The Gift of Entropy

In my dream, these hands warped themselves into claws.

I looked down at them, feeling not fear or anxiety as I should have, but rather fascination. The flesh has begun to blacken, pop, and slough away in great wet chunks to reveal skeletal talons beneath. These bones were not the healthy brown of a fresh body, nor were they the clean and pure white one might see in ecclesiarchial illumination. No; they were dark with age, striated in venous red and mossy agate green. I should have been horrified; but again, I felt no fear. I should have been pained by this mutilation, but I only felt wonderment. A vague, disembodied sense of curious trepidation to discover where this transformation led. Perhaps it was that moment which I realized I was dreaming; yet conventional wisdom stated that should have woken me up. I did not; I only continued to gaze down at this painless disfigurement, flesh giving way to far darker form underneath.

It was then I heard the voice, low and rumbling like an underhive sluiceway, echoing in my head. "You are like them, you do not yet understand. But I will show you."

A text appeared in my grasp, bones clutching the page as its lettering whirled and glowed under my eyes. I could not read it, but its elaborate font was unmistakable. It was a litany, a paean our brothers and sisters of the imperial church read to affirm their love and devotion to the holy emperor on distant terra. Such words were above me, a hive city nobody as myself should not have felt worthy to look upon this script reserved for his most devout servants. And yet here it was, in the grip of my new atrophied grasp. And no sooner had these wraith-like nails touched the vellum text than did it too begin to wither, curl, blacken and crust with age. Words melted off the page into meaningless babble, parchment crumbled to dust and drifted to the floor, immaterial as sand and dirt in the deepest undercroft.

"Hymn, gospel, proverb and parable–" the voice continued, "these things imply a certain permanence. The Imperial cult tries to enforce order, stasis, rigidity. They build great monuments of thought, reinforce them with unthinking and unquestioning belief dictated to common people. No great monument, however, is above the immutable fact of time. No thought or belief, no matter how strongly enforced, will last forever."

I became aware of my surroundings, then. I stood in a grand and baroque foyer; lavish in rich burgundy carpet, fine furniture of dark teak, walls adorned in tapestries depicting the frolic of celestial envoys and great exploits of our most anointed saints. It was a palatial chamber fit for the most noble of nobles; an administratum superior or planetary governor who wanted for nothing. In it's centerpiece was a depiction that even the lowliest aberrant scum is taught to venerate; our most holy gilded Emperor, a shining beacon wrought in the finest golden armor, standing proud above the broken and mortally wounded traitor Horus. I gazed up at the profound lithograph; I should have felt swelling pride and love for our Emperor, his divine mercy to save us from the corrupting ravages of Horus' blaspheme. But again, I felt naught except disconnected bemusement.

"Everything crumbles," the voice ominously intoned. The heirophantic mural began to pock, melting and running like thick oil exposed to turpentine. The gold of our emperor's armor dribbled in rivulets along with the black and red of Horus', pooling and crusting on the floor in a pattern that turned my stomach. The tapestries mildewed and fell away. The carpet so soft beneath my feet sponges over with pungent algae that burned my nostrils, before flaking away to rough pitted ferrocrete beneath. And the voice gurgled on, "The mighty of the Imperium say 'Look upon my works, and despair!' But I say in return, nothing beside remains. Around the decay, of their greatest achievements, their proudest accomplishments? The lone and level mud of time stretch far and away."

I looked back down at my hands. The rot which had done away with weak flesh now gnawed at my arms: gone was the soft and penetrable epidermal sheath of skin, the quivering meat red beneath. All that remained was bone; bound in tendon stronger than titanium, arteries clinging and pulsating with bile. Decay, putrescence, these were my characteristics now. I reached up and touched my face, feeling only the jagged black osseous ridge of an empty eye socket. Lips and gums gave way to a row of iron-hard, offal-ripping teeth. My mortal coil had been untethered; slavish connection entropic firmament broken. Less, and at the same time more.

