Even aboard Horus's vast fleet, the lowest decks of its grandest and most magnificent flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, were dark and damp, like some forgotten corner.
"..."
At that moment, in this place filled with the strange smells of machine oil and metal, a little girl named Ali sat in her family's cramped, damp, and gloomy cabin. Through its equally tiny window, she looked out at the filthy, chaotic, damp thoroughfare running through the lower decks.
In her gaze was the confusion, innocence, and cunning peculiar to children. Yet, for some reason, it was also filled with complicated, contradictory emotions. Like these lower decks, like the people living in this dark, damp, desperate place, she struggled on regardless, nurturing a stubborn glimmer of life and hope.
But little Ali didn't know what hope was. Or perhaps the hope she longed for had never been here at all?
Her parents both worked on the Vengeful Spirit's lower decks. Her father maintained the macro-cannon decks, performing routine upkeep on the enormous guns and coming into intimate contact with them every day to keep them operating properly. It was an extremely dangerous job, especially during wartime. Her mother was a cleaner, responsible for clearing away the propellant residue and corrosive substances left on the deck after the macro-cannons fired. She was always busy on decks littered with propellant residue and corrosives, and filled with poisonous fumes. Like her husband, she worked tirelessly, doing what little she could to keep their family going.
So, as the child of lower-deck workers, little Ali had naturally been born into the lower decks herself.
Still, though her life had always been full of hardship, she did have a little luck of her own. At least she didn't have to toil every day like her parents. She had