#ylthinocrambles

[thousandbuns]

Pro-tip: do not combine autism, Space Marine conditioning and Tzeentchian allegiance into one entity. End-results will be devastating to the subject and everyone else in the next five sectors.

[whining-ylthin]

40K Tumblr: "we're getting way less engagement on our pictures and fanfics of Canon Blorbos, the local fandom seems to be dying :("

Me, who'd been primarily obsessing over OCs after realizing I can just Write My Own Guys about 6 months into my 40K hyperfix (i.e. for the last three years):

"what fucking engagement"

[thousandbuns]

Memory is such a strange thing. You remember the trees and flowers that once grew in your homelands, and the patterns - shapes, colors, sequences - that came from them. You remember how these patterns were woven into cloth and painted onto clay, but not the hands that did it.

You remember the various animals, domestic and wild, that used to live there, and the objects crafted in their image - toys, instruments, pottery. You remember what materials were used and how they were harvested, but not the people who worked the clay digs, cut the wood or harvested bone and horn.

You remember a village - the shape of each house and layout of passages between them - but not its inhabitants. In your recurring dreams, it is always empty. All the doors are wide-open, but no face comes out to greet you. Smoke lingers in the air as always, but the sharp smell of gunpowder chokes out the scent of burning wood. You feel the warmth of the flames around you, but you know the true blaze is yet to come. The weapon in your hands weighs heavy despite your enhanced physique.

Finally, a familiar voice breaks the silence. It's your lochias - your squad commander - at the time. The exact words are long lost to your memory, but you remember his way of speaking - curt, rough, always on the edge. Most of the time you wouldn't hear anything but commands, insults and reprimands snarled through his teeth. That one time, however, he speaks of you with praise.

You were focused, efficient and obedient. Your value to the Legion is proven once more, and you will be rewarded accordingly.

You remember thinking - because you still do - that you'd rather be punished.

You wake up and breathe in the stale, faintly chemical voidship air. The unpleasant heat on your back subsides as soon as you roll over to your side and tug off the thin bedsheets. The dormitory around you is near-empty. Your lochias - a stern, but patient and soft-spoken man - approaches in silence, sits at the edge of your bed and cradles your hand. He couldn't have understood whatever words you spoke in your sleep, but he clearly knows you had that dream again.

Both of you have one. None of you ever mention the details.

You just squeeze his hand and nod your head, and he slowly lets go. He knows there's no point in dwelling. You're set to deploy again today, and you need to be focused, efficient, obedient. It's what the Legion values and rewards. It's how you survive.

Sometimes you'd rather didn't. And sometimes you'd rather just forgot. But as both of you get up and ready, you remind yourself once more, the thing isn't that you need to remember or forget.

The thing is that you'd rather not need to remember in the first place.

[thousandbuns]

"Traditionalist" Iron Warriors warband that got the wrong memo out of Olympia and incorporates some form of kin-slaying into its initiation rituals as a proof of "obedience" and "reliability".

To say that the consequences are quite dire would be an understatement.

[thousandbuns]

Average latter half of the light cycle in the Lord-Sorcerer chambers aboard Chaos voidship Wayfaring Medea.

(Also I couldn't do quick funny doodles if my life depended on it.)

[thousandbuns]

evening doodle of my Chaos Sorcerer/Technomancer, trying to finally nail down his design

Edit: why the fuck is this at 100+ notes

[thousandbuns]

I set out to spitball about "toxic old man yaoi" dynamic between two of my Iron Warrior OCs based on a random thought I've had earlier today.

I end up doing that and also spitballing a partial rewrite/adjustment to the backstory of their whole warband to more accurately justify why a group fixated on "keeping true to the (pre-Heresy) roots" that disdains Chaos and the Warp can still include Heresy-era Astartes (who aren't entombed in a Dreadnought, abusing stasis or made several milennia worth of a time-leap during Warp transit) as late as M41 and accept recruits with hybrid geneseed. All so I can get to a hypothetical scene where an ancient, effectively half-mechanized Apothecary can bark "it's not like I trust you or anything, you Dornian mongrel" to an Imperial Fists successor-turned-Iron Warrior squad sergeant who's currently patiently cleaning out the tubes in his respirator (he's not even Apothecarion-trained, his presence is an oddly specific request from Lord Tasios).

[thousandbuns]

"Ylthin, do you have any high-quality cute SFW art of your two gayboys?"

No, best I can do is some combination of shoddy meme redraw, NSFW or "Khonsu exhibits peak goblin behavior" gayboy art.

I'd post the "Freyr getting his head squished" one in full, as jank and bad as it is (perspective? never heard of 'em!) but I fear Tumblr will slap me with the NSFW label, so paired crops it is.

Happy Valentine's Day! 💙🐺

[thousandbuns]

Writing a Chaos Sorcerer who suddenly finds themselves in a position of authority/power due to a random stroke of luck and is now dealing with semi-justified impostor syndrome because people will grossly overestimate what they're capable of and things will actually come crashing down around them in the long run

AKA I'm venting again.

[thousandbuns]

And that's lineart finished for one of my OCs, Kaspar - Apothecary and Chaos Sorcerer of the Opened Eye warband.

He's horrible and I love him.

(CW for some body horror/medical imagery, fingers crossed Tumblr won't complain about it)

[thousandbuns]

Khonsu: "'Horrors beyond human comprehension' my ass, I routinely expose myself to the aether-currents of the Realm of Souls and lemme tell you, after enough practice your pattern-seeking brain will learn to recognize, categorize and name specific Warp sensations and phenomenas, making them perhaps still mysterious in their inner workings, but otherwise perfectly comprehensible, just difficult to describe with a vocabulary base that's already struggling to encapsulate your mundane senses."

