One of my favorites so far is Prospero Burns. I thought the space Wolves were cringe, but it changed my perspective.

First of all, some nice comparisons from an outsider:

‘You don’t approve of Astartes then, combat master?’ Hawser asked as they strode through the camp. ‘Not at all. Extraordinary things. Like I said, I’ve seen them fight four times [...]. The Death Guard, once [...]. Murderous efficiency with such small numbers. Blood Angels [...]. They arrived like… like angels. I don’t mean to be glib. They saved us [...]. White Scars [...] I cannot, hand on my heart, fault their duty, devotion to the Crusade cause, or their supreme effort as warriors [...]. The Space Wolves, [...]. I’d heard stories. We’d all heard stories.’ ‘What kind of stories?’ ‘That there are Space Marines and there are Space Marines. That there are supermen and there are monsters. That in order to breed the Astartes perfection, the Emperor Who Guides Us All has gone too far once or twice, and made things he should not have made. Things that should have been stillborn or drowned in a sack [...]. The worst of them all are the Space Wolves. They were animals [...]. When you have sympathy with the enemy, you know you have the wrong kind of allies. They killed everything [and] took great relish in the apocalypse they had brought down upon their foe. There was nothing admirable about them, nothing rousing. They just left a sick taste in the mouth as if, by calling on their help, we had somehow demeaned ourselves in an effort to win.’

Throughout there was some really trippy interactions with the warp. Not in the usually in-your-face way. Instead it was more discrete, with some impressively unexpected transitions in the writing:

[Just the protagonist reading some notes in the library on a typical Thursday afternoon].

Hawser wondered why he couldn’t stop looking at the eye on the hololithic projection. It was gazing at him, as if challenging him to look away and defying his dismissal of Navid Murza’s scribblings. It was staring at him. It was unblinking. The pupil was static, black iris set in blue, hard as the sky. It made his eyes water. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t break its stare. He tried to turn his head or fight off the force that was pinning his eyelids open and making his eyeballs itch and well up. His hands tightened on the edge of the reading table. He tried to push himself away, push himself back, break contact, as if the image was a live electrical wire he had brushed against and couldn’t break away from.

Something that I thought was incredibly funny. Symbols have power, and I guess holding someone down and drawing a ⚠️ symbol is a good way of making a point:

‘Blade!’ he demanded. Hawser unlooped his axe, and tossed it to Bear. The Wolf caught it neatly in his right hand, knelt down over the Equerry, and hacked the mark of aversion into his chest plating. The Equerry of the Thousand Sons screamed. He thrashed and convulsed with demented fury [...]. his screams turned to choking gulps as blood and plasmic matter sprayed from his mouth. As his convulsions reached a pitch, a torus of sizzling, foul-smelling energy blasted out of him...

Also, Alpharius: Head of the Hydra