend. Calm's channels in Saturn's near-space swarm with redaction ciphers, warning markings and aggressive territorial notices, for this is the domain of the Holy Ordos of the Emperor's Inquisition. One may enter, save those with Ordo-clearance, and should they even be able to obtain it, you would see the moons of the ringed gas giant encrusted with a host of military facilities, weapons manufactoria, and shipyards. In the depths of those rocky spheres lies some of the darkest and most terrible secrets the Imperium possesses, knowledge that would strip the mind of a mortal bear with but a single glance, and devices too terrible to be even named. Inceladus plays host to the great conclaves of the Ordomelius, those inquisitors who waged the eternal war against the arch-enemy, while Shadowed Mimas is a planetary penal complex built to house the absolute worst of those the Inquisition would seek to imprison. Here still is the fortresses of the moon Titan. No pilgrim craft would ever even come within maximum all-specs range of this world, and even if they somehow could their paltry sensors would return nothing, for the home of the Grey Knights themselves is both precious and arcane beyond all comprehension, and loath to divulge any of its mysteries. Jupiter, the largest of all the solar planets, swarms with activity, its ancient shipyards continuing their 10,000 year pledge to serve the naval needs of the Empire of Humanity. Shift workers in cramped, battered lifters constantly stream back and forth from their hab units on Callisto, Anache, Europa and Ganymede, watched all the while by the hulking defense barks of battlefleet solar. The inner system gulf draws near. Monitor forts embedded in long, excavated and stripped asteroids, the husks of mining operations that once fueled the first human expansions, track all craft approaching the inner planets ceaselessly. System traffic now begins to divest itself of its more eclectic craft as the lanes approach the near space of Mars. The Red Planet, the first mankind walked upon after departing old Earth, now the sovereign realm of the twinned Empire of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The greatest forge world in the entire Imperium, Mars is the hub of its own galaxy-spanning domain, and from here the fabricator general commands the hosts of the Techno Magi, without whom the Imperium would simply cease to function. It is a holy world in its own right, crowned by the globe encircling Ring of Iron, a place of pilgrimage for all who tread the machine god's path of knowledge, and perhaps the greatest repository of human learning yet existent, second only, but in some ways equal, to Terra itself. The pilgrims who have arrived in system, weeks, months, maybe even years ago, have yet to even lay their eyes upon the throne world, though. For them, their fate is now to be spent upon Luna, the sole natural satellite of the birth rock. Luna was once a citadel of scientific research and development. The lunar gene cults of the ancient past, once brought to heel, had been the artisans that had brought forth the legionnese startes of old, churning out the super-soldiers that had ushered in the age of the Imperium and championed the great crusade. Those days are long gone, scoured from its tunnels and surfaces, by the fires of the Horus Heresy. In our darkening forty-second millennium, Luna is a fortress, the holdfast of battle-fleet solar, and an outward bastion from where the skies of Terra are ever watched by mighty defense lasers and torpedo silos. On Luna's exterior, barely protected from the suffocating void, there are the holding pens. All who would set foot upon Terra are processed here. It is the first port of call many will make within the Sol system, and the last before they are permitted to land upon his most sacred realm. These processing centres stretch for thousands of kilometres, congested by ceaseless tides of pilgrims and petitioners, and it is here the stories of many end. For all the millions that die in the warp are in breach of the rules of travel within the boundaries of Sol's light. Many more will perish in their pens here, of casual violence, of a deadly altercation with another pilgrim, of runaway disease, or simply old age. The wheels of the adeptus Terra turn slowly for this horde of human livestock, and the scribes and servitors that work upon thousands and thousands of passage-parchments and ident papers are long deaf to their mulling pleas, and their guards ever ready to dole out punishment for those who attempt to, be it by bitterness, frustration or desperation, breach the lines. Yet again, despite all that stands before them, those that are granted the precious stamp of a scribe official granting them onward passage still number in the millions. To make their destination, they must observe strict flight plans to keep them out of terrain near space, as congested as the surface they are heading for. Terra is a ravenous glutton, feasting on the fruits of its stellar empire in a perpetual effort to stave off starvation. As you said that a cargo ship lands upon one of the throne world's many spaceports every millisecond and another leaves at the same time. When these do dust off from the choking smog drifts of the hives, they do so picked clean of everything they have brought with them, for the populace of Terra is eternally famished. Should a delay in these supply chains ever occur, even by so much as an hour, thousands will starve, such is the way of things. Liftercraft form an endless