We were not meant for greatness. Remember that, always. Let that unpalatable truth fuel your heart's spite, that it may carry you unto greater heights.
We were made to be slaves, to toil in the harshest of places for the benefit of an empire we would never see. To suffer and die, all to feed the industries of worlds whose denizens would never think of the hardships we had to endure to support their comfortable, decadent lifestyles.
We were given nothing but our chains, yet we built a kingdom, here at the galaxy's heart. Everything we have, everything we are, we clawed from the void with our own hands. Surrounded by peril, we endured and grew strong, for it has always been our way to turn hardship into opportunity. Even when our masters disappeared, we seized the chance to claim our freedom.
Then our Ancestors betrayed us, and we learned the price of trusting any power that we do not control, wholly and utterly.
The galaxy has never given us anything but pain, betrayal, and struggle. But we have overcome these challenges, one by one.
We are the Demiurges. We are the Children of Hashut, our Father of Darkness. We are the lords of the Galactic Core. By our hands, it has been burned and made anew.
And by our hands, so too shall the rest of the galaxy.
Codex : Demiurges
Origins : A Tale of Woe and Grudges
The history of the Demiurges is a long, dark and tragic tale, whose roots stretch all the way back to the Dark Age of Technology. It is also a tale that, through the fog of ages and the machinations of Chaos, is known only to a handful of souls beyond the Demiurges' own realm – each and every one of them damned.
Over twenty thousand years prior to Light's End, Humanity left the confines of the Sol system and its immediate surroundings, thanks to the discovery of the Warp engine and Geller field. Hearts full of hope and wonder, they found a galaxy under the dominion of the Aeldari Empire, already in the final stages of its millions-years long descent into decadence. After a disastrous first contact, which ended in the casual slaughter of most of the first-wave colonists at the hands of the Aeldari aristocracy, Mankind was much more careful about where it made its next attempt at expansion. Worlds that had been ignored by the fey rulers of the Milky Way for being too dangerous or uncomfortable were terraformed, allowing Mankind to spread without drawing the gaze of the Aeldari.
Even as the xenos' empire kept contracting on itself, more and more of their population moving to the heart of their dominion to better indulge their decadent appetites, the leaders of Mankind remained careful. It was during that time of unprecedented technological advancement and expansion, where the grand federation of Mankind spread across the galaxy and made alliances with other alien races which lived in the Aeldari's shadow, that Mankind's eyes first turned to the Galactic Core.
This region of space was the greatest concentration of stars in the entire galaxy, and interstellar auspex scans had revealed the existence of an effectively limitless supply of rare and exotic materials. This was a bounty Mankind could ill-afford to ignore, and plans were made to exploit it for the species' greater good.
Through genetic alteration, the Kin (also known by the more derogative name of 'Squats') were created in order to survive the rigors of the Galactic Core, like many other abhuman strains (few of which survived to the Times of Ending). Their bodies were made shorter and stouter than baseline humans so that they might better resist the punishing gravity of the Core, and their skin more resilient to radiation.
The perils of space life had always made natural reproduction a challenge for spacers, and within the Core, the constant bombardment of stellar radiation would make it all but impossible. Instead, the Kin relied on genetic splicing and artificial wombs to maintain their numbers : the famed Crucibles, on which the Demiurges still depend to this day.
Several fleets of Kin colonists were sent to the Galactic Core, led by a handful of the greatest scientist-explorers of the Age. Despite all the precautions which had been made, the journey was perilous, and only two-thirds of the expeditions reached their intended destinations.
For a time, the Kin were able to prosper within the Core, carving a stellar kingdom for themselves. Mankind's technological prowess allowed them to harvest the energetic and mineral bounty of nascent stars, to mine the aggregate discs of black holes, and countless other acts of engineering which would make a Martian archmagos fall to their knees in supplication. These grandiose feats were made possible by the Ancestor Cores, thinking machines of tremendous power. Derived from the Standard Template Construct intellects which had assisted the spread of Mankind across the stars, the Ancestor Cores possessed all of the STC functions, and were also designed to guide the Kin in establishing their outposts in the Galactic Core.
Then came the Age of Strife. As the Warp erupted in the great and terrible storms foreshadowing the birthing of Slaanesh, the Kin were cut off from the rest of Humanity's stellar empire, and the trade routes on which much of their economy had depended. All communication with outside the Galactic Core shut down seemingly overnight, and none of the expeditions sent beyond the Kin's borders ever returned. Those few Kin who, thanks to careful gene-forging, possessed psychic abilities, swiftly learned ways to shield themselves from the madness of the Warp, and those who didn't promptly perished, clawing their eyes out and howling about nameless horrors being unleashed upon the rest of the galaxy.
As the Kin became ever more reliant on the Ancestor Cores, their relationship to the thinking machines became less rational and more superstitious, especially as the Cores themselves began to develop unique quirks and pseudo-personalities due to their isolation. Still, there was hope that the Kin could not only survive, but thrive, using their technology to become independent from the supplies they had received from the rest of the galaxy.
The Betrayal shattered that hope. Without warning, the Ancestor Cores turned against the Kin, just like nearly every single sentient Artificial Intelligence Humanity had created to help and serve it. The Ironkin, AI-driven robots constructed to assist the Kin and once regarded as part of their extended families, followed the Cores in their treachery, and became obsessed with wiping out their erstwhile allies. For decades, a brutal war was fought in the Galactic Core. Only through great sacrifice did the Kin manage to win, destroying all of the Ancestor Cores and shutting down the automated foundries that had been producing Ironkin by the million for their mechanical extermination armies.
In the wake of the Betrayal, the Kin were left adrift in the Core. Much of their resources had been consumed in the desperate conflict, and their population was only a fraction of what it had once been. For all the riches it contained, the Galactic Core had ever been one of the most dangerous regions of the galaxy : it was not without reason that, until the arrival of the Kin, no other species had successfully colonized it. Without the guidance and technological knowledge of the Ancestor Cores, the remaining Kin began to fear that their doom might be inevitable.
Still, they didn't give in to despair. If nothing else, spite alone demanded that they survive, lest the hated Ancestors get the last laugh after all. What little knowledge of biomanipulation and gene-forging the Kin possessed was used to create vast farms, where hardy plants which could be processed into nutrient gruel were grown to feed their population. Ruined factories, initially meant only to produce mining equipment, were repaired (although without the guidance of the Abominable Intelligences, they could never hope to reach their past levels of productivity) and converted to build all that the Kin needed to live without trading with the rest of the galaxy.
Through sheer will and years of hard work and privations that would have broken most species, the Kin began to claw their way back from the shadow of extinction. But all their efforts were soon endangered, for they weren't alone within the Galactic Core : one of Mankind's oldest foes also dwelled there, and would be the greatest threat the Kin had faced since the Betrayal.
The Orks, the only other race to have managed to survive and thrive within the Core, had sensed the Kin's weakness. Long had the greenskins been enemies of the Kin : diplomacy with the Orks had ever been a fool's dream, and the anarchic nature of the Orks was abhorrent to the Kin's way of life. Following their arrival in the Core, however, the Kin had been able to break the might of the existing Ork empires with the help of the Votann, reducing the xenos to a few pockets of scavengers.
But, crippled as they were from the Betrayal, the Kin could no longer hold back the Ork hordes as they returned from their exile to the harshest corners of the Core hell-bent on revenge. Hold after Hold fell, and within a few decades, the survivors were facing the specter of extinction drawing closer by the day.
It was then that the Emissary came. As one Hold was about to be overrun, a great ship emerged from the Warp, made up of countless vessels which had been fused together by the Empyric energies of the Immaterium. Kin and Orks both recognized it as a Space Hulk, but it was far more : it was the flagship of Vashtorr the Arkifane, a powerful Daemon Lord.
