Warhammer 40000, Mercutian (Night Lords): storytelling - Someone has to record their history, before it is forgotten. Someone has to write their myths, before they forget their purpose.
The Historian
Reality has no meaning, except as it is remembered.
Even for one who was there, saw it all with his own eyes, once the moment has passed only recollection remains. Only the storyteller, the historian, can bring the past into the present, the future.
Many histories might be written. None will be the whole truth and all will contradict each other in myriad was. Those who come after us will pick and choose the truth of their generation. They will bury works they disapprove of, unearth new/old ones that their ancestors rejected, write new commentaries and interpretations, make of the past what they want it to be. Always believing that what was left behind by those who came before them can tell them how things were, and that this vision of the past will show them how their present came to be and what lies in their future.
For that, someone must write our history. I shall write this version.
It is said: the Astartes shall know no fear, writes Mercutian of the Night Lords. This is true: as an aspect of our physiology and training. It makes as little sense that we should look down on others for this moral failing, feeling fear, as if our contempt were for their short statures. They have not had gene therapy and we have.
We are stronger than they, but is not the conviction of those who stand against us greater? Some may break and run, but many do not, even from the Lords of the Night. They are brave. Our father does not think well of bravery, calls it delusions of immortality or a sign of a greater fear of something else. But I have seen fear in the eyes of my enemies, and I have seen them not falter for it.
My brothers do not want to hear this. They are right on the practical level: strength trumps virtue every time. An Astartes is stronger than a mortal man. But without virtue all killing is the same, and we are no different than the slumlords our father hunted. Maybe we are not different.
They do not like to hear Astartes compared unfavourably to humans. That is the rhetoric many of them would use, that being of Adeptus Astartes makes us different from the mere mortal men such that even the term 'human' has come to mean 'them', not 'us'. We were never like them. We never ran from terror or cowered in the dark. We are not made for empathy. To speak of weakness is weakness.
Such nonsense tribalism brings. Are we xenos now? We are the sons of the sons of the Emperor, beloved of all, who is the very definition of 'humanity' all others things must be based around.
If we were not human, then what value would this Imperium of Man we fight for have? It might as well be built on the backs of the Men of Iron our foolish ancestors once used to fight their wars. Before being destroyed by them.
We are all the same. Our brothers, our fathers, the lowliest menial, and our enemies that we call 'noncompliant'. Oh yes, our enemies. Humans all.
My brothers say I think too much.
Once upon a time, there was a monster in the darkness. This monster hunted evil.
Because this became reduced to a fairy-story, a cautionary tale of times long past, a fiction, a planet died.
The monster was a hypocrite who killed in protest of killing. The monster killed those innocents he had once justified himself by claiming to protect from the predators he hunted. The monster was betrayed by everyone, even himself. So he chose to die, for vindication.
That is another story.
Once, briefly, the Night Haunter, the terror in the dark, was a king, and he was a good king.
This is often forgotten, in all that came before and all the happened after. There was almost a moment when things could have been different. There was rule of law. The penalty for breaking the law was death, but it was understood by all what the laws were, and that while the guilty would be punished, the innocent would unmolested.
Then the Emperor came and took him away.
I believe our failure is this: that when our methods do not succeed, we escalate the magnitude of our efforts. That we might use a different strategy to achieve the same goal is not considered. Means becomes ends.
We create worlds where the guilty fear. We do not create worlds where the innocent do not fear.
I do not mean 'innocent' as a sainted moral category of purity and virtue. All humans are inherently evil; some have simply not committed crimes worthy of death yet, but would if they did not fear retribution. A legal definition.
Fear of retribution is only effective when it is specific. If one who has not committed a crime against the king's laws can be hunted as surely as one who has, there is no incentive to avoid crime to avoid punishment. That way leads to desperation and nihilism.
