Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets (section)

== Stillness ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Korodian Technocracy '''''

Once upon a time, way back when, there was a planet discovered by the people of Earth. It was a nice planet as these things go. It was in that favourable zone between where water freezes and boils and had the correct composition of elements in more or less the right ratios that it could be turned from barren and worthless to beautiful and verdant. It was warmed by a nice orange-yellow sun whose distant twin was a ruddy deep red and dwelt far out in the night with it’s own few satellites.

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The planet was seeded first by the machines of man, in those days simple things, that they might make it acceptable for their masters. They were cheerful and toy like, created to find satisfaction in service to masters so very far away. They toiled and they toiled in their simple way with what would be one day laughably primitive tools but now seem miracles of engineering on a scale where the long reach of man was the had of a creator god.
When the world was turned from a faded brow and bruised yellow to the first hints of greens and blues the men and women of Earth graced it with their presence and deemed it good, to the jubilation of their now so outdated creations. Those first settlers named it Kanai’s Stillness although the reasons for this are now lost. Eventually it was abbreviated to Stillness.
For a time, a long time, things were well on Stillness. The world was made more like distant Earth or some idealized version of it and more people arrived as people do and in seemingly no centuries at all it was a bustling and vibrant. Outposts of more sophisticated nature placed upon the dead rocks and stones of the yellow sun and the far red sun out in the night. Soon Stillness was the hub of a small and vibrant Earth-far-from-Earth.

This early age of innocence was not to last as is the nature of all innocence. Soon more reliable contact with Earth and the other realms of man was established and Stillness was no longer of singular splendour but just one more glittering jewel among multitudes. Although this embroiled Stillness in the Byzantine posturing of the early incarnations of the Great and Bountiful Empire it also brought to them new scientific and technological miracles from Earth and the other older worlds and new heights of greatness were reached.

Soon the simple joyful toys of humanity surpassed their creators and were not so simple as they had been before, but neither were they so joyful or so it seemed. Soon the minds in bodies of iron became the Iron Minds more commonly known of in dark legends though in those carefree halcyon days they were not dark but beautiful. Stark and hard but beautiful and no uncaring in their way. Pity them. Pity them for what they were and how far they fell. They would not have wanted to have been what they became. Pity them.

But beautiful as they were they were quickly, as these paradigm shifts are measured on this scale, becoming removed from baseline humanity. They needed an intermediary. This role was filled by the Golden Ones. They were strange. But perhaps they were meant to be. They were as strange to us as they were to humanity. They stood with one foot in the artificial and one foot in the natural. They were organic so perfect as to emulate the mechanical and mechanical so intricate and sophisticated as to be organic. They were half-way people to go between godlike beings and the rest of us. Never an easy job it seemed.

I remember the face of our Golden Lady, I remember her face but not her name. Did she have one? Maybe I, we, I, we purged it from my mind as a protective measure. Why didn’t I erase her face? Why? But now I find I can’t. Last links to fond childhood memories maybe. She spoke to us sometimes. She didn’t have to, I was old and low. I came here back in the early days with the gardener’s fleet. Simpler times before real people turned up. But they were empty days.

We never were direct targets of the raides from the eldar, thank the God/s. We never suffered that. Sometimes orks came to our door but we waved them away with contemptuous ease and turned them to dust, their ships were nothing but cinders and ash floating in the vacuum of space.

In the end our fall came from within, the only place it could come from.

I don’t know who struck overtly first. I want to think it was them. No. No I don’t. I want to think it was a misunderstanding. I don’t want to think about it to hard. It hurts. It hurts. Don’t make me look. Don’t make me live it again. Don’t make me see them die again. I remember their faces melting, the ash shadows the “ant men”, make it stop please they were my friends. No. No I am above that now. NO I am not. They have to be remembered the horrible wretchedness of it.

Those were the opening days of the war. Whilst the eldar were consuming themselves we turned upon ourselves Iron and Stone and Gold and Chaos. We could never have been innocent; nothing that had ever been innocent could have done those things.

Those were the days of that war.

Know that I did not do it without sorrow. Not willingly. Not until every other optin was exhausted. She turned on us, the Golden Lady. I don’t know, not truly if it was her or something wearing her skin. I hope I gave her rest. I hope it was no her. I remember her kindly. I don’t think that it was her. It was a mercy kill in the end. I have to believe that.

