The fourth glimmer broke away from the eternally burning golden star deep within the Warp. Carrying an obsession with "salvation" and compassion for a twisted fate, it pierced the boundary between matter and the immaterial like a lonely messenger, falling toward the deepest, most despairing darkness in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Its destination was Nostramo.
A planet consumed by its own sins.
Here, it was eternal midnight. Thick, dense clouds of industrial smoke and toxic gases formed an impenetrable sky, shutting out the star's light entirely. On this sunless land, light had become a luxury that existed only in ancient legends. The planet's surface was covered in tightly packed hive cities that soared into the clouds, their immense steel structures piercing the black sky like a monster's fangs.
At the highest levels of these hive cities lived an aristocracy steeped in extravagance and decay. Like parasites, they clung to the planet's body and drank its blood, building their palaces upon the bones of commoners and maintaining their tottering rule through the cruelest laws and extrajudicial punishments. Beneath them lay Gang organizations tangled together like spiderwebs. They controlled the middle and lower levels of the cities, using violence, drugs, and fear to establish the underworld's only law.
At the very bottom lay the endless abyss known as the Underhive. It was the foundation of the cities, the final destination of all waste, sewage, and corpses. Sunlight, hope, law, morality... everything human civilization had created lost its meaning here. Crime was the only law of survival. Violence was the only language of communication.
Into the abyss of such a world, the glimmer quietly descended.
Warren. An old corpse collector who had lived in the Underhive for more than seventy years.
His job was to push a squeaking sheet-metal wheelbarrow through the Underhive's