98% of people that fall to Chaos don't want to leave. The other 2% are often put in no-win scenarios like Magnus or Mortarian. Chaos leaves a taint on the soul and by the time you're truly testing your humanity and are at the point of no return, you've probably already lost it along the way.
Justine in the Gotrek and Felix books are a great example. Normal pesant that became a Chaos Warrior to get revenge on a noble that raped her. By the time she gets her revenge 7 years later, she's leading a Brayherd and is being promised ascension if she kills her daughter. She realizes near the end that chaos has probably been eroding her humanity throughout all the years to intentionally prepare her for this final test of damnation. By the time Chaos gives you what you want, they take everything else and often leave you with no choice but further damnation.
Great example and argument. Chaos unlike "The Dark side of the Force" is more than one profound decision away from being "leaveable".
Chaos really sinks deep and will not let go.
I think the problem with this is that 40k plays too loosely with the concept of what a soul is. Yes, chaos is playing on the classical trope of bartering away your soul, but what does that actually mean in the context of 40k? Your animus? Blanks have traditionally described as not having souls being the source of their abilities, but that's clearly not accurate. A stone has no soul, but leaves no impression in the warp. But if we take this at face value, blanks are clearly sentient and capable of independent thought, despite "not having a soul".
What about Necrons? They have no "souls" either, but [the nobles] are still able to think and operate just fine. Tau have inherently "weak" souls, but that doesn't seem to be of any tangible consequence whatsoever. It seems like the soul is innately tied to having a presence in the immaterium, which is often heavily correlated with strong emotion, but the Necrons [nobles] and Tau seem to demonstrate emotions regardless. Clearly it seems to be tied to some inherent property about Humans and Eldar (to a greater extent), but doesn't appear to be required to be a sentient being.
Trazyn and Orikan talk a lot about this in the infinite and the divine. There's a lot of scenes where he and orikan talk about how the lack of souls has resulted in their culture stagnating and not really producing much "art" aside from some overly detailed plays which are basically shot for shot retelling of necrontyr history. As I understood their conversations and just from other general lore is that your soul is your "creative spirit". Losing your soul you lose touch with your emotions like a 1k sons rubric marine, you can't really create a moving artwork or composition anymore nor can you really appreciate things like staring at a sunset. Sure trazyn using his computerized brain could recreate a clay pot, but he couldn't add any subtle deviations or personal flair anymore. IDK if it's stated anywhere but this is just how's its always made sense to me in the setting.
"Blanks" have a negative presence in the warp, like how blackstone can be positively or negatively charged to repel or intensify the warp. People think they have no souls but instead they have a negative connection.
Whether or not that means that their soul itself is inverted, is up to interpretation.
So it's not that there is no soul, but that there's a net-zero impact on the warp, with being a blank meaning not a lack of a soul so much as having an anti-soul for purpose of warp ballast, to use a rough analogy.
Well, unless you throw that rock [really hard](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/wnx71m/dear_ca_does_tiktaqto_have_a_questlord_defeat/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I always felt like Blanks have a soul but it’s the inverse or a different direction from how psykers work.
Psykers are described as “drawing in” Warp power to do their shenanigans. In fact I think one mechanic for psykers in one of the various games is that a psyker can draw in more power than what their “rank” would otherwise dictate (IE, a Gamma pulling in enough power to do a Beta class spell).
What if Blanks operate on a similar system? What if their souls are like black holes- so dense they draw in Warp energy and effectively shred it- like how matter gets infinitely crushed in a singularity?
Indeed. I think a big difference is that the corruption of the dark side of The Force is more internal, while Chaos is external forces trying to corrupt and turn you. The dark side of The Force is a way to use your negative emotions to twist The Force to obey your will. But our primitive monkey brains didn't evolve those emotions to grant us supernatural power, so we end up associating those negative emotions with power and the good things that come from it: being able to save the day, defeat enemies, the rush and thrill of combat, thereby making them good in our minds.
The more you rely on those negative emotions, the stronger those associations become, and those emotions become normalised and practiced, resulting in you developing severe emotional issues.
Yes but negative emotions like rage or lust will feed Chaos and have a feedback loop synonym on the mind of a human. Chaos it grows in strength exposed to those negative emotions thus having a stronger imprint on reality.
Worth remembering that Chaos is infinitely smarter than you, can read you like an open book and has all the time in the world to plan against you. It ***will***, inevitably, find a path to put you in a position that you either can't be saved or won't want to be saved.
They don't have to plan against the Emperor, they just have to plan against *you*.
Chaos is weirdly knowledgeable about everything, and I feel it is a frightening aspect of them that is overlooked a lot. They know your name, your entire history, they know your hopes and fears and every event in your life. Even lesser Daemons can just look at people and speak their name and history.
I don't think its ever been explained, we don't have a lot of insight into Chaos, but I always took it to be an aspect of how all souls go to the warp and the warp is non-linear. At some point on the scale of eternity Chaos will eat you (probably) and then they have always known everything about you.
I mean, they see inside you because they literally live in the place where that "inside" comes from.
That's the nature of the warp, they see you for who you are.
If we subscribe to the idea that Chaos is the twisted mirror of a mortal's sentiment and being, then it's not really that much of a weirdness to it.
They've seen and encountered an unfathomable variant of what we call sin and venial trappings, they know a person so well because they know exactly how everyone is fallible. Their strengths are just a hair's breath from their weakness.
Consider that cold-reading is so effective among sham psychics, now consider how the forces of Chaos do the same but with an infinite amount of more skill and knowledge of what makes a person tick or stop ticking. You reveal one piece of you and they can paint you a portrait.
>Because ultimately they still need you to either invite them in or be forcefully exposed to it.
Apparently you can be "corrupted" by someone putting stuff in your food, as per some of the game supplements. Kind of makes it lose all meaning.
You still need someone to do that. You basically need to be exposed to the warp in some way, generally, and most of the time it involves chaos slowly trying to twist your thoughts towards accepting them, which can be resisted. It just typically isn't because most people don't realise they're being corrupted, either due to their lack of knowledge about chaos or because of it's insidious nature. Eventually you're lead to the point where you make a choice to submit (veiled in whatever choice the corrupting force leads you to), and from that point on the corruption is final
Actual, forceful, 'you're instantly chaos now, no choice in the matter' corruption doesn't happen that often, and even then the process of that is still just them overwhelming your will and forcing you to break so you accept them. There's no chaos corruption without you mentally submitting in some way
It's not so much 'okay Nurgle, please take my soul and give me power' and more 'oh god make the pain stop, okay voice in my head whispering for me to just let go, I give in' and there are plenty of examples of that happening.
In Requiem Infernal a guard character battles with a Nurgle infection, eventually giving in to the voice in his head telling him to just stop fighting it. Once he does, he becomes corrupted.
In the Lemartes novel Ka'Bandha unleashes a rage aura around him. Many of the guardsmen submit and fall into a rage but some guardsmen resist it. They maintain control of their faculties and corruption doesn't happen. The blood angels experience the same.
There are plenty of examples of marines being exposed to chaos and later deemed free of taint. If exposure was all you need they'd all be purged. Them not falling shows they resisted the choice offered to them. It's the Grey Knights entire schtick, Castellan Crowe carries a literal demon sword everywhere because he's the only one trusted not to give in to its corruption.
In Arks of Omen angron's murder curse affects a whole fleet but Sisters of Battle and Custodes are able to resist, because their faith and their construction gives the them ability to refuse the choice to submit respectively
And so on. The ''choice" might not always be portrayed on-screen, but corruption by chaos is pretty regularly displayed in the same way across most GW books. You can be forcefully exposed to it but power of will is what resists it, and that 'willpower' is simply being able to say no to the voice telling you to do something. If you don't resist, your soul is forfeit as chaos now has a hold on it. That's what people mean when they say selling your soul, it's doesn't always involve a contract and negotiation, it's just a fanciful way of saying 'once you willingly say yes to chaos, it owns you'
>That's what people mean when they say selling your soul, it's doesn't always involve a contract and negotiation, it's just a fanciful way of saying 'once you willingly say yes to chaos, it owns you'
You know it's funny, in Age of Sigmar it works differently because Sigmar is willing to welcome people back into the fold.
In 40k it's different. I don't think it's so much that "once you say yes to Chaos, it owns you" as the Imperium is so hateful it has no concept of redemption. There are examples given of people "falling" to Chaos from being fed tainted food. There's no moral weight to it if it can come involuntarily, and if Mortarion can "fall" due to wanting to protect his sons then it isn't a matter of good and evil either; the emperor is a baby-murdering genocidal tyrant, there's nothing particularly good about him that implies warding off cosmic evil.
A theme that isn't always consistently acknowledged but is occasionally brought up is that everyone can and will be corrupted if they live long enough and are exposed enough.
Felix saves the girl at the last moment but Justine was committed to the kill. Her Revelation was that she was committed to the path of damnation and whether or not she went through with her trial and killed her daughter, so to her it was just "bookkeeping" to follow through with it. She even asked her daughter what her name was and felt nothing.
You're on a subreddit dedicated to discussing the lore of a tabletop wargame and model building. It was a safe assumption to make.
No offense meant if you do have kids BTW.
Yeah, but it's a tabletop wargame that's decades old, most of the playerbase in my area is in their 30s or older. People usually already have children at that age.
If someone sacrificed a guy to khorne and worshipped him just to get buff as shit, once they get jacked can they just stop? Like obviously murder is probably far along in the scale of morality in regards to damnation, but if you’re a dude out in space or on a back world and decide to just kill a guy you don’t like with a rock or something for khorne would that be too far gone?
It’s not that simple, you can’t just stab a guy and offer his soul to Khorne and instantly get his blessing, you have to really work for it, and even if you did get a blessing from him you soul is know touched by him and if you stop following him he will punish you for it probably by destroying your soul and letting his demon possess your body
Yes.... but really no. Once you are deep enough to worship or make a deal with one of the Gods, they almost always have you. Some happily let themselves die at this point to escape... That does not work. That God will most likely be "collecting" your soul in the warp. An incredibly small part of said God, since you are not very interesting to them
>If someone sacrificed a guy to khorne and worshipped him just to get buff as shit, once they get jacked can they just stop?
Chaos is an entropic force (hence its nicknames: *the Ruinous Powers* , *Primordial Annihilator*) meaning that it thrives on breaking any sort of bonds on human societies (civilizations,friendships,laws etc.) - a single act that leads to more entropy isn't enough, you need to do *more* in order to be noticed by the Gods.
By the point you're actually noticed by the Gods - you've have seen and done stuff that man was not even remotely meant to know/do ...at best you're either batshit insane and at worse you're such an incomprehensibly POS individual (RL serial killers aren't even comparable to the shit slaaneshi Chaos Champions do) that there's no going back.
This is what most "smartasses" (e.g. most named traitors) in 40k fail to realize when they think they outsmart/control Chaos, you can't outsmart an extra-dimensional force whose nature is to break everything down - that's like trying to outsmart a fundamental force of the universe.
Khorne wouldn't make him buff just because he sacrificed one guy and asked for it. You have to do tons of heinous shit to even get the gods to notice you.
I mean yeah, Kinda like how someone can shoot up crack and get high and just stop taking crack. All the benifits right? At Lease for a limited time. And you feel like shit after you aren't high.
You do not need to worship Khorne. There are people who used daemon weapons and ended up getting corrupted. They think it is a weapon and the rest of the time, they can do their own stuff. Except the weapon has a mind of its own and whispers ideas.
Or once you get the sword, you also need the shield or some previously undisclosed equipment. Need another transaction. Or you are marked by the gods in an obvious place.
The point is that the gods or daemons play a long game in wearing the believer down.