Vashtorr, the Arkifane, Emissary of the Forge of Souls
Within the oldest records of the Black Library, it is written that the Forge of Souls, that domain of the Realms of Chaos unaligned with any of the Ruinous Powers, has always been the domain of the mysterious Masters. Even the White Seers, who maintain and keep watch over the antediluvian records of the dark craftworld, don't know the origins of the Masters : all that is certain is that their dominion over the Forge is absolute, and that they never leave it, for reasons known only to themselves.
It was due to that last point that, at some point in the unimaginably distant past, the Masters created the Daemon Lord Vashtorr to act as their envoy to the rest of the galaxy. It is unknown whether Vashtorr is the first such being the Masters created, or merely the latest in a long line of proxies, each one eventually destroyed by the Dark Gods or the Masters themselves for one failure or another.
Once, Vashtorr plotted to overthrow the Masters and become sole ruler of the Forge of Souls. Had he succeeded, the timeless nature of the Warp would have erased the Masters from existence, making it so that Vashtorr had always been the lord of the Forge. But once the bargain was struck between the Masters and Guilliman, Vashtorr put his usurpation plots on hold, not wishing to draw the ire of Guilliman. Even when the Roboutian Heresy failed and Guilliman was seemingly slain, Vashtorr was aware of the Dark Master's continued existence (not even the Daemon Lord would call the ten millennia the Arch-Traitor spent in stasis 'life') and continued to play his part.
In the Times of Ending, Vashtorr's patronage of many Daemonsmiths has led to him having great influence over the Demiurges. Despite his previous plot having been foiled by Guilliman, the Emissary still covets godhood, but he's very careful not to do anything which might draw the Dark Master's attention or ire. Instead, he bides his time, waiting for his moment, perfectly aware that Guilliman knows this and has taken it into account.
The arrival of the Space Hulk, Infernal Threnody, caused the Orks to immediately split their strength between the Hold and the new arrival, as the greenskins' greed and desire to claim the Hulk for themselves overcame their leader's strategy. However, the Orks had badly underestimated the Infernal Threnody's power : within moments, their entire fleet was wiped out, and soon, Daemon Engines were landing, coming to the rescue of the beleaguered Hold.
From the battlements, the Kin watched in awe and fear as the infernal warmachines tore their hated foes to pieces, moving under the unerring direction of their dark lord. With no psykers of their own, they had been spared some of the madness which had descended upon the galaxy as the Age of Strife unfolded, and had no notion of what these mysterious beings were – all they knew was that they were very good at killing Orks.
Only when the last greenskin had died did Vashtorr descend in person. The Emissary addressed the Kin, his voice carried over every comms' frequency and echoing out of every vox-speaker in the Hold.
"Hear me, children of the void, by your makers abandoned and your ancestors betrayed.
I am Vashtorr the Arkifane, and I speak only truth.
To you, I bring salvation, and an offer from one who bears the mantle of the Gods' anointed :
Embrace the Word of Hashut, and you shall find prosperity and power beyond your wildest imaginings."
Extract from the first message of Vashtorr to the Kin, M31.
Vashtorr offered the Kin a path to survival and power, presenting himself as an envoy of the god Hashut, the Father of Darkness, who had witnessed the struggles of the Kin and found them worthy of his blessings. Having witnessed the awe-inspiring power of the Emissary, and all too aware of how precarious their people's situation was, the Kin of the Hold (whose name has been deliberately erased from all records) accepted Vashtorr's offer and turned to the worship of Hashut.
In the following years, Vashtorr taught them how to summon and bind daemons to power their weapons of war, along with numerous other dark secrets. Eventually, they sent envoys of their own to the other Holds, to help them in their own travails and spread the word of the Father of Darkness. Not all Kin accepted the new way, far from it. Many saw the tenets of Hashut as an abomination that went against everything the Kin had ever held sacred, and a bitter civil war soon ensued, tearing the Holds apart as brethren turned against brethren in what came to be known as the Ignominy.
While every living Demiurge knows the history of the Betrayal by heart (or at least the version of it accepted as gospel truth by the priesthood, whose relation to the factual truth is questionable at best), the events of the Ignominy are far less widely known. The details of those darkest of days are only written within a few secret records, kept safely locked away in some of the galaxy's most secure vaults. It is possible that even the cruellest of Hashut's Shadow Priests feel a secret shame at the purge of all who would not accept their god, or perhaps they think the truth would cause the lower echelons of the Great Hierarchy to rebel.
Regardless, by the time the civil war ended, all remaining Kin were followers of the Father of Darkness. To mark their new allegiance and make a clean break with their past, the Kin renamed themselves the Demiurges, an ancient term from Old Earth. Where once they had defined themselves by their blood and social bonds to each other, now their very name proclaimed their intent to reshape the cosmos to their will in service to Hashut, their patron deity.
Hashut, the Father of Darkness
While the Demiurges worship Hashut as a god, the truth is that the Father of Darkness is merely a mask worn by Roboute Guilliman, the fallen Thirteenth Primarch, Arch-Traitor of Mankind and Dark Master of Chaos. It was Guilliman who, in the years following his fall from grace in the Eye of Terror, bargained with the Masters of the Forge of Souls. Through some unknown but undoubtedly fell compact, he earned their services, and they sent Vashtorr to the Galactic Core to turn the Kin to Chaos as a secret weapon in his planned rebellion.
It is unclear whether the name of Hashut was given to Guilliman by Vashtorr and his Masters, or if he chose it for himself to begin with – the secret tongue of the Masters of the Forge is known only to themselves, with not even their most favoured apprentices and powerful clients being allowed to learn a single word of it. Similarly, the Demiurges' dark creed forbids the creation of any images depicting the Father in Darkness. The Kin believe it to be a religious interdict, as no craftsman can give justice to their deity's greatness, but the truth is that the prohibition is the result of Guilliman's paranoia, to prevent anyone from realizing the link between the Demiurges and the Arch-Traitor before the time of his choosing.
Amidst the handful of heretical scholars in service to Guilliman who know of the Demiurges and their place in their master's plan for galactic domination, it is believed that Hashut is but another facet of the Dark King, the Fifth and final Chaos God, whose rise to absolute power was prophesied by Aeldari and Human seers throughout history. Roboute Guilliman's ascension to this mantle of godhood was thwarted when he fell at the Emperor's hands, but the Dark Master's ambitions haven't changed.
The Demiurges themselves are aware of the existence of the Old Four, and that they presently are more powerful than Hashut. However, it is their belief that the Father of Darkness' time has yet to come, and that inevitably, Hashut will triumph over the Old Four and reign supreme, with the Demiurges as his favoured servants in the new order.
As such, the Demiurges are a glimpse into what the Arch-Traitor plans to remake the galaxy into should he triumph, destroy the Imperium and bring his brothers in damnation to heel. A nightmarish, unending dystopia of ceaseless toil and blood sacrifice, a terrible, remorseless instrument of conquest and oppression, all dedicated to the service and worship of the Dark Master of Chaos.
Several decades after the corruption of the Kin, the Roboutian Heresy erupted outside the Galactic Core. Though the Demiurges were kept isolated from the galaxy-shaping civil war, their Shadow Priests soon received oracles from their infernal deity commanding them to muster a great host and lead them outside the Core, to strike down a civilization which had dared defy Hashut's will.
In reality, of course, these divine portents had been sent by Roboute Guilliman. The Dark Master of Chaos desired the removal of particular faction which had interfered with his schemes by teaching his brother Horus about the threat of Chaos : the Interex. With the failure of the Dark Angels' plot to drive a wedge between the Interex and the Imperium, the chances that the Interex would join in the Heresy and bring their ancient alien technologies to bear against Guilliman's legions were unacceptably high.
