The warp portal flared, scouring my mind, shredding my very essence with impossible colors and sounds that had no place in the realm of mortals. Agony became all, became the only truth in a lightless void without beginning or end. I felt the battlefields of Vorga III dissolve around me, the distant screams of my fellow troopers fading into a buzzing static that bored into my skull like a drill. Then a new sound, raw and primal - the first thin wail of a newborn gasping in the shock of sudden existence.
Lasgun fire stitched glowing holes across the twisted bodies of the cultists, the air thick with the stench of charred meat and ozone. My chainsword bucked in my grip as it chewed through pallid, cackling flesh. The world tilted, the temple's unnatural geometry folding in on itself. I stumbled, my boot slipping in a slick of blood and entrails.
The warp portal pulsed, a nightmarish heartbeat in the fabric of reality. Its kaleidoscope surface bulged outward as if straining to birth some unspeakable horror into the materium. I raised my blade in trembling hands, the litany of protection on my cracked lips dissolving into a wordless snarl of defiance.
Light. Blinding, searing, a corona of unlight that scoured the world to bone. I felt it peel away the layers of my being like a rotten fruit, skin and flesh and memories flensed until only a screaming core remained. The warp reached out with a million grasping tendrils and in the moment before oblivion claimed me, a final thought flickered through my disintegrating mind.
Cold. Pressure. Squeezing dark and the frantic drum of a heartbeat too fast and too loud. My heartbeat, and yet...not. I tried to draw breath and found my throat blocked, fluid-filled. Panic rose, black and oily. I thrashed against confines that seemed to shrink with every passing second, caged by my own weak flesh.
Light again, cold and harsh against new eyes. A watery blur of shapes in shades of blood and stone. The iron tang of blood on my tongue, in my nose. Huge shadows moved at the edge of vision, indistinct and looming. I fought to focus, to understand, but the world refused to resolve into sense.
Rough hands grasped me, a touch like sandpaper against skin too new, too raw. The urge to lash out surged through me but my limbs only jerked and spasmed, a parody of coordination. Something was wrong, something was missing. The hands lifted me and suddenly the world yawned into a vast gulf of empty space beneath me.
I dangled, helpless and howling. The scream that tore from my throat was high and thin, lacking any shred of dignity or control. I raged against my own impotence, disgust and despair a black tide that drowned all thought.
This was wrong. It was all wrong. I was Korvin Macht, Storm Trooper of the Imperium, a weapon forged in the fires of endless war. I had stood against the forces of the archenemy with nothing but my faith and my fury. I had watched worlds burn and felt the sticky heat of blood on my hands as I executed the Emperor's will.
This puling, sluggish thing I had become was an affront, a sick cosmic joke. Every instinct screamed to move, to fight, to regain some scrap of control, but this frail flesh betrayed me. I could only twitch and gurgle like some mewling beast.
The blurred shapes above me resolved into faces, their features still hazy and indistinct. A man's face, grey-bearded and careworn, his eyes a piercing blue that seemed to stare through me. He cradled me in arms corded with muscle, yet I sensed a tremor running through them, a hesitance in his grip.
"He has the eyes of a man who's seen battle," he murmured, his voice rumbling through me like distant thunder.
If only he knew. If only I could make him understand the lifetimes of death that lay behind these new eyes, the horror and the glory of the Emperor's wars. I tried to force words through my infantile mouth, to shape my tongue and lips around the litanies of fury that had once come so easily.
What emerged was a garbled string of grunts and whimpers, as meaningless as the mewling of a grox. The man's brow furrowed, confusion and concern chasing each other across his weathered face. He passed me to another set of hands, smaller and softer but no less unsure.
I raged. I howled. I hurled myself against the confines of this new flesh with all the strength of my will. And it made no difference. This body was a prison, a cage of blood and bone that mocked my every attempt to master it.
Despair rose like bile in my throat. Was this my fate? To endure this humiliating weakness, this impotent parody of life? I, who had once strode the battlefields of the Imperium like a demigod, now reduced to a helpless scrap of meat, unable to even lift my own head?
As if in answer, a memory surfaced, sharp-edged and cold in the tumult of my mind. A lesson beaten into me a lifetime ago, in the brutal foundries of the Schola Progenium. The first and last lesson, the one that superseded all others.
Endure. Survive. Prevail.
These were the watchwords of the Storm Trooper, the core of every thought and deed. To yield was to fail, to fail was to die, and to die was to betray the Emperor's trust. I would not yield. Not to this body, not to this fate, not to anything in this strange new hell I found myself in.
I was Korvin Macht, and I would endure. I would learn to master this flesh as I had mastered the battlefields of the Imperium. I would shape this world to my will as I had shaped the enemies of mankind with bolt and blade.
And Emperor willing, I would find a way to once again serve His glorious purpose, no matter the cost. With that determination crystalizing in my infant heart, I ceased my struggling and stared up at the faces above me with eyes that burned with unquenchable resolve.
I would not yield. Not now, not ever.
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