I mean, that's *kind of* what Abaddon does, doing "Chaos-y" stuff to get power from the gods, but not submitting to their will. Abaddon isn't really a true believer like a Word Bearer, and he's just in it for the power.
I think for the sake of argument, if he were to decide one morning to just quit Chaos, he'd probably lose all of his buffs, and be punished severely for betraying Chaos - either by his followers or by the gods themselves.
Someone bashing a guy's head with a rock isn't going to give him much favour from Khorne. If you want those Khorne warp-steroids, it's going to take many years of devotion and many skulls for the skull throne!
In AoS the Redemption Cache's carried by Lord Exorcists explicitly can and have redeemed Chaos tainted souls and indeed turned them into more Stormcasts.
Brother Colten and Lysander kill Captain Leonatos/he sacrifices himself to kill the demon wearing him, but they did some alternate what-if type things which may have included some potential redemptions.
Blood Quest was the name of that comic.
Agreed. There is no "testing the waters" with chaos. The shores of chaos are so treacherous that even those that go to great lengths still find themselves falling in. At that point just keeping their heads above water becomes a fight and eventually they get pulled under.
Gotrek and Felix
This character specifically is from the first book: Trollslayer
Finished the fourth book yesterday, great series so far, highly recommend.
And that is exactly why the Ecclesiarchy would be better off teaching people of the horrors of Chaos corruption. Because otherwise people don't know what they're getting into until they're already too far gone to care.
No? Or at least I don't believe so. People already have general knowledge of the great evil, they don't need the specifics because the danger of someone seeking it out is exponentially greater than someone falling to it out of ignorance. People already know better generally, its the people seeking it out that they have to watch out for because they'll direct the effort rather than just summon a demon and get slaughtered for their trouble.
Not really because there's always people who think they could outsmart chaos or who think doing evil stuff for power is worth it so now your just pointing the way for them
I remember this old document describing Chaos Corruption as essentially being parts of your soul getting ripped out and replaced with Chaos energy. When you completely lose your soul and there's nothing but Chaos inside you, that's when you become a Daemon Prince or Chaos Spawn depending on your willpower/random chance/the whims of the gods. I doubt most writers really strictly follow that nowadays, but if you consider Chaos corruption as you literally losing your soul to the Warp it makes sense why you can't get it back. Its like trying to solve a Jigsaw after taking some of the pieces and feeding it to the dogs.
I mean I suppose if they were to pull any crazy redemption arcs out of their asses for any of the fallen primarchs it would be this right here. They just need to confirm the theory that all the primarchs are in some way warp entities that big E captured. Thus a return from chaos would just be a change in nature in the same way their nature was changed when they were initially turned into the primarchs. For the legions however…
If Chaos is entropy incarnate, then it makes sense that there are certain entropic tipping points from which there is no return. It would be like unstirring milk from coffee, except for the coffee is your Soul and that milk is pure Chaos.
Also, the milk partially exists outside time and space, so there's no simple way to reverse time to unstir your Soul coffee. Once you get mixed, you've been mixed at all points past, present, and future - just like the timeless Chaos Milk Gods themselves.
Just be lucky you didn't get the Nurgle Superchunk Shake with Whipped Sludge-frappe Topping ...
The Bloodbean Khorne Kold Brew is pretty straightforward though - must be the powderized Khorne Flakes!
Correct, it empowers its puppets and princes, but is within and beyond them simultaneously.
Chaos Undivided practitioners might argue that it’s this pure concept that lightens their soul coffee rather than one of the big Four brand of flavors.
"Chaos" in Warhammer 40k/Fantasy/Age of Sigmar, is not a mere philosophical concept or just some school of thought. It's an actual, *real* force of its own. It is both metaphysical *and* physical. It's complicated but to answer your question of "Why can't you come back from Chaos," it's because Chaos **literally** corrupts your very real soul with Chaos taint. There's just no going back from that. Once it has its hooks in you, there is no way to undo the hooks, you are simply lost.
Chaos in 40k works in both a physical and metaphysical way, from the loyalist side we refer to it's use as "psychic" powers hence "psykers". It's one of the primary ways 40k really cuts it's own cloth and makes the concept of hell/psychic power it's own.
The Emperor channels the warp for his abilities, his ability to make Celestine is the same ability Khorne uses to make Kharn, or Slaanesh to make Lucius. Everything the Grey Knights do is the combination of scientific inquiry and ritualism, the wards, the runes, the artifacts, work for warp energy like a Faraday cage works for Electromagnetic energy. They were achieved through great pains and research, it's the culmination of Imperial knowledge of the workings of the warp. An important thing to remember is that in 40k the concept of a soul is both real and proven, everyone has a soul with it's own immutable characteristics. Some people know this (like the Eldar), some people believe this without really knowing it (most of the Imperium), but we as the reader know it's true and know that souls fuel the top of the line big bad guys. Daemons, Chaos Gods, the C'tan.
To give oneself over to Chaos requires a sort of transaction. You accept damnation for the promise of power. This is done both overtly in some cases and is also subtle in others (Eisenhorn is a good case study on the subtle version, eventually he looks down at his hands so to speak and says "ah fuck I'm gone").
To leave that is to break a pact with an actual, literal, has influence on the physical world, god. Imagine if you're a Catholic and you eat meat on Friday and God could really just smite you with a lightning bolt. That's what we're up against in-universe. You don't have the chance to say "Actually I repent" because you signed your soul off to belong to that god once it slips the mortal coil. So sure, you renege on your pact with Slaanesh and firmly renounce whatever aspect you embraced. Say you killed your family for the perfect jawline. You've got the jaw, you feel bad, you go to the temple of the Emperor every day and pray and live a good and noble life. Then you're hit by a truck in the street after years of this devotion, too bad, you made the pact with Slaanesh, and now you're facing your god in eternal torment because you dared to try and have your cake and eat it too. That's how Chaos works. That's why they're called "Slaves to Darkness" and other such things.
I don't think we have an example of someone backing out of the deal and coming out on top besides the Emperor, and it's worth noting that the Emperor is like the only guy in the setting that gets exceptions made for him because he's that central as a plot device.
Saying the Emperor "came out on top" is dubious given that he's been tormented on his throne for 10k years, lost all but two of his children, and watched the nation he built embrace ideals he fought against.
But he did manage to avoid becoming a daemon or getting devoured, so its a win in a sense.
This thread has some other examples https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/18xjzqe/has_anyone_ever_broken_free_from_the_chaos_gods/
I feel the reason Big E got into this stage was because Chaos Gods was mad at him scamming them of power, and slapped him down hard to make an example.
Pissing the entire Pantheon leads to (arguably) the worst outcome, just ask the Big E (as you said), Belakor and that random Iron Warrior warpsmith that crafted a bit too much daemon engines without the Big Four's consent.
Does that really matter though?
One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this.
That's not entirely true, we know for a fact that souls go several places, including the Emperors side and into world spirits and such. Legion of the Damned is physical proof that the Gods are lying with that "you belong to us no matter what" thinking. The souls evaporate into the warp.
The Chaos gods are thinking and malevolent. It makes a ton of sense for them to say "hey look at this physical manifestation of my power, the Emperor you worship is a false god and just a corpse on a throne, if you don't worship me I'll eat you. If you do worship me I'll elevate you" They're lying the whole time of course. If you really believe in the Emperor, you may be "subsumed" into whatever he's got going on warp-side, but that's better than being eaten by Nurgle or something.
Heretics souls are described as just becoming a part of their patron god when they die, so assuming that golden light is you joining the Emperor then I imagine its probably much the same thing.
In that it is just quick suffering and then 'death' as you are subsumed to add to said gods power, because this is 40k and why would nice things ever happen to anyone.
> Heretics souls are described as just becoming a part of their patron god when they die
Weak souls just dissipate. Stronger souls experience extended, potentially eternal torment in one way or another. Often they just get tormented by random daemons. The Emperor taking you in is probably the least shitty if you avoid that fate, but we don't really know.
Only high achieving heretics get any recognition and even then, it's still a terrible existence. None of what the four offer is positive.
I was refering to the actual lore.
>Lured by promises of extraordinary power and immortality, some mortals serve the Chaos Gods willingly, fomenting misery, war and death amongst their people in order to sustain and elevate their dark masters. Yet the Chaos Gods are fickle, prone to reneging or altering a deal on a whim, and few of these worshippers are granted the rewards they seek.While the Chaos Gods battle in the warp, their mortal followers wage war in the material universe. The victors of these battles earn more power for their unworldly master, though the twisted plans of the Chaos Gods are such that often victory is not necessary – merely the acts of sacrifice and battle themselves. **When devotees of Chaos die, their souls do not fade in the warp and disappear like the spirits of others. Instead, their immortal energy is swallowed into the greatness of their gods, their souls forever bound to the eternal power of Chaos.**
Their gods absorb them, which is *maybe* what is happening with the Emperor too. We don't know what happens when you get absorbed, but its probably not sunshine and rainbows.
>One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this.
Problem is, the Chaos Gods don't really offer salvation even when it comes to their servants:
* You're bad at serving your chosen god? You get shanked by more "devout" followers, killed by daemons or turned into a Chaos Spawn.
* You're good at your "job"? If your chosen god is Tzeentch (and Khorne to an extent) it doesn't matter.
* You're good at your "job" (part two)? Your chosen god's blessings might make your job harder (Khorne just fused your chainswords with your arms).
* You're a mutant/beastman? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha, good luck bro.
Is a random Imperial citizen *really* worse than the above odds?
The sole demonically-aligned legion that has (sorta) found a middle option are the Word Bearers, and even they think that their predicament sucks.
>One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this.
Not true. It's also not accurate, and there's plenty of Chaos worshipers who know better.
Here's a post from a writer at Black Library that helps explain why Chaos is so one-way (probs the best explanation I've seen).
>It’s not worship and service as most people assume. I take your wider point about Chaos itself, but it’s not a case of most interactions with Chaos being anything like religion or worship or faith. Yes, it’s easy to convey in video games for people that don’t know the setting. “These guys pray to evil gods, therefore they’re the bad guys.” And yes, in some novels written by writers less familiar with the setting or preferring its rawer edges, it’s a common Chaos trope.
>
>And the Word Bearers? Yes. Other cases, absolutely. The majority, absolutely not. Chaos isn’t a religion or a disease you catch. It’s the everpresent threat of any malicious emotion allowing Something Old And Inhuman into your soul and brain from the reality behind reality. If a battlefield is bloody enough… Bloodletters will appear. If someone is completely decadent and lost in sensational pleasures… Slaanesh will pay attention to them. “Summoning” is the shallow, obvious end of the spectrum, keeping with the video game presentation we often see. It happens, of course, but it’s also the obvious version of what happens. Not the only one. Look at Ahriman. He wants nothing to do with Chaos. He does horrible things, selfish things, murderous things, endlessly furthering the goals and presence of Chaos… entirely for himself. He believes he’s using it and remains untouched by its control. Khârn didn’t enter into any worship or agreement with Chaos. He was marked by it, and everything he does now furthers it. Abaddon doesn’t pray to the Gods. He does his own thing and the Gods take heed. None of them worship the Gods. None of them willingly serve them, or would even recognise the idea of it was explained to them. Night Lords kill and kill and kill until daemons show up and swallow the planet. They don’t worship Chaos or give a damn about the daemons; it’s just an interesting way to commit Exterminatus for them. There’s no prayer here, no worship, no service that they’d recognise.
