Access to this file is restricted to Ordo personnel with a Beta-level and above clearance only.
Unauthorized access will be punished by 7th-grade physical scouring, followed by interrogation and judgement by direct Inquisitorial superiors.
Thought for the day : 'A moment of doubt leads to an eternity of damnation.'
Preamble :
We members of the Ordo Hereticus are, by the very nature of our office, often confronted with uncomfortable truths.
Our peers in the Ordo Xenos might scoff and name us mere Witch Hunters, doing a necessary but less important job than they, who keep the foul machinations of the alien at bay. And the Daemonhunters of the Ordo Malleus are conditioned to see all threats beyond that spawned by the Warp as insignificant, which I believe is necessary for them to confront these horrors without losing their sanity.
But the Ordo Hereticus is not without its own, subtler challenges. To dedicate one's life to it is to be forced to acknowledge just how fragile the entire Imperium really is. Paranoia, something of a professional affliction among Inquisitors, is as its most potent within my own Ordo.
Because we know, with utter and complete certainty, that there is no one, no matter how high or exalted their office, who is completely above suspicion. We doubt everyone around us, and even ourselves. We can never know if the person we are speaking to is secretly a heretic – whether they know it or not. Even those of us with mind-reading abilities can never know for sure, for heresy takes many forms, all of them more cunning and subtle than the last.
Sanctity is rare and precious, but it has been a long time since I have been able to trust it. There is nothing, it seems, that the Dark Gods cannot twist to their ends, no purity that they cannot defile, no soul that is safe from damnation's peril. And even with the thousands of heretics I have encountered throughout my career, none exemplify this concept like the Daughters of the Octed.
I first encountered the work of the Daughters of the Octed in the chem-swamps of Jallius III. At the time, I had no idea what the cult of mutants me and my Acolytes purged was anything more than it appeared to be : just another collection of damned souls, preying upon nearby settlements for sacrifices to their grotesque deity. Evidence found in their temple, however, suggested a connection off-world.
Following that connection brought me to Stephanie Aktar, and through her, I eventually learned of the four heretics calling themselves the Daughters of the Octed. These Daughters are an unholy alliance, a dread covenant formed of four members, each of whom was once a Sister of the Adeptus Sororitas, before she broke her oaths to the God-Emperor. Furthermore, each of these traitorous Sisters has become sworn to a different Ruinous Power, yet they still act in concert to spread ruin and heresy across the Fahren Sector.
As my peers in the Ordo will know well, such unity of purpose among the followers of rival Powers is rare, and a most dire portent. The Daughters of the Octed have plagued the Fahren Sector for decades. My investigation has revealed that their pernicious influence spread across over a score of worlds, infesting them with different strains of heresy united only by their ultimate allegiance to the Daughters. They have been involved in several rebellious uprisings in the Fahren Sector, and their cults have infiltrated all strata of Imperial society, growing in the shadows like a cancer that me and my peers in the Fahren Conclave are barely able to keep in check.
The rest of my research on the Daughters can be found in the attached archive. As I record these words within the Ordos' records, my Acolytes and troops are preparing for a raid on what we believe will be a gathering of all four Daughters of the Octed – a rare opportunity, and one I fear the Imperium cannot afford for me to pass on. I do not know whether we will succeed, or return alive.
I have sent astropathic messages to a few of my colleagues I trust, informing them of this archive's existence. Should any of them be reading this, it is my hope that you will be able to use the information therein to finish my work. The Daughters of the Octed are a blight upon the Fahren Sector, one that must be removed if we are to prevent this region of the God-Emperor's dominion from falling into darkness.
Inquisitor Markus Terkarch, Ordo Hereticus
The Maiden of Carnage – Kerilla Decker
Kerilla Decker was inducted into the Order of the Broken Sword, a minor branch of the Sisters of Battle. Records of her life before this in the Schola Progenium show exactly the sort of strong, faithful, obedient soul that the Sororitas look for in recruits. Her records among the Order of the Broken Sword, which my Acolytes have since confiscated under my authority, show that Kerilla Decker was among the finest swordswomen the Order had ever trained, with several mentions made of her prowess in the training chambers.
