Pain that can only be relieved by touch, pressure, weight. I don't mean sexually. I never mean that with whump, in fact. I mean, imagine a whumpee who has been worked so hard that every muscle is agony if they even think about moving. Massage is painful at first, but as the muscles warm and loosen the pain starts to gradually ease. Now they're desperate for it not to stop, where when it started they were gritting their teeth and stifling noises of pain.
Consider a space marine from Warhammer 40k's Deathwatch. (I know a lot of y'all whump friends prefer twinks to these inhuman genefreak monsters that I love, but imagine the marines as all drawn by the great Vezimira or tagedeszorns if that makes you see the vision.) The only way you can canonically get veterans from radically different chapters to work together seamlessly is to drive them to the point of collapse.
Space marines do not tire out easily, so we're talking days to weeks of training in armor without a pause, living off the recycling systems. By the time they're finally allowed to pause they practically have to carry each other back to quarters. A Salamander might have to literally carry an Ultramarine (Guilliman is a less physical guy as Primarchs go) or an OG Blood Angel (depending on where they are in their Red Thirst progression; they probably can't stop and slurp down a Serf Capri Sun during DW training). A Templar helps haul a literally unconscious Blackshield who's some kind of comparatively smaller purple-eyed albino from who knows what ancient chapter. He hates that, hates this weakness, but he will not shame his own chapter by letting the squad fail.
So at some point all of that is over, the tech-priests have taken the armor away to be serviced, and everyone has been slapped back to consciousness and been given a good talking to by the Templar veteran and a more surreptitious word of encouragement by the old Salamander. They all stumble through scrubbing down with scouring powder in the showers, and the Salamander, every scar of achievement twinging, can finally flop facedown onto the slab in his quarters. Maybe his branding priest or priestess is there, a trusted grandchild of a niece or nephew twice removed, not the first of his extended family to perform the office and already growing old in his service. He can hear them bustling around murmuring orders to the serfs. When the first pour of hot oil hits his back a heavy muscle twitches, startling the younger ones, but with a little encouragement they roll up their sleeves and dive in. Massaging ceremonial oil into an Astartes is no easy task, but now it is made easier by the limp exhaustion of the Son of Vulkan's muscles. At first they can see sinews pop out in his jaw and temple against the pain, because they've never had an unkind word from Milord the Astartes, and he's not about to start now. But as they go along his face slowly relaxes. The middle back between the shoulders proves a bit stubborn, and at a nod from the elderly branding priest, a bigger and younger serf climbs up to kneel on the Salamander's back so he can pound on it with his two fists bunched together. They all see the sigh of relief from the triple lungs, raising and lowering the young man in place.
On his night-black skin with its network of little red cracks, the older of the whorls of paler scarring are hard to read, faded with time. They'll have to be renewed one of these days, while the priest remembers what they were. But for now the space marine is at rest, breathing easier as a dozen little weights knead at his sore body.
The ones who serve the Templar veteran are probably going to need mallets, and if he thinks any one of them is trying to spare him he'll bat them across the room. They'll die, or they'll learn. The Blood Angel's serfs are pale and listless, and at least one definitely won't survive the night, but at least he'll be unfailingly gentle and courteous with the survivors. The son of Guilliman's serfs run like a well-oiled machine. He might mumble a mild reprimand if he notices anything isn't precisely according to routine, but he's not a harsh man, only a very meticulous one.
The Blackshield has no one who is particularly his servant. They serve the Deathwatch. They handle him carefully enough, aware of how temperamental some Astartes are, but not with any affection or reverence. He wouldn't be a Blackshield, chapterless, brotherless, if he was not dishonored in some way. In the end, there will be a pile of serfs sleeping on rugs around the base of the Salamander's slab. The Blackshield will be alone.
This is where stars die. This is where stars are born.
The supermassive isn’t as big as some others of its kind, perhaps 10,000 times the mass of Sol. Stars revolve around the event horizon at a rate scarcely perceptible to an observer with any rational perception of time. The redshift as their angle to the observer changes gives the black heart a red-orange halo. A “thin” lance of stars and dust fires in two directions, showing the axis of rotation. The knowledge of how something that eats light can give birth to so much light has long been lost.
The distance from which any of this may be viewed challenges any sane sense of scale. In the skies of worlds that orbit the stars outside the event horizon, the dust around the accretion disc has created a nightly river of light that has different names in different systems: the Emperor’s Belt, the Throne Road, or among the more pessimistic, Temptation’s Way.
Absolutely anything could hide among the stars of the great lance. Its radiation confounded vox traffic and confused navigators, making the Astronomican hard to see. The currents of the Warp were strange out at this end of the galactic Arm, faster and faster the nearer one was to the lance. A ship whose Masters were careless, or just unlucky, could overshoot its course and find itself among the stars of the lance, lost beyond finding, never to be heard from again.
