Amunal looked upon his people, their arrayed numbers. To many of the cultures he had shepharded, they were the wisest, most intelligent. In two generations, people had gone from struggling to understanding how to work iron all the way to machine tools, power in their homes, so on and so forth. Amunal had barely even taken an active interest in their lives, almost all that they had learned was but second-hand knowledge from a being that was studying physics that eclipsed that of any theoretician on Mars. 

It was thus that while these learned men had in mere years ingested more information than many human minds could muster, they were amoebas. Inferior, tiresome, boring. And yet as an impulse from his very core, he knew that this very inferiority was something to be shepharded. So clearly beneath the long-eared breed of the starlanders, it was in his very genes to protect humanity. He knew in part because he had examined his own flesh, his own making. 

But… between his examinations of himself and the entire universe with the complex devices he had forged by crushing metal into advanced alloys with his bare hands, the Starborn knew that there was some aspect to this world he couldn’t examine. It frustrated him almost to the point of tearful emotion. There was some unexamined variable, some fundamental truth that would ground all of his epistemic and ontological queries. He had examined that neighbouring planet time and time again, and they were no closer to solving what plagued him so thoroughly. There was nothing to describe the unpredictability that he so often observed in the universe, there was nothing to account for the randomness. 

There was….

Chaos.

It was beautiful once he came to the realization of it. It was a dark thought, one he dare not articulate for the danger he put into mortals. But this word he had for the roll of dice that determined far more than logic and sanity ever could enamoured him. 

Without it, what purpose would anyone serve? Automata, puppets of disgusting meat and sinew and bone that were predestined to ignominious lives regardless. Those seeking nothing more than immediate hedonism at best, or those seeking to continue their lineage for some barbaric yet equally meaningless philosophy of attaining some form of supremacy either real or more typically merely imagined to be real. Perhaps the worst logical conclusion was merely the obsession with survival out of fear of the unknown that might come after death. The unknown was meant to be made known, and on some nights Amunal even dreamed of death for this very reason. But he never spoke of this, for such thoughts would quickly spiral into a death-cult in lesser minds. 

It was with Chaos that a man staving off the barbarians attacking his farm to protect his woman could be anything more than a genetic predisposition to guarantee reproduction; [i]it was by the virtue of Chaos that this was love.[/i] He had no capability to accept illusion of free will where there was none, in a world without Chaos. It was thus that he was infinitely grateful for it, seeing it as an undeserved gift brought forth by a truly loving Demiurge. There was no way to articulate his gratitude for it, and so it was that he remembered kneeling one night and praying towards it, for what else could Chaos be but God? God in His ultimate wisdom, creating a world such that it might give him the opportunity to truly come to conclude his existence in his own right. 
It was Chaos that one day he sought to make the God of these people. For decades he had instilled in them that their prior pagan beliefs were mere echoes of [i]Sophia[/i], the feminine personification of knowledge as it translated to in one of the long dead court-languages of the planet. 

But as he ever felt more weak in confrontation with the unknowable, it felt good to surrender to Chaos. Chaos would be the name of the one true God, the acceptance of a great inevitability that was the only way to account for so much that couldn’t otherwise be explained.

But all of this was a flash of thought on the matter of his people. They were the brightest, and the brightest were the best. They weren’t the scribes and scriveners of old, these were not hunchbacked stuttering fools, these were philosopher-Kings groomed specifically for this in the event Amunal died. Which, in the coming days, he might. 

The Asclepians were not standing idly amidst the sudden change of their sister planet, and so the people of Brahms had to act lest they were acted upon. 

It did not take Amunal to understand the long-ears were here in part because of the ancient war that ravaged this planet. It did not take him long to understand that these people were forced into their eternally primitive state by the planet so near yet so far. 

In some sense he was appreciative of the wisdom of this world’s ancients, so carefully hiding away their technology just for the day someone like him would be there to capitalize upon it. 

So it was that after addressing the best the world had to offer, he went to address the second, third, fourth, and so on in order of [i]bestness.[/i]

Finally, they descended into the depths of the palace of Ummariah. Drones and other craft of the Asclepians were already visible in the atmosphere to the Primarch’s eye, they were coming for him. Little did they know, he was coming for them. It was a tragedy, one he would have to pray to this unknowable Demiurg to forgive him for. But people would die before his gambit could be completed. 