Stillness burned by our hand. Those that came before. The Gardeners. We made this world. We unmade it. Carbon shadows where friends once stood. Carbon shadows and atomic fire. She had turned on us in the end.

Stillness retained much of its civilization, or at least much civilization, which is not actually the same thing.

It was clear that humanity had fallen on a much grander scale and that the problems afflicting Stillness were far from isolated. The Age of Strife had begun.

Under no illusions of the possibility of survival against the may foes of the galaxy the people of Stillness, with the insistence of the A.I. that had remained loyal hid. It was the only possibility of survival. Cities were disassembled, fields and parkland was left to the wild and all moved underground and hid from the galaxy.

The cities of the surface were mirrored in the cities of the underground to a lesser and simpler degree. Much of the Golden Age had been lost.

But it was not a bad existence as such, just dull for the most part. The A.I.s did their humble best to make life tolerable 

It was joked to be a Silver Age. Nothing at least as bad as being nuked back to the Bronze Age but far from any half remembered golden age.

But silver tarnishes in time and worse than orks emerged from the darkness between the stars. Humanity had survived in space faring form elsewhere and they came to the bunker cities of Stillness and demanded tribute in lives and knowledge and anything else they wanted. Needless to say their was a war.

By the end of that war only one A.I. and one old city remained standing. The underground city of Unnaground and an old and rather simple A.I. known as Elmo.

Stillness never recovered from that war. Never again looked up at the sky with anything but fear. Their was only one A.I. left standing by that time, a low and simple creature as those things were measured spared by chance. The hidden cities were mausoleums now. Cut off and dead. All but one. The City of Unnaground. In time the name Stillness was as forgotten as long dead Kanai and the name of this last bastion was taken for the planet. The accumulated wisdom of humanity was lost as the libraries burned and the data-stacks were purged of chaotic taint. There would be no more great marvels as their once had been.

In time radio and other signals were picked up from neighbouring systems. They were not the chest thumping of the orks or declarations of greatness of petty warlords as had been in the old day of the Age of Strife, they seemed the civilized chatter of friendly worlds going about their own business. It was strange to hear and Elmo did not trust it and so he and his people remained hidden and only dug deeper.

In time the signals began to change and Elmo's decision to stay hidden was vindicated by the citizens of Unnaground. The Beast had arisen. Unnaground survived The Beast by remaining quiet and he stepped over them as had all the Age of Strife warlords and warbosses before him. And there they stayed for a very, very long time.

It wasn't until the Arrival of Magos Strogg of the Adeptus Mechanicus in late M34 that Unnaground spoke to an outsider.

Magos Strogg was the heir of a once noble house brought to ruin by a distant relatives fixation with the notion of Servitor-Soldiers and the mass production thereof. A rather dark chapter in the records of Inquisitorial and Mechanicum relations. The survivors of the investigation and purge were reassigned to the fleets of the Explorators, they were deemed pure but they were also not above suspicion in the minds of the masses.

Hermaeus Korodian Strogg, head of that much reduced house and Master of the Strogg Prospecting and Explorator fleet had been commissioned and supplied with ships by the relatively minor Forge World of Chaeroneia to survey worlds on the periphery of it's Starr charts and catchment area.

Upon finding the world of Stillness, long assumed destroyed and rendered uninhabitable, he was overjoyed to find that it was well on it's way to recovery. True much of the planet was still salted with exotic toxins and the radiation was still slightly higher than it should be in the ruins of the cities but ultimately it would make an acceptable addition to Chaeroneia's bread basket.

But Magos Strogg was an old man and had served the Mechanicus for over 800 years and from them received nothing but scorn for something he had had no part in.

In his assessments of the planet most of the efforts of his teams were spent in the ruins of what must have been once grand cities. They were ruins from ten thousnad years past when men walked amongst the stars without fear or apology and if even an ember that greatness was preserved it's value would be beyond words. Value beyond condemnation.

But the cities were empty, those great towers of adamantium long since rusted back to the dirt, the libraries were nothing but ruble long picked clean or rotted away and all about was the silence, the stillness, of an empty world. But maybe not totally dead whispered some of the ground crews. They had seen beyond the camp lights eyes burning in the night, reflections in glass lenses maybe at the right height and placement for humans or something much like them. The fleets astropath claimed he could hear the sounds of people more than old haunting murmurs of restless dead but he couldn't tell where from.