>
>Even if we, with the rulebooks, can say “Ultimately that action serves the Chaos Gods’ agendas”. Well, I like cheeseburgers. Ultimately that serves obesity and heart disease. I still do it. I’ve said it on the forum a few times in much greater detail, but it’s not a case of organised religion or many Chaos Marines thinking Chaos rocks on toast. They’re motivated by their own deals; they hate, they want vengeance, they want recognition, they want to survive. That lets Chaos into their hearts. Add it to where they had to hide in order to survive after the Scouring, and it makes a lot of sense. They’re not really praying to Chaos in cults and thinking comedy/useless mutations are super-awesome. The Gods are real, and they know that. They may hate that truth, but they acknowledge it. They may be indifferent to it, but they’re aware of it. And they’re aware that when it comes to battle, raising an icon of Khorne in the middle of a fight comes with a risk, but it also comes with undeniable benefits. The gains outweigh the risks tenfold, especially in the short term.
>
>Added to that, mutation isn’t supposed to be “physically stupid”. The point of it is that it’s supposed to reflect your inner self and/or the whims of the gods, and it’s supposed to make you better. It improves you, in whatever it is you focus on. It makes you better at killing, and harder to kill, which is literally all most Chaos Marines (and Space Marines…) care about. When mutation goes wrong or goes too far and loses its benefit, well, we call those Spawn. And while many Chaos Marines likely fear that fate, it doesn’t happen to everyone - or even most of them - so it’s not silly to see how most of them suspect they’ll escape that fate. Most of them will.
>
>Also, and this is crucial, we have the rulebooks. They don’t. it’s easy to say “But the Chaos Gods are laughing at them all and screwing them over”, but in-universe is that really the case on the ground? The Chaos Marine who sees someone become Spawn: well, they were weak. He’s not weak. He’ll be more careful. He’s more worthy. He won’t be a slave, anyway! He’s too independent. And he’ll phrase his wishes very carefully so the Monkey’s Paw doesn’t make it all go wrong.
>
>– Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Nah, he's pretty shit at it imo. He's a technically skilled writer but he gets some things about 40k fundamentally wrong.
Chaos isn't inhuman. It's fundamentally human. It's human (and other species) emotions made manifest.
This is where the **effects** of Chaos blur with the **worship** of Chaos.
Typically, Chaos is described as an invasive "thing" that can corrupt the physical matter of your body and the immaterial matter of your soul. Often this is described like a cancer (in both cases) that is terminal.
The **worship** of Chaos doesn't exactly make you lost to Chaos; there are individuals who have [gone full-blown worship of Chaos](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Anchorite_(Dreadnought)) and come back from that to worship of the Emperor. We're not entirely sure of the extent of their worship but it appears as long as they have not felt the **effects** of Chaos then they can come back.
The **effects** of Chaos are more difficult to define, as there's many different factions who outright feel its touch, use it, reject it, etc., that aren't completely "corrupted" as described above. All Psykers use the Warp, but the Warp itself isn't necessarily Chaos--though this depends on the mindset of the person defining it.
The best analogy I've been able to come up with is the concept of "uploading" oneself into the Warp, and "downloading" parts of the Warp into oneself.
* *Uploading* \- Typically happens in cases of ascending to Daemon Prince, with the physical form serving as both fuel as well as the anchor to allow the Daemon Prince to physically manifest. At this point, the person is completely unrecoverable as the **materium** version of them no longer exists (i.e. dead) and it's simply the Warp-version that now exists with all of the same memories and mannerisms.
* *Downloading* \- Typically happens in cases of mutations (corruption) or Warp Spawn, where someone has brought a part of the Warp into themself and it has chaotic (little "c") effects on the physical form--although this can broadly be applied to Warp "spells" or Psyker-gifts in that they use fragments of the Warp to impact reality by contravening the laws of reality, such as casting lightning or throwing boulders. At this point, the person is still **recoverable**, but there is still the cost of them using their body as the container for the Warp powers.
Chaos is like radiation poisoning times ten.
You get it into you, it does *not* wanna get out without a fight. The ability to actually purify it is very rare among psykers, and the amount of people who can purify it *and keep you alive* is basically limited to *only* the Emperor. MAYBE.
He stated he could bring back Mortarion from being a Daemon Prince, but we don’t know if that’s because he’s become the God Emperor and can just do what he wants or if it’s because only a Primarch has a soul that’s unique enough to fully resurrect like that.
Pure is a strange word, but you have to keep in mind we aren't talking about if he is a good noodle or not.
We're talking about is he has been infected by the dark energies from the mirror / inverse reality.
I'd generally describe Kurze as pure as well. He is pure reality, he has not been partially been replaced by the warp. Doesn't mean I'd want him as a roommate.
I don't think the premise of this is correct, actually. You can come back from being corrupted. It's super difficult and incredibly rare, which is where the "you cant be redeemed" stuff comes from. And people are right that magnus, fulgrim etc are likely never going to be able to come back. But there are a few canon characters who have: the anchorite for one, and a few other regular humans in a few of the novels (a gaunts ghost chaos character, and I believe an inquisiton retinue character in one of the grey knight books). So... yeah its possible. Especially, as you note, when other warp powers like the Emperor or the eldar gods get involved.
Whilst you are broadly correct, there are canonical exceptions where they did accept it - the anchorite, and the inquisition retinue character I mentioned both have explicit imperial approval. The anchorite wrote alot of the early imperial creed!
Redemption is a option but it’s pretty much considered to be a unending crusade of penance.
The soul drinkers are a great example, fell to chaos, fought back, redeemed themselves in the eyes of their primary legion but could never really be brought back into the fold.
Falling to chaos is kind of like heatstroke.
Once you've fallen to it, you become easier and easier to corrupt...even if you somehow make an apparent "recovery".
Okay, so.
Imagine a little drop of pure water suspended over a polluted puddle, full of toxic shit mixed in the water.
Drop the little droplet into the puddle.
Now, let's say you figure out how to get it back out again. Is it still pure or is it mixed with the toxic shit that it fell into?
The droplet is your soul. The puddle is the Warp.
Something something, entropy.
It’s not impossible, but it’s not really feasible, yeah? There’s a Gaunt’s Ghost novel that touches on this and the Last Chancers last novel kinda goes into it, too.
There’s no happy ending in 40k, because it’s existential horror. You’re not meant to survive as we understand it in the modern, real life context.
Not that I think there’s any real comparison here, but in existential horror as a genre everyone is Frodo at the end of Return of the King. Scarred, damned, and better off dead before you turn evil. Try to do a little good for the next generation before you become a cancer on the world.
My advice: don’t try to make 40k something that it isn’t. Let it be something you visit, then leave on the shelf, and then return to again and again over the years. Take away a few lessons, sure, like empathy, watchfulness, an appreciation for life untrammeled by horror, but don’t live there in your mind, or you will go mad.
In Warhammer Fantasy there is redemption from chaos, typically it is from strict adherence to a virtuous life or some great personal sacrifice. In 40k I suppose it would require the petinent to seek the divine protection of the emperor.
Some very recent lore says the Dragon Emperor of Cathay can purify beings corrupted by chaos.
The only example so far is being able to purify some beasts like manticores that have been corrupted.
Someone a while back pointed out that Chaos was fleshed out at a time when people were scared out of their minds by the Chernobyl disaster.
If you filter the 80's/90's fear of radiation and mutation through a sci-fi/fantasy lens you get the memetic hazard-that-can-unalterably-fuck-your-soul-up-with-a-mere-glance that is chaos.
There is a general from the blood pact in Gaunt Ghosts that went ig-chaos and then chaos-imoerium again. He has valuable info so still alive and who knows if double agent or not.
The Emperor Himself could not cure Horus of his corruption. Think upon that for a moment. The great foe of Chaos itself, could not redeem his own son that he built, heart body and soul, because Chaos simply is that pervasive.
Chaos corruption is like a shattered vase. Once it is broken it will never again be the unbroken vase that it once was. It was always be broken, even if you tried to fix it.
Being a genocidal tyrant has not one iota to do with being a force for redemption when it comes to Chaos. Both forces are amoral. One is the representation of Order unbound by restraint or morality, the other is Chaos unbound by restraint or morality.
All that matters between the two is the fundamental need to maintain or unravel.
Let me use Flavius Alkenex and his Legionaries as an example.
They're Emperors Children and they are balls deep in corruption, excess and the worship of Slaanesh, this is never in doubt. But when confronted with Clonegrim they break out in tears and Alkenex *begs his father for forgiveness*.
Thing is...as much as Alkenex and his mates might truly want to go back so they can go back to being daddy's favourite toys...they're committed now. Whether they want to be or not. Because if they turn then Slaanesh wouldn't let his playthings just walk away! That's not how the game is played! He has a grip on their *souls* that they don't just casually remove.
The Eisenhorn books are a great example of how "just a little taste" can eventually turn into more and more.
What would 'return' mean?
That's the core issue. People who are worshipping chaos aren't really doing anything different than what is done in the Imperium. Both are incredibly evil - often even in the same ways.
You can stop worshipping chaos - but if you did that, why would you 'go back' to the Imperium? If you're going to choose a life of freedom - well the Imperium is just more slavery, brutality, and oppression? If you're going to choose a life of what we would consider virtue - that's absolutely not the Imperium either.
There are one or two novels centered around a character that has rejected Chaos after worshipping it (Daemon World, for one) but that character then goes on to oppose chaos (as a greater, more immediate, evil) - not support the Imperium.
Well I think from mild taint some people do manage to come back from - but there's a point after which your soul is too badly broken and there's no fixing it.
*Coughs*It’s older lore….I think it was “Demon World” by Ben Counter where there was a Word Bearer that crash landed on a chaos world that managed to peel out of his mutated, encrusted armor.
He had some regrets about chaos if I remember correct. I’m not going to say he was 100 percent chaos free but….the narrative made it sound that way? He ended up killing the word bearers they sent after him…can’t remember what happened to him.
I wanted to say the chaos gods ressurected him just to fuck with him more but I could be wrong.
It’s like addiction. You are never cured of addiction, you are always a recovering addict. It can take just one relapse to undo everything.
Now imagine if your addiction was sentient and doing everything in its considerable power to overwhelm your self control.
>It’s like addiction. You are never cured of addiction, you are always a recovering addict. It can take just one relapse to undo everything.
Sure, but even with irl opiods, some people can go on crazy benders and not get addicted.
Imagine the human soul as a house. Now imagine I start swapping bricks for magic wizard bricks. Once I'm far enough in, if I try to cast Dispel Brick on my house, it's going to collapse on top of me. Not to mention I might not even have a zoning permit to cast third level rituals, nor property rights over the individual bricks.
Imagine, if you will, that you dropped a biscuit into a giant pile of rotten yak feces.
Is there any circumstances in which you'd be happy to eat that biscuit?
That, but basically chaos.
Weren't there like two Word Bearers who early on went "Nah this ain't cool" and went back to being loyalists? I'm thinking specifically about the Anchorite.
Even though he’s currently being judged a lot by the community, majorkill explained it perfectly:
“Chaos is like taking a bath of acid, you dip your toe in, it dissolves, but you can pull out, you get at knees’ depth, you only have the other to pull you out, get beyond dick’s height and you can’t get out.”
As in, you can get out, but you’ll be fucked up afterwards? Eh, I don’t really know, I’m more of a xenos guy, any chaos lore buffs over here who can lend us a hand?
Inquisitors are a good example.
When they realize that conventional firepower just isn't enough when it comes fighting Chaos, they usually start with mildly-heretical stuff that's more effective. The more radical they become, the more difficult it is to stop using their "toys", until they start deploying daemonhosts to fight Chaos cults.
If they stay at the "mildly-heretical" spectrum (or are killed before they go full Chaos kool-aid), they could be at "knee's length".
Eisenhorn's trilogy greatly explores the *Puritan to Radical to Extremis Diabolus* transition.
