"Take up the mighty powers of destruction, for therein dwells the power of life." 𓃡 the Angron guy 𓃡 ART PRINTS FOR SALE | cryptid man | evil flesh wizard | Bloodborne brainrot | #1 Angron and Gehrman simp | World Eaters and Exorcists enjoyer | surrealism and horror fiend | 26 | he/him
controversial as it may be to say on 40k tumblr I will absolutely die on the hill that Angron would never be romantically/sexually interested in anyone other than a mortal
"'Angron has his share of trophies too,' said Khârn, 'but only from the foes that deserve to be remembered.'
'Should we not remember them all?'
'No,' said Khârn firmly. 'There is nothing to gain from knowing your enemy. The only thing that matters is that they are to be destroyed. Everything else is just a distraction.'"
My two cents on the little I've seen on the TADC drama and gooseworx checking out is that it's another chapter in the "Fandoms are not fans" book. Fandoms in the modern era are filled with people who are less fans of the property, but fans of the fandom who are seeking community. This is not worth being annoyed about in isolation, but people who crave community are irresponsible and fundamentally have a different relationship with the property.
Fandoms can be extremely supportive and places to find yourself, but they are also imperialistic entities. They see properties and creators as things to take and tools to use. Capitalism and it's alienating nature have soaked so deeply in our bones that we see creators as employees and us as bosses in a content farm. I'm tired.
PRIDE MONTH IS UPON US... AND THE CATS MAKE THEIR RETURN FROM THE SHADOWS.
All designs are available as shirts, stickers, mugs, pins, blankets, tapestries, and more on my Redbubble and TeePublic shops. This year I've added the aromantic flag as well as two options for the aroace flag. Invite one of these snarling beasts into your home today, and let's go bite throats.
All purchases go to support a starving queer artist. Thanks!
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For this WH40K OC Weekend Brought to You By Gisa™ ( @ossmodula ) I give you snippets from TWO fics instead of one, Imperium Aeternum and Vexations. Both of these excerpts are unpublished to AO3 as of posting but will be up soon. These focus on my OCs Ihsahn Kurosh of the Gal Vorbak and General Areshkar Ulver Sarkal of the 76th Lacus Hellwalkers (attached to the World Eaters) respectively.
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THE AURELIAN HERESY: IMPERIUM AETERNUM
The first excerpt comes from The Aurelian Heresy: Imperium Aeternum, a rework of an alt heresy fic my friend @undevelopeddistrict and I started in 2020, and it pertains to the theme of BETRAYAL. While it's not entirely an OC-centric fic and is mostly about Lorgar struggling to pick up the pieces after Erebus fails to sway Horus on Davin's moon and gets him killed in the process, it does have a lot of OC-centric moments. Here's a small snippet featuring everyone's favorite babygirl Argel Tal and my sweet little boy with a daemon in his brain, Ihsahn Kurosh. Lorgar has just had a cryptic night terror that he KNOWS must mean something horrible happened, and he is going to do whatever it takes to figure out what the gods are showing him. He has yet to learn that he has been betrayed by someone close to him.
CONTENT WARNINGS: None.
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++Word Bearers Light Cruiser Key of Solomon++
+++03:34 Terran hours+++
Ihsahn sat in silence on the observation deck of the Key of Solomon, eyes closed and blood-hued Mk. IV helm resting in his lap. Over one green eye lens was the gleaming gold Serrated Sun, the light of the dimmed glow-globes on the deck slithering over its surface. Across his knees laid his sheathed power sword, Ecclesiastes Diabolica, the string of xenos vertebrae hanging from its hilt swaying gently with each lurch of the ship. He wore a cloak now, unlike the last time Argel Tal had seen him. Black as crow’s feathers, it fell over Ihsahn’s right pauldron and was clasped at his gorget with a silver chain. Its surface was subtly embroidered with silver thread, taking the form of intricately depicted Colchisian moon lilies. Argel Tal knew comparatively little of who Ihsahn was, but his strange connection and fascination with the flowers was obvious. The Crimson Lord leaned against the wall across from the bench where the other Astartes sat, helmed and with his arms folded across his chest, watching his brother through crystal blue eye lenses. The Carrion Flower did not open his eyes, his red gauntlets resting motionlessly on his helm and sword.
