Memories of a Fiend

I am Vritra of Chemos. It’s something I remember telling myself as I ran with my brothers across some other Emperor-forsaken wasteland a very long time ago. I remember there being a Crusade, perhaps several. In those days we were the Emperor’s finest, his very own children, and from that we took our namesake. Even long after the tedium of the Heresy and our exile that we endured, we keep our title, the Emperor’s Children. None can take that away from us, not our brothers, and especially not our impotent Grandfather. Like all children, we have succeeded our parent. We are the essence of humanity, purified of the flaws of its base genetics. I am Vritra, and I am a Child of the Emperor. This I know.

My true father, flawless and the best of us, Fulgrim, I remember most clearly. Even in those early days, before witnessing blessed perfection, he was beautiful. Every chiseled muscle and every lock of silver hair. To say we loved him would be too human. In truth, we hungered to be like him, the very best of our kind. To be one of the Third Legion is to crave perfection, and yet the more we strove to be as he was, the more we loved him for inspiring such heights within us. Among the Legions, it was our fate alone to witness perfection, inches out of our grasp.

My brothers, Lucius and Eidolon felt the hunger as well. I cannot remember whether they were my superiors or not. I remember seeing them from across the battlefield, as we descended onto yet another pitiful ball of dirt to quell some uprising of vermin. They too felt that our talents were too often used to clean the messes of others. The Third Legion excelled when we were put to the forefront of the crusade, finding new havens for human life to flourish and purging them of unclean alien filth. The stars were to be taken for the burgeoning, naive Imperium of Man, and we, the Children of the Phoenix were at its forefront.

The alien worlds we visited were too many to number, each with their own strange and unique marvels that were crushed beneath our ceramite heels. None were like the rotting earth and the black, smog-filled skies of home. I remember that each was a constant reminder that humanity would always need more worlds. Perfection always required sacrifice.

I remember Laer. We descended upon it in waves, submitting the serpents to a massacre. So great was our victory that the Imperium even assigned a bard to us to write of our glory. Lucius chopped the alien serpents to pieces with his power blades. I remember that in those days I was proficient with a sword, not enough to rival Lucius, I will admit, but I always preferred ranged combat. I believe I had a plasma cannon, or perhaps a heavy Bolter. None of it seems to matter, no crude weaponry salvaged from the scraps of man’s golden age can match the beauty of Sonic Weaponry. As always, we found power and made it our own. The Laer serpents had been unworthy devotees of the Prince of Pleasure, our future patron. It was that conquest, and the performance that followed it, that set my brothers and I on the path to true perfection.

Kynska’s masterpiece was the final piece of the puzzle. I barely remember the mortal’s name, they come and go so quickly, but then, it doesn’t really matter does it? What value does a fallible shell have but as the vessel for her art? The Maraviglia is true art. One of a kind, and like nothing else in the universe. The first note was a narcotic to the ears. What followed was a symphony that caressed the mind even as it raked across the raw nerves. I hear it in my dreams, in every act of indulgence and beautiful excess. It was over too soon and the curse of the Third Legion came to the fore once more. We alone witnessed perfection, and had it fade inches from our grasp. Nothing again can ever equal that shining moment when I witnessed perfection with my brothers and my Primarch. Marius was the first of us to pick up those strange devices Kynska had fashioned to project her strange sounds. The excess, the divine cacophony that followed, the carpets of writhing flesh, the discordant notes that rent the air were enough to turn Her eye to our family, our Legion for the very first time. She Who Thirsts, our beloved Prince of Pleasure had looked into our hearts and found us worthy. She reached out, breaching infinity, and sent His handmaidens to come frolic among us. The Pride of the Emperor sang with joyous, rapturous vibrations, that echo through her haunted hulls to this day.

It all becomes a whirlwind from there. At the command of Horus and Fulgrim, the perfected demigods that still held us in awe, we slaughtered those who would not accept our vision. On the third and fifth worlds of the Istvaan system, we bled our loyalist brothers dry in the cold earth. I would like to say that I fought like Lucius or Fulgrim, striving to achieve blessed perfection, but in truth, I, like many of my brother Kakophoni were suffering from withdrawal. We dulled the pain with chemicals, using combat drugs to overclock our senses and wielding Kynska’s divine symphonic weapons. Our brothers had looked upon us as if we were insane as we brought forth the devices. The opinion quickly changed when the air rippled and Loyalists burst like ripened blisters amid the fury of Slaanesh’s symphony. Across the galaxy, as Horus burnt his way to Terra, my brothers and I cut a swathe through the worlds we passed, sparing no opportunity for excess. Why should we have? After all we had sacrificed in the Crusade, after all the suppression, we indulged ourselves. Astartes are the apex of humanity, and we reaped the crop we had helped sow. The universe will always have more mortals.

The Legions will accuse the Emperor’s Children of losing interest and plundering Terra while the rest of them made their doomed rush for the Holy Citadel. In truth, a great many of our brothers, both in our own Legion and others, had seen the outcome of the battle. As more and more fell in the Siege, those who knew that the battle was doomed did what we had to. We took what we could from the citizenry and made ready to retreat, cargo holds filled with slaves and plunder. Horus’ bravery and blindness led the Heresy to ruin, and even with the backing of the great Nine, he still failed. Those who committed to the attack were crushed, while our fleets were left the strongest, exactly the way it should have been, we thought.