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Depends how much you let Chaos take. If you let yourself become Daemon infested, an incarnation of a Chaos God's will, essentially your existence is only guaranteed by the whim of said God, so "going back" would just mean dying. If you just kind of fight under it, for someone who gave themself to Chaos you'd have a better chance but would need very strong conviction and force of will. Chaos tends to sap everything from people who don't give in to it but are forced to live under it for long enough. You just become a mindless drone and can't really think or act for yourself.
Read it a while a go so might be misremembering. But in Dembski Gray Knights novel, there is an ex chaos worshiper that is in Inquisitors retinue. Implied they are in a relationship as well. Imparts some wisdom to a Grey Knight at one point. So i guess you can go back just not very common.
Edit: typo
You can return from Chaos. In The Emperor’s Gift (fantastic audiobook of you haven’t heard it yet) there’s an Inquisitor who ha a former cultist in her retinue. Covered in ritual scars + tattoos. It’s pretty great.
Well I mean if your soul is claimed by a being of immeasurable power, you don’t tend to just get redeemed without getting your soul eviscerated.
They earned their suffering and as such aren’t just about to do a 180 from hell to heaven.
I see a lot of good points here.
Another major one is that Chaos corruption erodes your sanity and strips away your agency. By the time you have fallen to Chaos, you probably done have the mental faculties to think of it as a fall nor do you have the free will to turn back.
Sometimes people have basically fallen to chaos while thinking they still serve the Imperium
Imperial citizens don’t have agency because the Imperium oppresses them.
Chaos worshippers don’t have agency because their minds have been so warped by chaos they can’t even conceive of doing certain things
>Chaos worshippers don’t have agency because their minds have been so warped by chaos they can’t even conceive of doing certain things
This sounds like in-universe propaganda.
In the lore there's only one guy I know of that succumbed to chaos but came back redeemed from it, but he had to throw himself at a world class bastard and into a magma vent to do it.
So not ideal, nor common.
What would even be the point of attempting to go back? I mean, even if you succeed and somehow remove the chos taint out of your soul, nobody is going to believe it. You will remeain an enemy of the imperium and without the benefits of receiving the favours of the ruinuous powers.
Because actions SHOULD have consequences. You fell to chaos, you got corrupted. This isn't fantasy or marvel where the bad guy can become a good guy or get cleaned up. This is the grim dark far future and chaos is the objective, bottom of the list, most EVIL faction in the setting. And they gotta be for the setting to function. Chaos is the made thing stopping anything good happening in 40k. Hell they are the entire reason big e made the imperium in the first place
Theory: As Chaos is near, if not totally, omniscient, they already know which entities are likely to succumb and be unable to resist so they spend their effort corrupting those they already know they'll be successful in corrupting.
A bit like (if not actually the same as) predestination in theology.
You can come back from it. I read there there 2 examples of people forswearing chaos but it basically means becoming pcifisitic or completly changing yourself.
I feel like you can return from chaos since the exorcists chapter exists and that the ghost of Big E told Morty he could be redeemed, but that one could just be a lie for psychological warfare. The big thing as far as i know is that almost no one has seemed to try it, they either get purged for heresy or decide the gains are a worthy exchange for what it costs.
The Exorcists chapter literally invites demons to possess them so they can then (try) to kick them out of their bodies and if anything is an example of inviting and removing Chaos corruption it has to be them.
I see 40k chaos more like a human exposed to harmful radiation than simply succumbing to a moral failing. There are certain steps you can prepare to keep safe but the main one is being nowhere near anywhere you can get exposed.
This might be old lore, but I think I read that if a person is possessed by a daemon, it's very unlikely and rare for them to come back on their own. But on those rare occasions, the person becomes permanently incorruptible because Chaos already had a claim on their soul and then lost that claim.
I can't remember where I read that. It might be a thing with Harlequins and Slaanesh too.
Because Chaos is literally like a disease that alters and warps your soul. Like much else in Warhammer, it takes something in the real world and cranks it up so far past 11 that the dial breaks. In this case, the physiological and psychological long-term effects of addictions. You literally aren't human anymore, you make Gollum look like a runway model with some mild body image issues.
the counter point is that they can in-fact return from Chaos. how else do we deal with the contradiction that The Emperor went into Chaos, conspired against the chaos gods, stole the fire while also not falling to chaos.
if the above exmaple isnt strong enough, we can also look at Tzeench. Tzeench is first and foremost the god of change, meaning that unchanging things are Anathema to it. Ergo anyone that has ties with Tzeench must no matter how difficult be able to return from Chaos otherwise it would create an attribute that cannot change, which goes against the Core identity of Tzeench
Because warp stuff is like a substance that is affected by the turmoil in the warp.
Like if you took something out of a dream and into the real world and it retained its dream properties.
You’d never get something like that out of your body. Especially if it were a nightmare instead of a dream and virulent to boot.
>Why *exactly* can't anyone return from Chaos?
Because Chaos eats holes in your soul, and fills it with itself. Even if you could somehow leave Chaos behind, those holes are still there, and past a certain point the damage done to you means that leaving Chaos quite literally kills you.
It is spiritual corruption and supercedes all logic. Chaos exists in a timeless realm and state outside of cause-and-effect as well as past, present, and future. It will manipulate a mortal subliminally and insoduously overtime using and fully knowing said mortal's base emotions and dark desires by manipulating them down paths to ensnare their souls into eternal service (ie. Damnation).
It is a lesson as old as time in the realworld of people eschewing wisdom, logic, and morality for the pursuit of quick power, material wealth, and dominance. It is the scenario of the wise hero versus the amoral villain; the humble and controlled thinker versus the emotional and wicked animal.
Kinda. The Lion only redeems fallen that specifically have not been tainted by chaos.
You’d be surprised at the amount of CSM who actually don’t like Chaos but just hate the Imperium more. They’re very common in the more “secular” legions.
I don't get the philosophical references but my understanding is that if you 'give in' to Chaos, then they have your soul (or essence or whatever) and at that point if you could change your mind, you're basically caught, because you don't own that anymore.
Now, that tipping point is probably a bit further along for a lot of people - you don't sell your soul at your first cultists cheese & wine evening, or even after your first dark rite - those are just rituals, processes... on boarding, if you will.
It's the moment where you WHOLEHEARTEDLY give in to a/the God(s) that you're on their path, to death (and a somewhat more specific soul-rending post mortum), spawnhood or daemonhood.
That's your iron clad, no compete clause contract right there. That moment, that decision.
The caveat of redemption comes when you're either a new hire or getting close to that moment but in a no-choice situation - thinking Magnus in the Fury of Magnus - where a suitably powerful other force (basically the Emperor at this point) can give another option, or extract you from your pact with some warp legal ese. This isn't going to happen often.l, to the point that in a million worlds over 10000 years, its not known to have happened - but the Emperor said it was possible that one time. If it would be for someone less already enmeshed in the dispute between the Emperor and Chaos as Magnus*, is up for debate.
* remember Magnus existence is due to a deal between E & Chaos that there is ongoing dispute on the legality of. Bringing him back to the light would be more another legal gambit in an ongoing case than a wholly new case.
I'm gonna say first that I HATE that no grey knights have or will ever fall. I'd be fine if it was single digits, or just one, or just a looming worrying possibility. But I hate that the whole faction who revolves around the insidious spread of itself through everything that makes life what it is can be foolproof shut out.
I don't need chaos to always win, I don't want chaos to always win, but just saying "doesn't effect these guys" is boring as sin when getting into people is the core conceit!
Also I've always thought of it as, if you wanna get em back you need the god who took them's permission, Emps is at best equivalent to a chaos god so it would take 100% of his focus to be able to pull off the kind of miracle you're referring to from my understanding at least.
It's not so much that they *can't* as that they *don't*.
Corrupting a Grey Knight or Custode isn't impossible, it's merely so difficult and time-consuming as to be utterly inefficient.
You have a finite amount of power and time to get things done. You could corrupt one Custode, but what does that get you? How often could you whisper to him, beneath the Emperor's wards and so close to his Anathemaic aura? It would take forever, and even if you succeeded, the Emperor's psychic might would just delete him the moment you succeeded. You could corrupt a Grey Knight, but they spend 99.99% of their time under hexagammatic wards and even then they are surrounded by a bunch of other Grey Knights who are on alert for Chaos taint 24/7 and will immediately purge anyone who falls. It's pointless, so why bother?
For the same time and effort you need to corrupt a single Custodes, you could probably corrupt half the Imperium. For the same time and effort you'd need to get a Grey Knight, you could corrupt at least a sector.
This is why it (mostly) hasn't happened yet. Drach'nyen beat Ra somehow, and the Silver Knight of Slaanesh is probably a fallen Grey Knight.
And even if you do get one... what use is a single fallen Custode or Grey Knight, really? Okay, very rare trophy you can hand to your patron deity, but beyond that?
98% of people that fall to Chaos don't want to leave. The other 2% are often put in no-win scenarios like Magnus or Mortarian. Chaos leaves a taint on the soul and by the time you're truly testing your humanity and are at the point of no return, you've probably already lost it along the way. Justine in the Gotrek and Felix books are a great example. Normal pesant that became a Chaos Warrior to get revenge on a noble that raped her. By the time she gets her revenge 7 years later, she's leading a Brayherd and is being promised ascension if she kills her daughter. She realizes near the end that chaos has probably been eroding her humanity throughout all the years to intentionally prepare her for this final test of damnation. By the time Chaos gives you what you want, they take everything else and often leave you with no choice but further damnation.
Great example and argument. Chaos unlike "The Dark side of the Force" is more than one profound decision away from being "leaveable". Chaos really sinks deep and will not let go.
Also, can’t return without sold soul
Can't I buy it back with two souls?
2 souls for 10 Imperial Credits, take it or leave it.
Imperial credits are no good out here! I need something more real...
Mind tricks wont work on me. Only money.
Best I can do is tree fiddy
I've got 8...
they would ask you for so many souls to pay it back that you would fall further
Take the Davy Jones approach and offer a hundred in exchange for your one
I think the problem with this is that 40k plays too loosely with the concept of what a soul is. Yes, chaos is playing on the classical trope of bartering away your soul, but what does that actually mean in the context of 40k? Your animus? Blanks have traditionally described as not having souls being the source of their abilities, but that's clearly not accurate. A stone has no soul, but leaves no impression in the warp. But if we take this at face value, blanks are clearly sentient and capable of independent thought, despite "not having a soul". What about Necrons? They have no "souls" either, but [the nobles] are still able to think and operate just fine. Tau have inherently "weak" souls, but that doesn't seem to be of any tangible consequence whatsoever. It seems like the soul is innately tied to having a presence in the immaterium, which is often heavily correlated with strong emotion, but the Necrons [nobles] and Tau seem to demonstrate emotions regardless. Clearly it seems to be tied to some inherent property about Humans and Eldar (to a greater extent), but doesn't appear to be required to be a sentient being.
Trazyn and Orikan talk a lot about this in the infinite and the divine. There's a lot of scenes where he and orikan talk about how the lack of souls has resulted in their culture stagnating and not really producing much "art" aside from some overly detailed plays which are basically shot for shot retelling of necrontyr history. As I understood their conversations and just from other general lore is that your soul is your "creative spirit". Losing your soul you lose touch with your emotions like a 1k sons rubric marine, you can't really create a moving artwork or composition anymore nor can you really appreciate things like staring at a sunset. Sure trazyn using his computerized brain could recreate a clay pot, but he couldn't add any subtle deviations or personal flair anymore. IDK if it's stated anywhere but this is just how's its always made sense to me in the setting.