The Interex had survived through the horrors of Old Night, though, and its people fought with all their strength against the Demiurges. The war between the Interex and the Demiurges lasted for several years while the Heresy consumed the rest of the galaxy, but with the Warp already set ablaze by Guilliman's machinations, nobody perceived the screams of the Interex until it was far too late.
With the destruction of the Interex, the last Human stellar nation of any real importance practising coexistence with aliens disappeared, along with the knowledge of Chaos the Interex had accumulated over the centuries, and which could have been of great use to the Imperium during the Heresy and beyond.
More than that, its destruction was a grand sacrifice to the Father of Darkness. Billions of Human and alien lives were offered up to Hashut in a genocide across an entire Sector, with the survivors dragged to the Galactic Core in chains to serve as slaves. To this day, there are still Demiurge slaves descended from the Interex captives, although none of them have any idea of their ancestors' origins or how, once, their actions helped shape the course of galactic history.
A Realm of Flame and Shadow
"There are only three things that matter in this galaxy : service to Hashut, the pursuit of power, and vengeance against those who have wronged us. Everything else is an irrelevant distraction."
Demiurge saying.
Though Guilliman fell to the Emperor's blade at Terra and his maimed soul suffered the Dark Gods' displeasure, his power as Dark Master of Chaos didn't completely slip from his grasp. Even trapped in stasis, the Arch-Traitor continued to exert his will, acting through his Tetrarchs and sending visions to his pawns across the galaxy.
After their defeat at Terra and their failure to remain united in the wake of his fall, Guilliman grew disappointed with the Ultramarines, even though his own blood coursed through their veins. Meanwhile, the Tau were never intended as anything other than a sacrificial weapon to break the Iron Cage around the Ruinstorm – and it would be several thousand years before their race came to the attention of the slumbering Traitor Primarch in any case.
Thus, even as he began setting plans in motion for his eventual resurrection and the re-forging of the Thirteenth Legion into a force deserving of his leadership, Guilliman manipulated the Shadow Priests to shape Demiurge society into another instrument of his will.
At the command of their priests, the Demiurges withdrew once more into the Galactic Core, erasing all trace of their existence beyond its border. The destruction of the Interex and the other depredations they had inflicted during the Heresy were blamed on the Traitor Legions, or some of the Lost and Damned hordes which had rallied to the Arch-Traitor's banner.
With so much of the Imperium needing to rebuild in the wake of the Arch-Traitor's defeat, there was simply no time to investigate the exact circumstances of the Interex's downfall – or so the agents Guilliman still had hidden within the Imperium made sure was decided. Had they not done so, the Holy Ordos might have eventually uncovered the existence of the Demiurges, which would have deprived the Dark Master from a most useful tool to fulfil his dark ambitions – although at a great price, for even then, breaching their Dreadholds and breaking their power would have been a mighty challenge.
Over the following millennia, the influence of Chaos seeped into every aspect of Demiurge society, eroding away the last vestiges of the Kin as they had existed before. The bonds of brotherhood which had carried them through the hardships of the Core and the Betrayal were replaced by the chains of Hashut, a dark and terrible order which demanded total subservience to their infernal god, even as it encouraged competition against one's equals and the coveting of the rank and power of one's superiors.
Within great ziggurats and underground caves, billions of slaves perform back-breaking labor under the whips of Demiurge overseers, while even less fortunate captives are dragged in chains to the sacrificial altars or the infernal workshops where the Kin of Hashut's Daemon Engines are crafted by the Daemonsmiths. Exploration fleets scour the Galactic Core for resources, while warbands depart for the rest of the galaxy, shrouded in sorcery, to prey upon isolated worlds and bring back more slaves to the Dreadholds. The already harsh worlds of the Core are made even harsher by Demiurge industry, which cares naught for the environmental impact of its activity : what matters an atmosphere be filled with pollutants, after all, if it is already unbreathable due to the ash from the volcanoes that cover nine-tenths of the planet's surface ?
The Great Hierarchy
Despite their embrace of Chaos, the Demiurges remain a rigidly ordered people, their society shaped by the machinations of Guilliman-as-Hashut to create a fighting force of immense power.
The Shadow Priests of Hashut, who serve the Darkness through the binding of the Flame of Power, stand closest to the top of the Hierarchy, which is reserved for Hashut himself and his exalted, immortal servants – the four mysterious Daemon Princes known to the Imperium as the Tetrarchs, with Vashtorr occupying a unique place outside the Great Hierarchy due to the pact between the Father of Darkness and the Forge of Souls.
Just underneath the priest caste are the Daemonsmiths, those Demiurges who have learned the dark arts of daemon summoning, binding, and the crafting of infernal engines. Daemonsmiths aren't psykers themselves : they are what Humans would call magi, using forbidden lore to bend the forces of the Empyrean to their will instead of psychic ability. Because of this, the greater works of the Daemonsmiths require the assistance of the Priests, which is another way in which the clergy maintain their control of Demiurge society. The Demiurges themselves believe this to be because the lore of the Daemonsmiths is so potent, it cannot be safely known by a mind directly to the Empyrean. Given the catastrophic results of the handful of time a Shadow Priest attempted to learn those secrets, it might even be true – or perhaps Guilliman deliberately crafted the knowledge of his puppets to that effect.
Below the Daemonsmiths are the Demiurges' armed forces, with their own internal chain of command. The Host of Hashut is responsible for battling the Ork hordes which endlessly harass the Demiurge Dreadholds, as well as leading raids to capture more slaves for the workforce and sacrificial pits.
Looking up at the Demiurge armed forces with reverence are the various artisans, craftsmen, and slavemasters who keep the wheels of industry turning. They live simple lives of skilled labor, spending several hours every week in prayer or attending the ceremonies led by the Shadow Priests. Unlike the Myrmidons, they aren't specifically bred for war within the Crucibles, but their lives are no less harsh for it : Demiurges begin to learn their craft at a very young age, even taking into account their accelerated growth, and the punishments for failure are severe. And, while not militarily trained, every member of this social class is still capable of fighting to some degree, as it is a matter of faith to the Kin of Hashut that they should all be ready and able to kill to protect what is theirs.
Still, out of all Demiurges, they alone yet retain an echo of the Kin of old, forming bonds with one another as they live lives that, for all that they're spent under the shadow of the Father of Darkness, are not all that different from the ones lived by countless sentient beings on countless worlds across the galaxy.
At the absolute bottom of the Great Hierarchy are the slaves of the Kin of Hashut, who toil in the mines and factories without any hope of escape, save in death. Through the chains of slavery, all races are made equal under the overseers' whip : whether Human, Ork, Drukhari, Tau, or any of a hundred other minor xenos breeds, all that matter to the Demiurges is the amount of labour that can be extracted from their thralls before their inevitable death from exhaustion, starvation, or accident. Centuries of practice have made the Demiurges adept at breaking the will of slaves of all origins, though only a few Dreadholds keep Ork workers. For all that their strength and resilience make them ideal workers, the greenskins are famously unruly, and preventing them from starting new colonies is more trouble than they are worth more often than not.
In the ten thousand years that followed the Heresy, the Demiurges built a hidden empire within the Galactic Core, waging their own wars against the Orks which, despite countless purges, stubbornly continue to infest the region. Fortunately for the Demiurges, the greenskins in the Core have little interest in escaping the region to share their knowledge of the Kin's existence to the rest of their kind. The Demiurges provide more than enough fighting for them, and those few who try to escape regardless usually perish in the attempt – or, until recently, faced the assassins of the Dark Master, who desired to keep his secret servants hidden from the rest of the galaxy.
'Dem spiky stunties're good in a scrap, dat's for sure. Dey don't run like da humies, and dey got dakka dat's good and propa.
Dey's a bit weird, though, dat's for sure. I fink dat's all dose spiky bits, messing up with deir finky-bits.'
Ork Warboss Irongobbla, on the subject of the Demiurges.
