I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.
INNOCENCE AND PUNISHMENT
While the Adeptus Arbites are Judges and enforcers of the Emperor's Law, it is the Assassins who bring death to those heretics and traitors who have earned the High Lords' attention. Founded during the Great Crusade by the Sigillite, who brought together the various schools of murder that had flourished across Sol during the Age of Strife, the Officio Assassinorum is a weapon with many different aspects, from the shapeshifters of the Callidus Temple to the drug-fuelled berserkers of the Eversor Temple. Over the millennia, the Assassins have turned the tide of wars and ended revolts before they could begin. Wrapped in secrecy, they have rarely fought in open warfare, but as with many things, this will change with the coming of Light's End …
We see the Assassinorum Temple. It does not look like much, when seen with mundane eyes. At first glance, there is little to differentiate its gothic spires from the countless temples and cathedrals that cover so much of Terra. This is by design, of course, for the lords of the Temple know the value of secrecy.
But we see deeper, brother. We see the eyes and the traps, the wards and the guards. We see the weight of death, crushing every stone. The Officio is responsible for less than a millionth of the deaths laid at the Imperium's feet, yet it is one of its most dreaded weapons.
We see the harvest of flesh across the galaxy. We see a thousand thousand killers being watched and judged, subjected to great trials before being dragged in the shadows so that they might be reborn.
We see unlit corridors where weapons of flesh and blood pass one another without a sound, and the chambers where children are made into killing machines. We see devices that pour knowledge into minds shaped like steel traps, and chemicals and drugs in bodies that have forgotten their names.
We see murder among the stars, done at the behest of a council made up of Humanity's most ruthless and ambitious lords. By mono-molecular blade or tank-rending bullet, by bloody claw or tasteless poison, those who are marked for the Officio's attention are walking dead. Only thrice has a kill order been rescinded; only twice has that decision been made in time to save the target from their doom.
We see the great Temples, the ones whose existence is known to the other High Lords and their lackeys. Speak now their names with us : Callidus. Vindicare. Eversor. Vanus. We see the empty halls also, where once stood Temples that fell out of favor over the ages. We see the lingering ghosts of the terrible conflict that was waged in the shadows, after the tyrant you always feared the Ecclesiarchy would inevitably create brought forth a reign of blood upon the galaxy.
We do not see the Culexus, only the shadow they cast in the Warp. Is soulessness not torment enough, that the Assassins must inflict such horror upon the Pariahs to create these monsters ?
We see noble Fadix, last of a long line of Grand Masters that stretches all the way back to Malcador. He stands forever alone, watched with dread and suspicion by his peers, bearing the weight of ten thousand years of murder, and the shame of two terrible failures. He clings to his faith to our father to endure that burden, but now our father is dead.
What will become of him once he realizes that, we wonder ?
Since the reformation of the Officio Assassinorum in the Roboutian Heresy's troubled aftermath, the halls of the Assassinorum Temple had only ever been breached twice. The first time had occurred after the War of the Beast, when the mad Grand Master of the time had slain all of the other High Lords and imposed a tyrannical rule upon Terra. For the crime of the Beheading, Grand Master Drakan Vangorich was brought to justice by none other than the Primarch Angron himself.
Returned from his xenos-purging crusade across the stars, the Lord of the Red Sands had smashed through every defense of the ancient structure, and slain every agent the treacherous High Lord had sent against him before killing Vangorich and putting an end to his insanity. To this day, secret records existed, available only to the current Grand Master, that described the onslaught of the Primarch's wrath in near-religious terms. Written by the few survivors of Angron's retribution, these texts served as a reminder of the price of over-reaching beyond the set limits of the Grand Master's duties. While the fact of Angron's return were known to the High Lords and their closest circles, only the Grand Master of Assassins knew the details of the final confrontation between Vangorich and the Twelfth Primarch – only he knew the last words of the Beheading's architect.
Whatever those details may be, whatever these secret accounts may relate, no Grand Master had ever contemplated such treason again.