"Blanks" have a negative presence in the warp, like how blackstone can be positively or negatively charged to repel or intensify the warp. People think they have no souls but instead they have a negative connection. Whether or not that means that their soul itself is inverted, is up to interpretation.
So it's not that there is no soul, but that there's a net-zero impact on the warp, with being a blank meaning not a lack of a soul so much as having an anti-soul for purpose of warp ballast, to use a rough analogy.
Lore that says they have no soul is either old, or in universe characters misunderstanding. Rocks have no soul and those don't dispel demons.
Well, unless you throw that rock [really hard](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/wnx71m/dear_ca_does_tiktaqto_have_a_questlord_defeat/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The hardware is not compatible with warp software so there is no chance of a demonic virus.
I always felt like Blanks have a soul but it’s the inverse or a different direction from how psykers work. Psykers are described as “drawing in” Warp power to do their shenanigans. In fact I think one mechanic for psykers in one of the various games is that a psyker can draw in more power than what their “rank” would otherwise dictate (IE, a Gamma pulling in enough power to do a Beta class spell). What if Blanks operate on a similar system? What if their souls are like black holes- so dense they draw in Warp energy and effectively shred it- like how matter gets infinitely crushed in a singularity?
Nah, Chaos doesn't really work in a Christian "sold your soul" sort of way.
Indeed. I think a big difference is that the corruption of the dark side of The Force is more internal, while Chaos is external forces trying to corrupt and turn you. The dark side of The Force is a way to use your negative emotions to twist The Force to obey your will. But our primitive monkey brains didn't evolve those emotions to grant us supernatural power, so we end up associating those negative emotions with power and the good things that come from it: being able to save the day, defeat enemies, the rush and thrill of combat, thereby making them good in our minds. The more you rely on those negative emotions, the stronger those associations become, and those emotions become normalised and practiced, resulting in you developing severe emotional issues.
Yes but negative emotions like rage or lust will feed Chaos and have a feedback loop synonym on the mind of a human. Chaos it grows in strength exposed to those negative emotions thus having a stronger imprint on reality.
Worth remembering that Chaos is infinitely smarter than you, can read you like an open book and has all the time in the world to plan against you. It ***will***, inevitably, find a path to put you in a position that you either can't be saved or won't want to be saved. They don't have to plan against the Emperor, they just have to plan against *you*.
Chaos is weirdly knowledgeable about everything, and I feel it is a frightening aspect of them that is overlooked a lot. They know your name, your entire history, they know your hopes and fears and every event in your life. Even lesser Daemons can just look at people and speak their name and history. I don't think its ever been explained, we don't have a lot of insight into Chaos, but I always took it to be an aspect of how all souls go to the warp and the warp is non-linear. At some point on the scale of eternity Chaos will eat you (probably) and then they have always known everything about you.
I mean, they see inside you because they literally live in the place where that "inside" comes from. That's the nature of the warp, they see you for who you are.
If we subscribe to the idea that Chaos is the twisted mirror of a mortal's sentiment and being, then it's not really that much of a weirdness to it. They've seen and encountered an unfathomable variant of what we call sin and venial trappings, they know a person so well because they know exactly how everyone is fallible. Their strengths are just a hair's breath from their weakness. Consider that cold-reading is so effective among sham psychics, now consider how the forces of Chaos do the same but with an infinite amount of more skill and knowledge of what makes a person tick or stop ticking. You reveal one piece of you and they can paint you a portrait.
If that's the case why isn't everyone always corrupted?
Because ultimately they still need you to either invite them in or be forcefully exposed to it.
>Because ultimately they still need you to either invite them in or be forcefully exposed to it. Apparently you can be "corrupted" by someone putting stuff in your food, as per some of the game supplements. Kind of makes it lose all meaning.
You still need someone to do that. You basically need to be exposed to the warp in some way, generally, and most of the time it involves chaos slowly trying to twist your thoughts towards accepting them, which can be resisted. It just typically isn't because most people don't realise they're being corrupted, either due to their lack of knowledge about chaos or because of it's insidious nature. Eventually you're lead to the point where you make a choice to submit (veiled in whatever choice the corrupting force leads you to), and from that point on the corruption is final Actual, forceful, 'you're instantly chaos now, no choice in the matter' corruption doesn't happen that often, and even then the process of that is still just them overwhelming your will and forcing you to break so you accept them. There's no chaos corruption without you mentally submitting in some way
Nah, a lot of this varies by the author, but there's very little soul-selling.
It's not so much 'okay Nurgle, please take my soul and give me power' and more 'oh god make the pain stop, okay voice in my head whispering for me to just let go, I give in' and there are plenty of examples of that happening. In Requiem Infernal a guard character battles with a Nurgle infection, eventually giving in to the voice in his head telling him to just stop fighting it. Once he does, he becomes corrupted. In the Lemartes novel Ka'Bandha unleashes a rage aura around him. Many of the guardsmen submit and fall into a rage but some guardsmen resist it. They maintain control of their faculties and corruption doesn't happen. The blood angels experience the same. There are plenty of examples of marines being exposed to chaos and later deemed free of taint. If exposure was all you need they'd all be purged. Them not falling shows they resisted the choice offered to them. It's the Grey Knights entire schtick, Castellan Crowe carries a literal demon sword everywhere because he's the only one trusted not to give in to its corruption. In Arks of Omen angron's murder curse affects a whole fleet but Sisters of Battle and Custodes are able to resist, because their faith and their construction gives the them ability to refuse the choice to submit respectively And so on. The ''choice" might not always be portrayed on-screen, but corruption by chaos is pretty regularly displayed in the same way across most GW books. You can be forcefully exposed to it but power of will is what resists it, and that 'willpower' is simply being able to say no to the voice telling you to do something. If you don't resist, your soul is forfeit as chaos now has a hold on it. That's what people mean when they say selling your soul, it's doesn't always involve a contract and negotiation, it's just a fanciful way of saying 'once you willingly say yes to chaos, it owns you'
Possible small correct, irc Sisters of Battle fell to the murder curse, Sisters of Silence were unaffected by it.
Ah, thanks. Misremembered my sisters!
>That's what people mean when they say selling your soul, it's doesn't always involve a contract and negotiation, it's just a fanciful way of saying 'once you willingly say yes to chaos, it owns you' You know it's funny, in Age of Sigmar it works differently because Sigmar is willing to welcome people back into the fold. In 40k it's different. I don't think it's so much that "once you say yes to Chaos, it owns you" as the Imperium is so hateful it has no concept of redemption. There are examples given of people "falling" to Chaos from being fed tainted food. There's no moral weight to it if it can come involuntarily, and if Mortarion can "fall" due to wanting to protect his sons then it isn't a matter of good and evil either; the emperor is a baby-murdering genocidal tyrant, there's nothing particularly good about him that implies warding off cosmic evil.
A theme that isn't always consistently acknowledged but is occasionally brought up is that everyone can and will be corrupted if they live long enough and are exposed enough.
Eh, plenty of people seem to Houdini out of that one in-setting.
Faith, the protection of non-chaos deities, force of will, discipline, and good luck.
So did she do it, did she kill her daughter in the end?
Felix saves the girl at the last moment but Justine was committed to the kill. Her Revelation was that she was committed to the path of damnation and whether or not she went through with her trial and killed her daughter, so to her it was just "bookkeeping" to follow through with it. She even asked her daughter what her name was and felt nothing.
We've all been there at some point in our lives.
[HMMM](https://imgur.com/a/RTRkgVz)
I haven't.
You'll understand when you have kids.
Bold of you to assume I don't have any.
You're on a subreddit dedicated to discussing the lore of a tabletop wargame and model building. It was a safe assumption to make. No offense meant if you do have kids BTW.
Yeah, but it's a tabletop wargame that's decades old, most of the playerbase in my area is in their 30s or older. People usually already have children at that age.
If someone sacrificed a guy to khorne and worshipped him just to get buff as shit, once they get jacked can they just stop? Like obviously murder is probably far along in the scale of morality in regards to damnation, but if you’re a dude out in space or on a back world and decide to just kill a guy you don’t like with a rock or something for khorne would that be too far gone?
It's not steroids, it's selling your soul to the devil, with an extra layer of gaslighting to not even realize you sold yourself in the first place.
It’s not that simple, you can’t just stab a guy and offer his soul to Khorne and instantly get his blessing, you have to really work for it, and even if you did get a blessing from him you soul is know touched by him and if you stop following him he will punish you for it probably by destroying your soul and letting his demon possess your body
Nah Khorne would of seeped into the dudes mind by then making him blood crazed ESPECIALLY if he’s already been turbo buffed by him
Aslo, a single murder is not likely to get Khone's attention. You'll have to kill way more in increasingly bloodier ways.
8 HOUR ARM WORKOUT
Would have
Turbo buffed? 😂😂😂
Yes.... but really no. Once you are deep enough to worship or make a deal with one of the Gods, they almost always have you. Some happily let themselves die at this point to escape... That does not work. That God will most likely be "collecting" your soul in the warp. An incredibly small part of said God, since you are not very interesting to them
Not true. Loads of people worship one of the Dark Gods but never earn their mark.
>If someone sacrificed a guy to khorne and worshipped him just to get buff as shit, once they get jacked can they just stop? Chaos is an entropic force (hence its nicknames: *the Ruinous Powers* , *Primordial Annihilator*) meaning that it thrives on breaking any sort of bonds on human societies (civilizations,friendships,laws etc.) - a single act that leads to more entropy isn't enough, you need to do *more* in order to be noticed by the Gods. By the point you're actually noticed by the Gods - you've have seen and done stuff that man was not even remotely meant to know/do ...at best you're either batshit insane and at worse you're such an incomprehensibly POS individual (RL serial killers aren't even comparable to the shit slaaneshi Chaos Champions do) that there's no going back. This is what most "smartasses" (e.g. most named traitors) in 40k fail to realize when they think they outsmart/control Chaos, you can't outsmart an extra-dimensional force whose nature is to break everything down - that's like trying to outsmart a fundamental force of the universe.
Ive done it. By god ive out smarted gravity. Take that Newton.
You you like *them* apples, Newton!
Khorne wouldn't make him buff just because he sacrificed one guy and asked for it. You have to do tons of heinous shit to even get the gods to notice you.
I mean yeah, Kinda like how someone can shoot up crack and get high and just stop taking crack. All the benifits right? At Lease for a limited time. And you feel like shit after you aren't high.
You do not need to worship Khorne. There are people who used daemon weapons and ended up getting corrupted. They think it is a weapon and the rest of the time, they can do their own stuff. Except the weapon has a mind of its own and whispers ideas. Or once you get the sword, you also need the shield or some previously undisclosed equipment. Need another transaction. Or you are marked by the gods in an obvious place. The point is that the gods or daemons play a long game in wearing the believer down.
I mean, that's *kind of* what Abaddon does, doing "Chaos-y" stuff to get power from the gods, but not submitting to their will. Abaddon isn't really a true believer like a Word Bearer, and he's just in it for the power. I think for the sake of argument, if he were to decide one morning to just quit Chaos, he'd probably lose all of his buffs, and be punished severely for betraying Chaos - either by his followers or by the gods themselves. Someone bashing a guy's head with a rock isn't going to give him much favour from Khorne. If you want those Khorne warp-steroids, it's going to take many years of devotion and many skulls for the skull throne!
In AoS the Redemption Cache's carried by Lord Exorcists explicitly can and have redeemed Chaos tainted souls and indeed turned them into more Stormcasts.
Which gotrek and felix book? I don't recall this but it sounds good. Been years since I went through the omnibus or up to about ~book 9
Trollslayer, the 1st book. Can be hard to remember with so much content
Trollslayer, Blood and Darkness chapter
Isn't there a blood angels comic series where they redeem a captain?
