The Broken Chain, or the Black Book of Amihan Chainbreaker
By author Metempsychosis
Amihan and her daughters have always been a contemplative bunch, and for all their factionalism and disputes, for all their many schools of thought and disagreements between them, they do agree on and hold to certain ideas, ideas that resonate to some extent with the Imperial Truth, though the philosophies of the Chainbreakers diverge from it in interesting ways. All these discussions and arguments over the years and decades of the Great Crusade have been compiled and distilled by the Primarch and her Librarian Marina of Merdeka into a single volume called The Broken Chain, a sort of baseline commentary on the Imperial Truth and the philosophies of the Chainbreakers. It is half a manual for the Legion's standard operations, half a philosophical tract of why the Legion fights.
The book is structured into a number of dialogues, each one based on and discussing a certain maxim or aphorism that expresses the Imperial Truth, punctuated by quotes and poems and short stories said or written by Amihan or her daughters that illustrate major points made in the previous dialogues. It is a strange and contradictory work, at once rational and mystic, as it tries to come to grips with certain ideas over the course of the Great Crusade. In some of these dialogues, Amihan seems to wholeheartedly endorse the deeply rationalistic and secular ideals of the Emperor, despising superstition and the fear caused by the unknown, extolling the virtues of the human race, yet she stops short of pure human supremacy and pure atheism, and in other dialogues she argues against the "soullessness of the machines", as she expresses the fear of humanity and its dignity defaced and diminished by the traps mankind builds for itself. She also warns against underestimating the cunning of the xenos in their extolling of human potential, though she does not express a full hatred for them. In general, Amihan extols the importance of rational inquiry and the value of free thought and discourse, even as she recommends tactics to subvert and sabotage and ambush enemies in the name of the cause. All in all, the Bane of Kings comes across as a complicated figure, one who values critical thinking and the human spirit even as she and her daughters work to break the enemies of the Imperium in the shadows.
Though its core of 108 dialogues and 72 anecdotes are kept mostly unchanged from variant to variant, the Little Black Book (as it has come to be known) has many editions, variants, annotations, and commentaries, its first edition written long before the Rangdan Xenocides. Every Chainbreaker cell has a copy and a commentary on the Book, each cell adding their various practical experiences applying these theoretical postulates in practice and discussing these applications.
The Little Black Book is also one of the most widely translated books in the Imperium, and its stories and ideas have seeded themselves in many regions of the galaxy, especially among the systems brought to Compliance by the Chainbreakers. Though it was originally written in both the contemporary Gothic and Merdekan tongues, the Legion's operations across the Imperium have required them to translate their ideas into unnumbered tongues. Naturally, some difficulties and confusion have been caused by rough translations and paraphrases, but the high-minded ideals and Machiavellian tactics of Amihan and her daughters have, for better or worse, seeped into many systems and their governance.