The Word Bearers' Flagship.
The Chapter Master's office.
The air hung stagnant, filled with the mingled scents of aged parchment, dried ink, and fine dust.
There was no battlefield smoke here, no low hum of Power Armour hydraulics, only the scratch of a Quill across rough paper and the intangible weight of the mountainous piles of scrolls.
Rockefeller sat behind a broad desk.
He was not wearing the Artificer Armour that symbolized his glory and duty, only a simple white linen robe. His hair was slightly disheveled, and faint bluish stubble shadowed his chin.
His gaze rested on a logistical supply manifest spread across the desk, its densely packed figures and annotations seeming to writhe.
"My lord, these are the new documents," an attendant in a plain robe said quietly, pushing a small alloy cart into the room.
Parchment scrolls were stacked on the cart like a miniature fortress, almost spilling over its edges.
Rockefeller did not even look up. He merely raised a hand and casually pointed the tail of his Quill toward a corner of the office, where similar "mountains of paper" had already formed several continuous "ranges." Some were barely held together with ribbons, while most were piled haphazardly, almost reaching the scripture-adorned dome.
"Leave them there. I'll... deal with them later." His voice carried a trace of fatigue he could hardly conceal.
For the Word Bearers, the most immediate threat was neither a xenos fleet nor lurking heretics, but the endless paperwork growing exponentially as the Great Crusade expanded.
Ammunition expenditure lists for every boarding action, repair assessments for every damaged warship, population and resource statistics for every newly reclaimed world, identity checks and the cataloguing of possessions left by the fallen.
Countless streams of information surged like a flood, and he and the Legion's Lord