I awoke today like any other. Even now, I feel the pounding against my head as if the air itself, the very world around me were trying to beat me down. I don't think it bothers me as much as it used to. I even think I could one day be used to it, or perhaps one day it will be gone. Sometimes I fancy it to be a concience of sorts, reminding me of the deaths I've caused, forcing me to look back, to remember the faces of those that I have killed.

My name is Paelyn Tango Blackerocke. Having no mother I do not know where the third of my names came from, truly, though if my sources were correct then 'Gustave Blaque' and 'Istas Rocke' were the two technicians responsible for my birth. My... Birth. Strange, how such a sentence should sound foreign. I know I was not born, instead grown in a tube under some long forgotten laboratory, but the reference remains as if I imagine myself to have parents, somewhere. My geneseed came from somebody, but I somehow believe that those people would be less than proud of what their own genes were forced to produce.

I doubt even DeValera is proud of his accomplishments. His troops, his creations, his chances taken to play God. Every day I awake finding my thoughts on him, and what lives I could have lived were I not so subservient to his wishes. But then, he approves wholeheartedly of what I do. He encourages me to do what I do best, and that is to kill. I hate it, truly, I can simply not stand to kill any more, but still he approves of me. Now and then, when he tells me I've done well, I forget the evil things he's done to me and think of what it is to have somebody who approves, somebody that knows who you are and encourages it. It's like a drug, I think, and I'm addicted to it's effects. He can wrap his veil of lies around me, and then I just don't care any more...

I think, somehow, that's why I became friends with Len. The original 'odd couple' we seem to be, but... She too, knows how it is to be different, superior, but at the same time seperated. There are brief moments when I think that I could simply leave my world behind, and go with her to whatever and wherever she thinks is best. I don't know why it sounds appealing, perhaps I've been too long without thinking my own thoughts, as if He might hear me. Len wasn't supposed to be, and still she carries on. She has friends, even, people that care for her I would expect, and I also guess now and then that she cares for them as well. Primarchs were never supposed to care. Primarchs are simply better.

And perhaps this is what seperates me from the world I inhabit. That for so long I've blindly held faith in my vaunted superiority that I forget so quickly I was created to protect the very people I kill. I imagine a different life for myself, one without boundaries and rules and orders each day, and I'm lost. Simply, lost. I can't think past efficiency, stealth, subterfuge any more. From time to time I wonder if I have an imagination at all. Len tells me stories of what she has been, and I can't help but be jealous of it - the one of we two who was not supposed to live, and yet she lives a better life than I do. At the same time, I have to admire her. I hate the confusion, now. I just wish I could lock away my thoughts, and do what the normal people do. I want to be normal. I want to be myself.

To kill DeValera is the only way that I can break out of this mould I was born into. I have to be away with him, his life, to exterminate his presence in this galaxy. But when I do, I will lose the approval. Len, she tells me, will be there to talk - but I don't know that I ever want to talk of what I hear when I close my eyes, the rythym that the pounding beats into me like morse code. She doesn't understand that I have to destroy my life to live another. She cannot know that I am afraid.

And that is how I rationalise it. How each day, I make the choice to carry on. So many times I've had the barrel of either of my pistols resting against my head, my chest, in my mouth, but I think to be free, first I have to put right the wrongs by DeValera in the past. That is how I make the choice to carry on. That's how simple it is.