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Author's note: The Tortured Vassals of Khorne are my Chaos army, who have quite an extensive history behind them. They are a ragtag bunch of former Marines, Cultists, Traitor Guard, Daemons, and hell knows what else. I will be publishing various little tidbits about them, from different perspectives. Some stories, some descriptions, some histories, and some character pieces.
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Part I: A Bedtime Story
Do you ever dream? What do you think happens to those dreams? They don't just die when you wake.
You're a psyker, we all are to some extent. All of our minds are affected by these mysterious powers in one way or another. Most of us are only but drops in the ocean, but it's an ocean made of drops. Before we accessed the Warp, these powers had no meaning at all. Before we opened up that world, we never knew what significance that connection had. The Warp is where all of our thoughts exist. When a shadow passes under your door at night, one neuron in your brain sends a message skimming through the Warp, like a spinning stone bouncing on water, and the message reaches another neuron which makes you shiver. Sometimes the stones reach the far shore, and sometimes they sink.
Do you ever have nightmares? Do you ever wake in terror from dreams of watching someone being brutally slaughtered? When they turn on you, do you flee or do you react? Or when you have nightmares, do you ever dream of an evil you can't describe? Do images of writhing noise and kaleidoscopic fear ever cross your vision, and do you ever feel the unbridled panic of a man unable to escape from a torture bed while being abused from every angle. His eyeballs are being slit open, his world burns, his family is threatened, and his former lovers detail his every failure. Do you see what I see when I sleep? Asymmetrical and boundless rage forced into a limited sensory intake desperate to escape, pushing from the inside of my head, until I want to explode violently, my body destroyed so that I may no longer feel pain, flooding the world in my blood, and I even feel a little bit excited at the thought. It makes my heart pump, chemicals through my body making me want to scream and claw my own eyes out. But then I am taken back to my nightmare and the infestation into my senses is painful, but more than painful it is horrible, it causes horror, and it is debilitating, it makes me feel useless, and it is all-encompassing, it traps me. I cannot tear my eyes away.
Do you ever have nightmares? What do you think happens to those dreams? They don't just die when you wake. You feel the same fears when you are in the daylight living amongst all those other walking souls as you do when you are alone and a shadow passes under your door. Those fears become real in the Warp. They are the thoughts that sink and come back. They are the nightmares that become real. Have you ever heard anyone say "everybody has their demons"? Well, everybody has their daemons. Everyone has a nightmare out there that will hunt them across the universe, through your whole life. Even at your very peak, when everything is going right, your daemon is right there, and one day you will both die together.
What do you think happens when a madman creates an army of super men who feel no fear? I wonder did it ever occur to the Emperor that one day they would feel horror and anguish and fear. Was that false god so egotistical that he really thought he could create beings that were invulnerable to the pains from which they were born? And what happens when those men have nightmares? What unimaginable terrors must they fear that could possibly make them sweat at night? What insanities and horrors bring those men to their knees and make them cry? Those men are the Tortured Vassals of Khorne, and even they have their own Daemons.
Sleep well my son, for our nights are numbered.
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