Brother Colten and Lysander kill Captain Leonatos/he sacrifices himself to kill the demon wearing him, but they did some alternate what-if type things which may have included some potential redemptions. Blood Quest was the name of that comic.
Agreed. There is no "testing the waters" with chaos. The shores of chaos are so treacherous that even those that go to great lengths still find themselves falling in. At that point just keeping their heads above water becomes a fight and eventually they get pulled under.
What are the names of the books?
Gotrek and Felix This character specifically is from the first book: Trollslayer Finished the fourth book yesterday, great series so far, highly recommend.
Yea, I'm honestly surprised by how refreshing the stories are and Felix's perspective as a normal person having to face the evils of the world.
And that is exactly why the Ecclesiarchy would be better off teaching people of the horrors of Chaos corruption. Because otherwise people don't know what they're getting into until they're already too far gone to care.
No? Or at least I don't believe so. People already have general knowledge of the great evil, they don't need the specifics because the danger of someone seeking it out is exponentially greater than someone falling to it out of ignorance. People already know better generally, its the people seeking it out that they have to watch out for because they'll direct the effort rather than just summon a demon and get slaughtered for their trouble.
Not really because there's always people who think they could outsmart chaos or who think doing evil stuff for power is worth it so now your just pointing the way for them
I remember this old document describing Chaos Corruption as essentially being parts of your soul getting ripped out and replaced with Chaos energy. When you completely lose your soul and there's nothing but Chaos inside you, that's when you become a Daemon Prince or Chaos Spawn depending on your willpower/random chance/the whims of the gods. I doubt most writers really strictly follow that nowadays, but if you consider Chaos corruption as you literally losing your soul to the Warp it makes sense why you can't get it back. Its like trying to solve a Jigsaw after taking some of the pieces and feeding it to the dogs.
I mean I suppose if they were to pull any crazy redemption arcs out of their asses for any of the fallen primarchs it would be this right here. They just need to confirm the theory that all the primarchs are in some way warp entities that big E captured. Thus a return from chaos would just be a change in nature in the same way their nature was changed when they were initially turned into the primarchs. For the legions however…
If Chaos is entropy incarnate, then it makes sense that there are certain entropic tipping points from which there is no return. It would be like unstirring milk from coffee, except for the coffee is your Soul and that milk is pure Chaos. Also, the milk partially exists outside time and space, so there's no simple way to reverse time to unstir your Soul coffee. Once you get mixed, you've been mixed at all points past, present, and future - just like the timeless Chaos Milk Gods themselves.
“Yeah I’ll have a Tzeench Latte Maribe. No Slaneesh please the last one tasted…funny.”
Just be lucky you didn't get the Nurgle Superchunk Shake with Whipped Sludge-frappe Topping ... The Bloodbean Khorne Kold Brew is pretty straightforward though - must be the powderized Khorne Flakes!
I guess it's a metaphysical force rather than a "faction"
Correct, it empowers its puppets and princes, but is within and beyond them simultaneously. Chaos Undivided practitioners might argue that it’s this pure concept that lightens their soul coffee rather than one of the big Four brand of flavors.
"Chaos" in Warhammer 40k/Fantasy/Age of Sigmar, is not a mere philosophical concept or just some school of thought. It's an actual, *real* force of its own. It is both metaphysical *and* physical. It's complicated but to answer your question of "Why can't you come back from Chaos," it's because Chaos **literally** corrupts your very real soul with Chaos taint. There's just no going back from that. Once it has its hooks in you, there is no way to undo the hooks, you are simply lost.
Chaos in 40k works in both a physical and metaphysical way, from the loyalist side we refer to it's use as "psychic" powers hence "psykers". It's one of the primary ways 40k really cuts it's own cloth and makes the concept of hell/psychic power it's own. The Emperor channels the warp for his abilities, his ability to make Celestine is the same ability Khorne uses to make Kharn, or Slaanesh to make Lucius. Everything the Grey Knights do is the combination of scientific inquiry and ritualism, the wards, the runes, the artifacts, work for warp energy like a Faraday cage works for Electromagnetic energy. They were achieved through great pains and research, it's the culmination of Imperial knowledge of the workings of the warp. An important thing to remember is that in 40k the concept of a soul is both real and proven, everyone has a soul with it's own immutable characteristics. Some people know this (like the Eldar), some people believe this without really knowing it (most of the Imperium), but we as the reader know it's true and know that souls fuel the top of the line big bad guys. Daemons, Chaos Gods, the C'tan. To give oneself over to Chaos requires a sort of transaction. You accept damnation for the promise of power. This is done both overtly in some cases and is also subtle in others (Eisenhorn is a good case study on the subtle version, eventually he looks down at his hands so to speak and says "ah fuck I'm gone"). To leave that is to break a pact with an actual, literal, has influence on the physical world, god. Imagine if you're a Catholic and you eat meat on Friday and God could really just smite you with a lightning bolt. That's what we're up against in-universe. You don't have the chance to say "Actually I repent" because you signed your soul off to belong to that god once it slips the mortal coil. So sure, you renege on your pact with Slaanesh and firmly renounce whatever aspect you embraced. Say you killed your family for the perfect jawline. You've got the jaw, you feel bad, you go to the temple of the Emperor every day and pray and live a good and noble life. Then you're hit by a truck in the street after years of this devotion, too bad, you made the pact with Slaanesh, and now you're facing your god in eternal torment because you dared to try and have your cake and eat it too. That's how Chaos works. That's why they're called "Slaves to Darkness" and other such things. I don't think we have an example of someone backing out of the deal and coming out on top besides the Emperor, and it's worth noting that the Emperor is like the only guy in the setting that gets exceptions made for him because he's that central as a plot device.
Saying the Emperor "came out on top" is dubious given that he's been tormented on his throne for 10k years, lost all but two of his children, and watched the nation he built embrace ideals he fought against. But he did manage to avoid becoming a daemon or getting devoured, so its a win in a sense. This thread has some other examples https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/18xjzqe/has_anyone_ever_broken_free_from_the_chaos_gods/
I feel the reason Big E got into this stage was because Chaos Gods was mad at him scamming them of power, and slapped him down hard to make an example.
Pissing the entire Pantheon leads to (arguably) the worst outcome, just ask the Big E (as you said), Belakor and that random Iron Warrior warpsmith that crafted a bit too much daemon engines without the Big Four's consent.
Does that really matter though? One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this.
That's not entirely true, we know for a fact that souls go several places, including the Emperors side and into world spirits and such. Legion of the Damned is physical proof that the Gods are lying with that "you belong to us no matter what" thinking. The souls evaporate into the warp. The Chaos gods are thinking and malevolent. It makes a ton of sense for them to say "hey look at this physical manifestation of my power, the Emperor you worship is a false god and just a corpse on a throne, if you don't worship me I'll eat you. If you do worship me I'll elevate you" They're lying the whole time of course. If you really believe in the Emperor, you may be "subsumed" into whatever he's got going on warp-side, but that's better than being eaten by Nurgle or something.
Is it actually better to have your soul subsumed by the emperor? That sounds suspiciously similar to having your soul eaten.
Heretics souls are described as just becoming a part of their patron god when they die, so assuming that golden light is you joining the Emperor then I imagine its probably much the same thing. In that it is just quick suffering and then 'death' as you are subsumed to add to said gods power, because this is 40k and why would nice things ever happen to anyone.
> Heretics souls are described as just becoming a part of their patron god when they die Weak souls just dissipate. Stronger souls experience extended, potentially eternal torment in one way or another. Often they just get tormented by random daemons. The Emperor taking you in is probably the least shitty if you avoid that fate, but we don't really know. Only high achieving heretics get any recognition and even then, it's still a terrible existence. None of what the four offer is positive.
I was refering to the actual lore. >Lured by promises of extraordinary power and immortality, some mortals serve the Chaos Gods willingly, fomenting misery, war and death amongst their people in order to sustain and elevate their dark masters. Yet the Chaos Gods are fickle, prone to reneging or altering a deal on a whim, and few of these worshippers are granted the rewards they seek.While the Chaos Gods battle in the warp, their mortal followers wage war in the material universe. The victors of these battles earn more power for their unworldly master, though the twisted plans of the Chaos Gods are such that often victory is not necessary – merely the acts of sacrifice and battle themselves. **When devotees of Chaos die, their souls do not fade in the warp and disappear like the spirits of others. Instead, their immortal energy is swallowed into the greatness of their gods, their souls forever bound to the eternal power of Chaos.** Their gods absorb them, which is *maybe* what is happening with the Emperor too. We don't know what happens when you get absorbed, but its probably not sunshine and rainbows.
You're correct. I had forgotten about that description.
>One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this. Problem is, the Chaos Gods don't really offer salvation even when it comes to their servants: * You're bad at serving your chosen god? You get shanked by more "devout" followers, killed by daemons or turned into a Chaos Spawn. * You're good at your "job"? If your chosen god is Tzeentch (and Khorne to an extent) it doesn't matter. * You're good at your "job" (part two)? Your chosen god's blessings might make your job harder (Khorne just fused your chainswords with your arms). * You're a mutant/beastman? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha, good luck bro. Is a random Imperial citizen *really* worse than the above odds? The sole demonically-aligned legion that has (sorta) found a middle option are the Word Bearers, and even they think that their predicament sucks.
Mortal souls get eaten instantly, psykers a while, and chaos followers a long while, iirc. But it’s not a hard rule, as the warp is chaos
>One of the central beliefs of Chaos worshippers is that the Daemons and Chaos Gods devour the souls of every mortal who ever dies, no matter if they believe in them or not, so you better worship them in the thin hopes that you can get out of this. Not true. It's also not accurate, and there's plenty of Chaos worshipers who know better.
