Warhammer: My Mother Sanguinius

My name is Nasir Amit, one of the first of the Space Marines.

My father was a barbarian warlord on Terra. My bloodline was poisoned by tea, leaving only the rarest part still close to human.

They found me in the dark fortress beneath Ovidia, surviving by gnawing on the flesh of the unsustainable. I am a despicable and impossible candidate, a mutant that any other Legion would summarily execute.

but--

Other legions have the luxury of choice, but the Ghost Legion does not.

I was exactly what they were looking for.

Those pharmacists in gray armor took me away and dragged me away from the stinking ditch of the technological barbarians.

They pressed me onto the cold, rough stone slab, cut my chest open, took out the internal organs, and stuffed the parts that didn't belong to me into it. They used sharp needles and saws to work on my body, injecting banned drugs and blood into me to keep me awake during the operation.

I couldn't close my eyes and could only watch.

Watching my body fall apart.

Pain burned my body from the inside out, and every heartbeat weighed on my consciousness like a hammer.

They implanted a second heart in my swollen chest, and the pain doubled.

But I survived.

I was one of the few who survived.

When I regained consciousness, my body had crossed the other side of technology and magic.

I was a completely different being, the first half of my life was gone, not even my name.

The legion commander chose a name for me from Gothic: Nasir Amit. I heard that this was a character in a drama from the ancient Terra period.

The name may have some other metaphors, but I don't care about that.

I am just an efficient war weapon, and I exist to destroy the enemies of the empire.

Names mean nothing to me.

We have no shining medals or glorious hymns.

Our uniforms are battle-stained ceramite as gray as a winter storm, and our medals are the bloodstains of careless cleaning.

Our recruits are despised genetic degenerates, and the murmurs of disgust that other Legions speak of us are the songs of our glory.

Honor is irrelevant, duty is everything.

From the radiation-infested wastes of Terra to the slaughterhouse-like labyrinth of narrow tunnels and caves on Neptune, to the wider reaches of the galaxy. My brothers and I fought on some of the most brutal battlefields in the galaxy, and in our brief intervals we would talk about the Primarch.

What would our Primarch be like?

He should be stunningly beautiful, because each of us is incredibly beautiful.

But what about more?

We don't know any more speculations.

The beauty the Primarch bestowed upon us has been stained and twisted by blood and the lust for blood.

Our glory was erased from the archives by the War Council, we were infamous, and every man in our Legion was a pariah.

Will He spurn us?

And maybe force us to be what He wants us to be.

I had met the Primarch once, but the experience did not go as I had hoped and expected.

That encounter occurred at the end of Kaibran's smooth journey.

In this protracted war, we fight alone, outnumbered, and without support, against the mutants of the entire world.

If it were soldiers from other legions, those who were always complacent about their honor or worried that they would be tarnished, they might have chosen to give up on this smooth sailing, or they might have been stuck in a dilemma due to lack of supplies.

Even Space Marines are plagued by hunger after months of sleepless combat.

As always, we endure.

We resupplied with enemy corpses and crushed them with rusty chainswords.

Between battles, amid the layers of dirt that surrounds our souls, we thrive and grow, and win one victory after another.

At the end of this war.

Rogal Dorn, he finally arrived with support and severely condemned the Immortal Nine after the war.

We were summoned to his precious Phalanx by the Terran Praetorian who had just inherited the Imperial Fists.

He first coldly explained to us the so-called imperial virtues, and then asked us to explain what happened on the planet Keblan.

That moment.

I don't know if I heard it wrong.

Some of the brothers next to me even laughed out loud, their voices half confused and half amused.

Legion Master Osuran stepped forward, his boots hitting the deck. He and his brothers in the Order of the Blood faced the new and glorious ranks of the Imperial Fists, and their demigod father in golden armor. Regarding Dorne's long speech, Osuran simply answered in four words:

"we won!"

But that wasn't the answer Rogal Dorn wanted to hear.

So he discussed our bad behavior on Keblan. Devouring the enemy's corpse is not to awaken the need for genetic detection nerves, nor to maintain "appropriate tactical needs", but just to make a living and eat meat.

"Yes!"

Osuran responded, repeating, "We won."

"You did win," Dorn insisted, "but your legion's servants became your nourishment."

"Yes."

Ossuran repeated again, "We won."

We came here to win, not to die of hunger without support. For us, as long as we can win, then all costs can be considered. What we need is victory, and the process of winning is not important.

Dorn was indifferent to the principles we regarded as the golden rule. He said coldly, "You ate the enemy and their families, with the purpose of breaking the enemy's bottom line."

"Yes."

Ossuran repeated for the third time: "We won."

Rogal Dorn dismissed us with disgust, and we returned to our warship.

Returning home did not bring us much pleasure, because soon after, we saw on the deck that the capital of Kebran was wiped off the planet by the Phalanx. Of course, our victory was not recorded, even though so many ghosts offered their blood and died for it.