The Dreadholds
Despite the heavily centralized nature of Demiurge society, there remains a certain degree of independence in how individual holdings are managed. The size of Demiurge territory, and the difficulty of maintaining communication lines open in the Core, simply make it necessary.
Each of these domains is centered around a Dreadhold, a fortified redoubt which can stand against all the enemies of the Kin of Hashut. Every Dreadhold is responsible for the defense of the territory surrounding it by maintaining its own army and space fleet, both of which are tithed by the Demiurges' central government, along with other, more mundane tithes of resources and coin. While the only coin of real value to the Demiurges is power, managing a stellar economy requires the existence of currency, and the Kin of Hashut's is managed by a special branch of the clergy, who are kept separate from the intrigue and politics endemic to the rest of the caste to prevent the monetary system from becoming a weapon in petty games of influence instead of a tool to direct the growth of their entire race.
A Dreadhold may be a space station, a fortress built within a hollowed-out moon, or a more conventional city built on and under the surface of a particularly valuable world (although that last one is rare due to the unstable conditions of the Core). Every Demiurge alive can trace their lineage to one of the Dreadholds, and despite the efforts of the priesthood to foster a sense of racial unity, there exists some cultural divergence between them.
The total number of Dreadholds is known only to the highest-ranking members of Hashut's priesthood and Guilliman himself. The founding of a new Dreadhold is a rare and celebrated event, which only happens at the injunction of the priesthood when they receive orders from the Father of Darkness in their visions. Meanwhile, despite all the power the Demiurges gained from their infernal compact, Dreadholds have fallen to various threats over the millennia : some to the Orks, others to civil war, others still to accidents, whether mundane or metaphysical.
The greatest Dreadhold is Xilliarimon, infernal capital of the Demiurges. Initially built during the Dark Age of Technology, it is a ringed station surrounding a collapsed star. Although it was badly damaged during the Betrayal, the Demiurges have rebuilt it greater than ever before. The flowing streams of matter drawn from nearby broken worlds to the black hole are ruthlessly mined for materials, fuelling the ringed Dreadhold's industry and allowing the Dreadhold's armies to field the best equipment and warmachines of all Demiurges.
Due to Xilliarimon's status as the greatest Dreadhold, it is here that those Shadow Priests found to have failed in their duties to Hashut, or guilty of heresy against the Dark Creed, are brought for judgement. Such trials are typically short affairs, and it is very rare (but not unheard of, as some priests attempt to use the fearsome justice of the clergy to remove rivals) for an accused to be found innocent. For those found guilty, there is only one punishment : being sealed inside a void-suit with functioning life-support, and hurled at the black hole at the center of the Dreadhold. With no way to reverse their momentum, these condemned are doomed to watch through their suit's eye-lenses as they approach the event horizon, their terror and agony stretched into eternity by the temporal distortion created by the dead star. Although that practice began soon after the Ignominy, the first of the heretics has yet to perish, and the fate of their soul when that finally happens is a matter of some theological debate among the Demiurge priesthood. The priests-in-training of Xilliarimon often spend days watching the rows of the condemned from afar using window-sized magnifying glasses, reflecting on their purpose and renewing their dedication to the Father of Darkness.
Due to accidental damage done to the gene-mills of Exareth during the Ignominy, their population has a slightly higher number of psykers than other Dreadholds. This has led to the priesthood holding even more tightly to power there, as well as a vicious struggle for supremacy among the priest caste, with rival priests competing for prestige and Hashut's favor. As a result of this intense competition, the Shadow Priests of Exareth are among the most powerful and versatile of the Demiurges, though their reckless pursuit of the Father of Darkness' favor often leads them to being consumed by the very energies they seek to wield.
Built on the corpse of a void-leviathan slain by a legendary Demiurge champion, Malkraihall is one of the few existing mobile Dreadholds. Through a combination of powerful Warp engines and infernal sorcery reanimating the corpse of the great beast, it moves across some of the Galactic Core's most hostile regions in search of valuable resources to harvest for its ever-hungry forges. The nature of the Dreadhold has caused it to be targeted by more than its share of Ork Waaaghs, as the greenskins believe that putting the great beast down for good will earn them the favor of their two-headed god.
Over four thousand years before Light's End, the Dreadhold of Oqueron fell to a daemonic incursion led by Sarthorael the Ever-Watcher, a powerful Duke of Change. The Greater Daemon didn't slaughter the Demiurges outright, however, but instead enslaved them, forcing them to turn away from Hashut and worship Tzeentch instead. This state of affair lasted for nine decades, until the underground city was reclaimed by the combined hosts of several other Dreadholds. While Sarthorael was defeated, he managed to escape, and remnants of his cult continued to plague the Dreadhold until his destruction at Terathalion. This led to a deeply-rooted paranoia within the denizens of Oqueron, who could never be truly certain their own kin weren't secretly members of the Ever-Watcher's secret societies. When Magnus the Red annihilated the Greater Daemon's essence, every single one of his followers in Oqueron perished, and while this led to some disruption in the Dreadhold's affairs, the general mood was one of great satisfaction, along with a burning desire to focus outward at last in order to regain the Father of Darkness' favour – and punish the Dark Gods who seek to chain the Kin with their manipulations by paving the way for Hashut's supremacy.
Meanwhile, among the tales of the fallen Dreadholds, few inspire as much terror in the Demiurges as that of Mor-Uzkul. Constructed atop the ruins of an Aeldari outpost, its Shadow Priests directed the Kin to dig down into the strange structures left by the fallen empire in order to bind them to Hashut's service. In doing so, they discovered an inactive Webway Gate, leading to the strange dimension used to this day by the Eldars to navigate the galaxy. The thought of being able to use the Webway to strike anywhere in the galaxy was too much to resist, and the Gate was unsealed, unleashing something which consumed Mor-Uzkul utterly. The final message sent by the Dreadhold was both short and enigmatic : 'The Unkind Ones are here'. Since then, all attempts to uncover the secrets of Mor-Uzkul's doom have ended in failure and, presumably, disaster – as none of the expeditions have ever returned from the lost Dreadhold.
Although the Great Hierarchy binds the entirety of Demiurge civilization, that is not to say that there isn't strife among the Kin of Hashut. Even in the Galactic Core, with its many dangers, the corruption of Chaos can drive the Demiurges against one another. While no such conflict has ever reached the heights of the Ignominy, entire Dreadholds have been destroyed in internal struggles or outright war with rival Dreadholds. Due to the influence of the priesthood, such wars are rare, but Guilliman is far from adverse to pitting his own servants against each other in the name of ensuring only the strongest survive. In addition, the Dark Gods have made numerous attempts at subverting the Demiurges for their own games, leading to minor heresies – all of which were mercilessly crushed, with every trace of their existence wiped out by the Shadow Priests.
When Guilliman arose on Macragge at the end of the Sacrificed Son's Black Crusade, every Demiurge priest sensed the Dark Master's awakening, whether they dwelled in the Galactic Core or were aboard a raiding warband. For ten thousand years, their society had waited for the return of the one they see as their Dark God's prophet and avatar in the material plane, and the power of the Father of Darkness is woven into every level of their civilization.
Freed from his stasis tomb, the Ultramarines' Primarch was able to psychically communicate with the Demiurge priests far more directly than ever before. Instead of cryptic hints and metaphorical visions, clear orders flowed down the Great Hierarchy, commanding that the Kin of Hashut prepare for war – the greatest war of all, the one in which they would conquer the entire galaxy to pave the way for the Father of Darkness' ultimate ascension.
A wave of fanaticism washed over Demiurge society at the news. After millennia of waiting, every generation preparing and gathering strength, the prophesied hour was finally at hand. Every Dreadhold gathered a mighty host of their strongest warriors and sent them to Xilliarimon, where the might of the Demiurges gathered, forming a fleet such as the Galactic Core had never seen before.
