I should begin by explaining the circumstances that brought me to Belmora Tertius in the autumn of 943.M41, for without understanding the mundane nature of my errand, the reader cannot properly appreciate what followed.

The Departmento Munitorum had tasked me with resolving certain discrepancies in the official histories of the Badab War, a conflict which had concluded some thirty years prior, but which continued to generate administrative complications. Three separate after-action reports contained conflicting casualty figures for the 236th Endymion Guard, and it fell to me to interview the regiment’s former commander, one General Maxim Vaskovich, who had retired to this distant agri-world five years previous.

The estate lay some forty miles from the provincial capital, reached by a poorly maintained roadway that wound through valleys perpetually shrouded in rust-coloured mist. The autumn rains had been heavy that year, my driver informed me, and the fields lay waterlogged and grey beneath the perpetually overcast sky. The house itself was a grey stone structure of no particular architectural merit, three stories, with shuttered windows and gardens that had been allowed to run somewhat wild. A servitor of ancient pattern admitted me to a vestibule notable chiefly for its austerity, and my footsteps echoed on the flagstones. The mechanism showed its age in the hesitancy of its movements, and I noted that it seemed particularly reluctant to proceed down the eastern corridor, though at the time I attributed this to some fault in its motive systems.

General Vaskovich met me in what had once been the drawing room but now served as his study. He was a man of perhaps seventy standard years, lean and upright despite evident weariness, his hair gone to iron grey and cropped in military fashion. His left hand had been replaced by an augmetic of crude pattern that clicked faintly as he gestured me to a chair. After the usual pleasantries, he offered the hospitality of his home for the duration of my work, as the journey to and from the capital would prove tiresome. I accepted and was shown to guest quarters on the second floor overlooking the gardens.

The work began in earnest the following morning. The general’s study was a sparse room, dominated by a great desk of dark wood and lined with bookshelves containing mostly tactical treatises and campaign histories. I noted several volumes on the Badab War, including what appeared to be an original copy of the Legatine Commission’s final report, a document not widely circulated. We worked through the morning comparing the general’s personal journals against the official reports. He was precise in his recollections, though I noticed he occasionally paused for long moments before answering, as if the memories required some effort to retrieve.

Lunch was served by the servitor at precisely noon each day: simple fare of bread, cold meats, and a thin soup. The general ate sparingly and spoke little during these meals. In the afternoons he would excuse himself for what he termed “personal pursuits,” and I was left to continue my review of documents in the small library adjacent to the study. Here I found a curious collection, works on miniature military modelling, treatises on paint formulation and brush technique, and several volumes on the manufacture of terrain pieces for tabletop wargaming. I thought little of it at the time, assuming the general had taken up some harmless hobby in his retirement.

The evenings were given over to supper and conversation. The meals were invariably modest: roasted fowl one night, a stew of local vegetables another, once a fish that I gathered came from the estate’s small ornamental pond. Over these repasts the general proved a thoughtful conversationalist, discussing matters of Imperial history and military theory. He seemed particularly interested in the question of how mortal soldiers might be effectively deployed against transhuman opponents, a topic on which he held strong and occasionally unorthodox views.

Of the Badab War itself he spoke in careful, measured terms. When he did, he spoke of his time commanding the 236th Endymion Guard, a planetary defence regiment mobilised when the conflict spread through the Endymion Cluster. They had participated in the Vyaniah raids, and he mentioned the Caelian manufactorum district particularly. When I pressed for details, he would often redirect the conversation or profess that his memory had grown unreliable with age. Of his personal life he said almost nothing. He had never married, his family were deceased. He chose Belmora Tertius for its isolation and quiet.

It was not until the third evening, after we had concluded our work for the day, that the matter of his collection arose. We had been discussing the challenges of maintaining discipline among conscript forces when he rose abruptly and walked to the window. The light was fading, and rain had begun to fall softly against the glass.

“You have noticed, no doubt, the books in the library,” he said. “I have taken up miniatures. Modelling, painting. Some men garden in their retirement, but I find this occupation suits me better.”

I remarked that it seemed an agreeable pastime.