Millennia later, after Goge Vandire's Reign of Blood was put to an end by the execution of the mad tyrant, another battle had been fought in the Temple of Assassins. The shape-shifting would-be usurper, Tzik Jarek, had sought to bring the Officio under the control of Vandire, triggering a civil war within the ranks of the Assassins. While this conflict, the Wars of Vindication, would last several years past Vandire's demise and spread across the entire Imperium, its first battle was fought on Holy Terra itself, within the very walls of the Temple. There, the Grand Master and his Legionary allies had confronted Jarek, putting the traitor to death and shattering his conspiracy to pieces.
While the details of both these occurrences had been kept secret from most of the rest of the Imperium, the Assassins themselves remembered them well. None questioned the necessity of these past assaults, but paranoia was one of the Officio's cardinal virtues. The Masters of the Officio knew that, should another High Lord attempt to follow in Vandire's footsteps, their first step would be to neutralize the threat that the Assassins posed to their ambitions. The watch of the Ordo Sicarius and the Officio's ties to the Eighth and Twentieth Legions made it all but impossible to turn the Assassins to such a cause again. Wary of failing in their sacred task of enforcing the Emperor's Judgment, the Grand Masters had made every effort to secure their headquarters against intrusion.
The Temple was moved several times across Terra, hidden among the thousands of cathedrals that covered the Throneworld. Apart from the Officio's members, only the Inquisitors of the Ordo Sicarius knew its actual location. But secrecy was far from the only defense of the Officio Assassinorum, who knew all too well how easily such a veil could be torn asunder.
Secret exchanges were made with select members of the Adeptus Mechanicus, with the Assassins trading forbidden relics recovered during their duties in exchange for technological improvements to their defenses. Ancient laws prevented the Officio Assassinorum from mustering conventional troops beyond the basic requirements of their holdings, but automated defences and creative interpretations of the letter of these laws allowed the Grand Master to marshal considerable power within his domain.
As was the case all across Sol, many of these defenses were affected badly by Light's End and the opening of the Tear of Nightmares. But, perhaps due to the metaphorical darkness in which they operated – things like that mattered when the Warp was concerned – the effects were less severe than elsewhere. And so, when the warband of the Innocent marched onto the Temple of Assassins, they found their intended victims ready.
We see the Innocent. They wear beautiful masks that cannot hide the monstrosity beneath from us. It is an echo of the Ninth's practices, though many bloodlines now conceal their sins beneath this tainted silver.
We see the source of the silver. We see the birth of the artisan order that craft these abominable masks. We see a ship marked with the crimson teardrop, crashing onto a lost world of Humanity. We see local explorers walking its corridors, finding only the dead, and the tools of their tainted craft. We see the innocent wonder in their eyes as they behold the craftmanship's beauty, and we hear the laughter of dead angels as the seed takes root.
We see a culture fall to ruin. We hear the defiant battle-cries of the last holdouts against the corruption. We see their last stand, at the gate of a temple the converts of Chaos' youngest god will burn and rebuild a hundred times bigger.
We see what they made of the corpses, and what they did to the children who hid there. In a galaxy of horrors, that atrocity still resonated with enough strength to draw the eyes of the Powers beyond.
Millennia later, we see our traitor nephews come to the world, driven by the vagaries of the Sea of Souls. This is no coincidence, brother. We see the masks forced upon their faces. We hear the screams of what remains of their conscience. We hear the broken sound of their laughter as they rise, purified of the last traces of their humanity, as their guilt is drunk by the masks they now wear.
There is no sin, they call out as they inflict their cruelty upon the galaxy. There is no good or evil, they shout, repeating one of the galaxy's oldest lies. There is only power. Only will, only desire, only pleasure and joy, and those should be pursued no matter the cost to others.
It is a lie. It is repugnant. It is wrong, and it must be ended.