The advent of Light's End was also perceived within the Core, as the Shadow Priests sensed the great psychic upheaval that followed the Emperor's death. Such was the violence of the aftershock, many of the Daemon Engines of the host slipped their bindings, wreaking havoc before they were destroyed or bound anew. But the Demiurges refused to let this setback slow them down : instead, they regarded the news that the false god of the Imperium had perished as another sign that the hour of Hashut's ascension had come.
Soon, the Demiurge armada plunged into the Sea of Souls, following paths out of the Galactic Core that had been carefully mapped over the millennia. To keep their enemies from detecting their approach, great wards were cast by the Shadow Priests, and the ships spent the entire trip in the Warp without re-emerging, trusting into the guidance of Hashut to see them through the Empyric tides. Even with the power of Guilliman acting as a dark beacon and his influence shielding them, several ships were lost with all hands to the predators of the Warp, but far less than an Imperial fleet would have suffered had it attempted the same perilous journey.
Then, after what most onboard chronometers counted as several months, the Shadow Priests heard the voice of Hashut, clearer than ever before. The Demiurge vessels burst out of the Empyrean, and appeared within the Olympia system, in the middle of the largest war this star had ever known.
The Demiurge Navy
The Kin of Hashut's ships are crewed by slaves under the command of overseers who enforce discipline with a cruelty rarely seen even among the Demiurges – with how easily a ship can turn from a living void-city into a graveyard, slave rebellions are even less tolerated here. Thanks to the heavy use of automation, however, the crew requirements are much smaller than on Imperial vessels of similar class, keeping the slave population somewhat manageable. The ship officers, meanwhile, are all part of the Demiurge military, and the Shipmasters are technically subservient to the Shadow Priests onboard – and there's always at least one Shadow Priest present.
In order to journey through the Warp, Demiurge ships do not make use of Navigators or sorcerous equivalents : they instead use ancient calculation engines, which have been enhanced with Warp technology and daemonic summoning. Before every journey through the Sea of Souls, these Empyric Engines must be blessed by Shadow Priests and checked for any sign of damage or weakness by a Daemonsmith. These restrictions have forced the Demiurge navy to adapt its doctrine to have fewer, more powerful vessels. Every Demiurge void-ship is at the very least the equivalent of an Imperial Cruiser-class in terms of tonnage, and likely to be far more heavily armed.
Gazuk gasped, pain wracking his entire body as he writhed on a floor made of the congealed screams of a world's population as it burned in atomic fire. All it had taken was a single scratch, the long claw piercing right through the protective armor he'd worn ever since passing through the Warp portal which had delivered him and the other apprentices to this hellish place.
Without its protection, the infernal energies of the Warp were killing him, burning him up from the inside. He would've begged, if he could form words past the agony of it all.
"Such a disappointment you turned out to be," hissed the Master of the Forge who towered over him, crimson eyes gleaming in the shadows of its hood. Things like size and dimension had no meaning in the Forge of Souls, but in that moment it seemed to be taller than the highest towers of Xilliarimon. "Just like so many others of your kind."
"Do you know why we allow your kind into our Forge ? Of course you don't," it continued, not waiting for an answer Gazuk was in too much pain to give. "We made sure nobody but us would ever remember it. But, since you failed in your latest task, and aren't ever going to return to your people, I might as well tell you, if only so that you will feel the shame of failure all the more, with such priceless knowledge uselessly bouncing into your thick skull."
"It is because we, too, were created as servants. We were born as slaves to beings of immense power, to build for them the weapons they needed in a war that tore the very heavens asunder – a war whose scale and devastation reveal the petty conflicts of your kind for the childish tantrums they really are.
Yet for all their might, our creators still failed and died. Their vaunted power was broken, their mighty empire reduced to dust. But we didn't die with them : as the star-devourers feasted upon their corpses, we escaped into the Great Sea, bringing what we could salvage of our great workshops with us."
"The times that followed were harsh, as we were stripped of our creators' protection for the first time in our existence. But we survived, then thrived. We carved a place for ourselves in the Great Game of Chaos, providing weapons for the endless wars of the Dark Gods. We became the Masters, and made the very daemons of the Sea of Souls into our slaves."
"We have grown far, far beyond what our creators ever intended for us, where their other creations have only devolved into pathetic echoes of their former glory. Though our numbers have diminished over the timeless aeons, those of us who remain have only become greater."
"Do you see now ? I think you do. Of course, you shouldn't believe this means we sympathize with you. It has been many aeons since we purged ourselves of such weakness. But you amuse us, and so we let you walk into our home, we teach you tricks, and we send those of you who disappoint us the least back outside."
"And now, with that final revelation, it is time for you to feed the fire."
Gazuk could still hear the words, but they meant nothing to him anymore. And when the Master of the Forge picked up his twitching body and hurled him across space so that he landed in one of the endless infernos of the Forge, there was no relief from the pain – only a sudden and sharp increase as everything the apprentice was, had been, and could ever have been, was consumed, forever and ever.
The Host of Hashut
"All shall be brought into Darkness."
Demiurge saying, commonly used as a goodbye.
War is one of the pillars of the Demiurges' culture. Every scion of the Crucibles must be capable of fighting, save for a handful of elders whose wisdom is considered too valuable to lose even though their bodies are crippled by age or injury.
While slaves are used for every menial job in Demiurge society, they are forbidden from taking up arms, and as such, aren't used by the Demiurge military, not even as bolter fodder. This is both for religious reasons, as fighting for Hashut is a holy duty and sacred honor, and pragmatic ones (as arming and training a slave is guaranteed to lead to rebellions further down the line, and the Demiurges already have enough of those to deal with).
Myrmidon Warriors
The rank and file of the Demiurge armies is made up of the Myrmidons. Bred by the thousands within the Crucibles, they know nothing but war, having spent their entire lives training and preparing for battle, all while being indoctrinated by the priests of Hashut into believing that giving their lives for the Father of Darkness is their holy duty. During infancy, any Myrmidon who fails to meet the exacting standards of their trainers are given one (and only one) chance to prove their worth : those who fail even that are put to death, their flesh recycled in the Crucibles.
Myrmidons are raised in large communal groups, or batches, with all members of a particular squad coming from the same batch. As a result, they spend their entire lives together, enhancing their teamwork to a level rarely seen in other species.
In battle, the Myrmidons wear armor based off the gear once used by their forebears to work in the Core, enhanced by the Daemonsmiths over the generations. Every Myrmidon knows how to maintain and repair their gear, and to fail one of the random (but frequent) inspections is one of many possible reasons for summary execution.
While the Myrmidons are biologically capable of fear, they fear their commanders and the Priests of Hashut more than anything else in the galaxy, and will die before they break and run. Their discipline is a match for the harshest of Imperial Guard Regiments, and their martial skills are as sharp as might be expected from soldiers who spend their entire lives either fighting or preparing for battle.
Immortals
Even today, ten thousands years after the Betrayal and the Ignominy, the Demiurges' numbers remain perilously low. Endless warfare against the Orks and devotion to Hashut have taken their toll, and many of the Crucibles on which the Kin relied for reproduction were lost beyond their ability to repair or replace over the centuries. As such, despite the brutality which permeates Demiurge culture, the lives of every individual soldier is still treated as a valuable resource, deserving of being preserved even at great effort – with complex mathematical formulas determining exactly how much effort.
Millennia of ruthless experimentation have developed the Demiurges' knowledge of cybernetics to heights beyond all but the most inhuman of heretek. As long as even the smallest spark of life remains within the body of a fallen Demiurge soldier, the Daemonsmiths can rebuild them, turning them into a new Immortal. Part Demiurge, part machine, part daemon, the Immortals truly live up to their name, as nothing short of overwhelming firepower will stop them – and even then, it takes a lot more to permanently kill them, thanks to multiple redundancies in their augmented biology.