She served the Order and the Imperium well for eleven years, shipped off from one battle-zone to the next, until she and her Commandery arrived to the war-world of Utrichien III. That miserable hell-hole had devoured Sector forces for years by that point, since the industry-barons who had ruled it for fifty generations in the Emperor's name had broken their oaths. The entire planet was a battlefield, with the hives and their prodigious industrial capacities as the prize for which Imperials and heretics fought.
Kerilla Decker was stationed on Utrichien III for ten months as part of her Order's contribution to the war effort when she was first recorded as missing. This was hardly uncommon, for the industrial warfare fought on the planet had created vast clouds of polluted fog in which entire Regiments had vanished at a time, only for the survivors to reappear days or weeks later, starved and poisoned. Kerilla Decker's sisters prayed for her safe return, these prayers eventually turning into hymns to hasten her soul's journey to the Emperor's side.
This is where putting the story together becomes difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. An interview with a soldier of the Raghatan 168th, whose Regiment was deployed on Utrichien III at the time of Kerilla Decker's disappearance, revealed what happened to her. The man's platoon had also gotten lost in the chem-fog, when they came upon what he described as "a figure in armor that came from the fog, caked in blood and filth". This figure killed all but three of his platoon, before suddenly falling down as if struck, and screaming in such agony (despite none of the Guardsmen's desperate shots having hurt it) that the man and his surviving companions fled in terror.
They were, of course, executed by their Regiment's Commissars once my Acolytes had extracted the truth from them.
What follows is only a theory, but one I believe is rooted in truth. Cut off from her squad and possibly exposed to the toxic fogs due to damaged equipment, Kerilla Decker wasn't able to distinguish between the Raghatan troopers and the Utrichien rebels. By the time she realized her mistake, several of the Emperor's loyal servants were dead by her hand. I believe that it is then that Kerilla Decker succumbed to madness, unable to reconcile her crime with the way she saw herself – as a faithful daughter of the God-Emperor.
There were other sightings on Utrichien III, where an armored figure caught isolated pockets of Guardsmen and rebels alike and slaughtered them before vanishing back into the fog. How she survived without resupplying, I can only guess. Perhaps even in her madness she remembered to scavenge her victims for food, water and power packs, or perhaps the boons of the Dark Gods had already warped her to the point where she no longer required such sustenance.
Three years later, Utrichien III was finally reclaimed, thanks to the intervention of the Iron Hands Chapter. In the time since her fall, Kerilla Decker must have recovered some measure of her wits, for she managed to escape the planet. She was next scene amidst the ganger wars of Lefferios's underhive, where the gangs bestowed upon her the title of "Maiden of Carnage" in fearful reverence, a title she continues to use to this day.
According to the last intelligence I have available, Kerilla Decker has become a fully-fledged servant of Khorne, the Dark God of Blood and Slaughter. Unlike most devotees of that false deity, she is no longer mad, seeming to have passed through the madness that afflicted her after her fall to find a cold, ruthless bloodlust on the other side. All she cares about is death, the slaughter of as many living souls as possible, but she is efficient in it, and can delay her own bloodlust for the promise of greater carnage to come. She still wears her power armor, though it is as warped as she.
She is the Daughters' spiked gauntlet, deployed when the time for subtlety has passed and bloodshed is all that is required, and hundreds of loyal servants of the Emperor have been slain at her hand all across the Fahren Sector. Those who have lived violent lives are drawn to her like moths to a flame, forming a congregation of killers who worship her as a saint of carnage.
The Beloved Radiance – Phaeliue Brudan
Phaeliue Brudan was born as the sixth daughter of the Brudan family, a noble bloodline that has given many worthy leaders to the Fahren Sector. Her parents gave her away to the Sororitas when she was five, in an effort to keep her out of the dangerous world of Imperial politics after losing two of their older children to a feud with another noble house. For years, she was simply known as Phaeliue, only reclaiming her family name upon reaching adulthood, by which point the feud had been ended, along with the Brudan's rivals, and the threat had passed.
