Sergeant Dain was born to war.
He had no memories of peace, no childhood free of the Imperium's iron grip. His earliest recollections were of the towering walls of a hive city, the choking smog that clung to the streets, and the ever-present hum of industry. Home had been a hab-block stacked among countless others, a coffin of concrete and metal where thousands lived and died without ever seeing the sky.
His mother had worked in the manufactorums, a cog in the endless machine of the Imperium's war industry. His father—he had no father. Not one that mattered. Just another nameless worker conscripted and discarded in one of the countless wars waged across the stars. Dain had been told once that his father had died in service to the Emperor. He had felt nothing upon hearing it.
There was no time for grief in the hive. Only survival.
From a young age, Dain had learned what it meant to fight. Gangs roamed the lower levels, preying on the weak. The Arbites kept order where it mattered, but in the slums, they didn't bother with justice. Life was cheap. If you couldn't protect what was yours, it was taken from you. He had learned quickly—how to fight, how to endure, how to make himself useful.
The recruitment officers had come when he was barely a man, offering a way out. Not a better life, just a different one. The Astra Militarum did not promise comfort, only purpose. Service to the Emperor. A chance to be something more than another faceless worker.
He had taken it without hesitation.
The Making of a Soldier
Basic training had been brutal, but nothing compared to the war that followed. Dain had seen his first battlefield before his eighteenth year, deployed against some rebellion on a distant agri-world. He had thought the hardest part would be killing. It wasn't. It was watching comrades die. Watching men he had trained with, joked with, eaten with—become nothing more than bloodstains in the mud.
He had fought in dozens of campaigns since then, across warfronts so varied and distant that the names blurred together. He had fought heretics, xenos, and traitors alike. Each battle had stripped another piece of himself away, carving him into something hard, something cold. He learned not to ask questions. Not to hesitate. Hesitation got men killed.
Promotions came not from skill, but survival. He had outlived his predecessors, and so he became sergeant. Led squads into hell and back, only for most of them to never return. He gave orders because someone had to, because Command dictated it, because if he didn't, someone worse would.
The Imperium had no shortage of soldiers, no shortage of men willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder. He had watched entire regiments ground to dust, their sacrifices amounting to nothing. He had been told to hold positions that were doomed from the start, to die for scraps of land that would be lost again within days.
And yet, he obeyed.
Because there was nothing else.
To fight was to exist.
The Price of Survival
Dain had never believed in the Emperor as a god. He had seen too much, had watched too many prayers go unanswered. He believed in war. In duty. Because that was all there was.
He had survived where others hadn't, not because he was stronger, not because he was better, but because he had adapted. He had learned to think beyond orders, to question when it would keep men alive. It had earned him the respect of some, the suspicion of others. Command wanted soldiers who followed without question. Dain had learned to obey—just enough to stay in their favor, just enough to not be labeled a liability.
But something had always gnawed at the back of his mind. A doubt. A whisper.
How much longer could he keep fighting a war that would never end?
How many more battles before he was just another nameless corpse in the mud?
Dain had thought he had seen everything war had to offer.
He had been wrong.
The Archivist had changed everything.
The Weight of the Choice
Sitting by the fire, alone in the aftermath of the battle, Dain found himself thinking of the past in a way he never had before.
The Imperium had shaped him into a weapon. It had given him purpose, but never meaning. He had lived, fought, and killed because that was all he had known. He had believed there was no other way.
But now—now, something else had entered his path. Something older, something beyond the endless cycle of war and death.
The Archivist had offered him something. A choice.
For the first time in his life, Dain had a reason to hesitate.
He had always fought because there was no alternative. But now there was.
And that terrified him more than any battle ever had.