“Would you care to see?” he asked.

I expressed polite interest, curious to observe what manner of work had occupied so much of his attention. He led me down the eastern corridor to a room at that end of the house. I noted that he unlocked it with a key kept on his person. The contemplation room, as he termed it, had once been a grand salon. It was perhaps forty feet in length, and great windows looked out onto the overgrown gardens, now dark with evening. But it was the table that commanded attention: a massive construction that ran nearly the length of the room, upon which had been built an elaborate miniature battlefield.

“The Vyaniah raids,” he said quietly. “The manufactorum district.”

The craftsmanship was remarkable. Tiny figures, no more than an inch in height, were arranged in precise formations. I recognised the olive-drab uniforms of the Endymion regiments, the Chimera transports, the Leman Russ battle tanks, all positioned as if preparing to advance across the ruined terrain. Each figure appeared to have been painted with extraordinary care and, upon closer examination, I saw that each face bore a distinct expression. The terrain was equally detailed: cratered earth, tangles of razorwire, the ruins of industrial buildings rendered in what appeared to be actual fragments of plasteel and ferrocrete.

Defending the manufactorum complexes were other figures. Grey-clad soldiers in their masses, and among them taller figures in blue-grey armour. I recognised the heraldry from classified reports I had reviewed: the Astral Claws, before their fall. The Tyrant’s Legion.

“You were there?” I asked.

“I commanded the assault on this sector,” he said. “We fought for nineteen days.”

I spent some minutes examining the display, noting the placement of units and the evident care with which the general had recreated the battlefield. When I remarked on the detail, he explained that he worked on it each evening. It helped him remember things correctly, he said. Memory could be treacherous, but if one recreated events with sufficient precision, perhaps the truth might be preserved.

We returned to the study shortly thereafter, and the matter was not raised again that evening.

That night I found sleep elusive. The guest quarters were comfortable enough, yet I lay awake for some hours, my thoughts returning unbidden to the miniature battlefield. There was something about the precision of those painted faces that troubled me, though I could not have articulated why. Each expression so distinct, so carefully rendered in a way that I can only assume was true to life. I told myself I was merely overtired from the day’s work, and eventually sleep came, though it was neither deep nor restful. Once, I woke, convinced I had heard something from below – a sound like distant voices, perhaps, or the low creak of floorboards – but the house was silent save for the rain.

The following day proceeded much as the previous. We worked through morning and afternoon, breaking for the midday meal and for tea at four o’clock. The weather had turned colder, and rain continued to fall steadily. I found myself grateful for the library’s small fireplace, though the chimney drew poorly and the room remained chill.

It was late in the afternoon, after the general had retired to his pursuits and I remained reviewing documents, that I recalled wishing to verify a detail about tank deployments. I remembered the Leman Russ positioned near what appeared to be a loading dock in the miniature display and thought to confirm the placement against the general’s notes.

I made my way down the eastern corridor, where I encountered the servitor returning from some errand. I asked it to bring me a pot of tea to the contemplation room, thinking I might spend some time examining the display more carefully. The servitor proceeded down the corridor readily enough, but upon reaching the door it stopped, its ancient mechanisms whirring faintly. I gestured for it to enter, but it remained at the threshold, extending the tea tray toward me without crossing into the room. I took the tray, bemused, and the servitor retreated immediately down the corridor with what seemed almost like haste. I attributed this to some fault in its programming, perhaps a proximity sensor that had degraded with age. I knew these old models could on occasion be peculiar in their functioning.

The door was unlocked. I entered, intending merely a brief examination, and moved to the section of the table I remembered. But something was not as I recalled it. The Leman Russ had been repositioned, I was certain of it, moved from its supporting position to deeper into the manufactorum complex. I studied the arrangement carefully, questioning my own memory. Perhaps I had misremembered. Perhaps in the dim candlelight of the previous evening I had simply failed to observe correctly.