chain between the surface and the gigantic warp-capable bulkers sitting at high anchor like bloated cetaceans, their dispatch craft appearing akin to parasites draining a host of precious life. The largest must remain even further out at the edge of the inner system gulf, ghosting the edges of Orspec's range. The largest and oldest battleships of Battlefleet Solar are here too, truly gargantuan things, cities cast into the void, their hulls bristling with the weaponry of their vigil. Some are ancient beyond reckoning and have watched the throne of the emperor since the days of the great heresy, their flanks still bearing the scars of that horrific conflict, worn proudly for ten millennia. Lie these paths, some only slightly smaller than Terra's orbital plates, hulking monstrosities of barely contained fury, prepared to meet out to the emperor's justice at a moment's notice. Terra, the brightest jewel amongst all the stars, and the putrid cadaver upon which a quadrillion people live and die and gasp for air in its suffocating crush. There truly is no world like it, it is singular, utterly unique in importance, the fulcrum around which the lives of truly countless humanity turn. From space it is a smog choked canker, a dull grey-brown orb of putrified skies around whom a thousand million flecks of light swarm. The atmosphere of Terra occludes the vision of those who thread the void above it, but should the mire clouds part, illumination's immeasurable light up its surface. Terra is an ecumenopolis, a city on a planetary scale. No hint of its ancient surface remains unblemished by humanity's touch. It is said this world once bore oceans, imagine the concept, liquid water upon Terra's surface. We know that it must have, but the last ocean was stolen by the traitor Kojazu more than 10,000 years ago. Now there is only bare, chem-blasted rock, but even that lies under millennia upon millennia of construction, destruction, and rampant industry. There is now not but an eternal city of unchecked humanity, thousands of years old built upon structures even older. Terra is a hive world in the truest sense, for it is an impossible warren of rock, creed, and adamantium, a lunatic city run amok on a planet as its canvas. It spires pierce the heavens themselves, while the accretions of its crumbling buildings choke caverns deep into the very crust. Down and ever down the pilgrim lifters plunge, crashing through the atmosphere of the throne world, the landers disgorge their human stock. The pilgrims now half mad or fully insensate to arrive on their ultimate destination. Terra, holy Terra at last. It is difficult to render into words the world upon which these pilgrims now tread. The tides of them swell with the various holy feast days of the adeptus minestorum, but regardless of the time of year, the rotting spires and decomposing causeways of the world are eternally crammed with the heaving masses of the devout. The chemical and radiation laced air of the exposed Terran atmosphere strips more of the linings of their lungs every day, scouring throats that continue to bellow hymnals and prayers to the sky, from where the black watchcraft of the adeptus arbites watch for disturbances amongst the carpet of humanity below them. Ecclesiarchy adepts lead processionals on their endless roots, atop gigantic prayer walkers, heaving mechanical things stalking forward upon piston legs, vox-ogmitters hollering ritual psalms loud enough to permanently deafen those of the faithful who cling to their sides. Cherub servitors douse the masses with pungent incense and flagellants scour themselves with neuro-whips, believing through their scourging pain that they may bring themselves closer to the understanding of their god's eternal sacrifice. By day, the wan light of sol casts its pale half-illumination around the choking skies of the throne world, but night is no impediment to the devout. As sol is replaced by sputtering gas lamps, or gigantic, ministerium-approved furnace engines that worship hymn through a flame eternal, the fires never stop burning, blasting the pilgrim crowds with punishing heat through the already stiflingly humid nights, as most never bother with sleep, merely continuing to whisper prayers through cracked and parched lips. From the crowds, the traffic of the world moves constantly, engines belching promethium fumes into already choking air. Ground cars clog roadways and arterials, while between these weave the priority conduits of those with connections or authority enough to utilize them. Even over the roar of a million million engines, the chanting of the crowds, the tolling of the bells, and the beat of the drums can always be heard, a dull ocean roar on a world that no longer has any seas save from the human one that swells upon its surface. From all around the world this ocean flows, heedless of any they may trample, heedless of any who fall behind, running from all corners of the world in the direction of the sole object of their worship. The Imperial Palace If Terra is the fulcrum around which the galaxy revolves, the Imperial Palace is the center of Terra itself. It dominates the literal top of the world, higher than any structure on a planet teeming with space-scraping spires. It is the absolute center of all Imperial authority. It is not a structure, it is a fully artificial landmass, a continent of adamantine walls thrust upon the peaks of the old Himalasia. The testament to the Emperor as he was, is, and ever will be, the one true master of mankind. Its