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Description
Most of my drawing time nowadays is spent for my job, but I still get some for-fun stuff done as well. Also, a friend introduced me to Warhammer 40K via If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, and I ended up falling down the rabbit hole.

I'm honestly not sure if creating fan-characters is really a thing in Warhammer 40K, but as I learned more about the setting, it got me thinking about what kind of smaller-scale, individual stories could be told within the universe. And when I get character ideas stuck in my head, the only reliable way to get them out is to visualize them somehow. So, here's a former obscure guardsman gone full heresy, but no less obscure. Fair warning: loooots of backstory rambling below, in case you actually wanna read it. I tried to create a concept that could feasibly fit within the canon lore, but I couldn't find much concrete information on what level of sentience/free will daemons have, or how a corrupted human might differ from a daemon formed from warpstuff (such as if they can get into realspace on their own), so apologies in advance for any lore mistakes that might be made. If you can think of anything that could be corrected or improved, by all means let me know.

I'm not entirely sure where this guardsman would have hailed from or even what her name was, I'm not even sure if she ought to have a name at all. I purposefully wanted to create a character that was just one among millions, faithfully and facelessly serving the Imperium. What I do know is that she and her squadmates were probably captured by Dark Eldar at some point, which went as well for them as you might expect. At some point during their captivity, seeing her brothers-in-arms, people she had probably fought alongside for years, suffer horrifically, and being completely powerless to do anything about it, her desperation and rage grew deep enough that when a little voice promising vengeance began to creep into her mind, she listened.

Here comes the part where I imagine the concept breaks the lore a bit. This gal almost certainly isn't a psyker, just a literally-who with maybe particularly strong willpower. Either way, she surrendered her soul to an entity of Chaos she hadn't even been aware existed, and the resulting infusion of Warp energy tore her apart and pulled her back together in a new, monstrous, utterly-inhuman form. Retaining just enough of herself to distinguish friend from foe, she broke free and slaughtered their former captors, then pulled herself and her comrades through the Warp, emerging back on the same planet they had been captured on. When they attempted to rendezvous with their regiment, their commissar's reaction was (quite understandably) not exactly welcoming. She was denounced as a heretic, and the guards she had sold her soul to rescue were judged guilty by association. They were gunned down in front of her, but before she could be put down as well, she was pulled back into the Warp to join the ranks of her new master's armies. The ordeal shattered what was left of her mind, and for the next several hundred years the former guardsman was just one more daemon in Khorne's great hordes, with no thoughts or drive beyond spilling blood.

It's only relatively recently that she's started "coming back" to herself, and even then her memories are still fragmented, and rage and vengeance still largely drive her. She has developed a deep hatred of the Imperium, believing her fall was largely due in part to the ignorance it enforced on its people, but resents it most for the execution of the innocents she tried to save in the first place. Despite her loathing for the Imperium itself, she's surprisingly pro-humanity, at least as much as she can be in her current state. She's much more likely to be found running with hordes facing Drukhari or other forces of Chaos rather than humans. Being a complete nobody has actually helped her a bit in this regard, allowing her to fly largely under the radar in her excursions. Lately, she's gotten even bolder, daring to hunt outside the horde. She'll find battlefields with lines being held by the Astra Militarum, and will skulk at the edges of those battlefields, using the chaos of battle to pick off enemies in an attempt to offer what little help she can.

As for the complete and utter insignificance of her actions in the grand scheme of things? Well, she tries not to think about that too much.

Description
Most of my drawing time nowadays is spent for my job, but I still get some for-fun stuff done as well. Also, a friend introduced me to Warhammer 40K via If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, and I ended up falling down the rabbit hole.

I'm honestly not sure if creating fan-characters is really a thing in Warhammer 40K, but as I learned more about the setting, it got me thinking about what kind of smaller-scale, individual stories could be told within the universe. And when I get character ideas stuck in my head, the only reliable way to get them out is to visualize them somehow. So, here's a former obscure guardsman gone full heresy, but no less obscure. Fair warning: loooots of backstory rambling below, in case you actually wanna read it. I tried to create a concept that could feasibly fit within the canon lore, but I couldn't find much concrete information on what level of sentience/free will daemons have, or how a corrupted human might differ from a daemon formed from warpstuff (such as if they can get into realspace on their own), so apologies in advance for any lore mistakes that might be made. If you can think of anything that could be corrected or improved, by all means let me know.

I'm not entirely sure where this guardsman would have hailed from or even what her name was, I'm not even sure if she ought to have a name at all. I purposefully wanted to create a character that was just one among millions, faithfully and facelessly serving the Imperium. What I do know is that she and her squadmates were probably captured by Dark Eldar at some point, which went as well for them as you might expect. At some point during their captivity, seeing her brothers-in-arms, people she had probably fought alongside for years, suffer horrifically, and being completely powerless to do anything about it, her desperation and rage grew deep enough that when a little voice promising vengeance began to creep into her mind, she listened.

Here comes the part where I imagine the concept breaks the lore a bit. This gal almost certainly isn't a psyker, just a literally-who with maybe particularly strong willpower. Either way, she surrendered her soul to an entity of Chaos she hadn't even been aware existed, and the resulting infusion of Warp energy tore her apart and pulled her back together in a new, monstrous, utterly-inhuman form. Retaining just enough of herself to distinguish friend from foe, she broke free and slaughtered their former captors, then pulled herself and her comrades through the Warp, emerging back on the same planet they had been captured on. When they attempted to rendezvous with their regiment, their commissar's reaction was (quite understandably) not exactly welcoming. She was denounced as a heretic, and the guards she had sold her soul to rescue were judged guilty by association. They were gunned down in front of her, but before she could be put down as well, she was pulled back into the Warp to join the ranks of her new master's armies. The ordeal shattered what was left of her mind, and for the next several hundred years the former guardsman was just one more daemon in Khorne's great hordes, with no thoughts or drive beyond spilling blood.

It's only relatively recently that she's started "coming back" to herself, and even then her memories are still fragmented, and rage and vengeance still largely drive her. She has developed a deep hatred of the Imperium, believing her fall was largely due in part to the ignorance it enforced on its people, but resents it most for the execution of the innocents she tried to save in the first place. Despite her loathing for the Imperium itself, she's surprisingly pro-humanity, at least as much as she can be in her current state. She's much more likely to be found running with hordes facing Drukhari or other forces of Chaos rather than humans. Being a complete nobody has actually helped her a bit in this regard, allowing her to fly largely under the radar in her excursions. Lately, she's gotten even bolder, daring to hunt outside the horde. She'll find battlefields with lines being held by the Astra Militarum, and will skulk at the edges of those battlefields, using the chaos of battle to pick off enemies in an attempt to offer what little help she can.

As for the complete and utter insignificance of her actions in the grand scheme of things? Well, she tries not to think about that too much.