She remained among the Sisters even after her parents pulled some strings to give her the choice whether to do so or to return to a life of privilege and intrigue. Her mentors in the Sororitas praised her devotion when she chose to stay, seeing it as her having overcome temptation in order to continue to serve the God-Emperor. I believe it is then that the first seeds of her corruption were sown, for Phaeliue Brudan had other, less noble reasons for refusing her parents' offer. In House Brudan, she would have been only one child among several, to be married off for the sake of political alliances, while among the Sisters, she could make her own path. She could hardly be blamed for having such a motivation ; indeed, having seen the cesspit of highborn politics, I more than understand such a desire. But she lied about her reasons, claiming that her superiors were correct and that it was only service to the God-Emperor that called to her.
The charisma of House Brudan served Phaeliue well once she became a full-fledged Sister of Battle, belonging to an Order that no longer exists, for reasons that will be revealed shortly. Soldiers rallied to her on the battlefield, and she helped win victory after victory against the heretics and xenos of the Fahren Sector. Harsh conditions bred a special kind of fanaticism among troops fighting in isolation of the rest of the Imperium for months or years at a time, and she became something of a symbol, even a Saint. These whispers fuelled Phaeliue's pride, though my psychologist-savants tell me it is likely she also suffered from thoughts of inadequacy at the same time, every word of praise reminding her of the lie behind her presence among the Sisters of Battle.
The turning point for the woman called the Beloved Radiance by her followers came during the Purge of Telechor VII. The Purge took five months, and involved some of the most brutal urban warfare the entire Imperium had seen that century. The cult of the Children of Below had ensnared several hive-cities and most of a Navy battlegroup, resulting in the sacrifice of millions of Guardsmen to 'liberate' a ruined wasteland.
Phaeliue returned to the main convent of her Order with a legion of fanatical believers behind her, seeking to claim the holy relics sequestered there. Instead, she was greeted with (entirely true) accusations of blasphemy and heresy. Enraged by the rejection, she and her followers put the convent to the torch, slaughtering everyone inside over a week of vicious tortures that she claimed were performed for the good of her blind sisters' souls. After that, she went on a crusade against her former Order all across Fahren, gathering minions and support from within the Ecclesiarchy and those Imperial subjects who are most vulnerable to the lies of charismatic warlords.
This led to her being decreed a heretic, and a military force was assembled against her crusaders, meeting them in battle on Kernek II, before the Grand Cathedral. Phaeliue survived the battle, but her true nature and allegiance were revealed to all during the fighting, as her flesh and that of her followers erupted with mutations bestowed upon them by Phaeliue's patron, Slaanesh, Dark God of Excess, whose influence had been responsible for her meteoric rise. Even with those accursed gifts, however, the corrupted crusaders were wiped out, and their leader believed slain, with every trace of the Order she had come from erased from records by the Ecclesiarchy.
Yet Phaeliue survived, and escaped. The purges of her followers were not as thorough as they should have been, and she began to rebuild her cults in secret, having removed the pretence of loyalty to the Golden Throne of their creed but keeping the title of Beloved Radiance. Her followers preach liberation from the yoke of Imperial tyranny and dedication to a worthier, closer spiritual leader, but it is a lie, carefully constructed to fuel her monstrous ego. There is no depths to which her cultists won't sink if they believe it will earn them her favor, no act too vile. They are fanatics of the worst sort, and I write this having spent decades of my life interacting with the Ecclesiarchy.
The Weeping Crone – Stephanie Aktar
A member of the Order Hospitaller, Stephanie Aktar was, as far as my investigation could find out, an utterly ordinary sister of that branch of the Adepta Sororitas. She wasn't one of their greatest healers, nor was she incompetent; she didn't distinguish herself by the intensity of her faith, nor did she draw the attention of her superiors by lacking piety. Her origins, too, are utterly unremarkable : she was just another orphan taken in by the Schola whose talent for medicine led to her being recommanded to the Order.
