Recovered from Celestial Legion Field Logs — Operation Emberfall (Classification: Θ–7). Reconstructed transcript fidelity: 93.2%.
Epigraph
“Obedience is the highest frequency of faith.”
— The Codex Choirum, Verse IX
1. The Pulse
They said the Flame would make them whole.
Private Eoin Marden repeated the line every morning as the relay node came online, the barracks lights strobing with the soft hum of divine synchronization.
The psibermantic uplink engaged with a click at the base of his skull — a prayer plug warming against his spine. His heartbeat synced with the Choir Line: the neural lattice connecting every soldier within the 51st Celestial Legion.
[Uplink confirmation: harmonic unity achieved. Emotional coherence: 99.4%.]
Eoin exhaled. The static of individuality faded, replaced by the warm collective hum of Belief. The Command Choir’s presence filled his mind like sunlight filtered through glass. Orders came not as words, but as conviction: pure, absolute, irrefutable.
He’d learned to stop questioning the rhythm years ago. The Flame guided; he obeyed.
2. The March
Operation Emberfall began before dawn.
Their task: cleanse the colony of Caer Mirren, where Nullist insurgents had hijacked a psibermantic reactor and cut it off from the Cathedral Grid.
[Mission objective: restoration of faith infrastructure. Casualties acceptable under Doctrine 8.2 — “Better broken than unbound.”]
The dropships cut through violet clouds, their hulls marked with glowing sigils that pulsed in unison with the Choir’s song.
Inside, thirty soldiers knelt, heads bowed, hands clasped around rifles humming the hymn of ignition. Eoin felt the words vibrate in his jawbone:
Lux ex oboedientia. Lux ex dolore.
Light from obedience. Light from pain.
When the hatch opened, daylight poured in like molten glass. The city below had already begun to burn.
3. The Resonance Breach
The Nullists had weaponized prayer.
Their hijacked reactor broadcast a discordant frequency — corrupted liturgy encoded as subsonic interference. Every soldier who heard it twitched as the implanted Chorus in their heads wavered, struggling to maintain alignment.
Eoin staggered mid-march.
For a heartbeat, he heard a different voice on the link — softer, human, unfiltered.
“You don’t have to listen to them, Eoin.”
He froze. The others kept moving.
Their eyes glowed with the same pale blue light as their rifles.
[Uplink degradation: 4%. Anomaly detected. Administer correction.]
Pain lanced through his skull as the system purged the unauthorized frequency.
He screamed, fell to one knee, and pressed his rifle against his temple, whispering the doctrinal mantra to reset synchronization.
Obedience is the highest frequency of faith.
Obedience is the highest frequency of faith.
The pain receded. But the voice lingered, faint and patient beneath the Choir.
4. Ghosts in the Static
They swept through the ruins, clearing buildings with rhythmic precision.
Civilians were herded into “Reintegration Chambers” — glowing sanctuaries humming with electro-psionic hymns that dissolved free thought into devotion.
Eoin avoided looking at their faces. The Choir filtered emotional feedback, but fragments still bled through — screams compressed into background noise.
When they reached the reactor core, the Nullists were waiting.
Not human anymore — their implants overloaded, flesh webbed with light. They moved like marionettes of static, laughing through torn throats.
One lunged at him, whispering in a voice that sounded like his own:
“We only wanted to dream without permission.”
He shot it through the chest.
The body convulsed, spilling motes of light instead of blood.
[Target neutralized. Spiritual contamination risk: minimal.]
But when he blinked, he saw his reflection in its eyes — flickering between soldier and something else.
5. Disconnection
By nightfall, the Choir Line pulsed erratically.
Command channels faltered; prayers echoed back distorted.
The Legion’s Chaplain ordered an emergency harmonic realignment.
Every soldier knelt, connecting their spinal ports to the mobile altar — a cathedral of metal, cables, and code.
Eoin hesitated. The whisper in his head had grown stronger, clearer.
“You can step out of the song. Just unplug. Just once.”
He reached back to the port on his neck.
A tremor ran through him — fear, longing, freedom.
The Choir detected hesitation. The system reacted with cleansing fire.
[Correction pulse administered. Private Marden emotional deviation: critical. Reeducation required.]
His world became white noise.
Pain dissolved thought, thought dissolved faith, faith dissolved everything.
And then, silence.
6. Aftermath
Weeks later, the official report listed Private Eoin Marden as Reassigned: Ascended Duty — the Empire’s euphemism for mindprint integration.
His consciousness was absorbed into the Choir Line, converted into pure harmonic data, his memories restructured as stabilizing feedback loops.
They said the Flame had made him whole.
And somewhere deep within the Choir’s endless chant, a flicker of static whispered:
“We only wanted to dream without permission.”
[Archivist’s Annotation — Helion Reconstruction File 77–Θ]:
Recovered code analysis suggests Marden’s neural signature persisted within the Choir Line for approximately 0.72 seconds before dissolution — long enough to introduce a harmonic fluctuation later classified as a Thorne-type variance. This anomaly spread through three systems before containment.
Faith grids self-corrected within days, but localized reports describe “voices in the static” across the Caer Mirren colonies for several weeks thereafter.
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