Freyr: "But do they stop being horrors?"

Khonsu: "Define 'horrors' to an Astartes with extensive medical knowledge and a hefty amount of practice. 'Ooooh, but you're a damned man steeped in heresy and the daemons will devour your soul'-- have you ever seen a shrapnelled gut up close? Have you smelled it? Did you have to piece it back together and keep it clear from infections so that Brother Sutekh over here can not only survive without entombment, but maybe even get back up and running by the time our Crusade fleet arrives at the next backwater system designated for conquest? Because I did. Many times over. Starting at about twenty or so years of age, and keeping at it for another one hundred, no complaints, and that's only counting what I did under the Imperium's banner."

Freyr:

Khonsu: "Because later on I got Warp-knows how many years to get mortifyingly proficient at all the things they expect of a Sorcerer - murder, torture, blood rites, all that noise. I'd call it a butcher's work, but that would be a fierce insult to the profession, actually. Butchers need clean cuts and large, intact chunks, no bleeds and bruises. I was usually asked to deliver the opposite."

Freyr:

Freyr: "What about your... personal fear of mutation, then? You've said that you can't control or understand it, and it's inflicted on you like a curse by the God of Change, isn't that a horror beyond--"

Khonsu: "It falls under the broad label of existential fear, which is a different beast altogether from the lack of imagination and state-sanctioned neophobia plaguing the Imperials, please and thank you."

[thousandbuns]

The juxtaposition: a lone Sorcerer walking towards the sacrificial altar through a crowd of Chaos cultists gathered in a dimly lit, soot- and blood-stained chamber, and their memory of the time they walked through a city in broad daylight, side by side with other healers, to provide aid to the sick and injured. The thread piecing these two images together: countless arms reaching out to to brush against them, to touch them, to grasp the cloth they wear, and disparate voices slowly amassing into a thundering chant announcing the arrival of the divine messenger.

In the memory, the senior healer asks his brothers to exercise restraint - no vocalization, minimal gesturing, timing the psychic action in line with administration of drugs or other conventional medical practices to not perpetuate superstition and set the ground for rationalizing their powers to the masses. They aren't angels, as the people outside call them. There are no angels in the gilded paradise they're building for mankind.

In the present, the Sorcerer enacts the ritual with sweeping, dramatic gestures, far more elaborate than they need to be. A perfectly memorized and rehearsed routine to impress the crowd, each step calculated to raise their spirits and invoke powerful emotion until they break out into religious ecstasy. They remain silent, but the cultists eagerly chant the prayers and curses in their stead. The paradise was built on the bones of those unjustly condemned, and their souls now rise as vengeful daemons.

And it's all an act, a theatrical mask, a stage performance. Whether they were alone or surrounded by their kin, they always wore a mask concealing their true face and true intent to the outsiders. A mask of the gilded, flat-faced helmet. A mask of the smooth, unadorned healer's veil. And beneath the mask there's nothing but emptiness, a sense of cold detachment, a dreamless sleep. A talented hand guided not by personal ideals, but orders from one's superiors. Someone else wrote the role they were cast as, and they memorized the script to the letter.

The wandering theater swapped hands and traveled far among the stars. The two worlds are ages and light years apart. Details have changed a thousand times over, but the intent of the play remained the same:

Use your miracles to make people obey the powers that control you.

[thousandbuns]

"I shouldn't introduce more characters because I don't want to ruin the pacing or forget about them and leave them redundant or too undercooked compared to the rest of the cast"

"Okay, but you could get away with introducing a handful of more typical Chaos Marines and not writing them too nuanced because the bulk of the narration is from one of two perspectives, Khonsu's (who's tired and doesn't care about most people past 'what will piss them off enough to disobey orders or cause them to start shit with others' - bare minimum needed to command the warband, basically) or Freyr's (who only keeps close company with the two 'no gods' renegade Iron Warriors and maybe the warband's Raptor specifically because they either don't preach about Chaos, are somewhat friendly or have something in common with him, and would most likely frown at the more typical CSMs), so it'd make sense they faded into the background a bit"

"Yeah, but it'd be good to have them chime in about something from time to time, or to at least bounce off of other characters without coming off as flat caricatures"

"But it'd mean writing them to be more fleshed-out as characters and we've already established it may cause pacing issues and redundancies, and--"

I stg, I'm my own enemy sometimes.

[thousandbuns]

My brain decided to move back to Khonsuposting. You'd think I'd have every square micrometer of the Autistic Evil Wizard nailed down after 3+ years and yet I keep having new ideas for them and it's honestly kind of worrying because I can't tell if that's a mark of high creativity or being fucking dumb and unable to workshop a complete idea fast enough.

Anyway. This time it's an intersection of Su's primary instance of body image issues and dysphoria (tied to their "old", pre-biomancy body) and psychic ability, focusing on the Astartes conversion process and how they remember it. Or, rather, don't remember-yet-remember because it was successfully purged and suppressed from their mind alongside most pre-conversion memories - but some remembrance of that body horror burned itself into Su's psychic presence. The straining growth, the deep surgical intrusion. Breaking and reassembling, fitting you into a narrow mold in a crude, unreliable process. An act of change enforced on you, and fully beyond your control.

The body and mind forgot, but the soul didn't - and it wishes it did.

[thousandbuns]

I just realized that Sándor is most likely not only forklift-certified, but also forklift certification-certified.

He can assess your forklift skills and legally sign your forklift certificate.

Imagine how much leverage this gives you in an Iron Warriors' line company.

[thousandbuns]

I got tagged on an art train thingy on Twitter a few days ago, subject was "how do you draw eyes", so of course I did a compilation of Khonsu's pleading emoji-ass stare. These eyes belong to an ancient evil wizard, please take them seriously.