Space Marine (Warhammer 40,000)

by Ian Watson

‘Pain is… a lesson that the universe teaches us,’ intoned the Chaplain. ‘Pain is the preserver from injury. Pain perpetuates our lives. It is the healing, purifying scalpel of our souls. Pain is the wine of communion with heroes. It is the quicksilver panacea for weakness – the quintessence of a dedicated existence. Pain is the philosophic vitriol which transmutes mere mortal into immortal. It is the Sublime, the golden astral fire! I am in pain always, in blessed pain. Recommend that you fix your attention on the countenance of Rogal Dorn, Cadet.’

Friendly note Lex gets a pain boner during this. But honestly I was kinda into this as transhuman lore stuff.

snout scanning the innards of the body, and with the soporificator instrument resembling some giant spider that stung metacurare

Oh I remember reading this and just thinking it was a little odd. How innocent I was back then, five days ago...

an Imperial Fist may become obsessed with conquering pain by force of will. This is a good quality in that we will fight on despite terrible injuries, Sir. Yet if subconsciously we invite such injuries–’ ‘Aye, such heedlessness – such invitation to injury, as if to a friendly playmate – can imperil our battle planning, risking loss of personnel and material. We must beware of this tendency, even when we exploit it. For we are not berserkers! On the contrary, we Fists are exemplary planners, fascinated by the minutest detail. You may sit, Cadet.’

Pain good masochism bad pain glove gives you boners.

The lecturer’s own hands twitched, and his pallid cheeks flushed red as he recited: ‘Fists of beauty, Fingers of death; Emperor’s fists– With death is our tryst.’

POETRY! Pure poetry. Almost as good as the later 'to slay is to pray'.

Should any puny neophyte reach our end, which seems unlikely, you will be rewarded with a brand of honour on your buttock. You

this is not the start of the weird butt stuff but this was the point where it was impossible to ignore. Looking back on it the weird butt stuff started in chapter 1 with their obsession with stuffing someone in a heat sink.

This was indeed to be an honour – for the sergeant himself personally wielded the electro-iron when Lexandro, Yeremi, and Biff bent over to flex the great gluteal muscles of their rumps.

JAYSUS. The author's not even attempted to be disguised fetish.

As ever more exotic organs and glands entered into a cadet’s body, dripping and squeezing their juices and secretions into his system, so the cadet became liable to wild emotional fluctuations.

THis is just so...Theweleitian and weird.

The cadets, who had fasted for five days, now gorged themselves on toxic fungi from a death world specially grown in the hydro-culture vats, slurped up glutinous soup made from decomposing venomgland fish, devoured foul cadavers heaped with stenchful excremental sauce, and chewed their way through discarded parchment and leather,

Bestie your kink is showing

After half an hour, if each junior cadet was able to fill a three-litre vessel with vomit, the celebrants cleansed their palates with avocado and mango, eggplants and gloryberries.

Two girls one cup? Nope one FIST one three liter bottle. Also they're gonna shit their brains out eating that.

tested themselves upon algometric pain-meters… and in spare time they scrimshandered the bones

The bones stuff is so FISTY. They scrimshaw the hand bones of fallen brothers. And some lucky ones get to scrimshaw Rogal Dorn's handbones.

Pus-hued,

For a guy writing Fists he really uses this connotation a lot to describe their armor.

hormonal seizure was upon him, triggered by sight of the bare green flesh of that alien foe of Humankind, whom he was most unlikely ever to see again.

Most of us call this puberty I think?

You came from luxury, d’Arquebus. I came from the very opposite. I do not romanticise agony as a virtue, nor imagine that it makes me superior. Be warned.’ ‘How kind of you to concern yourself.’

A flicker of character development? This is hateship fanfic, tbh.

Tundrish, apparently sympathetic now. ‘Death is the Boss – of this galaxy, of a million human-settled worlds. You obey the Boss. That way, Humanity survives as a whole against terrible odds. Far worse than death is disorder, the tool of Chaos.’

Deep Thoughts by Biff

primarch. To slay is to pray.’