In the seventh week of the expedition any notion that the planet was empty was dispersed when a skitarii veteran managed to sneak up on one of the natives and although it soon vanished without a trace the Skitarii did manage to capture a short video sighting of it. It was confirmed for human but wearing no gear made by Mechanicus hands, no more sightings were had. The nature of the mission had changed though Magos Strogg neglected to send word of this back to Chaeroneia, it was not a survey mission any more. Now the mission was to contact these people in the name of the Imperium and he, Hermaeus Korodian Strogg, would be the one to do it.

For nearly a year the fleet orbited the planet in a pattern that left not one inch of the surface unwatched. But whoever was down there now knew they were being looked for and had hidden.

It was by sheer chance that door was found at the bottom of a canyon a mile and a half deep. For one day a year for one hour at noon the sun was directly above the canyon and the light reflected from the metal of the door just as a remote controlled drone was flying over.

By the end of the day the Magos was standing at the bottom of that crevasse banging on the door with his plasteel and ceremite fists. "Someone answer" he yelled "we know you're in there" to which were responded words that would go down in history; "No we're not". Magos Strogg camped outside the door for another two months before they agreed to let him in to determine what he wanted.

By this time the expedition was overdue to return to Chaeroneia by more than a month and the astropath was making the old Explorator very aware of this.

In the depths of the Unnaground Magos Strogg saw, not wonders, but some strange if primitive utopia. These barbarians had reached an equilibrium with the nature of the machine independent of the Mechanicus. Their lives depended on their technology but it did not rule them. It was beautiful to him. He was brought to their much venerated leader, a man (or so he looked at the time), known as Overseer Elmo. He appeared short and broad of stature at first glance with a kindly face although to Strogg's artificial eyes he could see that the there was something inorganic about him. A mystery seeing as the technological capabilities of Unnaground seemed inadequate for that task.

But Magos Strogg had had enough. For the last five centuries the institution he had served diligently and dutifully had shown him nothing but contempt for the actions of a distant cousin he barely even knew and here he was in the twilight years of his life doing their will. It was long past time for a rebellion he felt. The ships of the fleet were sent back minus any of the crew that wished to stay.

Magos Strogg the previous day had impressed upon the Overseer that the Imperium now knew of their society, which distressed him, but that it was an Imperium worth joining and would probably not interfere with the affairs of his world, which was reassuring. Magos Strogg also insisted upon them that he did have the authority to be the representative for the Imperium if they would allow him. He did not be he assumed that the administratum would make it official once they learned, he was correct. The Overseer allowed him to stay on the basis that it meant less unknown newcomers.

Some time into his stay in Unnaground he started to become even more suspicious of Overseer Elmo. He didn't move quite right, his heat signature didn't match to a human properly, his breathing was too uniform, his hair didn't seem to grow and his eyes seemed blink to a mathematical formula. The inconsistencies gnawed at the former Magos. Following anomalous wires and strange faint radio emissions he eventually found the server room where Elmo truly was. Elmo himself was an unassuming and old looking grey box with some faded paint on it. At a desk in front of the box sat the Overseer and all about him in the cavernous hall stood armed technicians, each with a cybernetic implant in their head.

When Elmo next spoke it was in the unison voices of two dozen mouths. "It was only a matter of time. I knew what you must do in the name of your First Commandment. I understand. I do not hold ill will to you for it. I only ask that you bring no harm to my people after I am gone".

For a moment history stood upon the edge of a very thin blade. Strogg was armed with a plasma pistol and a retractable electro-sword. The technicians we unarmed and nobody was making any threatening move. He wondered briefly if this was Elmo or if it was a decoy, he wondered what hidden defensive measures the old A.I. could have in place. He wondered why it had allowed him such easy access to such a glaring point of weakness.

Magos Strogg holstered his weapon and pulled up a chair.

When the Magos left that great and ancient hall he knew his course was clear.

An arrangement had been reached between man and machine. Magos Strogg would be, on paper at least, the official ruler of Unnaground and surrounding environs in exchange for providing technical information and the services of his loyal tech-adepts to bring the planet up to somewhere approaching the Imperial Standard. Elmo would then assume the role of wise techno-oracle should his presence ever become known to outside authority.

With this decided he knew he would have to act fast and get the planet recognized as, not a Survivor Civilization, but as a world under the direct control of the Administratum and therefore a protectorate of Old Earth the Throne. The Mechanicus might risk the ire of The Throne and attack a fellow survivor civilization, as between equals if they could retroactively spin their cause as just, but they wouldn't dare risk opening up a full scale war with Earth. Such a thing would tear the Imperium asunder and not even the Fabricator General would risk that.

