The inquisitor is doing purges. Anyone who so much as knows about the mission to ‘pacify’ the ‘rebellious menials’ is being mind wiped or turned into a servitor or simply shot.
Junior Tech priest Alden is scared out of his emperor damned mind. He had reviewed the pict-cam footage from the battle servitors used during the mission. He saw that the ‘rebellious menials’ were actually cultists of some kind, mutated and crazy, they had summoned things… horrible things. And because he had seen, the inquisitor was probably going to kill him or turn him into a servitor, so the knowledge of those monsters never gets out.
They would find out he had reviewed the footage, they would come for him. At best he would be mind wiped, at worst they would scoop out part of his brain and puppet his body like a machine, while whatever was left of his mind would be trapped in it. He had always felt bad for the servitors, and now they might make him one. Even being mind wiped seemed terrifying. He saw what they did to supervisor Karsa, there was nothing that was ‘her’ left, she had just ended an empty shell of a person after being wiped. He had liked Karsa, she was kind to him as a trainee, and now she was gone.
The inquisitors men would come, and he would end.
Maybe he should die as himself… before they can erase his mind or mutilate and trap it. Alden eyes his built in plasma cutter, he could burn away his brain fast enough that it would barely hurt, and there wouldn't be enough brain matter left for them to turn into a servitor….
He couldn’t do it, his mind flinched hard away from ending itself like that. No matter how much he tried to hype himself up he couldn’t turn on the plasma cutter. But if he didn’t then the inquisition would do worse.
Alden stews in his panic for hours, imagining more and more a life trapped in his own body as servitor, or being tortured for information before mind wiped or shot. (The fact the inquisition would already know what was on the pict-cam footage, since they were there during the mission, and would have no reason to torture him for information, is not a thought that comes to him. Like most people who knew of the inquisition he just assumed torture would happen as a matter of course when it came to them.)
Eventually, his fear surpasses his reason, and his faith. He remembers the footage. The monsters seemed to be on the side of the cultists, and wreaked havoc on the inquisitions men.
He could… recreate what he saw. The monster would probably eat him after it was done with them. But that was better than being turned into a servitor. Alden also felt a vindictive glee at the thought that at least he would not die alone, and take those bastard with him. (And get revenge for Karsa too, who he liked.)
He knows the emperor would disapprove. He knows what he is thinking of is heresy. But all he had done was his job and now he would die or suffer a fate even worse than death. Just for doing his duty. The emperor can’t truly support something like that? But he knows this is a rationalisation, what he had talked himself into was heresy. The inquisitor would be justified in killing him now. Just for having the idea of this. So he was damned either way.
Alden reviews the footage, sees the complicated circles of human blood. Studies the glyphs he saw drawn on the floor from multiple pict-cam angles. He gets a knife and slices open his wrist and copies out the glyphs on the floor. If this doesn’t work out he would simply decline to seal the wound and bleed out, and hope his brain rotted fast enough that there was not enough brain that they could bring any of his mind back if they turned his corpse into a servitor.
As he is drawing he can hear the sound of marching boots coming down the corridor to his workshop, it was them! They were here!
He completes drawing the circle with his own blood just as the arbites and inquisitors men are banging on the door.