THERE IT IS

Fresh molten amber must be added subsequently to the shaved toes to replenish

Feet now?! YEah they slice some amber (toe jam) off Rogal Dorn's dead feet for the 'first' ritual. There's a later one with UNKNOWN BODILY SUBSTANCE. wink wink nudge nudge please send help. Also wtf is 'fresh molten amber' amber is petrified tree sap ya weirdo.

When the Reclusiarch passed back again, each initiate must hold out his middle finger, pointing stiffly forward from his fist. That little knife slashed sharply, circumcising the very tip of the digit, and even before the Larraman cells could clot – or perhaps because the blade was treated with some special anti-coagulant – a sprinkling of bright blood fell like rubies from each fingertip to mingle in the chalice.

This is just so juvenile and I kind of love it. The fist salute is the bird.

‘And after you return from your first expedition as Scouts,’ he promised, ‘other secretions from your body will be blent in this same chalice of the primarch – which was once His very drinking cup! – during your

O-other secretions???? READ THE NEXT NOTE WITH CAUTION

Each ball commemorated the initiation of a group of ex-cadets, throughout the aeons – each being a nugget of the liquid amber and blood drunk from Rogal Dorn’s own chalice by the Reclusiarch of whichever epoch, and defecated by him subsequently in this shape. At the opposite end of the graven floor, a second mighty bowl held darker balls, composed no doubt of the bodily secretions of the third degree likewise embalmed in amber.

There it is The infamous reclusiarch wombat poop thing.

psycurium, invaluable in the crafting of psychic hoods and force swords such as Marine Librarians could use.

sometimes I find some nice lore as a treat.

Organs of the Imperium fed on psycurium and power crystals as a sickly gourmet on oysters. A dyspeptic, phlebitic, tuberculous – yet still bellicose – gourmet, to whom such rarified nourishment was as a staff of life… Whilst the heart of that entity fed on… worship, which was being damnably denied.

Social commentary in "I think I'm Tolkein" style. Please put down the thesaurus, Ian.

Above which, an embroidery of light flickered in and out of existence, stitching hints of a sampler spelling out death.

We do love his commitment to beating a metaphor to death

Like mantises that eat their mates, or are eaten by them during intimate congress – even knowing that such a fate must occur – they were fraternally drawn to one another, obeying a bizarre tropism. The callous incident of the heat-sink… but

this to describe Biff, Yeri and Lex. Is it even SUBTEXT at this point?

sucking and gliding hydraulically. And the mid-distant signature of boltgun fire. First came the popping ejaculation of

This is a christian minecraft server!!!!

Tundrish sounded like a heap of turds. Biff Tundrish was someone who bashes piles of turds. Which suited okay for scavvies who grazed on a hive’s garbage, who supped on its polluted excretions – and skragged each other for the chance to do so.

Siiiigh

Scouts had skragged many gaiety pods. Those black ovoid lustres linked by slideways dangled beneath over-arching vitrodur umbrellas as though these were weeping solid sooty rain. The Scouts had rushed skiddingly from one pod to the next, annihilating languid swanky drugsters, warbling liquorites, squirming orgiasts who were responding to the war in their own indulgent style, if they even heeded it at all.

Llw update?

The Emperor’s Will is Supreme, Blessed, and Eternal. The Emperor’s Name is Death; his Throne is the Grave.

And then he hits us with this

Hydraulic recoil buffers were worthy of a sewage pumping station.

Seriously ??? There was not a single other thing you could compare it to?

he asked the amputee whose buttocks and groin were

It's just the details Body horror of a Blood Drinker he describes the guy's position three different times and each time focuses on the fact that he had been set up to his ass in molten lead. Not his hips. Not his flanks. Not his waist. THE BUTT YOU MUST THINK OF THE BLOOD DRINKER"S BUTT and also the fact he can't pee and at this point I am wondering if Watson has a sounding fetish too.

waxed wingnuts securing the gate of his oubliette. How he must have aspired to rise up forcefully, his yearning impregnating the walls with a similar passion.

This would be tragic if it weren't so .......eeeewwww

monotonous, peristaltic thrust upwards as of some gross mutant baby ascending a vertical birth canal in defiance both of gravity and of sane obstetrics.

theory: Watson doesn't hate women but he is terrified of their anatomy.