roots sink deeper into the rock of the world than any other, and its spires are crowned by the void itself. The titanic walls of this man-made continent oft have their peaks occluded by clouds, appearing to those outside as a vast singular cyclopean edifice, a circumference measured in the tens of thousands of kilometers, a stark reminder of that which they bear inside. To pass through them is a privilege known only to a scant few, a miniscule percentage point of the human species, and an honor alone many would simply die for. Within these walls there exists two broad administrative zones, the Outer Palace and the Inner. The former is the domain of the Adeptus Terra, the central bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man. They are the bearers of the word of the High Lords of Terra, and from them flows all power in the Empire, to the Administratum, the Astra Telepathica, the Arbites, the Adeptus Astartes and the Astra Militarum, and all others. They are who are responsible for interpreting the word of the Emperor himself, and for enacting his will, and they maintain an iron-clad grip upon all affairs in the Outer Palace. This region itself was once, like the Inner Palace, a shining beacon of the best artifice the Imperium could muster. After unification, the Masonic guilds of Terra had raised unto the world a creation of such beauty, it is said they never worked again once the palace was complete. Alas, the fires of Horus Lupacal's ambition scoured their work from this world, consigning it to half-remembered history, and grainy degraded picked captures. Whatever remains of it now is buried under brutal defences, corroded Gothic insanity, and the ruthlessness of a newer architecture of faith. And to call something here new is inaccurate, for there has not been a new structure constructed upon this world since the 37th millennium. The worker details of Terra work around the clock to protect, shore up, and maintain what they always have done. That is work enough. There is nothing new to be built, but once was a shining beacon has become a dark and stained mass of ruthlessness. Perhaps apt, given the fate our Imperium has had since those heady days of utopian ideals, now lost to ten millennia of violence and desperation. The Megapolis of the Outer Palace is even more dense than the world city outside the walls, but despite its role is no guarantee of opulence, as in many of its cavernous undergulves dwell menials who cling to the scraps of employment the Adeptus Terra grant them, functionally no different in living conditions from the under-hyvers beyond the walls. It is into here that the Pilgrims will attempt to gain access. The walls of the Outer Palace are a barrier physical and metaphorical, for it is said, or rather bellowed, by the adepts of the Ministorum that only the purest of heart and the purest of faith can be permitted to enter his domain. The processionals that approach the walls stretch for hundreds of kilometers, winding their way out into the hives beyond. They approach as a shambling, shuffling horde. Many frenzied into the heights of zealotry through a combination of mad devotion and drugged incense. Many more, simply numbed by the sheer insanity of the throne world, and struck dumb with an enraptured awe of even now seeing the palace walls. They are dying now in their droves, crushed amidst a crowd that now behaves as more fluid than people, or starved from a complete lack of food and water for the weeks they have spent in this processional, or finally succumbing to some horrific contagion their off-world immune systems have no means of defeating. The priests will extol that these losses are perhaps the purest, so strong is their faith in the God Emperor that he plucks them from the mortal plane simply by virtue of their nearness to his earthly realm. Statistically speaking, only the tiniest, tiniest possible fraction of those who attempt to gain access to the palace's many gates will ever be granted it. Even for the most holy of feast days, such as Sanguinalia, the Feast of the Angels' Glorious Sacrifice, those who wish to actually be present in the outer palace for the ceremony before eternity gate itself, the simple fact is that there are more than enough devout within the palace's boundaries itself to swell to nigh impossible numbers without ever needing the assistance of the crowds beyond. But still they come, ceaseless processionals intent on getting ever closer to this terracrious realm's embodiment of divinity. One cannot scorn them for it. It is faith in our God Emperor at its most direct. Their belief in him upon the throne is what pushes them ever onwards, heedless of their own safety and health. There is a purity in that devotion to him, our protector, our shield against the forever darkness, against the alien, the mutant and the heretic. When imagines many of them are fully aware their journey will kill them, and yet they still come, better the death of a pious man than the life of a damned. As the old saying goes, and what should happen, dearest Acolytes, should a pilgrim complete their journey. They have overcome the warp, the dangers of Saul's system itself, the processing centers of Luna, the depredations of predatory under-hyvers, disease, malnutrition, the Arbites. Let us say they have entered the outer palace. What do their eyes behold? Even numb as you now must be to the seemingly endless torrent of hyperbole needed to describe the madness of Terra. Death as your ears must be to ever more lunatic