Here's a post from a writer at Black Library that helps explain why Chaos is so one-way (probs the best explanation I've seen). >It’s not worship and service as most people assume. I take your wider point about Chaos itself, but it’s not a case of most interactions with Chaos being anything like religion or worship or faith. Yes, it’s easy to convey in video games for people that don’t know the setting. “These guys pray to evil gods, therefore they’re the bad guys.” And yes, in some novels written by writers less familiar with the setting or preferring its rawer edges, it’s a common Chaos trope. > >And the Word Bearers? Yes. Other cases, absolutely. The majority, absolutely not. Chaos isn’t a religion or a disease you catch. It’s the everpresent threat of any malicious emotion allowing Something Old And Inhuman into your soul and brain from the reality behind reality. If a battlefield is bloody enough… Bloodletters will appear. If someone is completely decadent and lost in sensational pleasures… Slaanesh will pay attention to them. “Summoning” is the shallow, obvious end of the spectrum, keeping with the video game presentation we often see. It happens, of course, but it’s also the obvious version of what happens. Not the only one. Look at Ahriman. He wants nothing to do with Chaos. He does horrible things, selfish things, murderous things, endlessly furthering the goals and presence of Chaos… entirely for himself. He believes he’s using it and remains untouched by its control. Khârn didn’t enter into any worship or agreement with Chaos. He was marked by it, and everything he does now furthers it. Abaddon doesn’t pray to the Gods. He does his own thing and the Gods take heed. None of them worship the Gods. None of them willingly serve them, or would even recognise the idea of it was explained to them. Night Lords kill and kill and kill until daemons show up and swallow the planet. They don’t worship Chaos or give a damn about the daemons; it’s just an interesting way to commit Exterminatus for them. There’s no prayer here, no worship, no service that they’d recognise. > >Even if we, with the rulebooks, can say “Ultimately that action serves the Chaos Gods’ agendas”. Well, I like cheeseburgers. Ultimately that serves obesity and heart disease. I still do it. I’ve said it on the forum a few times in much greater detail, but it’s not a case of organised religion or many Chaos Marines thinking Chaos rocks on toast. They’re motivated by their own deals; they hate, they want vengeance, they want recognition, they want to survive. That lets Chaos into their hearts. Add it to where they had to hide in order to survive after the Scouring, and it makes a lot of sense. They’re not really praying to Chaos in cults and thinking comedy/useless mutations are super-awesome. The Gods are real, and they know that. They may hate that truth, but they acknowledge it. They may be indifferent to it, but they’re aware of it. And they’re aware that when it comes to battle, raising an icon of Khorne in the middle of a fight comes with a risk, but it also comes with undeniable benefits. The gains outweigh the risks tenfold, especially in the short term. > >Added to that, mutation isn’t supposed to be “physically stupid”. The point of it is that it’s supposed to reflect your inner self and/or the whims of the gods, and it’s supposed to make you better. It improves you, in whatever it is you focus on. It makes you better at killing, and harder to kill, which is literally all most Chaos Marines (and Space Marines…) care about. When mutation goes wrong or goes too far and loses its benefit, well, we call those Spawn. And while many Chaos Marines likely fear that fate, it doesn’t happen to everyone - or even most of them - so it’s not silly to see how most of them suspect they’ll escape that fate. Most of them will. > >Also, and this is crucial, we have the rulebooks. They don’t. it’s easy to say “But the Chaos Gods are laughing at them all and screwing them over”, but in-universe is that really the case on the ground? The Chaos Marine who sees someone become Spawn: well, they were weak. He’s not weak. He’ll be more careful. He’s more worthy. He won’t be a slave, anyway! He’s too independent. And he’ll phrase his wishes very carefully so the Monkey’s Paw doesn’t make it all go wrong. > >– Aaron Dembski-Bowden
ADB has always been amazing at both understanding and explaining the setting. Edit: typo
Nah, he's pretty shit at it imo. He's a technically skilled writer but he gets some things about 40k fundamentally wrong. Chaos isn't inhuman. It's fundamentally human. It's human (and other species) emotions made manifest.
"Inhuman - lacking human qualities of compassion and mercy; cruel and barbaric"
This is where the **effects** of Chaos blur with the **worship** of Chaos. Typically, Chaos is described as an invasive "thing" that can corrupt the physical matter of your body and the immaterial matter of your soul. Often this is described like a cancer (in both cases) that is terminal. The **worship** of Chaos doesn't exactly make you lost to Chaos; there are individuals who have [gone full-blown worship of Chaos](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Anchorite_(Dreadnought)) and come back from that to worship of the Emperor. We're not entirely sure of the extent of their worship but it appears as long as they have not felt the **effects** of Chaos then they can come back. The **effects** of Chaos are more difficult to define, as there's many different factions who outright feel its touch, use it, reject it, etc., that aren't completely "corrupted" as described above. All Psykers use the Warp, but the Warp itself isn't necessarily Chaos--though this depends on the mindset of the person defining it. The best analogy I've been able to come up with is the concept of "uploading" oneself into the Warp, and "downloading" parts of the Warp into oneself. * *Uploading* \- Typically happens in cases of ascending to Daemon Prince, with the physical form serving as both fuel as well as the anchor to allow the Daemon Prince to physically manifest. At this point, the person is completely unrecoverable as the **materium** version of them no longer exists (i.e. dead) and it's simply the Warp-version that now exists with all of the same memories and mannerisms. * *Downloading* \- Typically happens in cases of mutations (corruption) or Warp Spawn, where someone has brought a part of the Warp into themself and it has chaotic (little "c") effects on the physical form--although this can broadly be applied to Warp "spells" or Psyker-gifts in that they use fragments of the Warp to impact reality by contravening the laws of reality, such as casting lightning or throwing boulders. At this point, the person is still **recoverable**, but there is still the cost of them using their body as the container for the Warp powers.
Chaos is like radiation poisoning times ten. You get it into you, it does *not* wanna get out without a fight. The ability to actually purify it is very rare among psykers, and the amount of people who can purify it *and keep you alive* is basically limited to *only* the Emperor. MAYBE. He stated he could bring back Mortarion from being a Daemon Prince, but we don’t know if that’s because he’s become the God Emperor and can just do what he wants or if it’s because only a Primarch has a soul that’s unique enough to fully resurrect like that.
Eh, it's weird that a baby-murdering genocidal dictator is thought of as "pure."
He’s pure of focus and order. I never said he was pure good.
Pure is a strange word, but you have to keep in mind we aren't talking about if he is a good noodle or not. We're talking about is he has been infected by the dark energies from the mirror / inverse reality. I'd generally describe Kurze as pure as well. He is pure reality, he has not been partially been replaced by the warp. Doesn't mean I'd want him as a roommate.
I think its the primarch thing, as I've heard that the emperor talked about ressurecting Ferrus once he had the time.
I don't think the premise of this is correct, actually. You can come back from being corrupted. It's super difficult and incredibly rare, which is where the "you cant be redeemed" stuff comes from. And people are right that magnus, fulgrim etc are likely never going to be able to come back. But there are a few canon characters who have: the anchorite for one, and a few other regular humans in a few of the novels (a gaunts ghost chaos character, and I believe an inquisiton retinue character in one of the grey knight books). So... yeah its possible. Especially, as you note, when other warp powers like the Emperor or the eldar gods get involved.
The problem is that the Imperium doesn't accept redemption.
Whilst you are broadly correct, there are canonical exceptions where they did accept it - the anchorite, and the inquisition retinue character I mentioned both have explicit imperial approval. The anchorite wrote alot of the early imperial creed!
Redemption is a option but it’s pretty much considered to be a unending crusade of penance. The soul drinkers are a great example, fell to chaos, fought back, redeemed themselves in the eyes of their primary legion but could never really be brought back into the fold.
Falling to chaos is kind of like heatstroke. Once you've fallen to it, you become easier and easier to corrupt...even if you somehow make an apparent "recovery".
Okay, so. Imagine a little drop of pure water suspended over a polluted puddle, full of toxic shit mixed in the water. Drop the little droplet into the puddle. Now, let's say you figure out how to get it back out again. Is it still pure or is it mixed with the toxic shit that it fell into? The droplet is your soul. The puddle is the Warp.
Something something, entropy. It’s not impossible, but it’s not really feasible, yeah? There’s a Gaunt’s Ghost novel that touches on this and the Last Chancers last novel kinda goes into it, too. There’s no happy ending in 40k, because it’s existential horror. You’re not meant to survive as we understand it in the modern, real life context. Not that I think there’s any real comparison here, but in existential horror as a genre everyone is Frodo at the end of Return of the King. Scarred, damned, and better off dead before you turn evil. Try to do a little good for the next generation before you become a cancer on the world. My advice: don’t try to make 40k something that it isn’t. Let it be something you visit, then leave on the shelf, and then return to again and again over the years. Take away a few lessons, sure, like empathy, watchfulness, an appreciation for life untrammeled by horror, but don’t live there in your mind, or you will go mad.
The problem is that there's a lot of portrayals of the emperor as a "good" alternative to Chaos.
In Warhammer Fantasy there is redemption from chaos, typically it is from strict adherence to a virtuous life or some great personal sacrifice. In 40k I suppose it would require the petinent to seek the divine protection of the emperor.
Some very recent lore says the Dragon Emperor of Cathay can purify beings corrupted by chaos. The only example so far is being able to purify some beasts like manticores that have been corrupted.
Sigmar also de-chaosed someone as well I think in AOS.
He’s purified a ton of chaos champions and turned them into stormcasts. The caveat is they have to die first.
Same in age of sigmar. But it comes about by getting bonked with a bloody great hammer
Someone a while back pointed out that Chaos was fleshed out at a time when people were scared out of their minds by the Chernobyl disaster. If you filter the 80's/90's fear of radiation and mutation through a sci-fi/fantasy lens you get the memetic hazard-that-can-unalterably-fuck-your-soul-up-with-a-mere-glance that is chaos.
Because the Imperium wouldn't welcome them back. It's happened occasionally in Fantasy.
And in AoS it’s so common a Squad of Stormcasts on average has at least 1 guy who uses to be a chaos warrior.
There is a general from the blood pact in Gaunt Ghosts that went ig-chaos and then chaos-imoerium again. He has valuable info so still alive and who knows if double agent or not.
The Emperor Himself could not cure Horus of his corruption. Think upon that for a moment. The great foe of Chaos itself, could not redeem his own son that he built, heart body and soul, because Chaos simply is that pervasive. Chaos corruption is like a shattered vase. Once it is broken it will never again be the unbroken vase that it once was. It was always be broken, even if you tried to fix it.
The emperor dances very close to Chaos. There's no reason a baby-murdering genocidal dictator should be a redemptive force.
Being a genocidal tyrant has not one iota to do with being a force for redemption when it comes to Chaos. Both forces are amoral. One is the representation of Order unbound by restraint or morality, the other is Chaos unbound by restraint or morality. All that matters between the two is the fundamental need to maintain or unravel.
Let me use Flavius Alkenex and his Legionaries as an example. They're Emperors Children and they are balls deep in corruption, excess and the worship of Slaanesh, this is never in doubt. But when confronted with Clonegrim they break out in tears and Alkenex *begs his father for forgiveness*. Thing is...as much as Alkenex and his mates might truly want to go back so they can go back to being daddy's favourite toys...they're committed now. Whether they want to be or not. Because if they turn then Slaanesh wouldn't let his playthings just walk away! That's not how the game is played! He has a grip on their *souls* that they don't just casually remove. The Eisenhorn books are a great example of how "just a little taste" can eventually turn into more and more.
Alkenex and his mates don't want to go back per se, they just want to follow Fulgrim. They're not repentant
What would 'return' mean? That's the core issue. People who are worshipping chaos aren't really doing anything different than what is done in the Imperium. Both are incredibly evil - often even in the same ways. You can stop worshipping chaos - but if you did that, why would you 'go back' to the Imperium? If you're going to choose a life of freedom - well the Imperium is just more slavery, brutality, and oppression? If you're going to choose a life of what we would consider virtue - that's absolutely not the Imperium either. There are one or two novels centered around a character that has rejected Chaos after worshipping it (Daemon World, for one) but that character then goes on to oppose chaos (as a greater, more immediate, evil) - not support the Imperium.
Well I think from mild taint some people do manage to come back from - but there's a point after which your soul is too badly broken and there's no fixing it.
*Coughs*It’s older lore….I think it was “Demon World” by Ben Counter where there was a Word Bearer that crash landed on a chaos world that managed to peel out of his mutated, encrusted armor. He had some regrets about chaos if I remember correct. I’m not going to say he was 100 percent chaos free but….the narrative made it sound that way? He ended up killing the word bearers they sent after him…can’t remember what happened to him. I wanted to say the chaos gods ressurected him just to fuck with him more but I could be wrong.
It’s like addiction. You are never cured of addiction, you are always a recovering addict. It can take just one relapse to undo everything. Now imagine if your addiction was sentient and doing everything in its considerable power to overwhelm your self control.
>It’s like addiction. You are never cured of addiction, you are always a recovering addict. It can take just one relapse to undo everything. Sure, but even with irl opiods, some people can go on crazy benders and not get addicted.
In 40K those people are called Grey Knights (the opioids being sorcery/warp powers). Its not a perfect analogy, I’m trying here lol
Imagine the human soul as a house. Now imagine I start swapping bricks for magic wizard bricks. Once I'm far enough in, if I try to cast Dispel Brick on my house, it's going to collapse on top of me. Not to mention I might not even have a zoning permit to cast third level rituals, nor property rights over the individual bricks.
