When you’re a child in the Imperium of Man, there are plenty of rules to follow. According to the priests, it is the duty of every human to exalt the power of the Holy Emperor. My parents always kept me inside. My father said I had a weak constitution, and that he didn’t want me getting sick.

I never went outside, and so I created an imaginary friend. When I told my father his name, he struck me and shouted that it was heresy to believe in such things. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted so badly to make my father go away! One day, he left with the Imperial Navy… and never came back.

I stopped talking to my imaginary friend until I was enlisted in the Imperial Guard, with an exploratory team. We had to explore a world that was slated for mining, and that world was long thought to be incapable of sustaining life. In my service, I’ve seen massive insects, killed countless xenos, even been tortured by a few of the point-eared bastards. Still, there’s always a feeling of anticipation that never fades when you’re about to make planet-fall.

Exploring what we assumed were natural caves, there were instead magnificent catacombs carved of gold and platinum. I knew that whichever administrator would run the mining operation would find himself a very wealthy man. We found a tomb full of horrible things, metal skeletons and green fire. All my friends burned. Only my sergeant and I made it out of the catacombs, stumbling out into the sand.

When we reached the surface, the Commissar saw us running. Safe in his ship, he marked us both as deserters and shot my sergeant in the head. My commanding officer lay dead beside me. Backpedaling in the sand, I picked up his las-pistol and started firing at the metal corpses, watching the white-hot energy dissipate against their silver flesh. That dead glow in their eyes burned into my brain as the battery ran down.

They just kept coming as one of them reached towards me. They weren’t using those green rifles… why weren’t they burning me like the others? The Commissar had stopped firing at me, and had started firing at the metal corpses for the same fear he was prepared to kill me for having shown.

But this is when my imaginary friend came back. He asked me if I wanted to live, and if I wanted help. I shouted without thinking. “Yes!” And my imaginary friend was given form in me.

I stood outside myself as pink and blue monsters descended all around. This was madness, I knew already. I watched as my body, seeming so small as the metal corpse stood tall at its full height, stood to smile back at iron teeth. This corpse opened its teeth and screeched a cacophony of scarab-clicks. For the first time, I knew what it said: “I am immortal, flesh thing.”

And, against all the instinct that told me to run, my feet stayed planted as my friend lifted my hands for me, grabbing the corpse by its cold steel spine. It pulled the thing’s skull close as the chatter of the pink and blue monsters came to their own horrible meaning. They announced my response on my behalf. “You are nothing!” and the corpses turned to dust… along with the drop-ship.

It didn’t matter. The imperium had granted me nothing but misery, and my imaginary friend had already granted two wishes so far. All he wanted was for me to be his friend forever. How could I refuse? I am a beacon of Chaos, their key to the materium, and I have a friend… Mr. Tzeentch.