What is our purpose? What allows us to say that we are righteous and they are vile, as all men long to? Why do some men die under our blades and some live? Our father once almost created the world he envisioned. It failed, and we made it so we could never go back, never try again. And we forgot what that dream had once been. Our methods are not inherently wrong, as others accused, they are the only thing with the power to accomplish our goal, but without a goal in sight, we flail around aimlessly and all the deaths we deliver add up to nothing.
Astartes are made to kill, the Night Haunter was often known to say. We are not diplomats or artists or scholars, he said with a eye for me in particular, just killers.
We are a weapon, certainly, but who aims us? A tool is a tool, unless it wields itself.
We tear down, we do not build. We were betrayed, so we must seek revenge. It is our way.
Who betrayed us? The Emperor, in turning what we had done into a shrine to his own godhood. The Imperium, for turning on us when we did only what needed done, that which was needed but no one else wanted to face. But as much, I sometimes suspect we feel, our father, for dying, for leaving us. Reality, for not proving to all that we were right and everyone else was wrong.
They failed, as we said they would, all the fanciful paradises our brothers tried to create have crumbled, but we have hardly succeeded in our endeavours. No one has won, except the gods of rust and ashes, the gods of crows and corpses. What is vindication when it falls on deaf ears?
There was once a child who knew nothing of humanity. He had no father nor mother nor home. He scavenged the underhive, wild and alone, and saw all the worst humanity had to offer. And he killed, not because he loved to kill, yet, nor because he was hungry, nor because he felt any anger or fear toward those he killed. He killed because he saw, all on his own, that some things were wrong and should not be tolerated.
This story has been lost.
A demigod is one who is both god and man. He may have the best traits of both sides of his ancestry, or the worst, or something in between. He will often have the powers of a god, but need not abide by the rules that govern them. He will also be mortal and he will die, for immortality is the secret the gods guard most jealously.
Demigods are made for defiance: they defy category, they defy tradition, they will not allow a status quo to hold. They do great, impossible deeds, break down what was old. And every son must defy his father someday.
In this, though, a demigod must fail. A son is made to succeed his father, but what of a father who does not die? A son must overcome his father by becoming greater than him, if it is to make a good tale. A son who is, inherently, less than his father and always will be, his defiance must end in tragedy for his hubris. Yet, what choice has he but to become rebellious, deny his father and refuse his name or to stay a child forever?
So nothing that happened is really that surprising in the end. Perhaps the fate of the galaxy would be different if the Emperor had had daughters instead, Mercutian wrote with a hint of a smile, for the daughters of a god are a different story.
Those who see the future say it is not set in stone. Yet, our father was rarely wrong in his predictions, even knowing the shape of the nightmare to come.
Why did he not seek to change what he saw? I cannot know his mind and I am no prophet myself, but I can speculate a little on why he saw the particular possible futures that he did of all of those that might have existed.
People are predictable. One does not need the gift of prophecy to be able to guess how they will respond. Most go through life with a blind certainty that they are right. Men act as they think best, and to change that would mean to change the very fundamental character of their souls. And few men were more stubborn or more immovable in their ways as the sons of the Emperor.
If the Night Haunter had given up all that he was, then the future he saw would not, could not have come about. His father would still have killed the man he was. That death would have been an inglorious one, would have been an apology, an admittance that he was wrong. Astartes are not meant for such things. I have implied that my brothers are losing our purpose and such dreams for the future we once possessed, but I do not deny the soul of our Legion. We did what was needed for the glorious dream humanity once had to come about, back in the days before all dreams died. The death he chose was one he could go to with head held high, one that laid the blame at the proper door.
We did not make a single, defining mistake. There is no single moment that we could have changed and thus changed everything. Some events were more important than others in the specifics of how our fates played out, but even had we not razed the flowering fields of Illia, even had Curze and Dorn not fought at Cheraut, things would not have been different. It would have been another campaign, another day. We are the Night Lords.
The only way to change the future would have been to change who we were. And we were not wrong.