The old man paused in his diatribe and looked up to see Julius approaching. He smiled warmly, and dismissed the wayward remembrancers with an imperious sweep of his hand. Dressed in a sober, dark robe of heavy cloth, Evander Tobias exuded an air of knowledge and respect that even the Astartes recognised. His bearing was regal, and Julius held a great affection for the venerable scholar.

Evander Tobias had once been the greatest public speaker of Terra and had trained the first Imperial iterators. His role as the Primary Iterator of the Warmaster's fleet had been assured, but the tragic onset of laryngeal cancer had paralysed his vocal chords and led to his retirement from the School of Iterators. In his place, Evander had recommended that his brightest and most able pupil, Kyril Sindermann, be sent to the Warmaster's 63rd Expedition.

It had been said that the Emperor himself had come to Evander Tobias's sickbed and instructed his finest chirurgeons and cyberneticists to attend him, though the truth of this was known only to a few. Though capricious fate had taken his natural talents for oratory and enunciation from him, his throat and vocal chords had been reconstructed, and now Evander spoke with a soft, mechanical burr that had fooled many unsuspecting remembrancers into thinking of him as a grandfatherly old man without a vicious bite.

'My boy,' said Evander, reaching out to take Julius's hands, 'it has been too long.'

'It has indeed, Evander,' smiled Julius, nodding at the retreating remembrancers. 'Are the children misbehaving again?'

'Them? Pah, foolish youngsters,' said Evander. 'One would think that selection to become a remembrancer implies a certain robustness of character and level of intellect beyond that of a common greenskin. But these fools seem incapable of navigating their way around a perfectly simple system for the retrieval of data. It confounds me, and I fear for the quality of work that will be this expedition's legacy with such simpletons to record the mighty deeds of the Crusade.'

Julius nodded, though having seen Evander's byzantine system of archiving, he could well understand the potential for confusion, having spent many a fruitless hour trying to unearth some nugget of information. Wisely, he decided to keep his own council on the subject, and said, 'With you here to collate it, my friend, I am sure that our legacy is in safe hands.'

'You are kind to say so, my boy,' said Evander, tiny puffs of air soughing from the silver prosthetic at his throat.

Julius smiled at his friend's continued use of the phrase ''my boy'', despite the fact that he was many years older than Evander. Thanks to the surgeries and enhancements that had been wrought upon Julius's chassis of meat and bone to elevate him to the ranks of the Astartes, his physiology was functionally immortal, though it gave him great comfort to think of Evander as the fatherly figure he had never known on Chemos.

'I am sure you did not come here to observe the quality or otherwise of the fleet's remembrancers, did you?' asked Tobias.

'No,' said Julius, as Tobias turned and made his way down the stacks of shelves.

'Walk with me, my boy, it helps me think when I walk,' he called over his shoulder.

Julius followed the scholar, quickly catching up to him and then reducing his own strides in order not to outpace him.

'I am guessing that there is something specific you are after, am I right?'

Julius hesitated, still unsure of what he was looking for. The presence of what he had seen and felt in the temple of the Laer still squatted in his mind like a contagion, and he had decided that he must attempt to gain some understanding of it for, even though it had been vile and alien, there had been a horrific attraction to it all.

'Perhaps,' began Julius, 'but I'm not sure exactly where I might find it, or even what to look for in the first place.'

'Intriguing,' said Tobias, 'though if I am to assist you I will, obviously, require more to go on.'

'You have heard about the Laer temple I assume?' asked Julius.

'I have indeed and it sounds like a terribly vile place, much too lurid for my sensibilities.'

'Yes, it was like nothing I have ever seen before. I wanted to know more about such things, for I feel my thoughts returning to it time and time again.'

'Why? What is it that so enamoured you of it?'

'Enamoured me? No, that's not what I meant at all,' protested Julius, though the words sounded hollow, even to him, and he could see that Tobias saw the lie in them.

'Maybe it is, then,' admitted Julius. 'I don't think I've felt anything similar, except when I have been enraptured by great art or poetry. My every sense was stimulated. Since then everything is grey and ashen to me. I take no joy in the things that once set my soul afire. I walk the halls of this ship, halls that are filled with the works of the greatest artists in the Imperium, and I feel nothing.'

Tobias smiled and nodded. 'Truly this temple must have been wondrous to have jaded people so.'

'What do you mean?'

'You are not the first to come to my archives seeking knowledge of such things.'

'No?'

Tobias shook his head, and Julius saw the quiet amusement in his weathered features as he said, 'A great many of those who saw the temple have come here seeking illumination as to what it was they felt within its walls: remembrancers, Army officers, Astartes. It seems to have made quite an impression. I almost wish I had taken the time to see it myself.'

Julius shook his head, though the elderly archivist failed to see the gesture as he halted beside a shelf of leather-bound books with gold edging. The spines of the books were faded, and clearly none of them had been read since their placement on the shelf.

'What are these?' asked Julius.

'These, my dear boy, are the collected writings of a priest who lived in an age before the coming of Old Night. He was called Cornelius Blayke: a man who was labelled a genius, a mystic, a heretic and a visionary, often all in the same day.'

'He must have lived a colourful life,' said Julius. 'What did he write about?'

'Everything I believe you are looking to understand, my dear boy,' said Tobias. 'Blayke believed that only through an abundance of experience could a man understand the infinite, and receive the great wisdom that came from following the road of excess. His works contain a rich mythology in which he worked to encode his spiritual ideas into a model for a new, unbridled age of experience and sensation. Some say he was a sensualist who depicted the struggle between indulgence of the senses and the restrictive morals of the authoritarian regime under which he lived. Others, of course, simply denounced him as a fallen priest and a libertine with delusions of grandeur.'

Tobias reached up, pulled one of the books from the shelf and said, 'In this book, Blayke speaks of his belief that humanity had to indulge in all things in order to evolve to a new state of harmony that would be more perfect than the original state of innocence from which he believed our race had sprung.'

'And what do you think?'

'I think his belief that humanity could overcome the limitation of its five senses to perceive the infinite is wonderfully imaginative, though, of course, his philosophies were often thought of as degenerate. They involved… enthusiasms that were considered quite scandalous for the times. Blayke believed that those who restrained their desires did so only because they were weak enough to be restrained. He himself had no such compunctions.'

'I can see why he was labelled a heretic.'

'Indeed,' said Tobias, 'though such a word has more or less fallen out of usage in the Imperium, thanks to the great works of the Emperor. Its etymological roots lie in the ancient languages of the Olympian Hegemony and it simply means a "choice" of beliefs. In the tract, Contra Haereses, the scholar Irenaeus describes his beliefs as a devout follower of a long dead god, beliefs that were later to became the orthodoxy of his cult and the cornerstone of a great many religions.'