But there were other changes as well, or so it seemed to me. Certain infantry squads appeared to have advanced from their staging positions. And scattered across the battlefield were miniature corpses I did not recall seeing before, small figures lying in the cratered earth across no-man’s land. I examined them closely. They too had been painted with care, their uniforms torn, their faces contorted. The general’s artistry extended even – perhaps especially – to his depiction of the fallen.

Something else struck me as peculiar. The surface of the table bore a fine layer of dust in places, as one might expect in such a room. There were areas where the dust had been disturbed, though not by a cloth or cleaning, but by something moving across it. Trails and patterns that wound between the miniature positions. And near the edge of the table, I noticed tiny flecks of paint on the floor, fresh enough to still hold their colour: olive drab, the grey of the Tyrant’s Legion, even the blue-grey of the Astral Claws’ armour. I bent to examine them more closely. The paint was dry but not old, suggesting recent work, yet I could not recall seeing these particular colours on the general’s brush the previous evening. I rose, increasingly uneasy, and made to leave the room.

I mentioned nothing of this at supper. The meal that evening was particularly spare, merely bread and a thin broth. The general seemed preoccupied and ate little. When I inquired after his health, he assured me he was well enough, though he confessed the nights were sometimes difficult. I attributed this to the pains that often accompany advancing age, particularly in those who had sustained battlefield injuries.

The fifth day was given over entirely to paperwork, comparing casualty rolls against unit dispositions. It was tedious work, and I did not venture from the study save for meals. But that evening, long after the general had retired to his chambers, I found sleep impossible. I found the bed adequate, the temperature agreeable, but there was a quality to the silence that left me uneasy. The old house creaked and settled in the wind, and the rain continued its steady percussion against the windows.

I rose and walked to the window, thinking to observe the storm. The gardens below lay in darkness, though I could make out the shapes of overgrown hedges and untended paths. And then I noticed: a light in the eastern wing. A faint, flickering light, as of candles.

It occurred to me that the general might have been taken ill. At his age, and given the evident strain of our interviews, some sudden indisposition was not impossible. I thought it my duty to investigate and so dressed and descended the stairs. The house was cold, and the lumen-strips in the corridors cast more shadow than illumination. As I approached the eastern wing, I became aware of sounds. Faint at first, then growing clearer. Not the sounds of distress I had anticipated, but something else entirely. Rhythmic. Distant. Like the rumble of distant thunder, or the tramp of many feet, or perhaps merely the wind and the rain combining to produce some auditory illusion.

The door to the contemplation room stood ajar. Through the opening I could see the flicker of candlelight, and I hesitated. Some instinct warned me that I was about to intrude upon something private, perhaps something not meant to be witnessed. But concern for the general’s welfare overcame my reluctance, and I pushed the door open.

He sat in a high-backed chair at the far end of the table, silhouetted against the windows. He did not move at my entrance. His attention was fixed entirely upon the miniature battlefield before him, and I saw now what I had failed to observe in my previous examinations. The figures were moving.

I must be precise here, lest the reader dismiss this account as the product of an overworked imagination or some failure of perception. The miniature soldiers were moving across the table. Not with any mechanical motion, not propelled by hidden clockwork or trickery of light, but moving as soldiers move, with purpose and weariness, advancing and retreating, falling and dying. As I watched, frozen in the doorway, a squad of Endymion Guard advanced across cratered ground toward a fortified bunker, firing as they went. A Leman Russ fired its cannon, and though I heard no sound from the miniature itself, I heard the report echo through the room, felt it in my chest. Men fell. Some tried to rise, most did not.

The defending force held their ground with desperate tenacity: masses of grey-clad soldiers, and among them the towering figures of the Astral Claws in their blue-grey plate. Where these latter met the mortal attackers there was slaughter of a particularly efficient and terrible nature. The Space Marines moved with inhuman speed and precision, cutting down the advancing guardsmen even as they pressed forward, and mortal men died beneath their hands as wheat beneath a scythe.

For several minutes I stood transfixed, unable to look away. I thought at first I must be dreaming, or that some fever had taken hold of me. I closed my eyes, pressed my palms against them, opened them again. The scene continued. The sounds continued: the crack of lasfire, the screams of dying men, the rumble of armoured vehicles, all faint and distant as if heard across some great expanse of time or space, but undeniably present.