The human denizens of this sector called it the Grave Spires. There was an excellent view of it from the rocky moon that orbited Desolus I. It shone ominously down on a Thunderhawk gently nosing its way into the blackness of a high-sided ravine. Lumes played over the spiny protrusions on the walls as the vessel dipped lower. A gangplank lowered as it swooped down within a few meters of the uneven floor of the crevasse. Five shapes dropped into the darkness, black ceramite barely delineated by the gleam of reflection, and the Thunderhawk curved up and away and was gone.
Without a sense of scale, the five Astartes looked very small here as they stood among the rocks. They were all dressed in the black armor and silver left pauldron of the Deathwatch, but they were by no means identical. One was markedly taller than the others, and one, the one with the black right pauldron, was a bit shorter and slighter.
“Well?” the gravel voice came from a marine with a black cross on a white field on his right pauldron. La’um’s HUD tagged him as Theta-2.
“Our objective is 600 kilometers bearing five degrees left as you face the Throne Road. We all arrive, or none of us does,” said another, whose right shoulder bore a red lightning bolt. His voice bore no sign of obvious damage, but something in the unhurried way he weighed each word felt older. He was marked Theta-1. “The terminator moves slowly, but do not be deceived. If you are caught out in the sun here, your armor will not save you. Kill Team Audax, run.”
La’um ran. In his own chapter he would have the copper stripe to his red helm that would mark him a veteran and a sergeant, but here and now he was only callsign Theta-3, and his helmet was black. Only his dull green right pauldron with the golden icon of the winged bull’s head marked him as a Harrower.
That did not bother him particularly. He was only the third man ever to be seconded to the Deathwatch in the entire history of the chapter, an honor superseding all minor inconveniences.
They had to scramble up the far side of the ravine, losing time as they climbed. Over his shoulder, La’um glimpsed a distant golden rim to the black horizon. Not even an Astartes could outrun the turning of a moon, he was certain. The objective was to stay ahead long enough to reach the destination. La’um understood his own top speed over distance to be something like 60 kilometers per hour. It would normally take him ten hours to run that far over uneven terrain.
As they burst onto level ground, he could already see the Blackshield start to pull ahead, but then his steps stuttered oddly and he fell back beside La’um. He had never turned his head. The gray-black plain sprawled in front of them all the way to the horizon.
For a couple of hours, they ran without incident. The watch-sergeant, Theta-1, did not have to keep pulling himself back to keep outpacing the others; his armored legs moved like clockwork, pace seemingly unvarying. But then, he’d done this run before. At around three hours by Terran reckoning, La’um’s vox clicked.
“If your strength should fail you, say so before you fall, cousin. I can carry you.”
His head jerked around in surprise. It was Theta-4 on a private channel. He had a green pauldron with a black dragon or lizard on it. His accent in Low Gothic was notably different even among a group from different worlds. He wasn’t small, about the same as Theta-2, but La’um had a hard time imagining him grabbing up an armored marine a foot taller than himself without difficulty. Still, his tone was not mocking. La’um thought he meant it.
“Acknowledged, 4,” he said.
When they had been running five hours, he could hear the others starting to struggle, harsh breathing audible even with all of them still helmed. The Blackshield Theta-5 had stopped jumping ahead and falling back. Now he was keeping pace with the others. He had shorter legs, but he also had less weight to carry and needed less air. It was 2 and 4 La’um was worried about. The watch-sergeant was obviously still having no trouble at all.
At about seven hours, Theta-2 stumbled for the first time. He caught it immediately and only lost a step, but the others had to check for that half-second, or he would not have been able to catch up.
La’um opened the team channel.
“Theta-4, trade places.” He wasn’t going to waste breath explaining why he was having an easier time of it. He was sweating, they all were, the recycling system in his armor humming faintly as it parsed poison from water in his sweat. The smell of Astartes sweat was chemical and bitter. But La’um was less out of breath than any of them.
They slid past each other, barely breaking stride. Now he was in the middle of their line, with the Blackshield Theta-5 over on 2’s left and the watch-sergeant on 4’s right. The next time Theta-2 stumbled, La’um and 5 each caught an arm and righted him, barely slowing.
At close to eight, Theta-4 stumbled, too. Again, La’um grabbed an arm to stop him from falling. He wasn’t sure if the watch-sergeant would actually help, but in fact he did, at exactly the same time as La’um. The sun was getting closer behind them now, steam rising from the cold rocks as the heat struck. La’um could hear it hissing. They were slower now because of the necessity of climbing over larger rocks. They dragged each other over boulders with a shaming amount of clumsiness for Angels of Death. Nothing on the horizon looked like any kind of objective to La’um, vision occasionally strobing in time with the beat of both hearts. He wondered if the watch-sergeant would in fact share their fate, or if he had some means of saving himself he had not mentioned. He didn’t seem worried.
