Quote Originally Posted by BRC View Post
Exploring that Cain "Might not be what he seems" is kind of tricky, because the books are written from Cain's perspective. Cain SEEMS like some sort of Superhero commissar, he believes himself to be a pragmatic coward with bad luck, but his actions don't quite hold that out. The result is that he's effectively the guy everybody thinks he is, just snarkier. His character is already pretty well explored, his Big Secret is that he's scared, but ends up doing heroic stuff anyway.
It's exactly because the books are written from Cain's own point of view, that leaves me with the faint hope that it could all change.

Cain is, afterall, a self-confessed liar. What if, for example, it turned out that Cain was actually pulling a double-bluff?
He knows how he appears in public - as the conquering hero, adored by his men and feared by his enemies.
He writes in his books that this is just a fascade, and that it was all bluster to hide his cowardly, selfish personality that got taken too far and somehow made him look even more heroic.
Then the twist comes that the cowardly side is the cover-up for something even more sinister. Maybe he spent his entire career trying to capitulate with the enemy, and was accidentally thwarted at every turn by various forces - Jurgen, Space Marines, Amberley, invasions by rival chaos warlords - which is the only reason he never managed to escape his Loyal Commisar role.

And his memoirs, looking back over his escapades, are yet more lies as he tries to hide any evidence that he was anything other than lucky.
When he protested that he didn't want to go down into the Necron Tomb? Reverse psychology, knowing full well that Kasteen trusted him so thoroughly that she would interpret it as false modesty!
How he always manages to find the necessary inspiration to find out where the next daemonic ritual is going to occur? The whole 'epiphany' thing was complete fantasy, to hide the fact that he knew where it would happen because he had planned it all along!
Accidentally uncovering a Slaaneshi cult full of gorgeous girls, lead by an irresistable sorceress, costing him the lives of two Troopers along the way? His long term allies, awaiting a deliberate rendesvous and with a pair of dupes ready to be used as sacrifice fodder!

....Okay, that's looking less like a coherent plot and more like Wild Mass Guessing, but you get the point. And it all ends with Amberley in her study putting the finishing touches to the last of Cain's memoirs, satisfied that she has done her old friend and lover justice in death.... Only for him to appear at her door, murder her brutally and then disappear after finally removing the last potential witness to his crimes, like Kaiser Soze.....