The Sound and the Fury

by Midwest

     Lord Guevara settled his body into the throne of the Imperial Battleship *Arbeiter*. The throne stood amidst complete silence and darkness, save for the dim stars that gently pierced through the reinforced ceraglass that allowed Guevara full view of Arbeiter's forward path. Directly above the throne, the ceraglass ran red with the blood of saints, and the purifying orange flames of their vengeful wraths, as the familiar scene spread out before him. It was the Massacre of Alsace IV, where heretics had turned everlasting day into crippling night, and only the cleansing flames of the Imperial Inquisition had fought and overcome the tide of hellspawn and daemon-men. Alsace IV had been brutal, as the Inquisitors and the Adeptus Astartes detachments under them had ruthlessly sought out any survivors. Guevara remembered the horrifying screams of the commoners as they stumbled like dumb cattle before the scythed fingers of the Emperor's holy Grasp.

     Lord Guevara also remembered with grim satisfaction the ravaging mindscrubbings of the Astartes, and the occasional execution that had been needed to ensure that not a single memory of Alsace IV would escape the planet's broken surface. The memory of the Massacre of Alsace IV was distant and sometimes tiring to retrieve, but Guevara always made sure that he could clearly and succinctly recall the memories that he did have of the incident.

     Che Guevara had been an Inquisitor Lord at the time of the Massacre, which took place in the 724th year of the 36th millenium. It had been nearly 5300 years ago, over five millenia of battle in the name of the Emperor. Not that time had flowed evenly throughout Guevara's long existence. It was not long after the Massacre of Alsace IV that, perhaps half a century by Guevara's recollections, that the foul Daemonbeast ensnared him in hand to hand combat, dragging him off to the bleeding rims of the Eye of Terror, where time flowed as effectually as frozen water. Guevara could still vividly remember the searing heat, the boiling pain of his body, its mortal shell unaccustomed to the stoppage of time.

     While Che Guevara had not grown old, he had grown hardened. For millenia he had fought the Warp Creature, whose countless faces shuddered and screamed, leered and cackled, hissed and bellowed as its "body," if one could truly call it that, writhed and arched under the unyielding assault of the Inquisitor. Guevara thought that he had been trapped for eternity, never to see his Imperium again. But that did not stop him from striking against the nameless Beast of the Void.

     In the end, Guevara triumped. He shattered the Daemonbeast upon his knee, crushing his spine, rendering apart his dense "mass" of chaotic energy. The resultant explosion flung the Inquisitor into the deep space of the Imperium's western edges, where he was found by Imperial warships alone, by himself, on an abandoned planet barely capable of sustaining life. When he returned to the Emperor's fold, he was surprised to learn that the date had been the year 778 of the 41st millenium.

     Guevara did not know how he had been transported to the planet, the fate of the creature he had battled, or of the future that lay ahead of him. But Guevara had learned one very important fact: that in all of creation, in both the Void and the Warp, that amidst all the angelic hosts and daemonic legions which occupy the galaxy of Man, nothing is more powerful than the possession of hatred.

     But not any hatred would suffice. Unstable hatred, irrational hatred, unfocused hatred all chipped away at the mind, eventually destroying its creator with the full fervor and anguish of the man who once possessed it. No, Guevara had learned, the hatred of Man must be focused and concrete. It cannot waver and it can never be forgotten. It had been pure hatred, wrought with the precision that is used by the skilled weaponsmiths of the Imperium.

     Guevara suddenly turned his thoughts away from the distant past and settled into his meditations. Once he had returned from the Eye of Terror, he had sought-out and reunited with his progeny. In the desperate times of the 36th millenium, the powerful Inquisitor Lord Guevara had been used as the basis for a new Marine Chapter, which had been founded in the 16th Founding in the 694th year of the 36th millenium. They were the Vandals, and had proven themselves zealous in the defense of the Imperium and of the masses of Man.

     Guevara had changed that. The Vandals' worship had decayed into the idolatry and paganism of the common Chapters of the Astartes. Guevara brutally cracked down upon the offensive practices, and replaced them with the pure doctrine of the Imperial creed. The transformation had been painful and scarring for the Chapter, but in the end they had fully converted to the new creeds and dictates.

     And as a final act of transformation, the Vandals shed their old name, and adopted a new name: the Dead Kennedys. The Chapter's homeworld was Thessaloniki, and their name is based on the native word "Kenedesh." It is a difficult word to translate, its true meaning, while officially translated as "Emperor," actually touching on both "saint" and "martyr." The Dead Kennedys are just that: saintly martyrs of the Emperor, who have no qualms over any action deemed holy in the eyes of the Emperor and the Emperor alone.

* * *

     Lord Guevara cleared everything from his mind, even the hatred that so often guided him forth as a vessel of the Emperor. Guevara had learned early that to maintain the focused beam of righteous anger for when it was needed, that occasionally he had to let it dissipitate from his being, to completely disappear to make way for a new beacon of cleansing anger to shine amidst the temple of his mind, formed from fresh new mental energies instead of the burned-out cinders of the old.

     Guevara cleared his mind once more, and allowed the sensations of the ship overtake him. The soft rumbling of the distant warp engines caressed his Terminator armour with sensous ease as the soft colours of the writhing warp-space outside slid gently over the ceraglass and the stained-glass mural of the Massacre of Alsace IV. Small creaks and the slightest noises from the ship eddied and pooled within the Chapter Master.

     After cleansing, purifying, and refocusing his mind towards the unbendable will of his Emperor, Che Guevara turned his calmed mind towards the task at hand. Inquisitor Ysrael had sent a message for Guevara to arrive at a hidden location in the Eastern Fringe, along with a full force detachment of the Dead Kennedys. The reason was left unknown, but Guevara suspected the truth. Che by no means was psychic, but his disciplined and experienced mind knew how to read the strands of fate as well as any Eldritch Farseer...

To be continued...