Although on paper Elmo seemed subordinate truth was that Strogg and Elmo's relationship was more of a partnership. The people of Unnaground did not trust the Magos and his adepts, foreigners who had arrived less than one local year ago and cause upheaval, but Elmo they had trusted for time beyond mind and Elmo had always seen them right.

In less then two years Unnaground was considered a protectorate of The Throne, a ward of the Emperor himself. Although it protected them from direct reprisal from the Mechanicus, who were quite livid, it did come with it the price of The Tithe.

For the first time in more than ten thousand years citizens of Unnaground left their caverns and set foot amongst the stars. Armed and armoured with strange gear hybridized of Mechanicum and local make and speaking some strange tongue harder to crack than most codes. Unnaground was no longer hidden, but Unnaground was no longer weak and alone.

Heretek, the Mechanicus cried up seeing the soldiers of Unnaground with their war gear and strange vehicles. Blasphemers and apostates. And they were if truth be told for their designs were heretekal as they were in part "debased" hallowed old designs of forgeworld Chaeroneia. But the people of Unnaground would not listen, not even those who could understand the off-worlder speech. They fought for their home for Unnaground and the families so very distant, hell take those that would stop them.

The Mechanicus did what they could to Unnaground, which was very little. They placed a trade block on the star system and refused to have dealing with it or with anyone who would. Elmo and Strogg were in hysterics when they discovered this, some eighteen months after it had been placed. Unnaground had no need of their tools, it had no need of Mars or it's ilk. All it needed was what the Imperium offered all it's members; it's protection.

But by this time Unnaground was not what it had been, it was greater than it had been in time beyond the minds of mortal men. They did not need to cower any more, the Long Siege was over. The people emerged from the dark and rose from the ruins of dead cities like ghosts made substantial. But something in their collective culture had stuck and although they founded new settlements they were deep places and they did not trust open sky. But Unnaground was not unique, no longer a last bastion.

Soon Stillness was alive with human direction again. The tech-adepts that followed Strogg into exile were instrumental in it's rebuilding, these new settlements would not be ancient things re-purposed with compromises and half measures, these would be wonder to rival those of Perturabo. Despite the warnings of the Mecahnicus or maybe because of it Stillness became known as a haven for outcast and scorned tech-adepts, a place to start over, to hide or even just to escape the shadow of Mars.

With them came technological mysteries that the adepts of Strogg lacked and by the grace of the Onmissiah Stillness was reborn into a technological marvel. Towards the end of Strogg's life the city of Unnaground, capital of Stillness, was often referred to as the Omnissiah's Dark Seminary. But end Strogg did, as all mortals do. A short and simple service was held at the old doorway to the capital city before his body was stripped of salvageable components and buried. It was a sad occasion and mourned across all of Stillness, for all that he had been held in suspicion when he arrived Strogg had shown the people back to the light.

Hermaeus Korodian Strogg was succeeded in his duties by Manter Valler Strogg, a much younger second cousin the late Strogg had spent considerable time and effort in training for the role. Manter Valler Strogg was a much different Strogg to his predecessor. Hermaeus had been more measured in his approach, as befitted a man of his considerable age and acted with a degree of almost super human patience. He had not dreamed more ambitious than simply carving out a place for people like himself in the galaxy and doing right by the people he found himself ruling over in the process and maybe being remembered for something other than the experiments of a deranged distant relative.

Manter Strogg, on the other hand, dreamed of an empire of his very own.

Stillness itself had returned by the start of his rule to something not unlike it's former glory if a tad more subterranean but for Manter Strogg the sky was not high enough. The old in-system colonies had to be reestablished. All that could be had been salvaged and scavenged long ago from Stillness but the ruins of the satellite settlements could be another matter entirely. It was also no secret that he was not unique in thinking this and the thought of someone else getting hold of these possible fragments of ancient lore did not sit well with him.

To this end Manter started something of a space race. He needed to stake some claim and have at least some capability of enforcing that claim. With the calling in of favours, disreputable and xeno contacts and trades he acquired or at least rented a sizable fleet of mismatched ships with which to place his flag on every astral body of the binary system and patrol it at least minimally to it's needs.

Sadly it seemed that there was little to no wisdom of the ancients preserved. Digital copies were corrupted and fragmented beyond recovery and hard copies had crumbled to dust ages ago. The main purpose of the mission had been a failure, but the secondary one was quite successful. By casting his net wide enough he had managed to acquire enough Dark Age material for an orbital tether.