Compression of the guts caused inevitable farting. D’Arquebus vented through his tunic and his silks virtually into Yeremi’s face. Nor did Yeremi have much option but to gas Tundrish in turn.

If this were my kink you could not WATERBOARD it out of me. But here he is. I admire his courage.

Rotating his power fist, he gave the finger to the Warlords: an adamantium finger bigger than any armoured Marine.

So noble. So heroic. A tear in my eye.

Lexandro pumped cannon shells at the arse of the Warlord swaying there in the cross hair graticule of his aiming screen. Explosion followed explosion. Damnably, gouts of plasma from Valence often interfered, detonating shells before they even reached the target’s void shield. Valence the void-brain, Valence the virtuous valet. Why couldn’t the figger choose his own portion of Titanic anatomy to shaft? Did he think he was helping? Akbar the sand-flea at least was pulsing laser beams at that missile atop the carapace.

heheheh shaft. but also that first sentence COME ON.

Yet his spirit, united with Dorn’s in that exquisite agonising pang, in that orgasmus of death, would transmigrate into a being of boiling ionised gas. In this form he would hover over the battlefield, dipping down to engulf enemy troopers, to consume these like fat in a furnace so that their smoke would rise up as incense into Dorn’s amber nostrils and by way of that conduit across time and space – beyond mortality itself – into the God-Emperor’s seered olfactory lobes so that the Divine Person would pause for a microsecond in his eternal scrutiny of the cosmos from his Golden Throne and would exclaim inwardly, ‘What sweet fragrance is that? Why, it is the odour of the enemies of the human Imperium, blazing.’ For a moment the Emperor would notice at least the aftermath of Lexandro’s existence… before what had been Lexandro dispersed.

I mean it's better than farting on him I guess?

He fired again and again at that phantom weakness, divined by spuomancy, targeted by phlegm.

So I was in public reading this (getting a smoothie) and I literally, viscerally rolled my eyes so hard I fell of the ledge.

was as though his hand and his whole arm were plunged deep within the hot tight birth-canal of some angry animal to manipulate the contents of a packed, pulsing womb.

Just why Again, he....seems terrified of the Jayjay

‘It’s biffing time!’

Boy howdy If this book finishes without someone saying 'it's FISTING time' I will be disappointed. ETA: I was disappointed.

On either side of his own silver plate, like some massive array of bone cutlery, were ranged the amputated hands of those who had died in the campaign, shorn of flesh and muscle and tendons.

So just a pile then??? How does anatomy work IAN.

In his mind’s eyes Lexandro could no longer quite capture nor comprehend the essentially alien anatomy of his quondam sisters. The anatomy of… woman…

A HA!!!!

Now his torso rested in a cup-shaped cart adorned with valour tassels and therapeutic seals. Two speechless simian servitors attended him, one to ingest his waste and cleanse him, the other to nourish him with its own enriched blood and shift his cart from window to window – from which he gazed out, praying for an exploration vessel of his Chapter to pass this way.

Yeah so this is the amputated Blood Drinker from before but like.... but like...'ingest his waste' Please god my eyes. PS: I'd pray too. These Fists are freaks.

‘Greetings,’ Lexandro addressed Tezla as one of the apish customised servitors licked the Blood Drinker with its long tongue.

HOW DID HE MAKE IT WORSE OMG

However, for several seconds Lexandro’s boots clamped him inflexibly to the plasteel surface like two puppies clinging to their bitch mother’s teats –

Why are you like this

no, but buried underground nonetheless: a maze of stone intestines and bowels.

I stg

Soon he’d be an empty arse, with

There's NO NEED for this

Steaming pipes, the girth of a squat, choked one exit tunnel as if they were hot worms infesting the bowel of some constipated leviathan.

At this point i expect it

shrinking into a bubbling, wrinkled scrotum of sintered alloys.

Well at least it's not scatological

for a bulging black silken loincloth, he was nude. By contrast

Bulging jfc

for the sergeant’s bowels, deprived of any control, had evacuated themselves.

Mais oui

Sagramoso smeared his hand into that excrement. Holding up his besmirched palm, he licked.

Yeah ok wow