Born on the civilised world of Arteus III, Tecca Nina's early life was not precisely remarkable. Her family was middle class, they worked middle-class jobs for the Imperium, she went to a middle-class school, and under most other circumstances, Tecca Nina would have found herself a similarly middle-class job to work in until her old age. It was therefore unfortunate that one day, in her early- to mid-teens, she began to hear and see things at the edges of her senses - never coherent, but always distressing, and somehow goading in the process. What they goaded toward eventually became clear, as one day whilst being confronted by a bully, she lashed out with her mind, a blunt fist of psychic power knocking the girl unconscious against a locker in full view of a lot of terrified students and teachers. Not three days after that incident, she was taken into custody by squads of black-armoured individuals who would cuff her round the mouth if she so much as whimpered.
The next thirty years of her life could be accurately described as "Hell".
Seven or so years were spent in what could more or less be described as the worst jail in existence. The relative freedom of expression her planet supported was a myth in that grey bunker, as were any other rights the people supposedly had; instead, Nina was kept in a bland grey outfit, in a bland prison cell, utterly isolated from others like her, those who were kept in this place for the sole crime of possessing psychic powers. The guards, at least, had no interest in the prisoners save when they tried to use their powers, promptly being beaten into submission, or in too many cases shot dead and incinerated, but at the same time, they refused to account for the prisoners' needs beyond food and water, a state of affairs that was especially gruelling for a pubescent young girl for reasons that need not be elaborated on.
Socially, therefore, most people in there were not well-adjusted, if she even had any idea about their personalities at all. Nina had only a couple of friends throughout that time, the first a forty year old in a nearby cell who had developed in secret a form of telepathic communication. That friendship lasted all of three months before he was discovered and killed - arguably for the best, considering that every time she used her own abilities, the whispering in her mind grew stronger. She learned the cause of this a couple of years after that, when she grew daring enough to develop her own form of telepathic connection with the thirty two year old two cells over from hers. Their communication lasted a week before he admitted that he'd felt something probing at his mind lately, attempted to convey an image of what it was, and suddenly had his psyche ripped asunder by a monstrosity that Nina herself barely avoided being targeted by too. After seeing what it had twisted the man's body into as the guards carried away the evidence, she no longer attempted to train her abilities.
She was, of course, lucky. She could have spent much longer in there. Instead, the Black Ship arrived not too long after she turned twenty- or was it twenty one?- and took her and every surviving psyker in for transport to Holy Terra. This took ten years in total, and somehow, inexplicably, wound up being an even worse prison than the last - one made of black metal lit by red lamps, a hellish combination that played havoc with her vision; one where the silver-armoured guards standing at every juncture seemed to physically crush her whenever they passed by, even though she knew she was lucky enough to never be subjected to their wrath personally; and yet they and others didn't ignore her, but rather dragged her and others away time and again for the sake of unspeakable testing, probing, and punishing of both mind and body, processes that would have left any sane person traumatised, let alone the psychological wreck she became as the whispering and imagery grew ever more pronounced when the silver guards weren't present.
She was, of course, lucky. Luckier than most, anyway, for her wardmates never degraded into monsters, nor was her section of the ship ever forcibly cleansed with fire to erase a single threat. So, too, could her journey to Terra have taken far longer, and left her truly shattered rather than simply cracked, good only as fuel for the Emperor's dying soul. As it was, however, she remained on the cusp of sanity by tracking her time in there, precise mental markers that anchored her enough to let her keep some sense of self.
A worse fate lay in store for her. Not minutes after she first saw something resembling sunlight for the first time in nearly two decades, she and many others were marched back into an obsidian fortress by men clad in the same sort of black armour she'd first come to know as terrifying, and told that they were to be used for the Imperium's greater benefit, and that they would be trained to use their powers in the name of the God-Emperor, a process that would take a full five years before they were deemed ready. These five years were, thankfully, nothing like as awful as her time on the Black Ship, but to say they were easy was fallacious - her teachers were unreasonably cruel, even having been through the same nightmares she had, and every mistake she made in learning to apply her abilities was punished with beatings and restriction of "privileges" - up to, for the first time, both food and water if they were feeling cruel. All the while still being targeted by unspeakable whispering and imagery, somehow worse than before despite being in such a holy place. Again, she was forced to rely on her internal clock to keep her psyche intact, adding to it with strict and regimented creative activities of a sort - picturing a blank page in her mind, imagining herself writing upon it, and in time generating an entire fantasy trilogy that, when one teacher noticed it, was judged amateurish and naive. That teacher promptly copied the whole thing down word for word behind Nina's back, published it, and made a relative fortune on her efforts.
The exercises, however, did their job. Combined with the data from those tests performed upon the Black Ship, the examination of her talents in the Scholastica Psykana, and examination of her own coping mechanisms, she was unbeknownst to her graded at the level Zeta Secundus - decently strong, not quite capable of protecting her own soul from harm as a Primaris might, but nor a mere sheep to be sent to slaughter and soul syphoning with the massed Tertius psykers. At the end of those five years, she was taken into the core of the Imperial Palace, a golden twisting morass she could never hope to navigate alone protected by giants themselves clad in gold, to what looked like some sort of throne room, and forced to kneel in front of a corpse that she recognised as important for reasons that escaped her in the moment, alongside ninety nine other unfortunate souls like herself.
