Fresh-Faced New User
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I'm more interested in pursuing the moods created by the situations humans might find themselves in the 40K universe, instead of the action side. It's been approximately 15 years since I've read any fluff proper, so any errors of canon are mine alone. I banged this together in the dying throes of a hangover, so it might not be all that I thought it to be.
This is a small piece of an epistolary novella, concerning a cynical senior marine writing a open letters to the young men who flock to join his chapter. It's most certainly a mood piece, albeit one without any serious attempt at editing or pacing. I'm just keen to see if it strikes a chord with members here, and if it makes a positive tune, I'll probably flesh it out.
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They speak of us and our confidence in the dark, as if we are stenographers of its undulating monologue, the untold truth of shadow and night encoded in our movements, tapped out like the dance steps of the blind. Who would rightly aspire to join us, take part in our constant job among beasts and madness on fiery planets? We appeal to that mordant part of young men, who would not compete with each other, but still clamber for some abstract test at the hands of wilderness and hardship, take a euphoric collapse in the moments of spent calories and contoured rocky altitudes beaten by zesty effort. They would walk silently among an ecstatic crowd and take little of the gestalt energy for themselves, find it hard to join hands with a woman and drunk in a simple embrace of nightly energy: no, they think of the stars and the mountains and the examinations contested in distant forests slathered in mist, of personal adversity as the ultimate constructor of one's own character, never mind the whole other universe of existence their own brothers and sisters embrace to the full. If a character is developed in a forest, and no-one is around to hear it - that is the part of the question we might tease them with, attack their brittle philosophies within an instant of filling their glass. Comradeship is not borne out by referring to everyone as Honoured Brother, or the gifting of scrolls to fellows around unnecessary campfires.
We, the Night Keepers, we do not sing, not out of some millennial injunction, but because we have simply lost the impetus to do so. We do not forego leisures because our duties require our undiluted, unpleasured attention, there are other reasons that we have given this vice up; the eternal mystery of the Emperor and his Divines might give us a bone for that conundrum too, some day. Instead, we find ourselves sequestered in spectrumless sanctuary, plotting ourselves a route in mental space through the dark. Light itself has become its own reward, and you would think that some might develop an earnest syndrome about it all, find repellence in the lines and hues of reality, take blunt exception to photons and their gaudy excess. We become an ultra-conservative batch, who frown upon the workaday living citizens as indulgent for their over-usage of light, their consideration of the visible to be an inalienable right, as opposed to being a rationable commodity to which exposure must be measured and assessed. Live among green glows of necessary screens and subdued shades, take in the miniscule speck and spin out a dream from an errant pinhead intruding upon the chapter stead. We become fantastists, hallucinating a passionate storyline from a mistaken shard of bleach-light that intrudes from a door mistakenly opened, and we construct the vivid from the mundane, as the chapter commands. We think it is in the service of inculcating tactical imagination: learn to manipulate the information in your heads, with no tablets or paper on which to calculate a speculative pincer. Internalise everything, breed discipline within yourselves, sharpen the forgotten senses by abstaining from light. A return to the womb, rebuild us from the very beginning; from dark you have come, to the dark you will return, keep yourself sharp for the final day ahead when the lights are gone forever.
And then they let us operate in day and night, throw us into bleak tunnels to trust those instincts we are supposed to have fixed up in the endless hours away from the sun, that basic heliogenetic curse removed from our concerns. Get ye into that place of gloom and go about your work, my lads, get about it and keep them eyes closed, they be half a curse no less I think, say captains of the lot. Most of the time we sit there and think that the whole success of the Night Keepers has been one constant impulse of luck that began all those lingering millennia ago and grew in its patience with a lichenous agency, that this whole gas about being conversant with the dark being the key to our keeping has been a joke that has yet to face a serious test, never mind all the countless campaigns and battles we seem to find ourselves on the winning edge of. Perhaps there is some merit to this thing that you might term a lark; we still exist, while other chapters with more seemingly realistic philosophies have found themselves etched in the Emperor's Garden, the moss growing yet over their revered names.
