Chapter Text
It was the 36th Millennium. For fifty centuries, the vast Imperium of Man has ruled the galaxy, the Emperor of Mankind sitting atop his Golden Throne, slowly withering away due to the treachery of his Primarch sons. It was the greatest empire Humanity has ever made - a place of glory, supremacy, and power, and at the same time, the worst empire to have existed in Human history; a place where death, decay, and the constant objectification of quadrillions was praised as Mankind threw itself into the endless machine of war and strife it had built. Things would be quite bad in this millennium, particularly, what with the rise and fall of the tyrant Goge Vandire, a name and personality so bad that it spawned the term “Goge Vandire Syndrome”: the habit of people having names as bad as that that they genuinely turn out to be terrible.
Prior to all this fuss was the birth of a woman who would be called “Calladayce” by her parents. Alas, the noble household she was born in, situated in the Albionic lands, had to give all the firstborn of their generation to the Adeptus Custodes, a golden order of ten-thousand elite, super-human demigods charged to protect, advise, counsel, and carry out all manner of sophisticated tasks for their liege, the Emperor himself. Thus, they could not name her Calladayce, and at the Avenue of Sacrifice she was one of the many little male and female babies given to those gold-clad warriors on the day their tithe of recruits was due. It would be in the gilded laboratories of Terra that, far away from home, that she would bestow herself the name “Calladayce” by sheer dumb luck, and by that same luck, survive.
For thirty years, she and those lucky, few successful boys and girls would be modified beyond all compare, meticulously modified and rebuilt in the metaphysical itself to become nine foot tall, super-strong, immortal warriors, whose only superiors in their qualities were the Primarchs of old. They were coupled with training sessions by what would have been her teens, followed by more training, and a side of archeoscientific-genetic modification all the same.
When this infant baby that would be named Calladayce finally popped out on the other end, she gave herself the name Calldayce, and so she once thought, for no reason. To boot, her first few weeks as a true Custode saw her give herself the name “Taurovalia” (Or “Bull-Leader”, mostly because she was frankly just bullish and not a leader). The name “Kesh” was inherited from the fact that Calldayce liked having full hair on her head, and was able to grow a solid hairstyle just like that, after the whole Custode-making malarky was done after her thirty years.
For the duration of her entire first year, Calladayce Taurovalia Kesh was a really unpleasant woman: she was toxic, had little personality, and unlike her more noble and humble peers, she was very condescending to baseline humans. So unpleasant was she that even other Custodians tended to avoid their gung-ho, toxic sister… Until something happened.
It was a series of “thought farts”, or so she calls them now, that led her down the rabbit hole of speculation and ununusual thoughts: why was she unable to think of certain things? Why did she feel compelled to serve the Emperor even when she felt so disregardant of everything else? She was barely the first to have them: thousands of Custodes have had them before, but they always pushed them down, deeming them treacherous idle thoughts. But down the line, she would push harder and harder, and like a “massive mental constipation" (or as she so unabashedly called it), she would finally sit down in her room at the end of the year to simply think it all over for the last time.
What she says happened that day was, and QUOTE, “like mentally shitting ten bricks, weighing 20 kilograms, whilst being borderline crushed to death by a wall of Adamentium being pushed by a full-force hydraulic press”. And with that absolute agony of a mental-soulful bowel movement, she had done something few Custodians had ever done: break their very mental, biological, alchemic, and spiritual programming - their inhibitors and locks, preventing them from cognitively processing, biologically thinking, alchemically feeling, and spiritually understanding anything beyond their sworn duties and the perimeters of their ultimate goal (The Emperor was “nice” in this respect, and did not want to outright servitorise his beloved ten thousand - but merely “padlock” their wider mental processes. It doesn’t make the fact of that being a thing amongst them any better, though.) - and as a result, a massive tsunami of feelings washed over Calladayce.
It would be an absolute lie to say she was the first to do this as well, but four hundred Custodians had done it before - and got insanely depressed over the forthcoming revelations that they were simply components of a grimdark tabletop wargame, washing over them like a tsunami.
Yet, when the depression tidal wave came, it seemed to just… Arch over her. Sure, she felt like she SHOULD be absolutely depressed over the fact that she, Calladayce, was just a part of a massive satirical tabletop wargame set in a grimdark lore backdrop for the purpose of having little toy miniatures with stats be pushed around. But… It seemed funny, actually. In fact, rather than depression, this entire affair just felt… Funny.
And when she came to think about things, the stars seemed to comically align: it was all so blatantly illogical, what with over-the-top wars, the absolute unfeasibility of the Imperium’s hyper-authoritarian and neo-feudal system of government, the bravado and dramatic prose of every single major warring species in the galaxy - from Humanity’s self-proclaimed supremacy, to the Aeldari’s self-righteous egoism, the absolutely unhinged ignorance of the Orks, to the unabashed pride every servant of Chaos felt when they did something comically super-evil - and the bitter irony of everyone, in every faction, having active infighting conflicts with one another for no other reason than “My ideals are better than your ideals!!!”
It was funny, and funny was it. Why should she be upset if the truth of it all could enable her to do something even better: be free? And coming to those realisations, why was she so toxic anyway? That was practically every major, notable sapient being in this reality (save for a few, of course) anyway; she didn’t need to be mean after all!
Thus, Calladayce Taurovalia Kesh would become one of the ten lucky Custodians who did NOT get depressed over the truth of their existence.
These are the tales of that woman. Forget the power of glory and victory, for so much has been made a joke of, never to be re-serious’d. Forget the power of stagnation and decay, for in the not-grim darkness of Calladayce’s sphere of influence, there is only bananar. There is no seriousness in the stars, only an eternity of humour and “we stay silly” energy… And the laughter of a Laughing God… (…That she just so happens to serve!)