Editing Avitus (section)

==Chaos Rising==
{{Topquote|I can almost hear your mewling now. "How could he betray us?!" "Why, Avitus, why?!" Look at this planet! Look at it! That is why! The entire galaxy is the same: Broken. Shattered. Rotten to the core! Honor, brotherhood, duty — they are no more than delusions and lies. We use them to justify the slaughter left in our wake. I cannot tolerate it any longer! I have seen the rot that runs through our chapter's honor — and it justifies nothing! My memories are full of the screams of those I have killed. Where others see life, I see only death. We all know how this will end. We have always known. It ends in blood.|Avitus' parting message after his treachery is exposed}}

In [[Chaos Rising]], Avitus remains more or less identical to his previous appearance. In the first mission, he gets to accompany [[Blood Ravens Force Commander|Commander Hairgel]] to kill some [[Lost and the Damned|traitor guard]], which is more or less his wet dream apart from him saying he was just starting to respect them. He generally advocates doing pragmatic things that will up your corruption meter, such as blowing up the gate to Angel Forge. If he turns traitor, Avitus becomes the only heretic to use Terminator armor against you, along with a cyclone missile launcher and assault cannon. This still leaves him nowhere near a certain [[Eliphas|Chaos Champion]] or a [[Martellus|Techmarine]] in annoying boss fights, but he will still wreck your shit if you ever give him the chance to fire any of his ranged weapons at you, especially with his cyclone missile barrage on Primarch difficulty.

During the fight the true extent of his grief spills out, with a greater loathing expressed than ever before. The nature of Kyras and the extent of his corruption demolish the pillars of sanity he had invested in the Imperium and the honor of the Chapter. Having held the rest of the galaxy in contempt prior, suddenly he did not even have the cause of the Space Marines to laud above that which he had loathed. The prior conviction he had toted in killing his foes was gone, and the dead returned to plague his conscience. Everything he had been taught was a lie; the galaxy was not the divine right of mankind and the God-Emperor - [[Grimdark|it is nothing but a nihilistic void that only demands endless killing]]. Which is entirely correct. In truth, Avitus did not fall to Chaos in the way his brothers might have understood it, instead he fell to the truth. He saw the galaxy for what it was once stripped of the comforting veneer of morality and higher purpose ingrained into him as a Space Marine; understood what it meant and could not stomach it.

This makes Avitus a notable example of a 40k character becoming "self-aware". It isn't his love of violence or any lust for power or the corruption of Kyras that turns him traitor, but a sudden awareness of the galaxy in the way we as spectators understand: [[Grimdark|it is a hopeless meat grinder, and nothing more; the setting exists for violence alone, for our pleasure]]. Avitus had been grappling with this doubt since the events of Victory Bay in Dark Crusade, and Kyras' cavorting with Eliphas pushes him over the edge. When he betrays the Imperium, it isn't because he suddenly hates it or his brothers or suddenly loves Khorne, but because of his new perspective. When Avitus betrays the Imperium, it is because he is a proud man with nothing left to ever take pride in again. Where he once held conviction he was only left with a death wish and he sought his demise in the only way he could ever respect it: amidst the heat of battle, in blood and fire, where the raging dead can be drowned out under the roar of bolter fire. In the end, Avitus died staging his last stand not against the alien, heretic, or loyalists, but against the whole cruel, uncaring universe.