From the distant world of Hadron's Standing, the Innocent were delivered to Holy Terra in a storm of dust and ash. As the Tear of Nightmares opened in the heavens, six mortal followers of Slaanesh had gathered before the Assassinorum Temple, disguised as priests attending one of the cathedrals that served as part of the Temple's camouflage. Each was a veteran of horrors, a powerful servant of Chaos who had inflicted untold atrocities in the dark places of the Imperium before being commanded to go to Terra by a golden figure visiting their dreams. Hidden from the eyes of Imperial authorities by the power of their master, which had twisted fortune to their advantage, these magisters of Ruin had made their way to the Throneworld among the throngs of pilgrims.
They had met for the first time mere hours before Light's End, and had performed the ritual that had brought forth the Innocent, culminating in their own willing sacrifice – each cutting their own throat, spilling their tainted blood upon Terra's holy grounds, desecrating them and easing the way for the Innocent. For a brief moment, reality sundered, and the Innocent and their followers were brought across the galaxy, finding themselves standing over the corpses of the magisters – which they promptly disregarded, their attention focused on the Assassinorum Temple.
Under the leadership of the Chaos Lord Melusis, in whose veins flowed the defiled gene-seed of the Eighth Legion, the Innocent and their mortal slaves advanced. With the Chaos Marines came the weapons they had used to lay waste to many worlds : tanks reclaimed from the battlefields where they had clashed with the Imperial Guard, as well as tainted vehicles of the Legiones Astartes, their machine-spirits broken and remade into cruel and spiteful things.
Within the Assassinorum Temple, Grand Master Fadix saw the approaching Chaos army. He did not know who these heretics were, how they had come to Terra or how they had learned the Temple's location. Yet his duty remained the same regardless of what the answers may be. The Temple had to be defended, and those who dared to despoil Holy Terra with their foul presence must be purged. There was no need to wait for the verdict of the High Lords : ancient precedents had long since been laid, allowing the Assassins to kill Chaos Marines and their deluded servants whenever the opportunity presented itself.
And so Fadix activated the defenses of the Temple. From transmitters disguised as gargoyles, a signal was sent from the Temple's apex, a command that was received by the swarms of psyber-crows that covered its walls and those of nearby cathedrals. Each of these creatures had been handcrafted by the artisans of the Officio, following techniques passed on since the Great Crusade – though the shape had been adapted from ravens to crows after the former had somewhat fallen out of fashion following the Nineteenth Legion's betrayal.
Thousands of the cybernetic corvids plunged on the Innocent. Their diamond-reinforced beaks tore through the crude armor and mutated flesh of the Chaos Marines' mortal followers, slaying hundreds of the degenerate cultists before the last of the familiars was crushed. First blood belonged to the Assassins, yet that tally had not been the true purpose of the attack : through the eyes of the psyber-crows, Fadix had taken a close look at his foe. A compilation of the images gave him a clearer notion of the forces arrayed against him : the Chaos Marines leading the horde were at least six hundreds, while the cultists accompanying them numbered in the thousands.
In recent years, rising threats to the Imperium had caused more kill orders than ever before to be approved by the High Lords. More and more Execution Forces had been dispatched, targeting Ork Warboss, Chaos Lords and rebel leaders across the galaxy. As a result, the number of Assassins within the Temple – which had never been high to begin with – had fallen to a historically low level. Yet the Officio believed in contingency planning, and the Grand Master had made sure to keep assets stored away precisely for a crisis such as this one – though not even his paranoia could have foreseen the true extant of the unfolding calamity.
Fadix's mind, which had planned and executed the death of hundreds of targets in the long centuries of his life, spun into action, weaving a plan to defend his domain and destroy the servants of the Archenemy.
Meanwhile, with the psyber-crows dispatched, the Innocent resumed their approach. The Temple's defenses opened fire on the Slaaneshi throng, answered in kind by the cannons of tanks. The Chaos artillery far outgunned the turrets of the Temple, which had been designed with secrecy foremost in mind – few cathedrals had heavy cannons, even in the Imperium. Though they took a toll on the Innocent, one by one the Temple's turrets were silenced, and the warband arrived before the gates.