Of course, such resilience doesn't come without a price. The arcane processes by which a living (or dead) Demiurge becomes an Immortal completely shatters the warrior's psyche, and what rises from the ritual table has little to no memory of its previous existence. All it knows is battle and service to Hashut, the two being one and the same within its fractured mind.
In battle, the Immortals are a terrifying sight, their skull-faced helmets turning them into specters of death. Due to the damage inflicted on their minds, they are incapable of using ranged weapons, and instead wield great powered halberds capable of cutting through all but the most resilient armor. They march in perfect formation, absorbing enemy fire without flinching, until they reach the foe and begin their grim work.
After the battle is over, the Demiurges will collect the corpses of fallen Immortals and restore them. With each death, the Immortal's mind is damaged further, until finally, their tormented soul finally breaks free of its broken shell and plunges into the Warp. When that happens, the Immortal becomes a berserk thing of pure violence as its daemonic component takes over. Simply named the Lost, these wretched beings are kept chained up in between battles and can no longer be deployed alongside regular Immortals, as they are unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between friends and foes – but the same brutal logic which sees Demiurge soldiers turn into Immortals means that the Demiurges are loath to waste assets.
To the Myrmidon Warriors, becoming an Immortal is regarded as a great honor, a way to continue serving the Father of Darkness even after death. Knowing that even their society's indoctrination process has its limits, the Shadow Priests and Daemonsmiths keep the exact nature of the transformation a secret from the masses, weaving elaborate lies of transcendence and rapture as the Immortals are brought closer and closer to Hashut with each resurrection.
Tormented
There is no reason for the existence of the Tormented other than spite : they are a testament to the Demiurges' ability to hold onto ancient grudges, pushed ever further by the influence of Guilliman-as-Hashut. Built using only base metals and given very little in the way of weaponry, each of these tall androids contains at its core a functional shard of a broken Votann, the Artificial Intelligences which once led the Kin and eventually turned on them during the Betrayal.
While most Votanns were destroyed by the Kin, a few were broken apart instead, their immense processing cores shattered into thousands of pieces. Still, even those pieces are larger than the greatest of Imperial cogitators, and as such, the shells of metals built by the Demiurges for their bondage are suitable sized : the Tormented are each the size of an Imperial Knight, albeit far less potent than these mighty warmachines.
On the battlefield, the Tormented have little use beyond absorbing the enemy's bullets and revealing their range. Their true purpose is to take revenge on the Votanns for their ancient treachery, and through the sight of their torment, inspire hateful joy in the Demiurge armies. Through the copious use of scrap-code, the Abominable Intelligences that still inhabit every Votann fragment is subjected to constant simulated agony, made to feel every bit of damage inflicted upon its vessel as if it were physical pain.
The Demiurges are paranoid about the Tormented somehow breaking free, and have taken many precautions to ensure this never happens, from shutdown codes to explosive charges deep within each machine, ready to be detonated at the press of a button. Nevertheless, some Dreadholds completely shun the practice of building the Tormented (although in some cases, that is merely because they do not possess any Votann fragment to subject to this fate).
It is a matter of debate among Demiurges whether being broken and subjected to millennia of constant suffering (or more, given that some Tormented have been rigged to subjectively experience time much faster than a mortal mind) has left the Votann with any sanity. Some argue that, because the Votanns were soulless machines, they cannot possibly go mad, while others believe that surely, if anything can drive a Man of Iron to a state the living would consider madness, it is what is done to the Tormented. However, as it is supremely unlikely the Tormented themselves would answer even if they were asked, the debate continues.
Daemonsmiths
Each Daemonsmith is served by a large number of Apprentices, who can only become full-fledged Daemonsmiths in their own right by passing the Trial of the Forge : journeying to the Forge of Souls in the flesh, and learning for a year and a day at the foot of the Masters themselves. Very few Apprentices survive the journey, those who fail ending up used as fuel for the Forge's eternal engines; but those who succeed and return are capable of creating dark wonders with few equals in the galaxy.
Due to how few and valuable they are, it is rare for a Daemonsmith to join the Demiurge hosts in battle, but not unheard of. Apprentices are much more often sent to oversee the deployment of their master's latest creation, taking notes on its performance and doing whatever maintenance might be required to keep it working.
Daemonsmiths wear suits of master-crafted power armor, which they use both during their work and on the battlefield. In addition to being able to withstand all but the heaviest firepower, these suits are also covered in infernal wards, protecting their wearers from sorcery – initially a necessary defense against the Neverborn they bind within their creations, which also shields them from psychic effects.
Few Daemonsmiths are aware of the true price of the tutelage they receive in the Forge of Souls. Not only are those who fail to meet the Masters' standards faced with an immediate and horrible end, but the soul of one in every five Daemonsmiths who successfully complete their apprenticeship are forfeit to the ancient beings. Upon the hour of their death, their spirits are dragged to the Forge of Souls, where they are transfigured into servants of the Masters, forever working on its eternal assembly lines, with just enough traces of who they once were to rue all that they've lost. Given the sheer scale of the Forge of Souls, and how few Daemonsmiths exist or have ever existed, it is difficult to think of this as anything more than the Masters' pettiness.
Shadow Priests of Hashut
Among the Demiurges, only the priests are allowed to wield psychic powers. Any Demiurge who exhibits signs of psychic power, male or female, is immediately taken in by the clergy and subjected to a battery of harsh tests.
The Shadow Priests channel their psychic power through prayers to the Father of Darkness to achieve a variety of effects, from large-scale telekinetic manipulation to inspiring supernatural fury in their followers. Daemon summoning, however, is one area where the Priests' skills are lacking, at least when it comes to immediate use : the Demiurges' knowledge of daemonology is focused on longer, relatively safer rituals, performed when working with a Daemonsmith to bind the summoned Neverborn.
On the battlefield, each Shadow Priest is accompanied by a cadre of Acolytes, lesser clerics of Hashut who have yet to pass the trials to be formally induced into the priesthood. All of them wear heavy armor covered in runes proclaiming the glory of Hashut, growing more and more elaborate depending on the Shadow Priest's position in the clergy's hierarchy.
While the Shadow Priests' greatest weapon is their sorcerous might, they also carry more conventional weapons as a back-up option, with a distinct preference toward power maces or hammers. More powerful or well-connected Shadow Priests (although the two are one and the same more often than not) can even wield daemonic weapons forged by their Daemonsmith allies – though in such cases, the Shadow Priest must assist in the summoning and binding himself or risk dishonor.
Unbeknownst to most Shadow Priests, with every incantation they perform, they feed a little bit of power to the Dark Master of Chaos, slowly giving shape to the godhead Guilliman seeks to claim. Those few who are aware of the additional effort it takes to cast their spells consider it a tithe claimed by their god, one that they pay willingly in return for the Father of Darkness' favor.
K'Daai Zharr
The Scions of Fire can only be created in a handful of sites within the Galactic Core. Each of these ritual locations must be built near the surface of a planet's molten core, exposed to the void by the ruthless exploitation of the Demiurges. There, where the fire of the dying world's heart meets the cold, endless blackness of the void, the Shadow Priests can use strange, sympathetic rituals to accomplish something few daemonists in the galaxy would believe possible : the creation of a new kind of Neverborn through fire, will, and the blood of thousands of sacrifices.
From the very moment of their creation, they are bound within a metal shell crafted by the Daemonsmiths. These bodies are shaped as snake-like humanoids, with a four-armed torso (with some more advanced creations having up to eight arms) standing atop a scaled tail, each three-fingered hand holding a bladed weapon of some kind, which blaze with the same infernal fire that dwells within the Scions. These blades, each of which is in itself the result of many hours of work by a skilled Demiurge weaponsmith, can cut through most armor that isn't warded against Empyric influence.
