Petyr was born on a hive world in a reality that was unkind to everyone who didn't like death, torture and constant warfare. He wasn't born with a name, but that didn't bother anyone. Almost no one was. Names were for places or people that mattered. People with privilege who lived in opulence, higher than he did.
Hive Worlds were the Imperium's engines—vast urban agglomerations that had long ago devoured their own planets. There was no soil left. No wilderness. No natural ground. Every square kilometre was metal, ferrocrete, or something older buried beneath centuries of construction.
This world had thousands of hives, clustered together like man-made mountain ranges. Each hive rose kilometres into the poisoned sky, its spires reserved for the ruling classes, while billions lived crushed together below.
Petyr was born far beneath even the lowest official census zones.
In the underhive.
The underhive was a different world entirely, where the sky did not exist.
Children grew up never knowing what "outside" meant. Concepts like wind, weather, or sunlight were abstract ideas from Ecclesiarchy sermons and half-corrupted data-slates. Above them were countless layers of habitation blocks, factories, transit tunnels, and forgotten infrastructure. Below them were collapsed levels, sealed-off regions, and ancient sections of trash that no one remembered building.
Somewhere in those dead zones lay archeotech hoards—lost relics of past ages—but no one went looking unless they wanted to disappear.
The air was thick and poisonous, recycled endlessly through failing filtration systems. It carried the stink of chemical runoff, machine oil, human waste, decaying corpses, trash and too many bodies breathing the same oxygen for too many centuries. When the systems failed, and they often did, people suffocated.
Light came from lumen strips that never shut off. A constant, buzzing glow painted everything in sickly yellow and corpse-white. Neon signs flickered in the dark, gang symbols, black-market vendors, illegal augmetics, counterfeit purity seals. Above them all, massive hololithic propaganda screens broadcast endlessly:
THE EMPEROR PROTECTS
WORK IS PRAYER
SUFFERING IS VIRTUE
Petyr learned early that none of it was meant for him and that none of them mattered even slightly. What was this so-called Emperor protecting? Him? Among all the billions of walking corpses that fought against a failing and decaying society?
Hive Worlds could not feed themselves. Petyr didn't know the numbers, but he lived the consequences. Trillions of mouths depended on food shipments arriving through Warp routes. When those shipments were delayed, even briefly, the hive began to starve. And when a Hive World starved, it went mad.
Riots erupted in hours. Gangs swelled into armies. Entire hab-blocks collapsed into cannibalism and lunatic violence. The claustrophobia, the hunger, the endless confinement turned people into animals, more so than they already were. Anarchy wasn't an idea; it was the only way to survive.
Sometimes, when it grew too bad, that the Imperium's integrity was threatened, the Adeptus Arbites came. But only if the riots threatened to reach higher levels of the hive. If the ruling class took notice of the 'filth' asking for something as outrageous as food, only then did it warrant the use of overwhelming force.
The Arbites didn't restore order, not in the ideal sense. Not in the sense that would make a 21st-century soyboi happy. No. They culled. They aimed their weapons and unleashed all their firepower on the flesh mountains, killing as many as possible, to get them to shut up.
Entire districts were sealed, flooded with toxins, or burned out to bring population levels back to something "manageable." Petyr had seen it happen more than once. He learned not to watch too closely, not to join the rebellions and simply focus on survival.
He learned to steal before he learned to kill. And he learned to kill very early. Pickpocketing first. Then stronger things: weapons, power cells, identity papers torn from cooling corpses before the corpse-grinders came.
Fighting followed naturally and necessarily. Those who didn't fight would be killed, and if you didn't kill, you were killed instead. If you wanted food, you stole and killed for it. Violence wasn't glorified; it was just normal.
Petyr learned where to strike to end a fight quickly, how to fall without breaking bones, how to move through crowds without being noticed and how to never give up. Never, no matter what happened. Hesitation killed people faster than hunger.
Almost everyone in the underhive knew how to use a gun. Ammunition was currency. A full magazine could buy food, protection, or a night's safety. Petyr learned to shoot in the dark, to reload blindly, and to aim centre-mass because warning shots were not a thing.
.
When the Imperial tithe came, no one dared to resist. Hive Worlds existed to supply the Imperium with labour, materials, and human shields. Petyr was dragged from the underhive with millions of others. Lines stretched for kilometres through loading bays carved into the hive's lower levels.
Their heads were shaved, their names were erased, and numbers were assigned. They were told they were no longer people but objects, given the privilege of fighting and dying for the Emperor's glory. Oh, how Petyr hated this Emperor. He hated him with his entire being, with every fibre of his body, did he hate him. He wanted to get his hands around the bastard's neck and strangle him. Ask him why he wanted this?
Petyr and millions of others were packed into troop ships and shipped off-world—willingly or not—to wars that had already outlived their purpose. To fight against the dying of the light.
.
Training was... suboptimal, to say the least. The Imperium assumed Hive Worlders already knew how to kill, or they didn't care. They also didn't have the resources to turn them into very skilled fighters. And they didn't have to anyway. It was far more resourceful to send trillions of humans out and have them slowly overwhelm the enemy.