Hidden in alcoves and behind murder holes, Vindicare killers opened fire on the Chaos warband. Their high-powered sniper rifles were aimed at the Chaos Marines, and the shells they fired had been designed to kill even the most thick-skulled Ork Warboss.
But the Innocent were protected by the unholy power they served. Auras of power rippled from their masks, and the Vindicare shells exploded in mid-air, or were thrown off-course and slammed into the screaming cultists instead. By luck or the whim of the Dark Prince, a few did find their mark, punching through ceramite and detonating within transhuman flesh – but even then, the wounded Innocent did not die, sustained as they were by the eldritch artefacts embedded on their faces. Warp energy roiled between them, each reinforcing the others.
This, too, was watched by Fadix. The Grand Master saw the silver masks glow with the same light that burned in the skies of Holy Terra, and recognized what it meant.
Concentrated fire from the Innocent's artillery soon took down the gates, and Melusis led his warband onward. Inside, the Assassinorum Temple was a labyrinth, filled with deadly traps. Those who lived there were all used to avoiding its perils – and the regular deaths were regarded as a culling of the weak. The Innocent herded their mortal slaves ahead of themselves, laughing as their followers died by the score to lethal defenses before destroying them and sending a new batch in.
After an hour of advancing like this without seeing a single defender – the Vindicare had retreated immediately after their first volley had failed to hurt their targets – the Innocent finally met resistance that could actually be fought. At the order of Fadix, a hundred stasis coffins had been opened. Their occupants had been loaded with mission parameters of exceeding simplicity : kill everything within the Temple that wasn't a member of the Officio Assassinorum.
One hundred Eversor Assassins were a force to be reckoned with. Not since the War of the Beast and Angron's wrathful judgement of Drakan Vangorich had so many of the drug-fuelled killers been unleashed at once. The first cultists to encounter them did not even have time to be terrified before they were torn apart. The ones after that barely had time to scream.
By the time the Chaos Marines reacted, the Eversor had slaughtered thousands of cultists. The lords of the Innocent, however, were stronger foes. Empowered by their silver masks, they faced the Assassins, revelling in the chance of slaying these living incarnations of the Emperor's justice.
Eventually, the last of the Eversor was put down. The bombs that were normally implanted within them to ensure they took down their killers with them had been deactivated : instead of series of nuclear explosions that would have levelled the entire Temple, each of the dead Eversor detonated with the strength of a fusion grenade as the chemicals running through their bodies were thrown off balance.
Between the fighting and the explosions, the Innocent had taken their first Astartes casualties. Nearly a third of their number had perished, but the rest pressed on, caring for the demise of their brethren only insofar as it had also weakened their own power. The strange hive-mind of sorts that the Innocent possessed may have prevented them from suffering from the same internecine conflicts that had ravaged countless Chaos warbands, but it had also destroyed any possibility of them forming genuine bonds of brotherhood.
They made their way through the ruins created by the Eversor's death, and deeper into the Temple. The Temple was far larger than it appeared : networks of tunnels and catacombs spread below its cathedral-like disguise, full of the archives of ten millennia of murder. The Innocent wanted to destroy it all – to erase every trace of the Officio's existence. As they went deeper, they left groups of cultists behind to burn the records and defile the monuments of past Assassins.
However, few of these slaves to Ruin completed their vile tasks. As their masters left them behind, silhouettes emerged from the shadows, picking up lone cultists and dragging them away before returning to the rest, having assumed the shape of their victims. From within these groups, the daughters of the Callidus Temple sabotaged the cultists' efforts. With carefully chosen words and actions, they turned the Slaaneshi worshippers against one another.
At the head of the Innocent advance, Melusis was growing frustrated. Although he and his brothers had slaughtered many servants of the Officio Assassinorum, they had yet to find their true prey – the High Lord of Terra that the Sanguinor had told them was there, the Grand Master of Assassins, who dared to think his actions were in any way just. For hours they wandered deeper and deeper, finding only automated defenses and small pockets of resistance – until, at last, they found Fadix.