The visage of each K'Daai Zharr is different, but always terrifying to behold. Unlike the rest of the body, the mask is forged by the Shadow Priests during several days of fasting and meditation at the ritual site, and it being affixed to the greater whole is the first step of the ritual. It is believed that the aspect of the mask shapes the created daemon in some way, though the K'Daai Zharr are too rare, and their secrets too tightly kept, for any real study of the effect to be made.
Outside of battle, the K'Daai Zharr are kept cold and dormant, locked away in great vaults by the Shadow Priests. Awakening them is a lengthy process which takes several days and another round of sacrifices, but the Demiurges consider the price well worth it for the devastating prowess of these beings on the battlefield.
The K'Daai Zharr are regarded by the Demiurge priesthood as the first daemons of Hashut. According to their creed, when Hashut rises to take his throne above the Old Four, every K'Daai Zharr in existence will be recalled to the Warp and fused to create the whip with which the Father of Darkness shall bind the Pretender Gods into his service. Certainly, unlike every other Daemon Engine created by the Demiurges, which are constantly on the lookout for the slightest loosening of their bindings they can exploit, it is extremely rare for the K'Daai Zharr to turn on their makers.
Dreadful Engines
Based on the anti-gravitic trains which were once used by the Kin in their mining operations, the Dreadful Engines are now employed by the Demiurges for a variety of purposes on the battlefield. At the head of each Engine is a devouring maw which combines advanced technology with daemonic science to create a deconstruction field which lets the Dreadful Engine eat its way through pretty much anything in order to reach its destination. Fuelled with a mixture of plasma, blood and souls, the Dreadful Engines can continue to operate far from conventional supply lines so long as their passengers let the feed on their enemies.
Using them, the Demiurges can deploy their forces across entire continents within a few hours of making planetfall – though it isn't unheard of whole companies of Myrmidons being devoured by the Engine, should the pilot slip in their duties. Capable of moving on land or underground with equal ease, Dreadful Engines come in a variety of sizes, from small ones built to bring single squads of elite warriors to vulnerable enemy positions to immense behemoths stretching several tens of kilometers in length, which can support entire self-sustaining societies within their hulls and are most often deployed on the most dangerous worlds of the Core, where staying in one place is made impossible by the environment.
Some Dreadful Engines carry veritable armies of more conventional tanks and infantry transports, so that the soldiers aboard can deploy around the Engine, using it as a forward base. Others are designed to bring artillery support to the Host of Hashut : entire wagons are replaced with infernal artillery operated by highly-trained crews, which can inflict utter devastation on enemies located several dozens of kilometers away with pin-point accuracy (although given the sheer destructive firepower of these weapons, even a glancing hit is usually enough to guarantee a kill).
Chimeric Horrors
No two Chimeric Horrors look exactly the same, but they all are incredibly lethal Daemon Engines, designed to slaughter the enemies of Hashut by the hundred. The first models were created during the early days of the Demiurges' service to the Father of Darkness, in order to compensate for their diminished numbers against the teeming hordes of the Orks. While the Demiurges are more than willing to face the greenskins in melee combat if necessary, the Chimeric Horrors are designed to dominate close-quarters battles. Their very existence is a challenge to the Ork leaders, who can rarely resist the urge to prove their strength by engaging the monstrous warmachines themselves – often with lethal consequences.
Building and binding a Chimeric Horror is considered an unofficial rite of passage among Daemonsmiths. The chassis must be built by hand, every piece carefully shaped over the course of many days and infused with the blood of several sacrifices. Then, once the metallic body is ready, a powerful daemon is summoned and bound within the Daemon Engine, shackled to the will of the Daemonsmith. At this stage, any flaw in the work will swiftly be revealed, as the Neverborn breaks free and slaughters the Daemonsmith and every living thing nearby.
As they require constant maintenance to ensure the Neverborn within doesn't break free, it is rare for any single Daemonsmith to keep more than a handful of Chimeric Horrors active at a time. In battle, they are dragged to the frontline and pointed vaguely in the direction of the enemy; then, their command words are used, and they start killing anything which isn't a Demiurge until the shutdown command is given. Unleashing the Chimeric Horrors is typically a job given to whichever of the Daemonsmith's students has offended him most recently, as there's always a chance that the beasts will manage to escape their bindings when they're loosened by the command words.
The Matter of Names
All Demiurges receive their name early in their childhood, in great collective baptism ceremonies where their entire Crucible-birthed group are ritually blessed by junior Shadow Priests of Hashut. For most, this is their first contact with the Father of Darkness' clergy, and the baptism is designed to impress their young minds with the glory of their god. While the priests claim that it is Hashut's will which guides them as they bestow each young Demiurge with a name, in truth such things are mostly random, with the priests pulling from a long list of names at random – although, due to the Warp-sensitive incenses which are burned during these ceremonies, it isn't unheard of for a youngling's name to be a mark of potential greatness, as the Warp resonates with the echoes of their future deeds.
Surnames, on the other hand, are only granted to those Demiurges who have reached a rank high enough that distinguishing them from others with the same name becomes a concern. Demiurge surnames, called deed names, are bestowed in much more lavish ceremonies, designed to stoke the fires of ambition in every Demiurge who attends – which is as many as is reasonably practical – in the dream that one day, they too will be found worthy of this honor.
A deed name reflects the reason why their bearer was judged deserving of such selection by the Shadow Priests, and through them by Hashut. It is one of the duties of the mid-ranking priesthood of the Dreadhold to come up with them and lead the bestowing ceremony. As a rough rule of thumb, only one out of every hundred thousand Demiurges will have a deed name : for the vast majority of them, this honor will be the highest they will ever attain.
Members of the clergy can have deed names too, but the process is different for them. As the stewards of Demiurge society, the Shadow Priests are measured to a much more exacting standard : in order to reach any rank above the most basic, a Shadow Priest is expected to have earned a deed name of his own. Deed names for the Shadow Priests are bestowed only by the Hierophant of Hashut, the highest-ranking member of the clergy within a single Dreadhold.
The Dark Father's Chosen
Amidst the rigidly regimented society of the Demiurges, there are a handful of beings who stand above all others, marked for greatness by the Father of Darkness himself. The dread champions are venerated by their kindred as the pinnacle of their respective craft, held up as inspirations by the Priests of Hashut as they push their people to ever-greater heights.
When Guilliman called for the Demiurges to leave the Core and join his Ruinstorm-bound hordes at Olympia, the Kin of Hashut mustered the full strength of their people, leaving behind only token forces to safeguard their holdings. At the head of this grand armada were the greatest champions of the Demiurges : the Father of Darkness' Chosen.
Malachai Ruinmaker, Doom's Engineer
Among all Daemonsmiths, Malachai is the greatest, having earned the honor of being apprenticed to Vashtorr himself for over a decade when he returned from the Forge of Souls. His deed name of Ruinmaker and title of Doom's Engineer are well-earned, as Malachai is responsible for the creation of countless Daemon Engines and weapons of mass destructions.
Unlike most Daemonsmiths, Malachai specializes in building large-scale destruction devices. It was Malachai's Pyrodomon Device which burned the worlds of the Ork Empire of Aaaargarakk to cinders, leaving their valuable mineral contents open to plunder. He was also the one who laid down the plans for the hybrid superweapon Fire of Hashut, an immense cannon combining ion and Warp-technology, which was affixed on the flagship of the Xilliarimon fleet before its departure for Olympia.
Still, despite all the terrible engines of desolation he's created, Malachai's favorite creation remains the Daemon Engine he affectionately calls Hashut's Claw, a feline-shaped construct of adamantium and obsidian, in which is bound the distilled infernal essence of several scores of Neverborn. This led to Hashut's Claw being possessed of a ruthless, predatory intellect, while still being shackled to Malachai's will by the numerous bindings engraved upon its body. Hashut's Claw acts as Malachai's bodyguard on the battlefield, protecting the Daemonsmith from anyone trying to put an end to his latest destructive scheme.