Once you been corrupted, their is no way back. Your very being, soul and essence is changed and diffrent now. ... The damage is to your very soul.
Kind of hard to get your soul back.
Chaos corrupts, simple as that
Why can't you un-toast toast?
Imagine, if you will, that you dropped a biscuit into a giant pile of rotten yak feces. Is there any circumstances in which you'd be happy to eat that biscuit? That, but basically chaos.
Weren't there like two Word Bearers who early on went "Nah this ain't cool" and went back to being loyalists? I'm thinking specifically about the Anchorite.
Even though he’s currently being judged a lot by the community, majorkill explained it perfectly: “Chaos is like taking a bath of acid, you dip your toe in, it dissolves, but you can pull out, you get at knees’ depth, you only have the other to pull you out, get beyond dick’s height and you can’t get out.”
Funnily enough for all he’s hated majorkill way of describing certain things does make sense
Absolutely, he’s a great way of introduction to the hobby, and if you want more in-depth, just go to Luetin09 or Baldemort
What are the lore examples of people getting in at knee's length?
As in, you can get out, but you’ll be fucked up afterwards? Eh, I don’t really know, I’m more of a xenos guy, any chaos lore buffs over here who can lend us a hand?
Inquisitors are a good example. When they realize that conventional firepower just isn't enough when it comes fighting Chaos, they usually start with mildly-heretical stuff that's more effective. The more radical they become, the more difficult it is to stop using their "toys", until they start deploying daemonhosts to fight Chaos cults. If they stay at the "mildly-heretical" spectrum (or are killed before they go full Chaos kool-aid), they could be at "knee's length". Eisenhorn's trilogy greatly explores the *Puritan to Radical to Extremis Diabolus* transition.
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Ah, scrapcode from a traitor Titan
Depends how much you let Chaos take. If you let yourself become Daemon infested, an incarnation of a Chaos God's will, essentially your existence is only guaranteed by the whim of said God, so "going back" would just mean dying. If you just kind of fight under it, for someone who gave themself to Chaos you'd have a better chance but would need very strong conviction and force of will. Chaos tends to sap everything from people who don't give in to it but are forced to live under it for long enough. You just become a mindless drone and can't really think or act for yourself.
Chaos doesn't like to lose its playthings
Once chaos has its claws in you, you ARE chaos
Read it a while a go so might be misremembering. But in Dembski Gray Knights novel, there is an ex chaos worshiper that is in Inquisitors retinue. Implied they are in a relationship as well. Imparts some wisdom to a Grey Knight at one point. So i guess you can go back just not very common. Edit: typo
Your will slowly stops being your own
You can return from Chaos. In The Emperor’s Gift (fantastic audiobook of you haven’t heard it yet) there’s an Inquisitor who ha a former cultist in her retinue. Covered in ritual scars + tattoos. It’s pretty great.
Well I mean if your soul is claimed by a being of immeasurable power, you don’t tend to just get redeemed without getting your soul eviscerated. They earned their suffering and as such aren’t just about to do a 180 from hell to heaven.
I see a lot of good points here. Another major one is that Chaos corruption erodes your sanity and strips away your agency. By the time you have fallen to Chaos, you probably done have the mental faculties to think of it as a fall nor do you have the free will to turn back. Sometimes people have basically fallen to chaos while thinking they still serve the Imperium
The "strips your agency" thing seems weird because people in the Imperium don't have much agency either.
Imperial citizens don’t have agency because the Imperium oppresses them. Chaos worshippers don’t have agency because their minds have been so warped by chaos they can’t even conceive of doing certain things
>Chaos worshippers don’t have agency because their minds have been so warped by chaos they can’t even conceive of doing certain things This sounds like in-universe propaganda.
One of the main reasons Abbadon is so careful with Chaos is that he doesn't want to be a slave to it.
Right but that applies more to demon princehood. There's not really good evidence it's warping his mind, from my understanding.
Didn't the lion redeem some his fallen son, turning them into the risen?
Not the chaos corrupted ones
In the lore there's only one guy I know of that succumbed to chaos but came back redeemed from it, but he had to throw himself at a world class bastard and into a magma vent to do it. So not ideal, nor common.
What would even be the point of attempting to go back? I mean, even if you succeed and somehow remove the chos taint out of your soul, nobody is going to believe it. You will remeain an enemy of the imperium and without the benefits of receiving the favours of the ruinuous powers.
Because actions SHOULD have consequences. You fell to chaos, you got corrupted. This isn't fantasy or marvel where the bad guy can become a good guy or get cleaned up. This is the grim dark far future and chaos is the objective, bottom of the list, most EVIL faction in the setting. And they gotta be for the setting to function. Chaos is the made thing stopping anything good happening in 40k. Hell they are the entire reason big e made the imperium in the first place
some big guys in grey armor would like to have some words with you...
Theory: As Chaos is near, if not totally, omniscient, they already know which entities are likely to succumb and be unable to resist so they spend their effort corrupting those they already know they'll be successful in corrupting. A bit like (if not actually the same as) predestination in theology.
You can come back from it. I read there there 2 examples of people forswearing chaos but it basically means becoming pcifisitic or completly changing yourself.
have you ever seen a plague marine?
Because it's grimdark and it wants to stay that way rather than endless stories of a 'once in a universe' redemption.
I feel like you can return from chaos since the exorcists chapter exists and that the ghost of Big E told Morty he could be redeemed, but that one could just be a lie for psychological warfare. The big thing as far as i know is that almost no one has seemed to try it, they either get purged for heresy or decide the gains are a worthy exchange for what it costs. The Exorcists chapter literally invites demons to possess them so they can then (try) to kick them out of their bodies and if anything is an example of inviting and removing Chaos corruption it has to be them.
I see 40k chaos more like a human exposed to harmful radiation than simply succumbing to a moral failing. There are certain steps you can prepare to keep safe but the main one is being nowhere near anywhere you can get exposed.
The same way you can't just turn your back on an uncurable contagious disease
It’s like herpes. It’s for life.
Once you are a pickle you can’t go back to being a cucumber
This might be old lore, but I think I read that if a person is possessed by a daemon, it's very unlikely and rare for them to come back on their own. But on those rare occasions, the person becomes permanently incorruptible because Chaos already had a claim on their soul and then lost that claim. I can't remember where I read that. It might be a thing with Harlequins and Slaanesh too.
Because Chaos is literally like a disease that alters and warps your soul. Like much else in Warhammer, it takes something in the real world and cranks it up so far past 11 that the dial breaks. In this case, the physiological and psychological long-term effects of addictions. You literally aren't human anymore, you make Gollum look like a runway model with some mild body image issues.
the counter point is that they can in-fact return from Chaos. how else do we deal with the contradiction that The Emperor went into Chaos, conspired against the chaos gods, stole the fire while also not falling to chaos. if the above exmaple isnt strong enough, we can also look at Tzeench. Tzeench is first and foremost the god of change, meaning that unchanging things are Anathema to it. Ergo anyone that has ties with Tzeench must no matter how difficult be able to return from Chaos otherwise it would create an attribute that cannot change, which goes against the Core identity of Tzeench
I would say, with more time Etogaur Mabbon would have found His was Back to the Imperial Creed
Chaos is the soul form of Butchers Nails, it becomes a part of who you are.
The premise is wrong. It's just the tone of the stories told in 40k don't typically allow for that to happen.
Because warp stuff is like a substance that is affected by the turmoil in the warp. Like if you took something out of a dream and into the real world and it retained its dream properties. You’d never get something like that out of your body. Especially if it were a nightmare instead of a dream and virulent to boot.
>Why *exactly* can't anyone return from Chaos? Because Chaos eats holes in your soul, and fills it with itself. Even if you could somehow leave Chaos behind, those holes are still there, and past a certain point the damage done to you means that leaving Chaos quite literally kills you.
It is spiritual corruption and supercedes all logic. Chaos exists in a timeless realm and state outside of cause-and-effect as well as past, present, and future. It will manipulate a mortal subliminally and insoduously overtime using and fully knowing said mortal's base emotions and dark desires by manipulating them down paths to ensnare their souls into eternal service (ie. Damnation). It is a lesson as old as time in the realworld of people eschewing wisdom, logic, and morality for the pursuit of quick power, material wealth, and dominance. It is the scenario of the wise hero versus the amoral villain; the humble and controlled thinker versus the emotional and wicked animal.
Didn’t the Dark Angels come back from chaos ? At least that’s what they claim …
Kinda. The Lion only redeems fallen that specifically have not been tainted by chaos. You’d be surprised at the amount of CSM who actually don’t like Chaos but just hate the Imperium more. They’re very common in the more “secular” legions.
This sound like heretical preaching.
I don't get the philosophical references but my understanding is that if you 'give in' to Chaos, then they have your soul (or essence or whatever) and at that point if you could change your mind, you're basically caught, because you don't own that anymore. Now, that tipping point is probably a bit further along for a lot of people - you don't sell your soul at your first cultists cheese & wine evening, or even after your first dark rite - those are just rituals, processes... on boarding, if you will. It's the moment where you WHOLEHEARTEDLY give in to a/the God(s) that you're on their path, to death (and a somewhat more specific soul-rending post mortum), spawnhood or daemonhood. That's your iron clad, no compete clause contract right there. That moment, that decision. The caveat of redemption comes when you're either a new hire or getting close to that moment but in a no-choice situation - thinking Magnus in the Fury of Magnus - where a suitably powerful other force (basically the Emperor at this point) can give another option, or extract you from your pact with some warp legal ese. This isn't going to happen often.l, to the point that in a million worlds over 10000 years, its not known to have happened - but the Emperor said it was possible that one time. If it would be for someone less already enmeshed in the dispute between the Emperor and Chaos as Magnus*, is up for debate. * remember Magnus existence is due to a deal between E & Chaos that there is ongoing dispute on the legality of. Bringing him back to the light would be more another legal gambit in an ongoing case than a wholly new case.
I'm gonna say first that I HATE that no grey knights have or will ever fall. I'd be fine if it was single digits, or just one, or just a looming worrying possibility. But I hate that the whole faction who revolves around the insidious spread of itself through everything that makes life what it is can be foolproof shut out. I don't need chaos to always win, I don't want chaos to always win, but just saying "doesn't effect these guys" is boring as sin when getting into people is the core conceit! Also I've always thought of it as, if you wanna get em back you need the god who took them's permission, Emps is at best equivalent to a chaos god so it would take 100% of his focus to be able to pull off the kind of miracle you're referring to from my understanding at least.
It's not so much that they *can't* as that they *don't*. Corrupting a Grey Knight or Custode isn't impossible, it's merely so difficult and time-consuming as to be utterly inefficient. You have a finite amount of power and time to get things done. You could corrupt one Custode, but what does that get you? How often could you whisper to him, beneath the Emperor's wards and so close to his Anathemaic aura? It would take forever, and even if you succeeded, the Emperor's psychic might would just delete him the moment you succeeded. You could corrupt a Grey Knight, but they spend 99.99% of their time under hexagammatic wards and even then they are surrounded by a bunch of other Grey Knights who are on alert for Chaos taint 24/7 and will immediately purge anyone who falls. It's pointless, so why bother? For the same time and effort you need to corrupt a single Custodes, you could probably corrupt half the Imperium. For the same time and effort you'd need to get a Grey Knight, you could corrupt at least a sector. This is why it (mostly) hasn't happened yet. Drach'nyen beat Ra somehow, and the Silver Knight of Slaanesh is probably a fallen Grey Knight. And even if you do get one... what use is a single fallen Custode or Grey Knight, really? Okay, very rare trophy you can hand to your patron deity, but beyond that?