adjectives. Ten billion adepts are needed to simply maintain the palace grounds. Aspires here are taller than any outside the world. The chasms cut into the bedrock of Terra for hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of stories. None are ever given a reprieve from the sheer immensity of it all. The architecture is impossible in its enormity, scarcely conceivable that such a thing is the work of humanity and not some geological process. But even such geology would itself be impossible. Plazas as wide as seas, avenues a continent long, triumphal arches tall enough for five titans to walk through, and titans there are, for the eyes of the god-engines of the legio ignatum have not ceased their ten thousand year watch over a palace they once defended against the most hated of traitors. The Lion's Gate spaceport, the Investiary, the Hall of Victory, the Plaza of the Nine Primarks, the City of Sight. There is enough within the palace to fill ten records. But where is it our pilgrims, desperate, falling, decaying, dying? Where is it they quest for? Eternity Gate, the final portal. The last bastion of the sanctum imperialis, wherein he lies. I am one of few who can claim to have laid eyes upon the most sacred location in the Imperium, and words, words will never do it justice. The crude mundanity of Gothic can literally never render grandeur that is in itself divine. The scale is crushing. It begets, by its very existence, a deep, primeval panic. Should one's eyes even deign to function, you will see a hallway, or what your mind can only make sense of if it applies that noun. You will see a stairs, hewn from a rough marble, although the scale will not make sense. For how can stairs be so vast? On either side of the stair are banners, standards of battle. Some are older than imagination, some are fresher than the pilgrims who have made it to this site. All are stained with the blood of a different world, of a different time, of a different war. They are a grotesque and glorious monument to ten millennia of unending conflict, of the immeasurable might of the Imperium and our uncountable losses. These stretch off to either side of the chamber, itself impossible to discern. Is it simply darkness, or distance, that occludes either side? One cannot tell. One's mind is attempting to format anything approximating a coherent perception of this visual information. It has little time to spend on this, but the stairs, the stairs end. At their end, at their apogee, there it is, eternity gate. On a world of impossible creations it is somehow the most impossible. With a kilometer tall, adamantine forged, ceramite inlaid, oramite laced, clad in the purest gold from the purest minds of the purest worlds. He is shown there, young and enliven, smiting the foulness of the war master. Flanking it, two reaver titans of the legioignetum, barring its entry, the companions of the adeptus custodes. This is where the angel stood. This is where the traitor hordes were thrown back. Nothing has ever breached it, and nothing will ever breach it. The impossible is possible in this universe of ours, but this is a law as fundamental as the rising of Saul's light. The god emperor is everywhere, but he dwells here. The existential horror this provokes is beyond reckoning. You stand there, faced with the portal to divinity incarnate, and it crushes your soul to dust. They die now, if nothing has ended them until this spot, beholding this last gate is the ultimate finality. The sight annihilates minds and stops hearts. They die weeping to have beheld what essentially none may behold. It is a madman's dream, and these pilgrims have lifted. What happens to them now? Well, they are husks, earthly shells that once housed a soul pious enough to have made it this far. Of their souls, I know not. Of their bodies, well, their hair is shorn to serve other purposes, and any remotely healthy organs are harvested by the medicaid corps to keep under-hive menials alive beyond their expected forty years. None have their names or dates or worlds of birth recorded. None are given burial rites, for Terra has nowhere to bury them. They are fed to the reclamation flames, the constituent minerals of their ashes sifted to fuel some manufactoria or other. You recall how earlier in this record I commented on Terra's eternal appetite? This extends, perhaps poetically, to the human crop of the Imperium. The billions of pilgrims swell a population already a quadrillion strong. The throne world, the pilgrimage, it is a gross, swollen infant thing, perpetually devouring people like a grock's devour's grain. It is the ancient deity Moloch, though saying so skirts boundaries heretical. Its hunger is a thing of instinct and necessity now, squatting amidst a galaxy at its behest and shoving the fruits of its realm into an impossible maw. Yet it is also the seat of divinity itself. The only being capable of our salvation, of protecting us against hungers more vast and more terrible than anything so mundane as what I have just related. He is entombed here, consigned to the anguish of immortality for our sake, for all our sakes. In their devotion, perhaps the pilgrims have the right of it. Perhaps in their journey, in their suffering, their sacrifices, they become more closer to him through an agonizing apotheosis than any cardinal in his robes or space marine upon their battlefield or lowly chronicler with his histories, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. 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