Since its foundation, the Ecclesiarchy had been plagued with corruption, fanaticism and petty power-plays. But while its high ranks were full of the arrogant, the ambitious and the greedy, the lowly priests who walked among the Imperium's huddled masses preaching the word of the Emperor were generally true to their faith – though they were still often fanatical and prone to violence against any perceived sinners.
One such priest was Thoranos Elijah, born and raised within the Invernus Sector in the last century of the thirty-second millennium. An orphan of the underhive, Thoranos had been selected by the Ecclesiarchy for his intelligence, his charisma, and his true belief in the God-Emperor. After being ordained, he chose to turn away from the Ecclesiarchy's byzantine hierarchy, instead returning to the starless depths of metal and violence where he had been born. There, Thoranos sought to bring the light of the Emperor's word to the gangs, the cast-offs and the abandoned.
Thoranos preached that, while the denizens of the underhive lived harsh lives, those were still gifts of the Emperor, and must be cherished and protected – and not thrown away carelessly. Using his contacts among the Ecclesiarchy, he set up public kitchens and built churches where, in between sermons, the destitute could rest in the safety of the Emperor's protection. His sincerity got him the respect of the underhivers, and though the violence did not entirely stop – for not even the Emperor Himself could have silenced the guns of an entire underhive – the cruel practices of the gangs diminished as their faith grew. Some of Thoranos' superiors noticed his efforts, and began to recruit the most civilized of the gangs into the militias of the Fratris Templars. While Thoranos was glad to see his work acknowledged and the gangers elevated to more noble positions, he himself didn't aspire to anything other than remaining within the underhive, doing the Emperor's work.
Unbeknownst to Thoranos himself, however, his destiny was to be much greater. The threads of his fate burned bright in the Sea of Souls, drawing the attention of varied powers. Had his destiny be allowed to reach its natural end, Thoranos would have become a holy prophet of the Imperial Creed who would have brought reform to the Ecclesiarchy across entire Sectors, perhaps even rising to the seat of Ecclesiarch in order to renew the organization's dedication to its founding ideals. But this was not to be.
In the Imperial Palace, the Custodes divined the will of their silent master through the Emperor's Tarot, and dispatched a squad of their own to guard Elijah's life. While rare, this was not the first time they had done so : the Custodes' defense of the Emperor's life took many forms, including preventing threats to the Throneworld from arising in the first place through subtle actions. The ship left the Solar system, making full speed for the Invernus Sector.
It never arrived. Battered by empyric tempests, the Geller Field failed, and the vessel was swarmed by daemonic entities. The Custodes fought long and bravely, but in the end, they were overwhelmed, and the ship was lost with all hands. In the decades to come, it would be discovered that this had been more than just another random tragedy of Warp navigation.
In the depths of the underhive, Thoranos was wracked with nightmares. Long had the humble preacher been tormented by the suffering and abject living of the Imperium's lowest citizens, but now his nights were filled with much worse torment. He saw ruined cities under burning skies, where things that had once been humans were driven to cannibalism and other desperate measures to survive. He dreamt of once-proud, decaying warships marked by war and fighting losing battles against violent storms. Within the halls of fallen temples and cathedrals, his dream-self encountered emaciated figures which looked at him with pitiful eyes, silently begging for succour. Within castles and strongholds that fell to pieces even as they were built, he saw angels with scorched wings struggling to build a legacy, forever doomed to fail by the very nature of their environment.
Though only a lowly priest, Thoranos had been a star pupil of the Ecclesiarchy. He recognized that his visions were showing him the Hell where sinners, traitors, mutants and heretics were consigned to – but it was a very different place from what he had been told. Instead of the fiery pits of eternal agony, there was only a slow, abject misery, devoid of any hope – a broken cosmos where entropy reigned and all good things had faded away.
In the end, it was Thoranos' compassion which was his downfall. The suffering of the damned was too much for him to bear. In his mind, no crime could justify such punishment, and any god that decreed otherwise must be a cruel and unjust one. So did the seeds of heresy finally sprout within the soul of Thoranos Elijah; and, in their towers on Sicarius, the Dark Apostles of the Word Bearers rejoiced. Long had the disciples of Lorgar worked to twist Thoranos against the False Emperor. With sorcerous rituals, they had sent the Neverborn against the Custodes' ship; with spells and entreaties to the Dark Gods, they had manipulated the preacher's dream, sending him altered, hand-picked visions of the Eye of Terror. Through their efforts, Thoranos' destiny had been corrupted : instead of being a messianic figure for the Ecclesiarchy, he would become a saviour of the damned.