Considering what she has now become, I find that lack of distinguishing qualities quite disturbing.
In her fourth decade of service to the Order, Stephanie Aktar was dispatched to the Aragothian Reach, a Sub-Sector that had been consumed by warfare for the last two centuries. There, hundreds of Astra Militarum Regiments have been wiped out fighting the Orks of WAAAGH! Mankilla, in a war of extermination that is still ongoing today. The ten years Stephanie spent there were some of the harshest of the long war, and she witnessed the slow and painful demise of tens of thousands of wounded that all her skills couldn't save.
She found comfort in her faith, as have countless billions of Imperial subjects since the Imperium's founding. But while the Imperial leadership in the Aragothian Reach was focused on the xenos threat, they were blind to the corruption that was growing within their own ranks. Despair at the state of the war was spreading, and the sermons of Imperial preachers weren't enough to keep it at bay. In the ruins and trenches of the Aragothian Reach, Imperial soldiers turned to darker powers for support, and the corruption of Nurgle, Dark God of Decay and Disease, seeped into them.
It was a slow process, but the grinding war provided the perfect environment for it. Prayers were slowly altered, one word here, one saintly name being slightly mispronounced there, and always in the name of the Emperor, that He might give them the strength to endure the horrors they faced while fighting His foes. Over and over, across decades, until each morning the soldiers beseeched the Father of Plagues for his blessing.
Stephanie Aktar was infected by this spiritual sickness, even as she continued to perform her duties tirelessly, saving the lives of hundreds of soldiers who died days later anyway. Then, one day, she was bestowed a blessing : her tears, of which she had shed so many since coming to the Aragothian Reach, now held the power to heal the wounded soldiers under her care. But that blessing came from Nurgle, Dark God of Pestilence, and not from the Emperor. Her tears poisoned the flesh and soul of those they appeared to heal, and that corruption slowly manifested in the flesh. A few months later, when the next set of reinforcements to be thrown into the grinder arrived, they found the trenches manned by rotting and mutated zombies that greeted them with wide smiles and open arms. These mutated monstrosities were still fully sentient, and had kept in contact with their commanders over the vox without anyone noticing anything strange was going on.
The reinforcements fled in terror (they were, of course, properly disciplined for their cowardice), and the trenches were bombed from afar, purged with fire before being dug up and filled with fresh conscripts once more. But Stephanie Aktar, who had been called the Weeping Crone by those she had saved, survived. I believe she was saved from the bombardment by the very Guardsmen she had corrupted, who wanted her to live even as the Imperium rained death upon them all.
Records show that a transport was lost in the area a few days later, though its disappearance was attributed to the Orks. With the number of Imperial vessels involved in the Aragothian Reach, it would have been easy for Stephanie Aktar and her surviving associates to sneak aboard a ship and discreetly take over, especially with the help of the Crone's corrupt blessings to infect more souls with her spiritual sickness.
Stephanie Aktar hates the Imperium with a bleak and terrible intensity, and has spread her message and corruption across many worlds. Always her method is the same : she offers healing freely to the downtrodden and the desperate, combining her tears' corrupting influence with mundane preaching of the Imperium's cruelty and callous disregard for its people. Her followers are fiercely loyal to one another, regarding themselves as one community pitted against a tyrannical regime. Her tears can still heal, but she has gained other blessings since her time in the trenches, though her physical appearance is unchanged. These dark gifts allow her to transform those who fight for her into relentless killing machines, immune to pain and incredibly resilient, as well as load their flesh with diseases released upon death, making them effective terror weapons.
The Many-Eyed Oracle – Aelvita Orrilus
Several of my Acolytes went mad while researching the twisted path of Aelvita Orrilus, and I cannot in good conscience blame or think less of them for it. At the time of writing, all but one have recovered from their ordeals enough to be of use once more, though it will be many years before I let them take to the field directly once more. What they uncovered made me consider upping the credential requirements for this file, but given the danger the Daughters pose, this might be a mistake that would cost the Imperium dearly.
