Soul Drinkers

From Tv Tropes

Purity through hate. Dignity through rage. Let the fire within light the fires without.

The Soul Drinkers are a Warhammer 40000 chapter of renegade Space Marines, a successor chapter to the Imperial Fists.

They are the subject of a series by Ben Counter: Soul Drinker, The Bleeding Chalice, Crimson Tears (collected in a omnibus), Chapter War, and Hellforged and the serialized-but-later-compiled-into-a-book Phalanx. In the first, they are nearly seduced into the service of Chaos, but reject it. Nevertheless, afterwards, they do not return to the service of the Imperium but forge their own path.

[edit] This chapter, and the novels about them, make use of these tropes:

• A Father To His Men.
• A God Am I: Teturact, who seems to think he's a hybrid of Nurgle and the Emperor.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Tellos. The Pirate Prince wants this too, but is cut short by the Griffiths captain.
• Axe Crazy: Tellos. How crazy? After losing his hands and the damaged nerves being unable to take prosthetic he decides the best idea is jam fan blades into the stumps and run around topless...
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: First played straight, then inverted. By the end of his physical life, Tellos can beat in wits, faith and reality bending Iktinos himself, one of the most faithful Astartes, as a result to his allegiance and ever-slaughter.
• Badass Creed: "Purity through hate. Dignity through rage. Let the fire within light the fires without."
  • "Cold and Fast!"
• Bearer Of Bad News.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sarpedon challenges Eumenes to a fight for First Blood, and almost loses (he comments it was lucky Eumenes took at one time his metal leg - which for some reason didn't count - and not a real leg). He also tells Eumenes before the battle that he requests first blood because he's not worthy of killing. Skip though Chapter War, Eumenes has the entire chapter under him, Sarpedon is incarcerated and weaponless, and Eumenes possesses two of the chapter's strongest Ancient Artifacts. Sarpedon easily escapes three armed space marines, takes Eumenes by surprise and Curb-Stumps him.
• Big Bad: Each book has its own. The overall Big Bad of the series, however, is a Big Bad Duumvirate composed of Abraxas and Daenythos, who have been manipulating the Chapter for millennia.
• Big Book Of War: Daenyathos' books. Reads almost as a Chaos/Word Bearers book. That's because Daenyathos is revealed to have worked for Chaos and still be alive.
• Bittersweet Ending: Phalanx: Ending Spoiler: The Soul Drinkers prove themselves loyal to the Imperium by fighting off a daemonic army summoned onto the Phalanx but are killed to the last man. Sarpedon, mortally wounded, dies dragging the architect of the chapter's downfall, Daenyathos, into the warp.
• Blue Blood.
• Chainsaw Good: Comes with the territory, but taken to the extreme with Tellos.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Of course, it's still very violent and angry.
• Defector From Decadence: Pretty much their original motivation.
• Despair Event Horizon.
• Didn't See That Coming: In Souldrinker, if you don't have a long time interest in the game, you wouldn't get the hint about the Architect of Fate, which is Tzeentch's most oft quoted title.
  • That nice Chaplain Iktinos? Why does he have a psyker perpetually locked in a box at the bottom of a pool, in a giant spacehulk for months on end?
• Did Not Do The Research: Crimson Tears. A Kabal of Dark Eldar that had given up and sworn to Slaanesh? Just possible, the little bastards enjoy changing allegiances almost as much as other people's pain. Calling Grotesques "Haemonculi"? Mistake, pure and simple.
  • Possibly justified in that it's just one Elder risking his soul for daemonhood. While the narrator speaks the Kabal pirate's thoughts that his Psychos For Hire would probably agree, it's understandable that one leader could be deranged enough to lead the others to mass suicide.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Sarpedon seems to be making a habit of it.
• Duel To The Death: More like "duel to the spontaneous spiderleg mutation impalement".
  • Averted in (the second) Chapter War. Sarpedon doesn't want to kill Eumenes and asks for a fight to first blood instead.
• Due To The Dead.
• Enemy Mine: They find themselves in this situation sometimes.
• Fire Forged Friends.
• First Blood: Sarpedon and Eumenes fight for this. Sarpedon barely manages to win, but Eumenes' plans go unhindered.
• Frozen Face.
• Gone Horribly Right: You wanted free-willed unindoctrinated anger-filled recruits with Tragic Backstories, Sarpedon? Well, you got 'em!
• Good Is Not Nice: It is quite violent and probably mutated. This is Warhammer 40,000, what else would it be?
• Healing Factor: Space Marines naturally have this, Tellos cranks up to 12 though.
• Heel Realization.
• I Did What I Had To Do: Sarpedon finds himself saying this too much to feel comfortable.
• I Die Free: According to Word Of God, the entire series is turning into this for the chapter.
• I Gave My Word: Sarpedon's bound by it.
• In Its Hour Of Need.
• It Didn't Help: Probably one way to sum up the series. Spoken adliteram in one instance:

  No doubt it had been an artistic marvel in its day, but now it was dark and sinister. The way the mandrakes could occasionally be seen, bleeding from one shadow to the next, didn't help.

