As the saying went, dramatization wasn't fabrication, and adaptation wasn't making things up.
Nearly every Legion's Space Marines shamelessly hyped up their own Primarch. They described the mighty as capable of destroying a planet with one hand, and the brilliant strategists as possessing peerless wisdom. Whatever made them sound impressive, they said it, all to emphasize their Primarch's supreme majesty.
It was all just for fun, with perhaps a little value as propaganda. Soldiers from different Legions used it to pass the time. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously.
But the problem was, this world was so damn absurd that you couldn't just make things up. The boasts could actually come true.
Take Angron, for example. He'd been doing just fine until some unlucky World Eater decided to make trouble on the Khala Network, claiming that their Primarch was the Lord of Exterminatus, with nine hundred and ninety thousand psychic steeds at his command. He was the Imperium's God of War, and if someone displeased him, one slap would be enough to blow up a planet.
It had only been a joke, but the Imperium's citizens were uneducated, and they genuinely believed it. Some had been convinced ever since the Great Crusade, and the story had become a fixed impression.
On some worlds under World Eaters control, the statues that should have depicted Angron had even been replaced by statues of a massive Imperial warrior riding a Vortex Torpedo. The result was thoroughly bizarre.
Even if you took the most charitable view, the bizarre imagery could be forgiven. After all, if the people of the Imperium weren't getting up to nonsense, they might be doing something suicidal instead. But after thousands of years of retelling, the World Eaters really had undergone some unusual changes.
For example, with the same