The sixth glimmer did not head for the war-torn interstellar front lines, nor did it plunge into some abyss of despair teeming with aliens and monsters.
Like the most insignificant speck of dust, it drifted down into the most heavily defended-and most vast and bloated-place in the entire Milky Way Galaxy: Archive Section 572, on the lowest underground level of the Imperial Palace on Holy Terra.
He possessed the body of a nineteen-year-old young man named Eli.
In this vast, boundless, brutal universe, where tens of billions died every day, nineteen-year-old Eli was as ordinary as a grain of sand in Terra's deserts. He was a low-ranking archival scribe. In this underground bunker that never saw daylight, his daily work consisted of sitting at a desk cobbled together from synthetic wood panels and painstakingly copying tedious figures about some remote sector's grain production from musty parchment onto an Imperium-standard dataslate.
But the young man possessed something exceedingly rare in this cold universe: pure optimism and fiery enthusiasm.
He was a mortal youth who believed blindly and fervently in the "Imperial Truth."
As he understood it, the great Emperor had established the Imperium to protect defenseless people like himself. Though he was only an insignificant cog at the bottom, every number he copied helped keep that enormous machine running, contributing to humanity's great resurgence.
That day, Eli held a dry piece of synthetic jerky that gave off a suspicious smell of machine oil. As he chewed, he studied the young man assigned to the seat beside him.
"New here?"
The young man looked about his age, with a face so ordinary that anyone would forget it the moment they turned away. He wore a slightly oversized gray uniform and kept his head lowered, looking meek and utterly harmless.
"Y-yes. My name