• It's Raining Men... and they're zombies. Lucky us.
• Kangaroo Court: The Trial of the Soul Drinkers in Phalanx sounded to be set up as one, but Vladamir Pugh was pretty damn adamant about trying to avert this in spit of some people's best efforts.
  • Played straight with Archmagos Khobtov though.
• Klingon Promotion: Sarpedon himself took the chapter like this. He does it again to Eumenes, who tried to do it to him first. Sarpedon even lampshades that he killed two Brothers in battle to control the chapter, and because of this all responsibility falls on him.
• Kneel Before Zod... Or Stab Zod In The Face!
• Lawful Stupid: The inquisitor and his interrogator from the first book should really think about who they're trying to kill.
• Lets You And Him Fight: A Designated Hero Batman Gambit involves Sarpedon tricking a Griffiths captain and a Chaos Cultist Dark Eldar into fighting each other. Even more acceptable for Sarpedon to do this in that the two were genuine enemies and he actually helped the Griffiths save some face and fight for their Emperor - so he could be free to deal with his Tellos inconvenience. Leads to this funny exchange:

• The Men First.
• Mutants: While initially proud for it because they thought it came from the Emperor, they discover it was actually meant to shackle them to Chaos and went out of control (while controlling them) when they rejected its offer, and most mutants they faced were bad sports.
• My Greatest Failure.
• Neutral Good: The Soul Drinkers and the Inquisitor from The Bleeding Chalice.
• Noun Verber.
• Numbered Homeworld: Typical of 40k the Imperium.
• Pride: The recurring theme of the series.
• Primal Fear: Sarpedon's "The Hell" psychic power.
• Rebellious Rebel: A good number of Soul Drinkers, especially the young ones, realize that Chaos is tainting the chapter before Sarpedon does.
• Red Right Hand: or Red Spider Legs. Or Huge Right Hand. Or Heals Insanely Fast. Or...
  • Practically a pun considering their relationship with the Crimson Fists...
• Retirony: After countless moments of Break the Haughty and questions about the future, Sarpedon finally gets an idea of what to do with his men by the middle of Hellforged. Too bad after that they get incarcerated:

  Either we'll die out here and it'll happen soon enough, or we will fight until we carve out a chunk of space for ourselves. Rule it like the Ultramarines rule their own roost. Make of it what the Imperium should be. That's the only way we can continue to exist in this galaxy.

• The Reveal: In Phalanx: }}spoiler|Daenythos, who is still alive, has manipulated the Soul Drinkers course since his "death" to become a force against the Imperium, using the Chaplains and the Catechisms Martial to ultimately turn the Soul Drinkers against the Imperium.}}
• Screw Destiny: Comes with the Astartes geneseed.
• Shrouded In Myth: The Voidspear. All we know is that it's scarier then any other weapon wielded by a Primarch.
• Straw Vulcan: Archmagos Khobotov, to the point where anyone else would realize what happens when you piss off the Elite Space Marines of the Astartes and then present them with a nice big force to crush.
• Take A Third Option: The Imperium or Chaos? They are the third option, and it's not very easy.
• They Call Me Mister Tibbs.
• Thirty Gambit Pileup: Mostly by Chaos.
• Too Dumb To Live: Archmagos Khobtov, the Inquisitor and Interrogator from Soul Drinker. Pretty much any Imperial character that is going after them without any assistance from the Astartes.
• Turncoat: Eumenes does an eerily action similar to the Horus Heresy: strand opponents on planet, bomb them, kill leader, split. Considering {{spoiler|he was about to turn against the Imperium and head to Earth to rule it, [[Spiritual Successor|it doesn't come as much surprise}}.
• We Are Struggling Together: Strangely enough, averted in the separate factions of the Soul Drinkers: even Eumenes listened Sarpedon out and agreed to reunite the chapter against a common enemy, the two sides then refused to kill each other out of fear of ending the chapter there and then. Played straight with the various anti-chaos/alien factions, which have no qualms destroying the others.
• We Could Have Avoided All This: The Mechanicus should really think about how they should interact with other Imperial agencies, especially ones that specialize in kicking ass and boarding actions.
  • The Administratum Official in charge of taking the Starfort should've been a bit more thoughtful about puppeting the Soul Drinkers into taking the facility.
• We Have Reserves: Chaos loves this as much as the Imperial Guard, though in the first three novels the Guard never actually try this.
• We Need A Distraction.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Played straight by Tellos, then inverted (With Great Insanity Comes Great Power).
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: How Sarpedon sees his rulership of the Chapter, especially that he got it through Klingon Promotions and feels responsible for that.
• Worthy Opponent.
• You Are In Command Now.
• Zombie Apocalypse: About 75% of Bleeding Chalice, including ships redesigned as zombie-plague hypodermic needles and another set up to provide a zombie apocalypse orbit drop.
  • Happened earlier in Soul Drinker. It seems Nurgle loves the "infect-your-enemy-with-a-plague-and-then-resurrect-the-dead-as-semi-demonic-zombies" approach to expansion.

---