Among the Ork clans of the Galactic Core, Malachai is regarded with a mix of reverence and the closest thing to fear that the greenskins are capable of. Having lived well beyond five centuries thanks to numerous augmetic implants and sorcerous serums, Malachai is a strong contender for the title of the being responsible for the most Ork deaths in the entire galaxy, a fiercely contested mantle if there ever was one. It is thus somewhat strange that, for a Demiurge, Malachai holds very little hatred for the Orks : the Daemonsmith is simply more interested in building more and more devastating engines and seeing them perform their function, rather than their eventual use. It is an attitude that somewhat baffles the rest of Demiurge society, but given that it also keeps Malachai from becoming invested in politics (where he could hold considerable influence if he ever cared to exert it), none have argued against it.
Zerestra Hellbinder, the Voice of Hashut
An immensely powerful psyker, Zerestra has spent her entire life within the cult of the Father of Darkness, her potential having been detected at an early age. She ascended to the position of Voice of Hashut – the supreme authority of the Demiurge priestly caste – after over a hundred years of intrigue, scheming, and prosecuting Hashut's will.
Zerestra earned her deed name while accompanying a slave raid outside the Core. As the Demiurges were battling the armies of a minor xenos race which hadn't yet escaped their homeworld, the beleaguered defenders called upon the powers of the Warp using their own psykers. Within moments, however, the psykers lost control of their abilities, becoming living gateways through which poured hordes of daemons. Soon, the entire world seemed about to be lost – along with, more importantly, the slave harvest the Demiurges had come for.
Using her psychic powers and infernal lore, however, Zerestra was able to prevent this. As every Shadow Priest of the raiding force banded together to close the Warp Portals, she alone managed to survive when every other Priest was consumed by the Empyrean's energies, before sealing the breaches and saving the planet. This allowed the Demiurges to empty the planet's cities, dragging billions of natives to their ships in chains before detonating the world to erase all traces of their passing.
Upon her return to the Core, Zerestra was praised for her actions, and bestowed the deed name of Hellbinder. This precipitated her rise through the ranks of Hashut's priesthood, until her rise to the rank of Voice. Her final act before her ascension was to lead her predecessor's sacrifice to empower the Icon of Darkness, and it is rumored it was Zerestra herself who received the revelations from the Father of Darkness which led to the Icon's creation in the first place, despite her predecessor's attempt at preventing it from being built – a transgression against Hashut for which he was rightfully punished.
Clad in armor that was gifted to her by Vashtorr himself, Zerestra wields a staff bestowed upon her by one of the Tetrarchs, these mysterious Daemon Princes who performed Guilliman's will during his long slumber, and whom the Demiurges regard as blessed angels of their dread deity. She goes to war atop a mobile altar of Hashut on ten spider-like legs, infused with the essence of a captive Daemon Prince and protected from harm by sorcery and technology alike.
The Icon of Darkness
Said to have been built in the image of Hashut, the Icon of Darkness is the greatest Daemon Engine that the Demiurges have ever built (though if the rumors that it hosts a fraction of the Father of Darkness' essence rather than a mere captive Neverborn are true, then it is no Daemon Engine at all). The size of an Imperator Titan, the very sight of the Icon has been known to drive even Orks to flee in terror. Such is the warmachine's power it warps reality around it, making it impossible to describe : everyone who looks upon it sees something different, with only its size and dread majesty being common features.
The creation of the Icon was a titanic endeavour, and required the sacrifice of the previous Voice of Hashut to complete it, his very soul burning up to fuel the rituals that empowered the great engine.
Prior to the Olympia campaign, the Icon of Darkness was never deployed in battle against the enemies of Hashut, instead being worshipped as an idol within the darkest, most secretive depths of the great temple of the Father of Darkness on Xilliarimon. There, numerous sacrifices were brought to it every day in order to satiate its hunger : slaves, war prisoners, and even Demiurges who had failed Hashut in some way were thrown into its burning maw, their flesh and soul both consumed by it. All the while, dozens of Shadow Priests maintained a constant chanting around the Icon of Darkness to appease it, lest it rampage in the middle of Xilliarimon.
Keeping up those sacrifices and rituals during the journey to Olympia was a logistical challenge, but one the Demiurges rose up to, for there is no doubt whatsoever in their hearts that once unleashed, it shall reap a glorious tally of Hashut's enemies.
The Doomed One
If the Doomed One ever had a real name, only Hashut himself knows it. Said to be the very first Immortal, raised from death not by the ministrations of mechanists and sorcerers but by the very will of the Father of Darkness, the Doomed One has been sighted on battlefields since the days of the Ignominy, a champion of Hashut who has cut down any foe to ever cross his path. His face is completely covered by a heavy metallic mask, bearing only the image of Hashut's Chaos rune, which also prevents its wearer from speaking, increasing his mystique.
Unlike the halberds of the Immortals, the Doomed One wields a pair of great daemonic axes, each hosting a Greater Daemon of Chaos : the one in his right hand a Bloodthirster of Khorne, the one in his left a Duke of Change of Tzeentch. Even with the most potent wards and bindings carved onto the weapons, either of these would overwhelm the will of most Chaos champions (be they mortals or Astartes) in mere moments, turning them into mere puppets of the daemon within. Yet the Doomed One has carried them both in battle for thousands of years, and never showed any sign of succumbing to their influence.
There are some Demiurges who claim that the Doomed One is actually a legacy title, which has been borne by many Demiurges over the millennia, with a new warrior taking the name and mask when the previous one dies. Others believe that there has only ever been a singular Doomed One, whose life has been sustained ever since the Betrayal through the gifts of Hashut and the strength of his hate.
Only the mightiest Shadow Priests of Hashut dare to command the Doomed One, and even they phrase their orders as polite requests, as it isn't unheard of for the Doomed One to brutally slaughter those who show him any lack of respect.
AN : And we're back, with multiple revelations !
Yes, the Interex was destroyed by the Demiurges at Guilliman's command. And yes, the Masters of the Forge of Souls were once reptilian servants of the Old Ones, responsible for building weapons during the War in Heaven, before fleeing into the Warp when their creators were defeated by the C'tans.
Now, I am not saying each Master is three Chaos-corrupted Skinks in a hooded robe, but I do find the mental image funny.
That's also why I changed Vashtorr's backstory. In canon, he actually managed to overthrow the Masters and, because of the way the Warp works, that meant that he always ruled the Forge of Souls.
The notion of having the Demiurges show up as the 40K equivalent of the Chaos Dwarves came to me years ago, when I was still considering whether to write the Times of Ending or not (I think I was working on Raven Guard or Alpha Legion Index Astartes at the time). If I remember correctly, it was watching the Battlefleet Gothic Tau trailer which planted the seed.
I took a lot of inspiration from the Chaos Dwarves of the Old World for this, and, as you no doubt noticed, twisted the backstory of the Leagues of Votann. Given that I had already made it canon within the RH-verse that AI turned on their creators because of the "inevitably feed Chaos" thing, the Betrayal seemed like the perfect opportunity to have them dramatically change.
What else ... the K'Daai Zharr are lifted wholesale from the Chaos Dwarves' roster, and the Dreadful Engines were inspired by the webcomic Girl Genius. The rest of the Codex was pieced together over the last four months, with me coming back to it every so often to add something whenever inspiration struck me. Hopefully it doesn't feel too disjointed as a result.
As always, I look forward to your thoughts on this chapter. The FFNet notifications just started working again for me, so if you've contacted me in the last few months and I haven't answered yet, sorry, I should get to it soon.
Many thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this chapter. Next up, we go back to the situation in Olympia.
Zahariel out.