The Grand Master confronted the lord of the Innocent in a vast underground library, which vast shelves were filled with books on the countless methods of murder Humanity had designed over its bloody existence. Standing on a towering balcony, the High Lord spoke to the invaders.
"Ah, here you are, 'Grand Master'," Melusis sneered. "We have been looking for you."
"Yes, I thought as much." Fadix' voice echoed in the library, empty save for the Innocent and their prey. "You have made quite a mess of this place."
"And you would judge us for this ?" laughed Melusis, the sound warm and cruel. "You are a killer, just like us. You hide the truth behind pretty lies, but you and I both know the truth."
"You know nothing, traitor," replied Fadix, his voice haughty and confident, full of cold and righteous anger. The mere sound of it was enough to make Melusis grind his teeth in disgust. "I serve at the will of the other High Lords. Through them, the will of the God-Emperor is made manifest, and I carry His judgement to those I command. But there are exceptions – circumstances where I am allowed to act without official sanction. By intruding here, by breaking the sanctity of Holy Terra, by defiling the Throneworld with your corruption, you have placed yourselves within one such provision. By the power vested in me by the Master of Mankind, I judge you all guilty, and sentence you to death."
But Fadix did not stay and face the Chaos Lord head-on : instead, he turned tail and fled, mocking Melusis, telling him that he and his kind would be lost forever in the labyrinth beneath the Officio, until such time as the Imperium deigned to deal with them. Enraged beyond measure by the High Lord's provocations, Melusis called all of his brothers to his side, and drew upon the power of their masks to hunt down Fadix through the tunnels.
Deeper and deeper they went, chasing the Grand Master's trail. In his rage, Melusis did not wonder why they had stopped encountering traps since the confrontation in the library. It was a mistake Fadix was counting on. He led his pursuers into an immense chamber, whose vaulted ceiling was held up by hundreds of meters-thick pillars of black stone. The temperature in that room was far below the point of freezing water, but neither Fadix nor the Innocent were bothered by the cold. Blue torches atop the walls – which reached over three hundred meters in height – cast a dim illumination upon the room.
There, the Innocent found Fadix waiting for them, standing in the shadows of the pillars. Driven by his anger, Melusis charged, and with a single blow of his daemonic axe, cut his prey in two. But even as the halves of the Grand Master fell to the cold metal of the floor, their flesh flowed like wax, revealing another Callidus Assassin – while the entrance the Innocent had come in closed, the massive gate rolling back into place.
Melusis laughed. Was this it ? A pitiful attempt to trap them ? Did that High Lord believe the Innocent would succumb to something as pathetic ?
And yet … there was something about this room. Something he couldn't quite understand, even as all his senses – both mortal and Warp-wrought – told him there was no threat in his surroundings. For the first time in decades, the Chaos Lord felt a twinge of unease.
Suddenly, where before there had been only bare stone, figures in black clung to the pillars, looking down at the Innocent with skull-faced helmet. Melusis saw over thirty of them leering at his warband. Lore that had been implanted in his mind during his ascension to the ranks of the Space Marines floated to the surface of his mind – Culexus Assassins, the soulless killers of the Imperium, most dreaded weapons of the Officio Assassinorum.
Then the collective Pariah aura of the Culexus slammed into Melusis, and he could think of nothing but the horror of it. All around him, the other Innocent stumbled, overwhelmed with a sense of dread that was entirely alien to them. Yet even that feeling paled in comparison to what came next.
Under the collective psychic nullification effect of the Culexus, Melusis felt himself sundered from the rest of his warband, cut off from the other silver masks. He felt his strength drain away from him, reducing him to the still considerable power of an Astartes. With a growl, he reached for his bolter, ready to open fire and rid himself of these abominations – but his hand froze mid-gesture.