He felt the first rumbles in the earth as faint vibrations from the violence on the surface of the world, but he didn’t show it. The men and women arrayed before him still looked the slightest bit uncomfortable with their new weapons and armour, for Amunal simply hadn’t the time to truly train them as he needed to make them competent users of these pieces.

It didn’t matter. There was a non-negligible chance most of them would die. All of them, even. He just needed to get himself to the leaders of Asclepius, and force them to end this madness. 

When the humans finally felt the violence outside, hearing and feeling it reverberating in their boots, when that happened was the moment that Amunal finally activated the device.

He had spoken of it briefly, but most of the people with him were only here because of their personal faith in him rather than comprehending this concept. It was a teleportarium, superstitious markings of religion covering almost every corner. But it still worked, and with very little effort it was able to bring this small force unto the world that caused the woes of Brahms.

It was a shock. Amunal had envisioned it. He had envisioned worlds even more advanced than this, if anything. But seeing it in person so close rather than through bare eyes was an entirely different experience. But there was no time to muse. Already in the first second of teleportation there was horror. In some instances his assortment of warriors was already dead. A few had teleported into objects, the teleportarium’s thinking engine not adjusting sufficiently for them and hence they had bushes poking out of their skull or decorate fountains where their hearts should be. In a few particularly horrifying cases, they had teleported straight into the bodies of some Asclepians. Displays of gory anatomy never intended to be seen by anybody were on display both for the Brahmian invaders, and the shocked native Asclepians. 

But there was no time for such ponderings. Amunal already urged his people onwards, feeling the slightest disturbances in sight and sound that heralded the reserve defence drones of the planet going towards their location. 

They were faster than he expected, but slower than he feared. 

Some of his own people were too uncontrollable, centuries of mythologized frustration apparent as they tried to take revenge on the Asclepians. A few he executed with a flick of the trigger on the laser weapon comically too small for him even if it was designed to be operated by human crews. The other barbarians he tolerated, if only because he expected justice to catch them otherwise.

Snatching a handheld electronic tool from one of the passerbies, it did not take long for the Starborn to understand how it worked, and shortly after use it to prevent a lockout from the nearby civilian vehicles from the security apparatuses of the world. Buggies more for leisure than practical use, they could nevertheless be forced to travel quite fast if safety measures were overridden to simulate a person suffering from a medical condition and so they flew to the Palace of Knowledge.

Out of almost five thousand people Amunal had assembled, only about three hundred made it to the Palace. It was enough.

Many Asclepians that didn’t need to die, did in fact die as their feet pounded up. The distance wasn’t far, but to all who were truly focused on what they were here for felt that their travel was taking an eternity. 

Before they could enter it, a monumental blast door dropped down to bar their progress. Amunal wouldn’t let it touch the ground to seal them off however; in but a flash of movement he caught it in one arm, and then rammed it upwards breaking the sealing mechanism to keep it in place. 

A single shot to the sensor apparatuses of the automated defences that came out of the walls made their exotic and advanced weaponry useless,  and it was at this point that he simply ran past the Brahmians he brought with him, their services no longer necessary. 

Arriving at the chamber where the apparatus of governance of the Asclepians was located, it was not too different to what he had expected. Ancient fellows with overgrown yet groomed white beards down to their knees. Pseudo-clerical clothes that gave some pretension of modesty yet were indisputably ornate to a person not deluding themselves. 

But his eyes were immediately drawn to something else. To something that beneath the skin and hair and clothes was him. A mirror of his own creation, dressed in the same robes and fineries. He was already standing, having come to the same conclusion from having seen Amunal on the vid-feeds. 

They approached each other, extending their hands to commune far faster than they could with verbal speech. In but moments they relayed to each other the whole of their lives, the slightest of vibrations in their fingers making a language they wordlessly decided on.

Through this, there was only one conclusion they came to; their superiority over all present made them ever more competent to rule.

But it was already clear enough, they had divergent philosophies. A mutually beneficial test of supremacy was in order. 

At once, and in their own respective languages, both Primarchs spoke to their own people: “Stop the violence.”