I understand they are damned, and they will lose their soul to the chaos gods, but what exactly does that mean?
As I understand it there is no haven for normal space marines, how is having your soul consumed worse than dying a normal death?
I’m sure there is some catch, but on paper it looks like they get a sweet deal.
Chaos Marines run the risk of some type of madness, being pulled into the gods’ great game, mutations, and possibly spawndom.
I think I remember there being lore at one point that suggested the Emperor was actually drawing Imperial souls to him so that Chaos doesn’t devour them. I don’t have a source for that though.
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Having your soul devoured generally will mean being tortured forever and becoming a plaything for the daemons that reside in the warp. And not in a fun way, more like in the way a mouse becomes a cat’s plaything but unfathomably worse and also forever. Did I mention it’s forever?
Chaos gives curses just as often as it gives blessings. Look at plague marines for example: I’m not sure I’d consider a gaping maw in my abdomen or an eight foot long cluster of tentacles much of a boon. But the blessing is that your mind is now made of a bunch of maggots that somehow function as a brain so you don’t really care about the festering sores and putrid rolls of fat slowly bonding to your armour.
The possibility of immortality is, I believe, only made possible at your patron God’s whim (e.g. Lucius - every time he is killed he gets resurrected) or…still at your patron God’s whim by ascending to daemonhood. I suppose both of these things kind of protect your soul? But I would also guess that the moment Slaanesh is tired of Lucius’ antics s/he will dump his soul into the eternal pit of slavering daemons who will turn him into a violin made of pure sensation and play him with a bow strung from barbed wire. And daemonhood comes with its own set of restrictions like not being able to exist in the material realm without assistance.
Afterlife in 40k is poorly understood, both in and out of the universe. The few guys who are special enough to resurrect, one way or another, don’t seem to report a universally applicable experience.
We are given to understand that human souls eventually fade and merge into the warp, whether under the auspices of Emps or of other warp powers. But we don’t really know how long that takes (time is meaningless in the warp) nor what the process feels like. We can make an educated guess that it’s horrifyingly painful, based on the fact that if a living human enters the warp without a Geller field they meet a horrifyingly painful end. But it’s only really a guess.
However, there’s no need to wait for the afterlife to see Chaos worshippers pay a price. It’s never “yeah I’m exactly the same person as before, only stronger / smarter / tougher / sexier”. You’ll handily defeat your enemies thanks to Khorne, then slaughter your family in a fit of rage. Your visions will let you achieve your greatest ambitions, and will also never let you have a moment of rest. You’ll stop feeling pain, and you’ll eventually stop feeling joy or love too. You’ll feel pleasure greater than ever before, and you’ll have to look for ever more extreme pleasure to get the same kick again.
All of those “side effects” (but they’re really main effects) will lead you to double down and ask for ever stronger boons to deal with them. Make me a mindless berserk so I forget about the loved ones I killed. Give me ten brains so I can follow all those maddening clues at once. Put me in a hole to rot so I don’t see what I am missing. Make me feel pleasure from pain so I can tap into another source of sensation.
Rinse and repeat, until you either meet a grisly end to the laughter of the thirsting gods, or you become the one in a billion that ascends to daemon prince i.e. stops being human altogether and turns into a living concept.
Incidentally, this is why Abaddon is such a big deal. While we don’t know exactly how (ask ADB to get back to writing Black Legion books), he’s found a way to play the four gods against each other, so that he gets a bunch of boons from them, while they block each other from taking control over him. He’s much less powerful than he would be if he gave in and started to worship the gods, but he’s still himself.