Young man: you come to our chapter gates, having spurned cruel society... you come to these gates and reckon that this is the thing for you, that all the thoughts that were helped into formation by the educational apparatus of the state converge to this single reckoning: a place among the Night Keepers. You're a damned fool, the first part is good enough for the chapter, and the second part is fixable. The part of you that makes you reflective enough to forget your family and friends is the seed of the thing we want, that self-examining streak the best part of which will have surgeries enacted upon it in mysterious ways you would never have guessed at in your long sports of vespertine cogitation. A capital time, mother and father! They shove us into the lightless alcoves and leave us there for a month, not a noise, not a word, not a tiny squadron of dust to give a tender sparkle of poetry, a couplet of rise and shine! The state bred into you the critical thinking you so hideously misuse in the service of your own palsied social drives, thinking that You Know Better than the rest of the idiots who compose that trillion-teeming structure that you occasionally condescend to know as "society." Society will have its parlour games and cocktail lore and the endless idiocy of the pendular leftward-rightward swings; you will have your time spent upon its distant ramparts, codifiying the latest means of dealing with whatever terminal technology has assailed our borders. My friends from school work as earnest professionals, in stable lives and degenerating at the hands of civilised living, whilst I, mother and father, dwell in holes it takes too long to dig out of compacted rock and soil, clearing the enfillades and sighting those ferocious weapons by which your sorry lives gain licence.
And where is the thanks for all this? Where are the ceaseless tributes from families defended, silk roads unharried, sisters unraped, fathers saved from dying in front of their aghast sons long convinced of their immortality? Do the merchants sometimes drop by and throw a few cans in our direction, run a tab at an imperial port bar and say there's a tight bunch and no mistake there your lordship a handy crew set to a man's task? No: their running babble is confined to haggle and josh, they spare none of that charismatic lexicant for the ones who without fail pull them out of the grasp of the ceaseless Chaos fleets and gibbering Orkish raids. We stand guard at palatial homes too close to the battlefront, while the powerful polloi convene in their parties, where they clamber over each other in ambition and wit, and we once had the hope that they would raise a toast to us, or at the very basic least come to have a conversation with us, however restrained and strictly informational for them it would no doubt have been.
Is this all too militaristic for you, young man? Does this smack of a psyche completely wrapt in the feeds of the combat-marinated centuries, the constant import of mantra and hardened sergeant cant? Yes, the old horsenut: it is by dint of our ceaseless effort and voluntary sacrifice that the whole bloody edifice of the Imperium may heap upon itself its sclerotic vices and amountless pastimes: it is because of the constant and supreme brilliance of marines who are the ultimate perfection of virtue and strength that the intellectuals might find the time to purchase upon some obscure fixity of debate, and perform their over-educated mating dances as they acclaim grand language over their wine and narcorettes. Who can blame any qualified professional for growing into their role, taking the method actor's trick and extracting from it the essence of the nth degree, its bloody and extreme edge? Every engineer congratulates his big white mathematical self for building the machines that enable the imperium, the lawyers take a sip and consider its stately laws, and doubtlessly the farmers can let their earthy satisfactions soar from the very roots of civilisation itself. We are all in this together, all of us who might form some tarot deck of necessity and purpose: I see the Marine and the Magistrate entangle by the Sun and the Shore, Chance behaving as the Mediator. An Engineer, broken.
Ah, yes: engineers. Every one of us tests positive for the traits that lead to the development of that parlous syndrome they call the engineer. Had there not been a chapter-intervention, we would find ourselves obscured by our own logic and thoughts, forming shunning colonies on river islands, browing over charts and plans, happy to be left alone to build projects, keen to be told what to do. It is our greatest fear, beyond being collateral Exterminatus and errant Inquisitors, that there will be no-one left to order us around. Is the role of Chapter-Master an elected role or an imposed one? In a moment of weakness in a ribald banquet, did our current leader accidentally reveal some long humming shred of autonomy, of a larger purpose and vision for the Chapter beyond its present happy station? To the chapter-throne with him, he who actually thinks!
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If you've read this far, thanks for taking the time.
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