We were fools, I was a fool, to forget the curse of the Legion. We laughed as we pulled back from Terra, stock holds full. To spite the supposed Sons of Horus, and the other failures who stood with them, we built up our fortress world of Harmony, the gleaming city of Fulgrim’s chosen. I spent many days there, enjoying the pleasure dungeons and the wide selection of slaves. I was no freeloader, of course, and when I sailed with the my brothers, nicknamed the Screaming Rapture by our fellow Kakophoni, we paid our tithe in slaves. All of us of the Third Legion picked at the dregs of Horus’ carcass, hounding his impotent sons who dared consider themselves the true heirs to Chaos. The Rapture and myself went back to Laeran, the holy seat of the Third Legion’s fall. In tribute to our Dark Prince, and in thanks for showing us the true path, my brothers and I ground up the Laeran genetic samples we recovered and distilled them into combat drugs. The sensation was so beautiful, so unreal, that we vowed before the before the Prince to taste the narcotic flavor of any foe we conquered, sending their souls to her maw as we partook in the essence of their broken bodies.

It was Fabius Bile, the mad Apothecary that convinced us that we could remake Horus with our pure gene-seed, rebirthing him in the perfect image of the Dark Prince. It was hubris, to imagine we could undo the taint of failure born into the Warmaster’s genetic code. Abaddon made us know our folly in the most amusingly audacious way imaginable, when he dropped a derelict ship upon Harmony, obliterating it and thousands of my battle brothers in a nuclear fireball that burnt the skies and boiled the seas. Visible from space, like the mythical Phoenix our Legion often used in its motifs, Harmony’s pyre signaled the  requiem of the Third Legion. It was a move that would never have been used by any of the other ancient legionnaires, and a move that none of us saw coming. To this day, I believe in the Warmaster for his ingenuity, for he knew of our curse, and played upon it. He let us believe we had achieved perfection before snatching it from our fingers.

The final humiliation came at Skalathrax, where we fought the sons of Angron, followers of Khorne and base brutes to a man. Despite their obvious inadequacies they fell upon our fortress at Skalathrax, where we relished in teaching them the folly of their ways. As the blizzard grew around us, many of our brothers and the enemy bled and died. Blades flickered, chainsaws buzzed, blood misted in the air, as it pulsed with discordant harmonics that tore our foes limb from limb. By this point, we had mastered the subtle art of killing with sound, and many of the newly made instruments emitted a resonance that would rupture a man’s cellular membranes, peel him away in flapping, wet strips, or simply reduce one to a stain on the rocky ground. Many experimental forms of art were tested in the delicious cacophony. My brothers, Bal-Sareth with his most excellent sonic instrument and Mikael with his dueling blades flickering, enjoyed the din and the spray of World Eater blood.

When the storm became so strong that even the degenerate mongrels of Angron agreed to a ceasefire, the final curtain closed. Kharn, a thousand curses upon his wretched name, saw fit to live up to his revoltingly base nature and massacred his brutish comrades, causing a riot that saw the shelters burn and brother turn against brother. That night saw three of my brothers cut down, one falling in rapturous ecstasy to the vibrations of the blessed sonic weapons of his battle brothers. We repaid the slights with blood and agony, with Mikael replacing his damaged helmet with a looted Berserker helm he would repaint in the coming years. Emperor’s Child and World Eater, all fell before our assault as two dying Legions painted the surface of Skalathrax in our blood.

Never again would we unite as one. None of us wanted to. We had failed to attain perfection as a Legion, and so we split off as individuals to pursue our own apotheosis. My brothers, the Screaming Rapture sailed the tides of the warp, spreading the word of Slaanesh in shrieks of agony and gushing spatters of blood. We drifted the fickle tides of the Warp, losing track of time as the Flayed Lady emerged from the bubbling ether into realspace. Many a day we would walk the immense hallways of the ship and see the many strange forms of the Sea of Souls. Boiling rivers of molten lightning melting slowly across the sky of a frozen hellscape. Eyes staring down like stars, and tongues reaching forth from the empty maw of the void. The sensors would go off and the Lady would be discourged back into the banal blackness of realspace, with new prey in her targeting reticules, and the Rapture would feast again.

To serve the Dark Prince is to know the subtle, barbed path between pain and pleasure. In the millennia of my service to She Who Thirsts, my armor has dug into my flesh, devouring the skin and bonding with the musculature. My nerves grow like a spiderweb of meat across the outer shell, allowing me to feel the excruciating bite of everything it protects me from. The sword She gifted me, a slender talon to bleed Her foes, makes my nerves sing in a thousand new voices, flaying my senses with every elegant slash. Every moment of my existence is an unending rush, as chemicals pump through my veins and my senses dissect the world in a million new ways. As Her champion, Her herald, Her paramour, my Prince has given me unendurable agony, blistering in its intensity and cold and barren in its absence. I have liquefied millions and fed their souls to my Lady and their remains through my bloodstream, crushed their works and burnt their worlds for Her beauty and favor.

Throughout all this, I remember, I am Vritra of Chemos. Even after the tedium of the Heresy and the exile we rightfully earned, we keep our title. We are the Emperor’s Children. None can take that away from us, not the World Eaters, our own brothers, or even the Warmaster himself. We are the essence of perfection, purified of its flaws of base humanity. I am Vritra, and I am a child of Slaanesh. This I know.