“General?” I managed to say.

He did not turn. His augmetic hand gripped the arm of his chair with such force that I heard the wood creak. His living hand was clenched into a fist, and I saw blood where his nails had broken the skin of his palm.

“They fight it every night,” he said, his voice hollow. “The same engagement. Nineteen days we assaulted those manufactora. This is the sixteenth day. The attack that nearly broke through before we were forced back.”

I found my voice, though it emerged strained. “General, I don’t understand. How is this possible?”

“I do not know,” he said simply. “I tried to stop. I packed them away. I even burned some of them, but each evening when I enter this room they are here, arranged as you see them, and as night falls they begin again. They advance. They fight. They die. And I watch, because I gave the orders that sent them there.”

“But this is impossible,” I said, grasping for some rational explanation. “Some trick of light, perhaps, or a reflection from outside…”

“Look at the windows,” he said.

I did. They were dark, reflecting only the candlelight within the room. No external source could account for what I was witnessing.

“The mind can play tricks,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Exhaustion, or some shared delusion…”

“Then we are both mad,” he said. “Watch.”

As I watched, the attack faltered. The Endymion Guard had pushed deep into the manufactorum, fighting from building to building, but now the traitors’ counterattack came with overwhelming force. The Astral Claws moved through the complex like avenging angels, and where they struck, entire squads ceased to exist. The general’s forces began to fall back, section by section, their withdrawal increasingly desperate as the Tyrant’s Legion pressed forward alongside their transhuman masters. And then, perhaps twenty minutes after I had entered the room, the figures began to slow. They moved more and more sluggishly, until at last they stood frozen once more, though not in their original positions. The attacking force had retreated from their deepest penetration, giving up perhaps fifty feet of hard-won ground. Bodies that had not been present at the start now lay scattered across the contested manufactorum floor.

“Each night they progress a little farther into the offensive,” Vaskovich said. “Tomorrow evening they will begin from where they ended tonight. In three more nights, they will reach the nineteenth day. When we pushed to the central generatorium and were forced into full retreat. I don’t know what will happen then. Perhaps it will begin again from the first day. Perhaps yet another scene from another engagement. Perhaps…”

He did not finish. I realised then that tears were running down his face, shining in the light of the candles.

“I learned all their names,” he said. “From the casualty rolls, all eight thousand men. I paint each face differently. I remember them; drafted farmers, factory workers, hivers who had never seen the sun before the war. And I put them in the path of fallen Angels and told them to advance.”

I left then. I offer no defence of my conduct, but I left. I returned to my quarters and did not sleep. In the morning, I informed the general that I had received urgent orders requiring my immediate return to the Segmentum capital. This was a lie, and he knew as such, but he did not challenge it. He saw me to the door himself, composed in the daylight, his uniform neat, every inch the retired officer.

“You have what you need for your report?” he asked.

I assured him I did.

“Good,” he said. “Thank you for your visit, Commissar. I trust you will understand if I do not encourage a return.”

The servitor brought my luggage, and I noted that it moved more freely in the morning light, away from that eastern corridor. I departed within the hour.

I submitted my report to the Departmento Munitorum without mention of what I had witnessed. The discrepancies were noted as resolved, the matter closed. Three months later I learned that General Vaskovich had been committed to the care of the Ecclesiarchy, his mind deemed unsound. I did not inquire as to the particulars.

I find myself thinking of him often, though, particularly in the evenings. I think of those miniature soldiers fighting their eternal battle, and I wonder how many retired officers across the Imperium maintain similar collections in locked rooms. How many paint the faces of the men they sent to die? How many watch them die again each night?

I have begun to collect miniatures myself, my unfilled evenings dedicated to the calm of painting. I paint soldiers from regiments I served alongside. Some I remember from the casualty rolls; others I recall from the moments when duty demanded I pass sentence. Those faces come easiest of all.

The nights are sometimes difficult.

Commissar-Captain Hadrian Wells died by his own hand in 945.M41, following his committal to the care of the Ecclesiarchy.