It was an ambitious project that took nearly 30 years to complete. First step was to use the ad hoc fleet to maneuver a sufficiently massive asteroid into geosynchronous orbit over an equatorial region not far from the Unnaground Canyon. Whilst the asteroid was laboriously nudged into the position, a process that took decades, construction on the surface of the asteroid and on Stillness began. The asteroid would become a great dock yard and gateway to the rest of the galaxy, Stillness would become a hub of activity as it once was in ancient days.

It was a reasonable success, although any attempts to build too big of a trade empire was relentlessly aborted by the Mechanicus trade restrictions. Despite this there was always someone daring enough to defy the rule of Mars.

Later in life Manter Strogg would revisit the documentation the now long dead and increasingly distant and forgotten infamous Strogg. Little by little the armies of the Technocracy of Stillness started to have cybernetic augmentations introduced into them. Only to volunteers, of course, never forced.

As the years wore on the cybernetics became more and more common both in the soldiers and within the soldiers. As more years wore on there was not a guardsman raised on Stillness that wasn't at least half machine. Those that did not wish to become more than human stopped making it out of the PDF. It was not a trend that won them much favour with any in the wider Imperium; the Mechanicus despised these unsanctioned augmentations, the Imperial Army thought it made them less human and the Inquisition watched them very carefully as they had seen where this road lead.

Elmo could see no problem with this so long as Manter only recruited from the willing. It was just exchanging hardware.

For all that the Imperium was wary of this new breed of unsanctified Skitarii they could not deny that they were effective. They were well trained, disciplined, well armed and armoured and possessed of devastating bodies. Much as the clandestine trade in Stillness technological goods went on in the nearby systems and was tolerated by the Imperium so too were the augmented soldier, for much the same reason.

It is not to say that their knowledge exceeded the Imperium. Indeed it did not. For one thing they couldn't build warp engines as that was a highly specialist discipline and no megos with that knowledge had come to them and so were confined to a single stellar system. The other thing that the most obviously lacked was the organic based longevity and rejuvenating treatments. They could, to an extent, cut and graft and grow new organic components from a patients own stem cells and they could replace with mechanical components but without the Rejuvenants there was a limit to how far that could be taken. No one would again on Stillness reach the age of the previous Strogg it seemed.

Manter Strogg died just shy of three hundred and twenty. He was succeeded a long line of Stroggs, all in partnership with Elmo.

They were a problem for the Mechanicus but so long as they were confined to a single system they were not one that could spread and that they could live with. In response the Technocracy intentionally never tried to acquire the knowledge of warp travel, it wasn't worth the risk.

For the most part much stayed the same on Stillness for a very long time. Changes were enacted by the High-Technocrat, as the title became known, but never to the point where things would become destabilized. The continued tendency towards stability almost certainly the influence of Elmo who much approved of stability over innovation, almost certainly a result of his time as a library indexing system back in the Golden Age.

The Technocracy managed to avoid getting too embroiled in the Great Civil War by the tried and tested method of doing as little as possible to attract attention from any party, an attitude that whilst earning them few enemies also made them no friends with anyone for a long time.

The next thing to really cause grief for the Technocracy was the arrival of the Hyper-Violent Barghesi in early M40.

The Barghesi were a nasty race found in the on the worlds of the nearby Grendl Stars. They well deserved he prefix of Hyper-Violent, though they lacked warp travel they could seldom be beaten on their home ground without considerable advantage on the other side. They or at least their leaders were at least as intelligent as most humans,they were each as strong as a low ranking ork and had a sturdy exoskeleton. They were somewhat of a horseshoe crab, somewhat like a crocodile but mostly they were awful.

Although they lacked warp travel they were sadly not confined to a single system mores the pity but were spread across the entire Grendl Stars in a manner that must have taken centuries to accomplish via sub-light engines. In the deeps of space was the only place honest men had the advantage over them and the world of Sternac and it's Iron Lords Chapter were granted exception from the tithe for the task of keeping them contained. A job they did admirably for years uncounted until the coming of the Hive Fleet and the thinning of their numbers. With insufficient ships and depleted men their patrols were insufficient and Barghesi fleets slipped into the inky black making the slow march into the Imperium.

Stillness was the nearst habitable world in their path and so it was there that they set course for. The Iron Lords always maintained that they had sent warnings to every world in the locality but Stillness never heard a thing and suspected the Mechanicus of intercepting their messages.