Not long after that, the God-Emperor touched her mind.
It is quite fortunate that the human brain contains no nerve endings directly, at least for the purposes of sensation. If it did, it would be likely that the electrical and chemical signals coursing through it would induce a constant headache at best, and an unbelievable agony at worst. For Nina, as with most of the astropaths-to-be, her Soul-Binding could not quite be described with realistic metaphors - the closest she could come would be to suggest that it felt very much like her brain had just been crammed full of said sensation-inducing nerve endings, and then shoved into an acid-filled blender with super-heated blades. To say it was pleasant, as some of them purported after the fact, was a strong statement. So too was calling it modest, or distressing. Even words like "excruciating" and "traumatic" were a little weak. If anybody ever bothered to ask, she would likely say it was the single worst experience she had ever had, before or since.
As it was, the teachers merely described it as "graduation". When she came to, she realised very quickly that, whilst the whispering in her mind and vague appendages in the corner of her eye were finally quelled, so too was literally everything else about her sight and vision - even though feeling remained, something made very evident when she was strapped down and the remnants of her melted eyeballs scraped out of their blackened sockets without anaesthesia. Nonetheless, she was practically crippled, and it took another month after that fateful event for her psychic-abilities to take over the role, translating the vibrations in the air into mental patterns she could recognise as sound, and the surfaces about her into images she could position herself relative to. Her telepathy even offered full colour awareness by the time the ship she was on found its way to her very first role as an agent of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica: a component in a major astropathic relay.
For most other astropaths, this would be where their story ended. Whilst a necessity for rapid information flow, the astropathic relays were constantly flooded with psychic messages from across the galaxy, and they were notorious for inducing the phenomenon called burnout: the crippling of an astropath's psychic powers, be it temporary or permanent, often accompanied by braindeath after however many years of replacing indecipherable whispers and visions with an indecipherable torrent of maddening ciphers in all forms. Only those of particularly strong will could hope to survive for any significant length of time.
Once more, Tecca Nina's tendency to develop psychological coping mechanisms saved her: this time, she simply found a way to turn off the part of her mind that was, for want of a better word, "human". Those in charge of the relay didn't want her to be human; they wanted her to be a wire. So, when she was in the immense choir that made it up, she was effectively no longer human, but a wire of thought and spirit, not taking in the messages passed to her, merely letting them move on through her being as fast as possible, and all the while maintaining that mental clock to draw herself back to when she was allowed a break, though by then she was assailed with reminders of her disturbing past so frequently that she often preferred not to revert at all. She burned out sixteen times in the first year before this mechanism took hold; once it had, she burned out once in the next six, and then only because she let that mindstate slip due to a bout of negative memory interfering with her focus.
This improvement did not go unnoticed. By now, she was in her early forties, and looked very much like she was in her late sixties, so major the toll of her life and powers had taken on her. It came as a great surprise, then, when she found herself recommended for work at a much less strenuous choir somewhere near the outer edge of the Imperium's holdings, and an even greater surprise when that work proposal came with a free rejuvenat treatment to ensure her ongoing service there. All at once, she reverted from looking and feeling like an elderly lady back to more or less her physical prime, complete with renewed hair growth. All this, however, would only serve to be the introduction for another trial entirely - granted, not one that would be at all comparable to the horrors she had faced thus far, but something difficult to overcome nonetheless.
At first, her approach into the deeper, less inhabited parts of the void left her wondering if her Soul-Bond was failing. Whispering she had thought banished for good returned steadily, growing louder the further from civilisation she went. It didn't take overly long, once she had taken up her position in the astropathic choir of that region, for her to recognise them for what they were: not the monsters of her past, but the dying screams and nascent dreams of aliens from far before her time, maddening to contemplate even compared to those other monsters of the Warp. They, after all, had at least some basis in human emotion. Nonetheless, her old coping mechanisms kicked in once again: shut down needless emotion, keep track of the passage of time, use the mind to craft creatively- this time, actually delving into and practicing her telepathic powers, to see what creative fashions she could use them in- all serving to keep her on track toward the eventual title of Astropath Transcendent... somehow, though, she found a sort of magnetic pull despite those mechanisms. Week after week, month after month, she kept being drawn back to contemplating, not the voices coming from the darkness, but the very darkness of the void itself, and this fascination manifested one day in the form of a deep chill filling her private quarters. After that, she found she didn't need to lose herself in her coping mechanisms anymore, though she continued to work on her telepathy where she could.
Again, this did not go unnoticed. Not long after this revelation, perhaps three years since joining the choir, she was requested by name by a man who referred to himself as Inquisitor Lycus Xande. He had need of a potent astropath to add to his choir - and, in addition to this, he offered her a position in his own retinue as an Acolyte, a role she dutifully accepted. It would be quieter still than the one she'd grown used to, and likely a lot more dangerous at times, but then it came with knowing she would be serving the people of the Imperium in their defense, not to mention granting her the relative freedom to expand her abilities: she suspects that she has yet to fully realise her maximum potential, and it would certainly be nice to see just how far she can go...