"The old gives way to new," this disembodied mentor continued. The opulent hall in which I stood had sagged and guttered away to mossy, fungal ruin. The cloy of heavy masking perfumes receded in the face of rich, earthy aromas never breathed in the industrial effluvia of the hive. Piercing and intoxicating in its headiness; primal, primordial, outside the false and stale firmness of doctrines I had known. "Entropy is a sickness of time, but sickness is necessary. It culls and purges; pus and bile cleanse the blood, that the new and pure may take it's place. Rust and ruin is the pus and bile of civilizations. The ancient empires of distant terra were culled that your Imperium could rise, but so too will the Imperium one day be purged as well "

I turned, and witnessed a beautiful girl whom I vaguely recognized. At least she seemed familiar, in a passing sort of way? Some local monger or tradeswomen, plying wares in the hives combed corridors? Smiling, pleasantly rotund, face wide and caring, fingers laced before an apron of syn-cloth. I reached out, stroked her cheek with the gentlest of caress, and she screamed.

The shriek echoed in the vacuums where my ears once perched, ringing hollow for all I cared. This woman, whom I might have known but felt nothing for, clutched her face where my touch had burned her, but the cheek which I had anointed was already falling away. Blackened with rot her flesh bubbled and opened, spreading far more rapidly than any medicae nurse could treat: exposing bone, boiling eyes from sockets, from neck to navel, desiccating even the temporally finite fabric of her clothing. And still she howled, voice peaking in ululate terror, until it peaked no more.

Would that I still had lips, I'd have smiled. Shed was her clothing, as well as her flesh and claustrophobic finitude. Before me, slender in bone, bound in the same tendons and sinews which bound me, stood that selfsame woman as a attenuated skeletal concubine. Far lovelier now was she: unburdened of her cumbersome flesh, dogmatic faith, and adherence to such trivial concepts as devotion to permanence.

"There was a King once," the fell tutor murmured, "on ancient and distant Terra. He had a power that not even the Emperor possessed; he could create wealth and plenty where there was none. Whatever and wherever his touch laid, bounty would spread forth." The voice paused, burbling in a chuckle that resonated my very soul. I looked down at the emaciated talons that used to be my hands; what were once weak and clumsy and so very mortal, now strong and nimble and pulsating in eldritch energy. "I grant you the same boon; what you touch will now blossom in the wealth of impermanence,  what you lay hands on will enrich your world by culling, making way for the new."

The beauteous woman, or rather the animate corpse that used to be her, now walked with hips swaying towards me. She knelt prostrate, and in her outstretched digits was a blade. It was pitted, jagged with hooks and barbs, it's green-gold metal appearing more as carved stone than any alloy I knew of. But the skeletal vixen held it out to me as a nubile supplicant. I took the weapon; it was as tall as I, I've never held such a creation, and it's single serrated edge defied all my admittedly-limited knowledge of such things. Nevertheless the sword, the corroded claymore, was light and felt natural in my decomposing grasp.

"I further grant you a badge of office," the mouthless tone rumbled. " The gift of Entropy. Use it that others know your status as my student and herald. Carve a gash in your hive, your world, teach your brothers and sisters that the stability they cling to is a lie! There is no truth in the firmness of imperial creed; all that is built crumbles, all that is rehearsed and reinforced will fade into the immaterium. On a long enough time frame…" this final thought it let hang pregnant in my mind for a moment. "...the only certainty is oblivion!"

I awoke, my eyes firing open, body drenched in cold sweat. I sat up in my small cot, peeling away thin sheets that clung to me as tightly as a lover. Despite the suffocating humidity I shivered, my skin wept droplets that felt like cold and heavy mist. I looked down at my arm and my eyes shot wide; skin normally pale from lack of sunlight was now wan and jaundiced, the color of aged bone. My dermis, which was once rough from a lifetime of menial servitude to the City and Imperium, was open and bled a sallow clotted pus. Breath caught in my lungs, sharp and hurried. I turned and stood from my dim bunk, only to quickly sit back down with a small cry. My bare foot fell on something hard and sharp as broken glass.

At the foot of my bed it laid, my badge of office, the corroded claymore. The gift of Entropy.