Ihsahn was thinking. He could feel his brother’s unease when he had come to rouse him from his quarters, claiming the primarch had requested his presence. Something clearly was not right, but Ihsahn was patient. He would wait for his father to explain everything. Nonetheless, he could not help but let his thoughts wander.
“The Sea of Souls is turbulent, brother.”
The voice of the daemon was always grating and unpleasant in Ihsahn’s mind. He never heard his Gal Vorbak brethren mention their own daemons speaking to them with any frequency, but Haakon seemed as though he liked to talk. The creature was very good at testing Ihsahn’s patience.
“I gathered as much,” he thought back to the Neverborn inside him, “I think whatever it is has been upsetting father.”
“He knows,” whispered Haakon, “Argel Tal knows.”
Ihsahn opened his eyes, blinking away the Warp-hues that swam behind his eyelids. He glanced at the Crimson Lord, who was clearly watching him despite the helm obscuring his face. Perhaps Ihsahn was not as patient as he’d assumed he was.
“Father is upset,” he said plainly, adjusting the position of his sword across his knees, “otherwise he would not have asked for me in the middle of the night.”
“I take it you want to know why,” said Argel Tal, studying the other marine’s face and body language. At first glance, he looked too kind, his soft hazel eyes those of someone who tended delicate things, not those of a killer. A lingering glance revealed tiny glints of violet within them, like the eyes of the savage Cadian cultists. Under his left eye a row of black Colchisian glyphs were inked in minute detail, forming a single line of text.
Each dream has jaws to crush us.
“Yes,” said Ihsahn, an odd tone leaking into his voice, “we are not simply meeting him here, I can feel the ship preparing for a journey. The Warp is turbulent, or so my passenger tells me. Why is our father upset?”
“He awoke from a vision,” said Argel Tal, shifting his stance slightly. Ihsahn’s reference to the daemon inside of him as his ‘passenger’ was unsettling to say the least. What sort of relationship had he formed with the creature while it was supposed to be lying dormant? He knew next to nothing of the daemon inside himself, and yet Ihsahn was on speaking terms with his own.
“Like the ones on Colchis…” said Ihsahn, trailing off a bit, “the horror…”
“‘The horror’ is right,” thought Argel Tal, “what part of this has not been full of horror?” The Crimson Lord inhaled softly, pondering how his brother might respond to his next words.
“I suggested that he seek an audience with Ingethel,” he said, “perhaps the beast can provide answers.”
“Answers, maybe,” said Ihsahn, combing his armored fingers through his hair, “or lies borne on the tongue of a serpent. Even Erebus, wretched creature that he is, knows the Neverborn are untrustworthy beings.”
“No offense intended, Haakon,” he thought. The daemon was silent for a moment before his response pulsed through Ihsahn’s brain.
“I take none, Carrion Flower.”
Argel Tal chose not to acknowledge the comment about Erebus. While the First Chaplain had been his mentor, he had also been a source of argument and animosity. He brushed it off, choosing to focus on Ihsahn’s appraisal of Ingethel.
“There is little choice at the moment,” he said, “something is wrong and the primarch is desperate to know what.”
“The Warp itself is a fever dream,” said Ihsahn, looking down at the steel grate floor, recalling how the same floor aboard the Orfeo’s Lament had been so caked with layers of human viscera, “it does not, by its nature, know how to be straightforward regardless of a message’s importance.”
A third voice spoke next.
“That is why,” said Lorgar as he stepped onto the observation deck, resplendent in his gleaming crimson warplate, tri-horned helm tucked under one arm and Illuminarum clutched in the opposite hand, “I am going to wring the truth out of that foul abomination myself.”
“Father,” said Ihsahn, bowing his head in respect to the primarch.
Lorgar offered a smile to his sons, but anxiety still shone through his artfully kohl-ringed eyes.
“Now my sons, let us get Ingethel’s attention.”
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VEXATIONS
The second excerpt is from the same fic as last time, Vexations. This one corresponds to the prompt FRIEND. Are Angron and Areshkar friends now? Are their shared experiences and being forced to rely on each other drawing them closer? Is it actually deeper than that? In this excerpt, they explore an abandoned lab complex in which the Overseers, the wicked geneticists of the Ctenophoran Ascendancy, forcibly modify the slaves of the nobility. The horrors they encounter within bring back sickening memories for both of them. Excerpt has not yet been beta read so congratulations, you are now a (partial) beta reader.
