Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

== Monster ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''

I am a [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#New_Men|monster]].

Is it surprising, that I admit it so readily? Most monsters are only reluctant to admit it because they have been raised their whole lives to believe it is not so. I have never had the luxury of knowing anything else. I have always been a monster.

I remember everything. I even remember vague flashes of those that came before. Memories of those whose cells were cultured to create my DNA. The sheer pain of those tortured to provide the power to restore those dead cells to life and revert the differentiated cells back into an egg. I remember the sheer terror of my mother as she was clinically violated in ways unthinkable to the average mind, and then forced to watch for eleven months as an abomination grew inside her. All the while her offspring communed with her mind and was privy to her thoughts. When I was born she rejected me, threw her suckling and adoring infant from her breast. The Drukhari caretakers took me away and put me in a kennel, feeding me with a bottle before switching to kibble. Apparently this was not an uncommon occurrence.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">


At six I was transferred from the kennels to the pens. Even though I was only a child by normal standards I looked twice that age. Our creator had tried many ways to accelerate our development. However, every attempt he crippled the batch’s ability to use psychic power. Something to do with the trade-off between soul development and time to adulthood. His solution was to accelerate body growth while slowing down mental development. Children in the body of adults. We were segregated into age-specific crèches and switched from a diet of kibble to live prey. Some kind of bird, I don’t know exactly what. At first I had trouble adapting to the change, but after watching those around me I eventually figured it out. Grab the head and twist. It was so simple.

None of us had names. Most of us were incapable of speech, beyond throaty screams and animalistic howls. We created a rudimentary language, composed of gestures, pheromonal signals, flushing of skin patterns, latent psychic communication, and what few sounds we could make. It was a crude language, but it worked well enough for our purposes. I had my own internal system for telling individuals apart. The one who always smelled was Stinky, the one who pushed the others around was Bossy, and so on.

[[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Fabius_Bile|I remember our creator]]. How I hated him. I will never forget his odor, a strange mix of preservatives and death. Although most of the overseers smelled of death in some way, none of them smelled like he did. Sometimes he would come to the pens and take one of us away. They never came back. He considered us all failures. Stinky had digestive problems, Bossy was too aggressive, my eyesight was too poor, and so on. He also considered us failures as a group. He had expected us to come out of the womb walking, talking, and quoting philosophy. Instead he got a set of maladjusted ghouls, pale-skinned soldiers that seemed incapable of what he wanted. It was strange. He wanted to create supermen, humans that could grow into functional adults without the need of any other. Yet he treated us like animals, apparently not noticing or not caring about how we hid things in our pens, or filched things from our Drukhari caretakers. Stinky even broke out of his pen to kill one that had threatened his surrogate mother. She was one of the few who hadn’t rejected her infant abomination. I envied him for that.


I remember my first kill. I was fully grown at the time, both in body and mind. Our creator had struck some kind of bargain with a Drukhari Kabal, using our services as soliders against their rivals in exchange for reciprocity. Of course, we had no idea that any of this was going on. All we knew is that we were suddenly taken outside the pens and dumped in this strange, new environment. I could smell the pheromone markings of the ones who had gone ahead of us. The alluring scent of the males, the more familiar scent off the females, smells of battle and blood. They triggered some kind of curiosity in us, and we moved ahead.

I followed the rest of the herd until we reached the din of battle, where we started to split up as our interest waned. I came across a Drukhari taking cover behind a series of containers, more concerned about shots fired from the other side than an ambush from behind. Our eyes met for a second before I attacked. Like an idiot I charged him in a straight line, and in response he brought up his splinter rifle and put a round into me. It was painful, and the poisons covering it would prove problematic in the long term, but at that moment I stopped more due to surprise than to pain. The two of us stared dumbfounded at the crystaline needle sticking out of my chest, clear fluid already hardening and forming a scab on my pale, blue-veined skin.

Looking back on it today, being older and wiser I would have done things very different. I was young and stupid. Fortunately so was he. If he was smart he would have stayed back, using his superior speed and agility to wear me down from a distance. He had grown fat and arrogant glutting himself on mon-keigh souls that were so much smaller and weaker than he was. He wasn’t expecting a mon-keigh his own size, who could look him in the eye with their flat, grey eyes. In the split second he stood gawking at the failure of his splinter pistol to put me down, I lunged forward and snapped his neck. Grab the head and twist. Just like the bird.

When the fighting was over I was returned to the pens without any medical attention. My body temperature had dropped and I had gone into shock. Our creator half expected me to die from my injuries and the others to cannibalize my remains. “The inability of man to eat his own dead without preparation is yet another biological weakness of our kind”, or something to those words. However, his expectations were misplaced. The others in my crèche did not eat me. They huddled up to me, keeping me warm through the night with their body heat.


I remember the first time I was exposed to the trigger scent. Our Creator had picked another fight, this time with [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#The_Fallen|a group of humans even larger than we were, dressed in armor so heavy they were as wide as two of us put shoulder to shoulder, and smelling so revolting to our senses our creator smelled good in comparison]]. He wanted us to attack them, and we weren’t doing as he had wanted. Although we may not have been the smartest of beings, we weren’t dumb. That’s when he released the trigger scent. All of a sudden my nostrils were filled with a musky odor, and my vision was awash with a kaleidoscope of colors. We rushed at the towering figures with a sudden disregard for our own safety as we had before. The giants were bigger and stronger than we were, but we overwhelmed them in a tide of bodies. Bossy ripped out the throat of one of the giant men with his teeth, even though it took him several tries to do so. One of the other giants tore him in half for that with his bare hands a moment later. We killed and killed and killed, until there were none left to kill, and then we tore the corpses into tiny pieces in a frenzy. I heard an animalistic scream. It took me a second before I realized it was coming out of my throat.

I remember when I was supposed to have died. Yet another Drukhari Kabal had come to our creator with an offer. They needed bodies and hunting hounds for a raid on realspace. I was one of those that was given. It was the first time I set foot in the Materium. I was almost overwhelmed, the cool breeze on my skin, the feeling of soil between my toes, the sheer number of scents and sounds and thoughts around me. The raid did not go as planned. The Kabalites had expected to find a world of farmers and fishermen. They had not predicted that an army had been dispatched there on rotation. We fought like cornered beasts, but a raiding party had no chance against a dedicated army, and Drukhari and members of my crèche alike fell to lasgun and shuriken fire. I took a lasbolt to the shoulder and dropped, nearly trampled in the confusion. I was lucky to have “merely” broken a leg. After the battle the dead were piled high, the corpses to be disposed of by burning. I was buried among them, overlooked among the dead and the dying. Though my arm and leg would not regain function for another month, I was able to pull myself free and limp to the safety of the forest, the smaller humans apparently unable to smell my trail of blood.

Our creator had treated us like animals.

And if there is one thing that animals are very good at doing, it is surviving.

</div>
</div>