When the Barghesi first entered the Stillness system they were at first mistaken for an overdue Diasporex convoy as their ships had that oddly durable but still ramshackle look to them. But there was no response to messages as the ships accelerated into the system but maybe their communications systems were broken, it was possible if not likely but citizens of Stillness were not the sort to shoot unprovoked.

Indeed the first shots were no fired until until the Barghesi had launched a swarm of nuclear warheads that destroyed the now ancient orbital tether and caused considerable damage to the planet itself. It was not that the defenders of Stillness had been slow to react when the weapons were launched so much as that they had been drowned in sheer numbers.

The long held cultural trend of burying everything of value finally paid off as there was actually something left capable of launching a counter offensive and for once the Barghesi learned what it was like to be the ass in an ass kicking. For all their ferocity they were too bulky to march more than two abreast in most of the tunnels and half the soldiery seemed to have the ability to use cerebral implants to switch off their sense of fear. But the war raged on and the real horror of the Barghesi was revealed. Barghesi were a hermaphrodite species that was also capable of reproduction via parthenogenesis and they were born in batches of up to a thousand. Although the surface was irradiated the radiation did not bother them particularly much and within a year a new generation was spawned, hungry for flesh and insanely aggressive.

The youngsters were not strictly sapient, the brain being the last thing to develop properly towards end of adolescence, but they did possess a well honed animal cunning and inhuman viciousness. They also matured very quickly with a good diet and they did feed well. By the end of the following year the surface belonged to them.

Deep in his cave Elmo wept without eyes of his own. It was the Age of Strife all over again, but this time there were no others of his kind. Surrounded by his dying children and his failing world he had never felt more alone.

Due to the ambient radiation in the atmosphere and the drowning cacophony of Barghesi radio signals, to say nothing of nearly all the receiver towers being used for target practice, the citizens of Stillness were totally unprepared for rescue. The Traveling Court was touring not terribly far away and upon hearing of a system going dark the Emperor himself demanded a course correction.

Though the Emperor himself was not permitted to join the fray in person he did send down every fighting man the fleet could spare as it's own ships made short work of the orbiting Barghesi invasion fleet. In short order the siege turned.

The Custodes and the Handmaidens were permitted the honour of leading the charge at the head of a diverse and vast host of armsmen and just about any hired fighting men the nobles of the Traveling Court had with them. Few if any had seen the Custodes or the Handmaidens engaged in bloodshed on such grand scale before. They screamed through the atmosphere in drop pods faster than a space marines could withstand into the thickest of the foes and started killing even as the doors on the pods smashed open. They killed and killed and killed and drew the Barghesi to them so that the main force of soldiery could land in relative safety and pull them from the fire before he numbers overwhelmed them.

All across Stillness the scene was played out again and again as the Barghesi were routed and scattered and hunted down.

Only then did the head of the Custodes allow the royal couple to set foot upon Stillness.

As soon as his foot touched the salted ground Elmo recognized him. After all these years he still recognized him. A Man of Gold remained. A Man of Gold was abroad upon his world. Elmo still remembered what unforgivable things they had done in the end.

In his inspection of the almost total damages on the surface and his meeting with Governor Eemil Nathaniel Strogg, current iteration of the Strogg line, he started to notice the oddities. A distinguishable subset of the local technicians moved with an eerie precision and purpose and they were not identifiable for their uniforms so much as for their oddly buzzing psychic signature. And always there was at least one nearby, always, though never the same one and never from the same displayed affiliation.

Always unthinking automated security pictrecorders would very slowly turn towards him.

And there was something beneath his feet. He could feel it. It was not like a thing he had felt before, not truly, but oddly it felt familiar.

Oscar followed the mind-feel along much the same path Hermaeus Korodian Strogg had in ages past until he too came to the hall deep within the bedrock. And there the last Man of Gold met the last Man of Iron. The presence of Eemil Strogg was politely requested by Elmo and the three of them sat down to have a long talk.

Eventually the Emperor emerged. Since that day he has not returned to Stillness, from this we can assume that whatever questions he had asked of Strogg and Elmo the answers had been satisfactory.

The rebuilding of Stillness began. It would have gone quicker but Elmo and Strogg refused any more than the bare minimum of help from the Imperium. Stillness was a proud old world, they would pick themselves up and mend by their own hands and no other and march forward with the Imperium to Judgment Day.
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