CONTENT WARNINGS: extreme body horror, vivisection, gore, mercy k!lling, slavery, medical experimentation
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“I think this is a laboratory,” said Areshkar.
Angron’s lips peeled back from his iron teeth in a silent snarl, his left eye twitching. He knew what that meant; this was the site of atrocities and he did not need to see them to know that. He wondered if, in another life, he might have been able to sense the afterimage of the sheer amount of suffering within those walls, or anywhere else on Ctenophora for that matter.
“Calyxas was here then,” he said, pausing to push aside a swinging door and peer inside as Areshkar continued down the corridor. He could see nothing but the erratic flickering of sterile, blue-white lights and a hanging barrier cloth of semi- translucent bio-plastic, behind which he could barely make out the shapes of scientific instruments. The chemical-meat reek seeped out from behind it, assaulting his preternatural transhuman senses with its intensity.
“My liege, over here.”
Angron turned back, letting the door swing closed once more as he searched for where Areshkar’s voice was coming from.
“I… found something,” continued the mortal.
The primarch crossed the distance to him in a few titanic strides, pushing open the next set of double doors and ripping aside the bio-plastic sheeting.
Areshkar stood at the center of another lab, not too dissimilar from the previous, knuckles white as he gripped the pistol at his side, muzzle aimed to the floor. He did not grip it out of readiness, but hate. Angron heard the general’s dog-teeth grind against each other with a click as he set his jaw in disgust.
“Look at them. Look what that whoreson has done here.”
Angron approached, his eyes finally meeting what Areshkar was looking at.
A series of cylindrical amniotic fluid cylinders lined the far wall of the laboratory, the dying lumens casting their fulgurating ghost-glow over them. Shifting, strange shadows played over the wall behind as the decaying light slithered over their occupants. They’d all been human once, evident in what remained of the Homo sapiens bodyplan in their forms. An eyeless, senseless face bearing nought but a slack-jawed mouth pressed against the side of its cylinder, continuing into a limbless, hairless, but still discernably female human torso. A near featureless lump of pale, veined flesh floated at the top of its own cylinder, deceased with its singular eye clouded over, the fluid it resided in gone rancid and brown with exudation. A tangled mess of elongated bones and stretched flesh curled in on itself within another cylinder, its immensely long and spidery limbs folded at too many joints and its torso encased in thorny ribs that protruded through the tissue and gave the impression of a stinging nettle. In the cylinder beside it, a body that looked as though it had become a fractal set spiralled in on itself, its mutated face distorting into a row of teeth that lengthened into a nigh endless coil. Still others floated in yet more tanks lining the walls in several more rows, a legion of deceased genetic victims reduced to a preserved archive of past abuses.
Angron’s eye twitched. The Nails bit again, spurred on by anger and the fact that he’d gone too long without killing something. His own knuckles whitened around the hafts of his axes. The cruelty necessary to perform the acts that made these people into twisted aberrations was something he was painfully familiar with, and it rankled him to see it on such display.
It was quiet. Mundane. A hideously perfect display of the banality of evil. Forgotten lives sequestered away to collect dust like discarded sales receipts.
It was rapidly becoming his greatest need to slaughter the Overseers wholesale with his own hands regardless of what fate was to befall the planet itself. All he could do for the time being was find the smallest shred of solace in the fact that these poor souls were dead. He tore his gaze away from the dead slaves, a tremor wracking the left side of his face as he counted the beats of his twin hearts to steady himself, to distract himself from the intensified ticking and searing pain of the Nails in the meat of his brain. Between the fluttering twitches of his eye, he studied Areshkar, finding the man frozen in place but for a minute trembling in his shoulders of barely-suppressed rage, and what he was beginning to suspect was the pain of some horrible recognition. In what few interactions they’d had up until that point, not once had Areshkar spoken openly of his past. Something about Ctenophora seemed a personal insult to him as well.