By the time they topped a spiny rise and he saw the bunker a kilometer below, even La’um was starting to hurt, legs and back aching. His armor complained at the power usage incumbent on keeping him from hyperthermia. He ignored it as he bent to haul Theta-2 up over his shoulder before the man’s knees could finish buckling. He could hear his muffled swearing, but he wasn’t stupid enough to fight it.
Somewhat to his surprise, 4 was still going, staggering down the slope being half-dragged by the watch-sergeant. Theta-5 put on a burst of speed. La’um saw him skid to a halt at the bunker, checking the heavy door, then shouldering it open with an audible groan of effort. La’um ran into the cold shade with the sun at his heels, all of them ahead of him, and the watch-sergeant slammed the bunker door. A faint pop and hiss traveled over the structure all around them as the terminator passed over it outside. Faint lumes guttered to life. The room wasn’t large for five space marines, but it was untouched by the heat. A stairwell to one side led down into darkness, big enough for two of them to walk abreast. Cold air blew from the vents, enriching the air. It felt thicker to La’um now.
“Put me down, damn you,” growled Theta-2. La’um slid him off his shoulders, watching him land on his feet. He leaned into the wall, then tore off his helm to reveal features that were probably very pale when they weren’t beet-red. He had short, dark hair, and two skull-shaped iron studs were embedded in his brow.
The others, seeing no reprimand from Theta-1, dragged their helmets off as well. La’um had never seen them before today. He hesitated, but the watch-sergeant had removed his, revealing a sharp high-boned face with more normal-looking eyes than the others. The bun on the back of his head was half-down, strands of black hair sticking to his neck padding, but he stood straight and alert, watching all of them.
La’um doffed his helm slowly, shaking his head slightly to free his copper earrings. The helmet pulled free of the socket in the back of his neck and the HUD vanished from in front of his eyes. Now he was looking at the kill-team with his unaided vision. He adjusted to the dark relatively quickly. Theta-4 was black, not just dark-skinned like some of the humans at the watch fortress, but as black as a moonless night. Red cracks seamed the surface of his face and his bald head. His eyes were red, too, but the surfaces of them were naked like the others, and like the others they were oddly round in shape. Theta-5 was even paler than 2 beneath the red spot high on each cheekbone. He had a thin fuzz of very white hair, and his eyes were a very light purple, something La’um had never seen, either. He was very pretty in an oddly frail and mortal-looking way for an Astartes.
A pair of straight scars, like equals signs, lay old and stretched across the hollow of each cheek.
They were looking up at La’um. He looked back, leaning his helm on one hip.
“I’ve never seen an Astartes that color,” Theta-4 said.
“I’ve never seen one like you, either,” La’um said. Theta-4 laughed. Wrinkles shifted around his eyes as they crinkled in genuine amusement.
“Mutants,” said 2. “All filthy mutants, by the - ”
La’um was glad he’d left his helm recording, because he didn’t actually see what the watch-sergeant did. He wasn’t looking away. It was just too fast, and then Theta-2 was lying on his back with a boot on his throat, wheezing. He grabbed at Theta-1’s greave, but could not twist away. He wasn’t making a good attempt, fingers weaker than normal.
“Are you a mutant, too?” he demanded.
“No. I am just faster than you,” said the watch-sergeant. “You say this because of my appearance?”
All of them had bolters and knives. Nobody had drawn one.
“No,” gritted 2. “There are such men in my Crusade. I said it because - ” He cut off, gasping, as 1 leaned on his throat.
“Mark me well, Theta-2. You are Deathwatch now, not Black Templar. You outrank no one. You are here to kill xenos. They,” an abrupt gesture indicated the others. “Are here to kill xenos. That is all that matters.”
“Watch-sergeant, a question,” La’um said. Theta-1 grunted as he stepped back, leaving 2 to kip back onto his feet. For a moment Theta-2 swayed, trying to be unobtrusive about grabbing the wall with one hand.
“Ask,” said Theta-1.
“Why did we run here? What is our objective?”
“Different chapters. Different traditions. All veterans,” said the watch-sergeant. “Perhaps one in ten Astartes seconded to the Deathwatch return alive. For those trained at Watch Fortress Desolus it’s four out of ten. We do not collect men and toss them out into the field like mice from a sack. We work them together until they are one unit.”
“All or none,” said Theta-4.
La’um nodded. He was younger than the others at seventy-five Terran, he was certain. He remembered what neophyte training had been like. With the benefit of hindsight it had been obvious that some of the purpose of that brutality was conditioning that the hypnomats couldn’t perform, or couldn’t perform well enough. He hadn’t been told that would happen here, but it made sense that it would.
