(Pre-Show) The Barracks

[Okor]

Okor stirred from his fevered dreams, grunting as he rose from his bare bed. His ceramite covered legs swung over the lip, his boots slamming down on the grey floor. He rubbed his hands against his helm, feeling trapped for the first time in millennia. His armour had been bound to him for aeons, seeing him through war after war. It was covered in the blood of millions of warriors, the scars of a billion weapons, and the dust of infinite worlds. It was as much a part of him as his own hand. As the air filtered through once more, its innate purity instantly obliterated is it sunk inside of his infested lungs. He looked towards the simple mirror on the wall, placed there in case the contestants felt a need to tend to their cosmetics before the bloody trials ahead. He shambled towards it, bending down in front of the treated glass. His eye, leaking pus, gazed into its reflection, seeing its own infected cornea mirrored, the small parasites dwelling in his vitreous humors wriggling inside the red orb. His gauntleted hands reached up, grasping the edges of his helm. With a meaty sucking sound, he began to lift...

He stared at his own face. Had it been so long since he had looked beneath his helmet? Since he had seen himself? He ran an armoured hand across his chiseled chin, the impressive physiology of the Astartes persisting even after millennia of corruption. His short black beard, kept restrained by his helmet for so long, was matted with pus and corrosive bile, leaked from his damaged mouth. His maw itself was cut and rotten, the yellow and black teeth inside were cracked, and riddled with holes. What was once a nose was little more than mucous-ridden holes, the organ itself destroyed by a savage blow from an Ork in the closing days of the Great Crusade. His head was bald, reminiscent of his Primarch. A series of cuts and scabs littered his skull, with several fresh wounds from where his armour had bound to his flesh. Translucent blood was already scabbing over, displaying his enhanced physiology. A twisted and cracked horn sprouted from his forehead, the dirty ivory cracked in many places, yet still standing as proud and tall as a warbanner.

It was his face. The face that had withstood ten thousand years in spite of Entropy and war. It was the face that would withstand ten more. He grinned, a foul smell seeping out of his blackened mouth. He fitted the steel collar inside of his gorget, the supposedly stainless steel already suffering under his ambient onslaught. He looked down into the helmet he held in his hands. It was rotten, decaying, rusted, covered in his own blood. Any mortal who donned it would find himself unable to support its weight, not to even mention the uncountable number of diseases that laired there. With hardly a second thought, he donned it, feeling a reassuring increase in the ever-present hum as the systems inside the helm activated. A verse passed through his mind, a snippet of a speech heard long ago. He took a deep breath, preparing himself.

"Despair all ye nations, the Corrupter has come,
And the sad days of this world are nearing their sum.
For the shining ideals through endeavours we sought,
Grow sour as he passes and are coming to nought."

He chuckled as he pushed open the door, ready to face whatever believed they could stop the end.