Ciaphas Cain, God of Chaos (Part 1)

If you're reading this, you're probably thinking that I'm not dead, that I somehow managed to survive the fall into that volcano, escape the notice of the Inquisitor who was dueling me, and went off to a distant sanctum of some sort to recover my strength. Or maybe Amberley spirited me away in hopes of squeezing more secrets of the protectorate out of me. Or maybe the BORG found my body and I'm narrating this from inside the cockpit of the Liberator walker, repurposed into a device roughly akin to a Dreadnought's sarcophagus. Even if my (admittedly somewhat justified) reputation for walking away alive and mostly unscathed from things that no normal human walks away from at all, it's still a little difficult to communicate when one is clinically dead.

And yet, that's exactly what I was after that fateful duel.

Nobody was more surprised than myself to find that a) there was more after that, and b) none of it involved eternal torment in Slaanesh's corner of the warp on account of my association with Emeli.

xxxx

For a while, everything seemed to drift. I felt oddly warm and content in a way that I'd never truly felt before, totally unmoored from such abstract and meaningless concepts as "suspicion" or "alarm" or "bowel-loosening terror". For what could've been seconds or weeks or even millennia (probably all of those and none of those at once, considering the finicky nature of time in the warp), I existed in some capacity, but without any reason to inquire further or motivation to do so. I simply was.

But then a voice reached my senses, and changed that.

It wasn't calling for me, specifically. In fact, knowing what I know now, I was probably the absolute last entity the owner of the voice would want at its side. But unfortunately for the both of us, I was the entity his call for aid ended up summoning.

I'm still not totally sure what compelled me to answer his summons. Maybe it was the nature of the summoner and the fact that he'd been bestowed with a package of genes from Him on Terra himself. Maybe it was the content of the pleas itself, which I still just can't seem to recall all that clearly. Or maybe it was the unfairness of it all, the fact that he was calling out for aid for anyone willing to offer it and the knowledge that nobody able to do so was answering. Whatever the reason, the voice finally got me moving, and I snapped wide awake.

All of a sudden, everything was crystal clear. The sky above me was an all-too-familiar shade of sickly green, the air thick with contaminants that defied description. A battlefield that called to mind the plague-tainted ice fields of Adumbria during the short-lived chaos incursion it had been on the receiving end of stretched out before me, littered with the bodies of loyal servants of the Emperor and Warp-touched horrors alike. All around me, a miasma of despair and misery swirled, the abstract sensations somehow chilling my skin as if they were physical sensations. And yet, even through that maelstrom of what I'd later realize were the warp energies of the Plague Lord and his servants, I could feel the warmth of unwavering faith and unbreakable will, flickering and weak yet still standing strong.

And then the oddly exuberant howls of Daemons aligned with Nurgle reached my ears, and my palms began tingling. I'm not certain what possessed me, but for one of the few times in my long and inglorious career, I felt the urge to deliberately do something very, very stupid... and for the first time, I took it.

In the blink of an eye, I was standing before the source of the sensation in my palms; a Great Unclean One in all its disgusting glory. The tingling sensation in my hands became a searing heat, the chainsword and bolt pistol the members of the Cainite Protectorate had come to see as inseparable from yours truly simply appearing in my hands. I brought the chainsaw up, and it's glossy-black metal effortlessly parried the corpulent Daemon's own blade as it swung down toward a target standing right behind me.

I saw the creature's eyes go wide, and it dawned on me, distantly, that I knew this daemon. "...Cain?!" It exclaimed in a voice vaguely akin to the slurping of whole rivers of filth.

"Hello, Gurug'ath." I responded as I stared straight into the Greater Daemon's three eyes, not even questioning how I was standing on the same level ground as the thing yet somehow at eye level with it. And then I took aim with my bolt pistol, pulled the trigger, and blew its head clean off.

I didn't spare even the slightest moment to contemplate how I'd managed to one-shot a Greater Daemon of Chaos with my unenchanted, typical, largely ceremonial bolt pistol I always carried on my person since I'd acquired it from the corpse of the governor (at least, I'd assumed it was that specific bolt pistol). I moved onto the next group of Daemons with a speed that was downright physics-breaking, my gleaming black chainsword tearing through them like a power sword through butter. Like a servitor on autopilot, I fell into the steady rhythm of battle, leaping from enemy to enemy and tearing them to shreds as if I was an incarnation of all the caricatures of me featured on Slawkenberg-made propaganda holovids given physical form. Most Daemonic incursions take weeks to drive off, but after a matter of seconds the last Daemon of Nurgle fell, the unnatural colors fading from the sky as the planet's slide into the status of 'Daemon World of Nurgle' came to a crashing halt.

For a second, I just stood there, weapons still in hand, not even exhausted in the slightest. It was only then, with the foul energies of Nurgle's servants finally dissipating, that I paused to consider the sheer absurdity of what I'd just done. It wasn't just that I'd somehow slaughtered a host of daemons with nothing but my chainsword and bolt pistol; while doing it I'd moved in ways that were simply downright impossible, even teleported once or twice. And then there was the matter of my weapons being the wrong color, and the way their supposedly mundane metals were able to tear through the immaterial bodies of those daemons despite the fact that creatures of the Warp are usually all-but-immune to purely physical attacks...

I finally caught notice of the gleaming, pure white light at the corner of my vision, turned, and was met with yet another surprise.

Standing before me was what could only be a brotherhood of Grey Knights, Nemesis Force-blades still clutched in their gleaming steel hands. None of them had their helmets off, but I could still tell from their body language that all their eyes were on me, and that they were all wearing expressions on their faces like one of the Gods of Chaos had personally manifested in the materium for the sole purpose of saving their shiny butts.

And then my gaze tilted downward, toward the otherworldly sheen on my weapons and coat, the exaggerated, oddly unnatural appearance of my clothes, and the brilliant multicolored flames that wreathed my body, and it dawned on me that they had every right to be giving me that look, because that is EXACTLY what just happened.

I was a frakking god of chaos.

I promptly vanished into the warp, my hands flying to my face as I fought the urge to scream "FRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!" at the top of my lungs.

xxxx

AN: Remember The Annals of St. Ciaphas? I decided to cross that fic with this one, by having Ciaphas meet an untimely demise and be reincarnated as a God of Chaos. Specifically a god of common sense solutions to problems, heroism, and selflessness. Only the formermost really fits with Cain, but then again a god is defined by what those who believe in him see him as, and Cain has quite the reputation as a hero among the members of the Protectorate.

And given this fic's nature as a Crackfic, why not have him make his debut by saving a brotherhood of Grey Knights from a host of daemons they were struggling with a lot more than they usually do?