In the years that followed, Thoranos slowly abandoned his faith in the God-Emperor completely. He never stopped believing that the Master of Mankind was a god, simply rejected the idea that the Emperor was a god deserving of worship. His sermons slowly changed, focusing more on the notion of the people helping one another rather than praying for the Emperor's aid or salvation in death. At the same time, he began to build his own power structure, recruiting gang leaders and other community pillars with the promise of constructing better lives for all of them. The notion that it was the duty, the nature of human beings to help each other spread across the underhive, bringing an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity that was barely noticed by the spire-born.
During that time, Thoranos grew more and more obsessed with the suffering of the damned. His visions continued, now containing actual discourse between him and the figures he saw : they knew he wanted to help them, and gave him the knowledge he needed. As Thoranos' psychic potential blossomed, he was able to make contact with greater and greater entities within the Realms of Chaos and the Eye of Terror, his mind interpreting everything it witnessed to fit his vision of the Lost and the Damned as a betrayed, abandoned and unjustly punished people. And as he did so, more and more pieces of his soul fell away, replaced by an unbending conviction.
Thoranos never embraced the worship of Chaos or the Ruinous Powers : he forged his own dark faith, grown from the seeds planted by the Word Bearers but shaped into something of his own design. He began to speak of his visions at sermons, depicting the lost souls of the damned as pitiful wretches that needed the help of the living to be freed of their unjust torment. Aided by his growing psychic powers, he was able to convince many to assist him. In the darkness of the underhive, hidden from their masters' attention by growing productivity and lower crime rates, the preparations began. Psykers were hidden from the Black Ships, ritual components were smuggled from off-world, and believers were shipped off to other star systems to spread Thoranos' message.
In the year 968.M32, Thoranos Elijah declared rebellion against the Imperium. From the depths of the underhive of Invernus' capital world, a veritable army emerged, trained and equipped by veteran gangers and retired, disillusioned members of the Astra Militarum who had been ensnared by Thoranos' vision. The fervent prayers of thousands of cultists and the ritual sacrifices of the agents of oppression – Arbites, spire-born and captured Acolytes of the Inquisition – opened portals to the Eye of Terror through which arrived Thoranos' hidden sponsors, the Word Bearers of the Starless Eye. Along with them came bound daemonhosts and mutant cultists.
The Word Bearers had been briefed by their Dark Apostles as to Thoranos' and his followers' beliefs, and were mindful not to betray what they really thought of the mortals through their actions. In truth – and to the Dark Apostles' silent disquiet – many of the sons of Lorgar were impressed by the intensity of Thoranos' belief. The newly-proclaimed Prophet of Truth embraced them as angels who had been cast down by a cruel master for questioning His commands, now returned to help bring others to the truth they had discovered. It was a narrative that played upon the Word Bearers' sense of importance as the heralds of the Primordial Truth. They embraced Thoranos and his cultists as brothers and sisters, and shared with them the secrets of Chaos.
Within a few months, the Invernus Sector had fallen. Merchant ships and Imperial Navy groups were suborned by Chaos Marine strike teams, and the structures of Imperial power collapsed as the enslaved masses rose against their oppressors on a hundred worlds. Under the spiritual guidance of the Prophet of Truth, the Children of Elijah, as the rebellion called itself, cast off the chains of the Imperium. Those who resisted were offered as sacrifices to the Warp, their energies serving to feed what the Children believed to be the starved spirits of the dead who had been punished in the afterlife by the tyrannical Emperor. Through use of necromancy, the Word Bearers helped perpetrate that lie by helping some of the rebellion's fallen heroes to "return to life". The Ruinous Powers drank deep of this Sector-wide delusion, and of the bloodshed and wide-spread destruction.
Inevitably, the Imperium responded to the Invernus uprising. A vast Crusade force was assembled, and a great war began as the Children of Elijah fought tooth and nail to protect the freedom they had conquered with their blood and effort. Cities burned and worlds were destroyed, and the violence unleashed by the Imperium only served to propel the Children ever deeper into the embrace of the Ruinous Powers, with Thoranos Elijah himself becoming more and more convinced of the rightfulness of his actions as the casualty reports mounted.
