#i wrote a snippet about siarotha and reader's first meeting a while back and am currently expanding that into something

[rotworld]

i'm new to wh40k and your writing has me hooked! i currently love reading lore about the drukhari and chaos space marines. i wanted to ask if you had any more details to share about your chaos space marine warband and mutant psyker reader?? i'm so obsessed with the messy dynamics of them all haha

i’m so glad you like them! as mentioned in the first piece, it’s a warband formed of outcasts and sole survivors. they came together out of necessity but they still fight a lot and trust is a relatively new, fragile phenomenon for them. they're held together by spite, pragmatism, and a frankly unhinged baseline human who is getting less "baseline" all the time.

->siarotha comes from the thousand sons. he’s very old, having been present for the burning of prospero, although most of those millennia were spent in places where time doesn’t flow normally. he’s about what you’d expect from the thousand sons: arrogant, secretive, generally manipulative, smartest guy in the room with an appalling lack of common sense. he has some amount of infamy for his past exploits but always seems to be holding back so the rest of the warband is wary of him. he considers himself “more philosophical than faithful” but he does have a complicated form of reverence for tzeentch. he has the power and knowledge to find other methods of transporting the warband to and from raids but will never admit it because he enjoys the intimacy of operating the warp gate with the reader.

->erghol comes from the world eaters. the butcher's nails make it hard for him to think clearly most of the time but he’s not as simple as people assume. he finds it both absurd and a point of pride that his old warband left him behind when he failed to disengage from an unfavorable battle. on the occasion that they come across other warbands, he’s especially hostile towards other world eaters and will often pick a fight. it’s unclear if he’s holding a grudge or if this is simply how khornate berzerkers say hello. siarotha believes that erghol’s attraction to the reader stems from their recklessness, a trait he finds familiar and appealing.

->kyloteknis comes from the iron warriors. he’s the least personable and the most pragmatic member of the group. he prefers to be in charge, whether that means leading and mediating a meeting or directing battlefield tactics. despite his generally abrasive demeanor, he’s dedicated to the warband to an extent that suggests something like fondness, although he claims to “at best, tolerate the lot of you.” he doesn’t share much about his history, but siarotha suspects that he was deeply affected by whatever happened with his old warband. kyloteknis isn’t particularly warm towards the reader and has no respect for their opinion in matters of war, but he will protect them when necessary.

->zonaras comes from the word bearers. he’s mild-mannered and easy to get along with, seemingly accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of a warband with so many strong personalities. aside from the reader, he’s probably the best at keeping the peace. he often clashes with siarotha because they’re both self-assured know-it-alls who like to hide things and subtly influence the rest of the warband. zonaras is fascinated by the reader and has been even before their newly acquired “blessing,” believing they’ve been singled out by the gods for some yet unseen purpose.

->claw and dagger both come from the night lords. they seem to have a problem with chronic, compulsive backstabbing and also a problem with fully committing to it. they were members of a warband that came into conflict with the reader’s warband and turned on their old allies a bit too eagerly in the chaos. they didn’t join so much as they quietly followed kyloteknis and the others back to their home base and promised to be useful in the future. despite a rocky start and constant “jokes” about stabbing the other members in the back, they’ve so far kept their word and earned their keep. claw is somewhat protective of dagger but tries not to make it obvious. they're big fans of the reader’s regenerative capabilities.

->grigori comes from the black legion and before that, he came from the blood angels. he claims he once succumbed to the red thirst “for a very, very long time.” it’s unclear how he snapped out of it or whether it still affects him, but he mostly keeps to himself and seems uncomfortable being close to the reader. he spends most of his time with erghol because he feels that they understand each other best. he seems desperate to maintain a good relationship with the rest of the warband and will go out of his way to find “gifts” for the others during raids. the majority of these gifts go to the reader ever since he discovered this pleases siarotha.

->the reader used to live an ordinary life of drudgery on a hiveworld. their psyker abilities have a mostly “passive” presentation that let them go undetected for a while but they were eventually found out and apprehended for collection by a black ship. before that could happen, the planet was attacked by siarotha’s old warband who made off with all those conveniently collected psykers to use as ritual fodder. being used as a conduit for warp energy tends to be fatal for the conduit but the reader turned out to be unusually resilient due to the nature of their psychic abilities. it was still a torturous existence and it was only a matter of time before they burned out, too. siarotha thought this was a terrible waste of great potential so he elected to leave the warband and “steal” the reader from them for his own purposes. his departure didn’t go as planned for several reasons and their relationship at the time was adversarial, to put it mildly. how and why they managed to survive is a story i’d like to tell another time, but they ended up with a strong bond. not everyone in the warband likes or trusts the reader completely, but they understand that siarotha’s hospitality is contingent on the reader’s continued wellbeing and survival so they’re inclined to behave themselves.