Before his wide eyes, the mask of silver that had been affixed on his face in another life fell, and smashed on the stone floor, scattering in a thousand fragments with a discordant sound. Struck numb, Melusis heard the same sound repeat itself, as the masks of his three hundred brothers also fell, the eldritch energies within them annihilated by the Culexus' mere presence.
And with the masks gone, all that they had kept away came flowing back in. All the doubts, all the bitterness – all the guilt, too, for despite his exile from the Eighth Legion Melusis had not fallen so far as to forget the teachings of the King of the Night. All the terrible things he had done since then drowned him in a tide of horror.
His axe slipped from nerveless fingers. It clanged on the floor, just an axe now, the daemon bound within it banished back to the Sea of Souls. Melusis followed it, falling to his knees with enough strength to crack the stone. His mouth was open, he wanted to scream, but no sound came out.
The skull-faced monsters walked among the downed Innocent, striking them one by one with beams of un-light from the strange devices affixed to their heads. Every warrior struck by these weapons fell, and even through the horror and the loss of his extra-sensory perceptions, Melusis knew they were not simply dead – their very souls were drawn from their bodies, absorbed by the Animi Speculi and subjected to a worst fate than anything the Dark Prince could conjure for those who failed him.
He heard footsteps, and forced himself to look up. There was Fadix, the Grand Master of Assassins, standing over Melusis' fallen form. Not a double this time, the Chaos Lord knew. Even through the pain and absence, he could feel the will of the High Lord, radiating from him like light from a cold star.
"How ?" Melusis asked, forcing the words out. "… How can you … bear it ?"
"I am the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum," replied Fadix. "By the will of the Emperor am I elevated beyond guilt, for I am but His instrument."
"But … He is ...dead !" croaked the Chaos Lord. "He is dead ! He is gone !"
For a moment, Fadix appeared to be considering Melusis' words, his expression remaining unchanging. Then, he nodded, as if to himself.
"Perhaps. But my duty remains the same."
The last thing Melusis, once of the Night Lords, saw before death finally claimed him and his withered soul slipped from his corpse, was the velvet ribbon in Fadix' hands closing in on him.
With the death of the Innocent, the immediate danger to the Assassinorum Temple had passed. The leftover cultists were swiftly slain, as Fadix gave the Culexus free reign within the complex. Divided and confused by the Callidus' infiltration, the cultists were easy prey for the Culexus and the Vindicare, whose weapons were more than powerful enough to deal with heretics and mutants.
Yet the threat was not over. When the Innocent had attacked the Temple, they had marked it for every nearby Slaaneshi force. The Lost and the Damned, the Laers, the Neverborn and the Tithed Ones – all knew that this was a place of importance, a battlefield worthy of fighting for even if they did not know why. With the Temple's defenses broken by the Innocent and many of his assets lost, Fadix was forced to order his remaining operatives to focus on defending the complex, rather than dispatch them across Terra to the rescue of other fronts.
AN : This chapter was a bit shorter than anticipated. I suppose the Titan one (which is almost complete, with over 9k words) will compensate for it. That particular chapter has proven a real challenge, as I go over all the lore of the Grey Knights in canon, all that I have written about them in the Roboutian Heresy, and sees how to build from this. I am quite satisfied with the answers I have come up with, but we will see what you think when we reach that chapter.
You may be thinking that the Imperium is winning a lot of battles despite the Angel War being supposed to be its darkest hour. I have two things to say in answer : first, while the handful of battles you see may be going well, there are still billions dying with every passing hour across Sol. Secondly, [ACCESS DENIED]. So you will have to wait and see.
As always, please tell me what you thought of this chapter, any questions you may have, and what you are hoping to see in the next parts of the Angel War. I am still hoping to finish this arc by the end of the year, but we all know what 2020 thinks of our hopes. Stay safe !
Next week : Faith and Woe, as K'alith the Prurient rises in the Ecclesiarchal Palace.
Zahariel out.