Once the tremor passed Angron made to speak, but was interrupted by a muffled moan of pain echoing in the next room. Areshkar turned sharply, gun up, and cast a glance over his shoulder at him. Another moan of agony echoed, this time louder. Angron gestured with an axe for the general to stay behind him as he made his way to the door with the slow, sauntering steps of a hunting cat. Fresh claret dripped from his nose and down his chin, leaving a series of tiny red droplets on the floor behind him. He squeezed through the doorway, pauldrons scraping the frame as he forced his way through, quickly finding himself in what had once been an operating room. At the center, on a cold metal slab, laid the source of the sound.
Carved open and pinned like a butterfly in an entomologist’s collection, a man still lived.
Though subtle in comparison to the dead floating in the cylinders, the man’s forced mutations were obvious in the prehensile tail that snaked from his spine and the size and almost batlike shape of his ears. Every part of him had been laid open by precise cuts, skin and subcutaneous tissue peeled back and pinned in place. Organs had been lifted from their cavities and placed on the slab, all still connected and visibly functioning despite their new location. His eyes swiveled frantically in their dry, red sockets, eyelids peeled back and pinned. All of his teeth were visible, his cheeks sliced and folded away as flaps of flesh. Every inner working, down to the tendons and ligaments in his limbs, was open to the air and visible, violated.
Areshkar entered, coming to Angron’s side and stopping, frozen in place. That horrible familiarity struck him again, his eyes wide and teeth clenched. The pistol dropped from his hand, clattering to the floor as the vivisected man let out another pitiful, wordless whine. Angron watched as Areshkar approached the slab, stiff as a Mechanicum automaton, and drew the surma tooth-blade sheathed at his back. His eyes full of miserable, mournful apology, he plunged the knife into the man’s skinless throat in a single, practiced motion, severing his windpipe and spinal cord.
Both of them knew it was the only mercy the man had ever been offered in his life.
Areshkar stumbled away from the slab, stuffing the bloodied surma back in its sheath and stooping to pick up his pistol. He avoided meeting Angron’s gaze as he shuffled over to a desk in the corner of the lab, clumsily digging through the abandoned and dust-coated skin-papers that littered its surface.
“I tire of this fucking planet,” he mumbled, as though he had simply run out of horror and only had exhaustion left.
Angron glanced back at the now dead man on the slab, scarlet cruor leaking from his severed throat and running in rivulets off the edge onto the floor. Another, smaller tremor peeled the corner of his lips back from his teeth and jerked his head aside as though something did not want him to look. His iron teeth scraped against each other as he forced his head forward again.
Angron remembered a slab. He remembered the restraints. The blades. The drills. The Nails pulsed sharply again as if to mock him. He could not look away from the vivisected man, as all he could see in him was himself.
But someone had offered that man mercy. Not him. Never him.
Areshkar reached the bottom of the pile of documents, finding spread across the surface of the desk what appeared to be a map. Any sense of satisfaction he might have felt was well drowned out by the mental fatigue quickly catching up with him, but he lifted it from the desk and held it out under the flickering glow of the lumens, doing his best to ignore the smell of freshly spilled blood and the bodily exudations of death in the room. While he could read precisely none of the repulsively alien Ctenophoran script, he did recognize the topographical details of various landmarks. Finding what appeared to his mind to be their current location, he noticed the Overseer’s sigil marked over it in red. He blinked, understanding coming to him as he spotted more of the sigils scattered over the map… and there was one scrawled directly over the heart of Leith Sae. Examining the rest of the locations, he realized that each of them had been located in places the World Eaters and Hellwalkers had already scoured of life.
Angron’s instincts had, regardless of his true intentions, led them to the only place Calyxas could have fled to.
“My liege, look,” he said, walking back to the primarch with the map in hand.
Angron tore his gaze away from the pinned corpse, his eyes settling on the map as Areshkar pointed to the sigils with a scarred finger. Herculean though the effort was, he forced himself to focus on the mortal’s words.
“You were right,” said Areshkar, “the only other lab complex belonging to Calyxas that we have not destroyed is in Leith Sae.”
“I should never have doubted you,” he continued, only in his mind. He would sooner fall on his own sword than let Angron think him capable of doubting him. He cursed the lack of intel the legion possessed on the Overseers, but at this point it mattered little. Without communication with the Conqueror in orbit or the rest of their forces, any more intel they may have possessed was useless anyway. Areshkar could not help but feel he owed the dead slave on the slab some morbid gratitude for drawing attention to the room with his cries. It made him sick to even think that way.