Petyr was thrown into wars that he didn't know the names of. He wondered if they even gave special names to the campaigns' nameless meatshields like him were on anymore. Planets which didn't fall through the endless storming of bodies were reduced to rubble. Trenches filled with mud, blood and not-buried dead. Monstrous Hive Cities where every corridor was a potential ambush, and every shadow hid something worse. Petyr couldn't trust anyone, couldn't believe anything, but still had to follow orders to a T. He had to throw himself into death with praise for the Emperor on his lips.
The darkness was constant and gnawing at every part of his being. He felt the corrupting aspects from all sides. The traitor, the heretic, the alien... but also from the sides of 'loyalist' humans and their allies. The so-called 'God Emperor', who apparently watched over them all, became what he never wanted. Petyr possessed a power that none other could claim.
He had 'uncommon sense'.
Common sense had long been lost. So he had uncommon sense. And this made him more dangerous than any other of the traitors, heretics or xenos forces. That was why he hid his thoughts and kept his opinions to himself. He knew that only true and undeniable power could ever hope to change anything.
Night battles under year-long artillery fire, where the Death Korps of Krieg showed how utterly broken they truly were. Chemical poisonous fogs that were human-made, that ate flesh and killed more Imperial forces than they did enemies. Vox-screamed orders layered over screams of the dying. Petyr fought because stopping meant dying, hesitation meant dying and dying meant endless torturous suffering at the hands of whatever corrupting force there was on the other side.
He became more efficient, more deadly, and more skilled. He never asked questions. That was how the Imperium preferred its soldiers.
Chaos.
Petyr came across this name and what it truly meant during one campaign against the traitorous forces of the Death Guard. The Death Guard were one of the Traitor Legions of Chaos Space Marines. They worshipped and devoted themselves exclusively to the Chaos God Nurgle, and as a result of his mutational "gifts", they had become Plague Marines; Heretic Astartes who were eternally rotting away within their power armour and infected with every known form of disease and decay but who were immune to all pain or minor injury.
Chaos, Petyr thought, was the only constant. Chaos, warfare, death and suffering. Those things seemed to be eternal. Petyr realised that chaos could help him rise to power if he agreed to it. Not by becoming a mindless puppet of one of the four Chaos entities, no. What Petyr wanted was to use chaos and the corrupt and disgusting system that had established itself and rise to power.
Sadly, he didn't get that chance. On the battlefield, Petyr met one such Death Guard Astartes. The abomination ripped Petyr apart like a piece of paper, roaring and enjoying the spray of blood and gore as he did so.
Petyr fell into the mud, face and the other pieces down, the ground cold and hard, drenched with his blood. No one stopped, no one cared. The battle moved on around him. It always did.
...
...
Suddenly, Petyr opened his eyes again and gasped for breath. Memories of a past life seemed to load themselves into his mind and settle right next to those he had made in this one. He saw his family, the past one, his name and his 'ordinary' life. Seeing his previous life and how ordinary it had been, he grew jealous. Jealous of himself and how he hadn't appreciated the comfort he enjoyed.
Petyr understood where he was, what terrible darkness he had been plunged into—the grim darkness of the Warhammer 40'000 Universe. But there was something else that awoke together with his memories. The Essence of the Mirror.
---
Essence of the Mirror
By taking this essence, you gain the ability to create reflections of anything. You gain the ability to duplicate any object you see, even if it's just an image. You can create an infinite number of absolutely loyal clones, and dismiss them at will. You can copy powers and abilities, as long as you see them being used. You may reflect or bounce any incoming attack in another direction. You may travel through any reflective surface.
---
Petyr remembered this type of power, the Meta Essence CYOAs he had read about and knew that with this, he had gained the power he needed to rise to the very top. But he hated being here. So instead of doing things from here, he would leave. Leave this reality and travel to another, to prepare and begin his path to the peak there.
His body had been healed after gaining the power of the Mirrors. He got up and made his way through the cold, mucous mud until he reached a large blood lake that hadn't been absorbed by the ground yet. With a thought, Petyr disappeared. He travelled through the reflective surface of the blood. He travelled through the mirror dimension, a realm that seemed to lie between all realities. One separate from everything and connected to everything, everywhere, all at once.
As he shot through the mirror dimension, he got a glimpse of worlds he knew about and wanted to travel to soon. The Omniverse was now open to him, so he would make good use of it and train and study all he could. His actions were instinctive as he thought about the place he wanted to go.
The Galaxy Far, Far Away.
Petyr emerged into a different galaxy, another world. A galaxy that was still violent, still corrupt, still filled with wars across the stars, but not built entirely on hopelessness and darkness like the previous one. A place where power could be taken, if one were smart enough.
He arrived with nothing to his name, but his mind and the power of mirrors. But this time, he would gain and build everything he wanted. Petyr would choose what he became.
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To clarify: This is a rewrite of my story 'Mirror Master' but without ASOIAF.
The focus here is on kingdombuilding and advanced technology. He is now technically seriously OP, but he won't rise to the top at once.
Star Wars first, and Warhammer 40k after he has established a great enough footing and powerbase. If you want a female lead, you can tell me. I'm still undecided.