The other Daughters of the Octed fell into damnation as a result of their inner moral failings meeting outside circumstances, but such is not the case of Aelvita Orrilus. She was, as far as I can tell, quite literally born into her heresy. My Acolytes' investigation revealed that both her parents belonged to a cult of Tzeentch, the Chaos God of lies and sorcery. Aelvita Orrilus was raised within that cult for the first nine years of her life, before her parents' apparent heroic death was orchestrated by the cult leader, it seems in order for her to join the Schola Progenium with the sole intent of infiltrating the Sororitas.
While rare for children that age to join the Schola, it is far from unheard of, as death can and does strike the servants of the Emperor regardless of their children's maturity. Aelvita Orrilus had been trained to show the traits the Sororitas look for in recruits, and her mind and soul had been tempered using dark rituals that made her true allegiance undetectable by the Mistresses of Novices under whom she studied, leading to her joining the Order of the Scarlet Shroud.
As my colleagues reading this will doubtlessly already know, the Order of the Scarlet Shroud was wiped out nine years after Aelvita Orrilus' induction. Aelvita Orrilus sent crucial information about the Order's defenses to her master, and a series of raid was conducted on its covens and fortresses by Tzeentchian cultists, with the main stronghold falling to the cult leader, a member of the dreaded Fifteenth Legion, the Thousand Sons. This Chaos Sorcerer, known to his slaves as Hekeros, sought to claim the relics guarded by the Scarlet Shroud for his own foul ends.
Once the Order fell and the relics were in his possession, Hekeros left the Sector, leaving Aelvita Orrilus behind after bestowing upon her the dark gift of mutation. Aelvita Orrilus' flesh is covered in eyes, through which her followers believe she can see the myriad possible futures and glean from them information that she can then use for her own schemes.
Here, however, is the true horror of her betrayal – nay, of her entire existence, and the reason why one of my Acolytes still needs to be kept under heavy sedation while my psykers prepare to excise the memory of the last three years from his mind. They investigated Hekeros, thinking to find clues as to his creation's intent in the master's own schemes, and discovered that Hekeros is no ancient Traitor from the Horus Heresy, but a newly damned soul, inducted into the ranks of the Thousand Sons in recent years – too recent years. Their research makes it clear that the child who would later be taken by the Fifteenth Legion and become Hekeros was born from Aelvita Orrilus herself, years after the destruction of the Scarlet Shroud.
It is one thing to know that the Warp makes a mockery of time, to hear stories of ships sailing for months only to arrive decades later, or even before they left. It is quite another to see the evidence of it before you, and the realization that the Archenemy is capable of creating such paradoxes was quite a shock for my Acolytes.
As far as I have been able to gather, it is Aelvita Orrilus who is responsible for assembling the Daughters of the Octed into one singular force of damnation and ruin. It is possible that she was the one who orchestrated their corruption as well, though I think this unlikely.
Aelvita Orrilus has inherited control over the cults that birthed her and destroyed the Order of the Scarlet Shroud. She commands cultists all across the Sector, hidden in positions of power as well as among the lower classes of the Imperium. All of them are fanatically devoted to her schemes and willing to give their lives for their completion, and they are responsible for countless acts of sabotage and terrorism that have weakened the Imperium across Fahren. Worse, many of them are minor psykers and meddling magi, and the rituals they perform threaten the very fabric of reality in the Sector.
AN : Got this finished faster than I thought (though given that I have had most of this written for months, that isn't saying much). This story was inspired by a prompt from TheRabbidRabbit, who wanted to see more Sisters of Battle corrupted by the Ruinous Powers.
I hope you enjoyed this latest document from our old friend Inquisitor Terkarch. I've another short story in the works, but as always, if you have an idea for a prompt, please put it in your review. You never know what prompt will cause inspiration to strike !
Zahariel out.