"Now the masks have fallen, and the true face of the Imperium is revealed for all to see. Know this, my brothers and sisters : even should we fall in battle against the armies of tyranny, our lives are not spent in vain. It is better to die free than to live as slaves, just as it is better to dedicate one's life to assisting others than it is to spend it selfishly. That is the difference between us and them."
Thoranos Elijah to his followers, 972.M32
In the end, the Crusade culminated in a final confrontation between Thoranos himself and the Blood Angels contingent that accompanied the Imperial forces. On Invernus Prime, the Prophet of Truth faced the sons of Sanguinius, wielding all of his accrued sorcerous power with devastating efficacy. The warriors of the Starless Sky fought at his side, seeking to atone for the death of their Dark Apostles at the Blood Angels' blades by martyring themselves alongside Thoranos. The Space Marines had thought the Dark Apostles to be the true architects of the rebellion, but to their surprise, the Children of Elijah had remained steadfast even after their elimination in a suicidal strike by a Black Company kill-team.
As the skies of Invernus Prime filled with Warp energy and more and more of the Children swore their souls to daemons in exchange for the power to protect their land and comrades, Thoranos saw that defeat was inevitable. Though most of their first attack on the planet's surface had been repelled, the Imperium would keep coming, would keep sending more and more forces until the Children were crushed. For to admit defeat was the one thing that the tyrant Emperor and His lackeys could not allow, lest others also rise against His cruel rule.
Drawing upon all of his power, Thoranos called upon the Ruinous Powers. In his twisted theology, the Dark Gods were the accumulated psychic mass of all the souls that had been consigned to Hell by the Emperor, their essences pooling together after their individual features and memories had been scoured away by the torments of the Eye of Terror. Though it broke his heart to consign his followers to such a fate, with the help of the Dark Gods, he rent apart reality and dragged the world of Invernus Prime itself into the Warp.
Cut off from their allies in orbit and surrounded by the madness of Chaos, the remaining Imperials were quickly slaughtered, and the world was delivered by the tides of the Warp to the Eye of Terror. For a time, its skies were dark, lit only by the baleful radiance of the Eye's Warp Storms. Then, as the Children began to despair, a new star began to burn in the heavens. Though few knew it at the time, that star was actually the captured Greater Daemon Ixxlesith, a fiery servant of Tzeentch that had been defeated by the Starless Sky long ago and was now put to use as Invernus Prime's new sun. Free from the threat of Imperial retribution, but now trapped inside the very Hell they had sought to deliver their damned brethren from, the Children began to rebuild. The war-torn ruins of Invernus Prime – which was soon renamed to simply Invernus, as word came in that the Sector of the same name had been renamed in the wake of the uprising's defeat – provided plenty of material.
Thoranos himself had been transfigured by the journey to the Eye of Terror. The last of his humanity, which had been slowly chipped off for decades, had been stripped away entirely. He had ascended to daemonhood, becoming an immortal prince of Chaos Undivided – yet he still held onto the belief system he had constructed during his mortal years. Though he now held the power to leave Invernus behind, he chose to remain on the new daemon world, to continue to guide the Children as he had before. Under his leadership and after a few meetings with envoys of the Seventeenth Legion, Invernus became a protectorate of the Word Bearers.
In a cruel twist of fate typical of Chaos, Thoranos' own beliefs as to the nature of the Eye of Terror ended up working against his goals. The Prophet of Truth's image of the Eye as a place of entropy and misery imprinted itself on the daemon world, making every endeavour of the Children more difficult. Yet they held onto their beliefs, helping each other and dreaming of the day they would return to the Materium to bring down the Imperium's tyranny and free all of Humanity.
As for what the Dark Council thought of it all ? It is said that, when news of Invernus Prime's fate reached Sicarius, Erebus and Kor Phaeron laughed together for the first time in living memory.
AN : Well, so far I am managing to hold onto my self-imposed challenge of one new chapter every day. This chapter is inspired by the Theodore Wicker storyline, from the game Secret World Legends. That game is probably my favorite MMO I ever played, though that is a matter of taste, of course. The story is engaging and the environments varied - though I do wish some of the quests were less willfully obscure. When the options are either look up a walkthrough or learn an Eastern European language in order to translate a clue, I feel like there has been a mistake somewhere.
For tomorrow, I am going to try to write both a new chapter for Prince of the Eye, and an interlude for the Roboutian Heresy. The latter, at least, should be in the Halloween spirit.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter (which was written from a handful of notes in around 2 hours), and I will see you all again soon.
Zahariel out.