Unjust Deserts

Inside a Cooperation Optimisation Cube at the Excessive Force Division of the Office for Social Reproduction, Urgigga and Ludím, now working as Confession Orchestration Prefects, paused their enhanced interrogation to review what they’d learned about the illicit text that was vexing the higher ups enough to make everyone else’s lives more hellish than usual. Before them was a table covered in recently inked scrolls, and on the other side sat the bloodied form of the rogue logistician who wrote the offending prose, slumped over, barely conscious and repeatedly muttering the simple phrase: all luck.

“So he’s really saying everything is luck?” Urgigga scoffed, “Not just like, when one of those green bastards manages to actually hit something?”

“That’s just one kind of luck, apparently,” Ludím responded with clear fatigue as he reviewed the definitions section of the scroll, “but yeah, he’s saying it’s all luck, all the way down.”

“Absurd! Khorne would never allow such a thing. The sacred texts clearly state that glory is earned through violence in his service, and that those shown to be glorious deserve to ascend and fight in eternal battle by Korne’s side.” Urgigga was practically frothing as she ranted, “This talk of luck is clearly more Tzeentch trickery! I have repeatedly warned Vice-Commandant Hamsum that the Office for Ceremonial Calculations is an obvious weak point for the schemes of those bird-brains.”

“Look, you’re not wrong,” Ludím interjected, “their citations are full of this logistician Jen’k-iins who got obsessed with randomness and went full Squawker. But there’s more going on here than just probability manipulation. He’s also obsessed with this guy St. Tomás of the Qarnu Anšar; maybe the only time one of our Astartes allies was cogent enough to end up developing cogito-hazards for the Strategic Ignorance Division. Tomás seems to have earned sainthood from the Church, and also to have once claimed it is matter of luck whether one succumbs to the taint of chaos or not. This chump” -- Ludím paused to kick the mumbling logistician before them -- "is claiming that licenses his ravings."

“The cur denies that the Mighty are called because they are born with dreadful purpose? And he is gifted sainthood?! Outrageous!” Urgigga rose to resume the beatings.

“It goes even further. He claims that Tzeentch has actually deceived us all by convincing us of a bunch of illusions, like that the universe is fundamentally violent, or that some people deserve glory more than others.”

“Not more of that D.I.E. nonsense!” Urgigga snarled, “I took the trainings, I get it: all deaths matter. But that first part is just heresy, Korne’s strategic brilliance ensures that violence is at the heart of every part of our world. His divine injustice means that even acts of procreation ultimately just serve to feed more bodies into his cosmic abattoir.”

“Yes, but this blasphemous screed argues that Khorne himself, as an embodiment of the rage felt by conscious beings, is a product of forces beyond his control, and so his influence itself comes down to luck. The examples he cites are dangerously persuasive. Do you remember when Galû slipped and brained himself in the arena?”

“Remember it?! I strangled half a dozen stress-slaves that night!” Urgigga did not like where any of this was going.

“Or the time that logistician neglected to properly calibrate the scope of her ritual and got rewarded with a fast pass to daemonhood at the father’s right hand? Luck.”

“Just some extreme examples of injustice to further prove how absolute the Great Butcher’s divine injustice really is!”

“But even that mindset is supposedly part of the problem” Ludím was starting to sound persuaded, or at least defeated by the abominable ideas, and it made Urgigga want to replace Ludím’s words with bloody gurgling. "A recent Bītṭuppi Institute study has found that believing that the world is fundamentally violent causes a 17% reduction in violent behaviour, and the impact is even stronger among people who have already achieved glory through violent conquest. That’s why he maintains that his heresy is fully in service to Khorne. It removes these illusions and so help us actually maximise violence and suffering across the universe."

“Well this all seems terrible and I hate it!” Urgigga ripped one of the scrolls to pieces as if she could somehow murder the fetid ideas it contained. Ludím’s just sat there, struggling to care about any of it, or anything at all to be honest.

“And there’s the proof that he’s right” said Vice-Commandant Hamsum who’s bulk now filled the doorway, “he is an honoured servant of Khorne.” He entered the small room and slid a folder of MPM reports across the table for the other two to peruse. “People absolutely fucking hate this idea. All of them. Half the people who hear it go catatonic from fatalism, the other half fly into a ceaseless rage. I’m honestly surprised one of yinz didn’t kill the other before I could get here. The places where copies were already distributed are now in full riot, violence is off the charts.”

“By the blood of the river!” Urgigga growled, flipping through the reports. “If these numbers are correct, one public reading of this heresy produces the same net rage as sweeps-week at the gladiator pits? That can’t be right!”

“Of course it can be, the universe is a terrible place and terrible things happen all the time. Turns out telling people they don’t deserve anything is the ultimate ragebait. Whatever he gleaned from these brain addled Astartes man-child and beak-nosed connivers, it’s got limitless applications in the Blood God’s service. We’ve got gore-mages already working on how to weaponise his text for deployment across all civilised cultures. Now, get him cleaned up, he’s going to have a long and illustrious career manufacturing cogito-hazards at the Office for the Propagation of Pertinent Information. Lucky bastard.”