“So you will run. You will fight. You will work until even you, mighty Angels of Death, can hardly stand. Then you’ll do it again. And I will be here with you, because I am your watch-sergeant. We emerge from the crucible as one body, or we do not emerge at all.”
He was barely out of breath now. La’um was mildly impressed.
“That was easier for you than me, little brother,” Theta-4 said to him. He had to look up to see the Harrower’s face. La’um’s lip twitched.
“My world’s air is thin, honored elder,” La’um said. “Everyone who lives there has adapted lungs.”
“Our strengths differ,” the watch-sergeant said. “This year you will learn what they are. You will learn your brothers and how they fight and what they bring.”
“And what about you?” Theta-2 asked, looking at the Blackshield. “Can you even speak?” La’um could tell he wanted to say “mutant,” biting off the word and swallowing it like a bitter pill.
“I can,” said Theta-5. His voice was lighter and his accent more rounded, as if he had been trained how to make the sounds with more precision. “When there is something needful to say.”
The watch-sergeant grunted. “Rehydrate. In one hour, we enter the tunnels.”
It's been an awful week for irl reasons and I've therefore spent a lot of it huperfocusing on that Deathwatch kill team idea I had and therefore doing research and planning instead of writing on either my novel or The Warm One.
I'm kind of looking at this roster:
Watch-sergeant/team leader: White Scar or descendant, obsessed with perfect timing, older than all but Blackshield, prides himself on using any weapon and making anything INTO a weapon, definitely lowkey a heretek.
Blood Angel or Ultramarine descendant, specialty ranged/overwatch. Oddly distant, others suspect he has private missions they're not being told about.
Black Templar, melee specialist, can't believe he's stuck on this kill-team with at least two mutants, brutal and direct with his hammer.
Blackshield Brother Vanitas: versatile, but in melee uses a long and a shortblade and is fast and graceful. Slim build for an Astartes, skin albinism, hair shaved, eyes inexplicably purple like his Primarch. Will not talk about his possible chapter or any past before the DW and does not like being asked.
Salamander, heavy flamer expert, laid-back, sturdy and strong, the glue that holds this team together. Gets shit done without argument.
Battle-brother from homebrew chapter still WIP, very red skin, bigger than average, comes from badlands/jungle deathworld with sulfurous tidelocked planetoid where the fortress monastery is. Stoic, dry sense of humor. Mildly suspicious of First Founding guys for some reason.
Hey there. I don't want to be intrusive, but I love your warhammer whump and wanted to see if you'd be willing to share some takes/prompts on psyker whump? Only if you'd like to, of course. I'm obsessed with them and think they are ripe for whumping
Sure!! I personally love biomancers and the idea of constantly fighting unnatural hungers, but even the best-balanced psyker is always at risk of becoming a gateway to the other side in a more direct way if they have much power at all. More below the cut, because I love talking about psykers!
They could bleed from any given orifice or from randomly opening wounds if they overdo it. Channeling a lot of power can cause random perils of the Warp where absolutely anything could happen. It could rain blood. It could rain candy. A steel floor could turn to quicksand for 5 seconds and then back to steel. Your dead grandma could show up and tell you either you did good or you're the worst. The tabletop books have tables to roll on, or used to, but there is no actual limit to what the warp can or will do. It is infinite unformed possibility. It's just that that possibility is informed by the universal roil of emotions and a lot of those emotions are terrible.
Even Imperial Sanctioned, whose training is rigid and abusive (for they are held to be dangerous, sinful, and disposable), develop weird little rituals of their own intended to stitch their sanity together and keep away the waiting, ravenous things outside the world. And Chaos psykers who survive for any length of time are not only hurt. They are changed.
Every greater use of the power of a True God brings with it a greater change in the flesh, something that brings outside of you whatever you're holding in. It might start with bleeding and teeth falling out as new, sharp ones grow in. It might change eyes and skin and hair and cause the flesh to sprout with spines, scales, eyes, horns. The ultimate destination might be apotheosis into daemonhood for a few, devourment for many, but once the changes start there is no going back. Then the servant of the True Gods has to hope they have found trustworthy companions among what the Imperium names the lost and damned - because no one can make it alone forever.
I actually have a lot of story ideas about characters struggling through the process of going to Chaos because the Imperium has failed them (as it does so many people) or just never really having a chance to be otherwise (because they were already mutated at birth in a way beyond the already-bad-enough sin of being a psyker). The canon books only have a crew of colorful weirdos surviving long among chaos space marines, and I enjoy those too, but I think there's room for all kinds of weird little cults and warbands out there.
