Sacred Grease and Recycled Miracles
Category: The Receiving Bay / Munitions Log
Character Perspective: Kara (Munitions Overseer)
The High Pontiff calls the rumbles in the mountain a "Godly Bounty." He stands in the Receiving Bay, his red vestments heavy with gold thread worth more than a soldier’s life. He looks tailored, clean, and impossibly insulated from the soot of the vents. When he moves to bless the pulse rifles, his silk robes rustle like dry paper—a sound that shouldn't exist in a place this loud.
He speaks of the "Deep Ones" and their benevolence while he sprinkles sacred oil over the cold, grey metal of the rifles sliding off the automated belts.
I’m the one who has to clean the purple sludge off them.
I ran Shift Four today. It’s a repetitive, numbing process: watching the "miracles" arrive from the dark. These rifles used to be pristine, but the quality has been slipping for years. Now they come out pitted, with jagged casings and sights that don't quite align—technology that still mocks our clumsy hands, but feels increasingly like the output of a dying machine. They come wrapped in that same viscous, purple film. It’s a thick, synthetic grease that smells of old lightning and burnt sugar. It’s the lifeblood of a factory we don’t understand, and it’s my job to scrub it away before the priests can hand the flawed weapons to the starving masses.
Across the trench, The Hind Presidium is digging again. I can hear the metallic groans of their rusted steam-tanks and the hiss of leaking pipes. They are desperate to keep their "Continuity" alive with scrap metal and soot. They gaze at the glow of our rifles with the desperate hunger of the damned, as if we’re wielding fragments of a sun they’ve forgotten; in return, we look at their massive, soot-choked crawlers and see only iron cathedrals built for a funeral seven hundred years in the making.
But Jonas is already hearing the static.
He’s spent too much time near the vents, and he says the sound is changing. He doesn't think the earth is giving us gifts. He says the mountain is just venting its exhaust, and the "Bounty" is just the debris being pushed out by a system that doesn't know we're here. He fears that if the machinery beneath our feet ever truly wakes up, a prayer and a gas mask won't be enough to save the Horns.
Until then, I’ll keep scrubbing the grease. The High Pontiff can keep his silk and his gold; I'll take a functioning rifle and a clear exit.
Discover the truth of "The Bounty" on April 30.
Pre-order The Cartographer of Forgotten Fronts at www.frankdewitte.com.
