When I was a child, I was scared of the dark. Even after all this time I still remember that. The constant, animal fear that something was within the shadows waiting to devour me. I would find myself staring up at the night sky, imagining that great void of darkness and the madness that must take over man to want to traverse it.
I had grown up on stories of the emperors angels, how the emperor sent them to places where his children needed them most, to protect us and keep us safe from the evils that would overwhelm us if given the chance.
When I asked my mother why angels of such splendor would willingly enter the darkness of space, she had told me. "The darkness is the place light is needed most, they are our protectors from the monsters. They are the tiny individual candles that form a bonfire that protects us from the night."
She had died a year after telling me that, as we tried to flee from marauders with strange tattoos on their skin and horrific mutations that make my fists clench in disgust even now. Those monsters had hunted our tribe for years after, my fear of the dark subsiding for the all to real fear of man. I had just reached my thirteenth year when I saw my first angel.
As the men and women did what they could to fight off a near endless horde of mutated monstrosities, as I did my best to stay strong as I clasped my stone spear in hand, that they arrived. A series of lights shot throughout the light and an earth shattering crash echoed throughout the world itself. One of them landed within the horde itself and I had to climb onto a nearby roof to see them, but I did.
Giants of obsidian and crimson, their armour as black as night except for their arms and legs, which were streaked with a red paint that looked like they had already been through a battle. Their pauldrons were black, with a grey swirl that consistently shifted and changed shape. And when they began to kill the mutant horde, it was like watching men walk through a river, undeterred by the water, entirely in control.
It was then that I knew I would become one, or die in the attempt. I knew it in my very soul that I would one day wear that armour, that I would bring salvation to the children of the emperor. And now as I finally wear that armour as a newly anointed battle brother of the Formless Shadow chapter, I remember that desire above everything else.
The desire to be the light within the dark.