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They taught me to destroy. I forgot everything else. Family, what you might call friends, fear... These things are lost to me. I did not even know I had lost them until I began to slaughter in the name of your emperor. I watched my prey fear, I watched them throw their lives away so that a comrade or relative might live a few seconds more. It all seemed so strange... I suppose it still does. These things are lost to me...

I don’t feel betrayal as others of my kin do. I don’t feel exhilaration or spiritual fulfilment as some of the others might. I have only what is mine, my own. My pathless rage, my pointless despair. I am not so different from your heroes. A hairline fissure of perspective separates our mass murder from righteous and heretical.

You think me a monster. Truly I am. But it is not my brutish bloodlust that casts me in shadow. This talent for slaughter is a thing of beauty to your kind when aimed in the supposedly correct direction. Making us into your killing machines leaves us only one recourse when we realise what we have become; What we were bred to do. I kill now. I draw out the pain, I inflict it with relish and I savour the results. Why? Because I can.
Because. I. Can.

The bolter is an ugly thing.
Its hard edged design was fashioned by a singular ideal; and that is death.
But it is precisely this purity of purpose which grants it such grace.
The bolter’s brutality earns elegance in the total fulfilment of its duty.

There seemed such little point in fighting for them. Humans... so weak, so vulnerable and volatile. Too proud to recognise their place, too self righteous to admit our supremacy. Only the strong can aspire. The rest merely fester in rejection and ferment their spite. High Lords indeed...

This is a good start. It definitely has potential.

That being said, show don't tell. The main character shouldn't just tell us that he's sad and angry. He should show it with the way he talks about things. Maybe he rants and raves about the Imperium (which he does a little bit towards the end). Maybe he despairs about his circumstances, and envies/hates those who still have hope. There are plenty of ways to make it clear that all he has is "pathless rage" and "pointless despair" without outright saying it. Secondly, it'd be nice if this was longer.

Still, nicely written.

I'm very happy you replied, LL. I value your criticism a great deal because your own works are so well constructed.

I feel I have done the readers a dis-service though. Each section is supposed to be completely seperate from the other and the entirity is intended to convey a sense of tone rather than anything else.

What I'm trying to say is that each section would be a snatch of conversation in a larger project but I was trying to gauge the reception of the tone of the piece before I began.

It was self indulgent and wrong of me to not make this clear and I apologise.


-Edit: I do genuinely appreciate the "show don't tell" criticism. Even if this project doesn't move forwards I will keep that in mind as I consider more melodramatic characters than I'm used to Thankyou.

That's a lovely little vignette. The internal monologue's strong and well-paced and I think it works well in its own right (though as part of a larger whole would be equally fab).

Which Legion / warband's he from?

Mhmmmm traitors.....I do love me a pice of well paced, and well made traitor astartes fiction.

Thanks guys. I'm still not sure on which chapter he started with and where he ends up but I want to focus on the fall and descent into cruelty so he won't be a legion heretic.

At the moment I'm considering him as a fallen Ultramarine ending up in several different warbands of my own creation.

Had the sound of a Iron Warrior to me. With the loss of his family and home, and the not being a lacky of one of the chaos gods along with hating the big E. Ties in nicely with their fluff IMO.

Looks good, so far...