Pilgrims of Hayte

"Your god is dead. Faith is a lie. Hell awaits us all. Let the stars bleed!"

- found carved into the body of Cardinal Mollis, the Hematite Hill Massacre

An apocalyptic murder cult as insidious as it is cruel, the Pilgrims of Hayte have plagued the Calixis Sector for nearly three centuries. During that time, they have risen to levels of infamy unrivalled by any other. Such is their well-founded reputation for horror and atrocity with the sector’s powers that be that mere rumour of the cult’s presence in a particular area is enough to generate near-panic among the nobility and prompt immediate, and brutal crackdowns by local authorities.

The cult’s ultimate goal is a simple one -- the destruction of the Imperium. More specifically, it is the tearing down of the Imperial faith and the slaying of all those who serve the God-Emperor -- one soul damned and one murder done at a time if need be. To this end, the cult seeks to twist and corrupt the minds of the unsuspecting, the downtrodden, and the weak of faith and to carry out acts of mass-murder and sow despair and terror on as a wide a scale as possible. The cult’s masters, known as the False Prophets, wield the powers of the daemon and the baleful energies of the warp with fearful abandon, driving on their coteries of madmen, lost souls, and hell-spawned monsters as living weapons in their unholy crusade to destroy the rule of the Golden Throne.

The Bloody Solstice on Malfi
The first major incident attributed to the cult, the events surrounding the “Bloody Solstice,” set the pattern for much of the cult’s later activities and can be seen as emblematic of its worst excesses and black-hearted passions. In the years immediately following the destruction of House Koba on Malfi, order had been restored to all but the most desolate areas of the upper hives, and an uneasy truce forced upon the fractious ruling houses and guilds.This fragile peace, however, was rocked by a series of dreadful murders.

Members of the Ecclesiarchy, ranging from lowly mendicant preachers serving in the poorest hab-stacks to senior cannns who tended the high altar of the Seven-Spired Basilica, were being slaughtered. Some died in what at first seemed accidents, others were attacked almost at random by screaming madmen, and more were torn apart by unknown forces behind locked and barred doors. As the death toll rose, the enforcers and arbiters could find no link or common cause between them other than their faith, and seemed powerless to stop the ever-spiralling number of killings. The targeting of the faithful in this manner caused a serious threat to the faith of the populace and resulted in copy-cat killings, the vandalism of shrines, open unbelief, and public panic reaching epidemic proportions. Eventually, the Holy Ordos were called in despite the misgiving of the Malfian elite.

With three full Inquisitors heading the task force, a brutal crackdown into suspected cult activity was carried out. It was discovered that a powerful group calling itself the Pilgrims of Hayte lay behind the attacks. The Ordo learned that from a stronghold in a deserted industrial hive sector known as the Rustblight scav-zone, they had infiltrated numerous refugee camps, low hive hab communities, and even some isolated shrines, replacing the clergy entirely.

The cult preyed on the weak, the desperate, and those that Malfi’s decades of near anarchy had abused and made destitute, turning them against Imperial law and Imperial faith. What the Inquisition had not guessed at, however, were the daemonic powers the masters of the cult possessed. When a 400 strong force of Adeptus Arbites and inducted Imperial Guard closed in on the cult’s stronghold on the fateful eve of the Solstice of the Winter Martyr, they were expected.

No sooner had the Inquisition penetrated the interior of the zone, attacks began from waves of crazed cult zealots more than willing to die if they could take the loyalists with them. As the task force forged slowly ahead through the maze of rusted works, it was hard pressed when horrific mutants and terrible slavering beasts, clearly twisted and bound with the energies of the warp, entered the fray.

The inducted troopers began to fail and rout in the face of the enemy, only to be mercilessly hunted down and destroyed by the insane cultists. The hardier Imperials, such as Arbites kill teams, soon found themselves isolated, outnumbered, and overwhelmed as their ammunition ran dry and shimmering daemons rippled out from the shadows to tear them apart. The three Inquisitors, finding their fighters spread out and overcome, moved to rally and concentrate their forces. However, they underestimated the dark motivator behind the cult. He called himself Karcist, Prophet of Truth, and he presented himself to the embattled Ordo forces with no less terrible allies than a pair of bound daemonhosts at his side. A massacre followed, and although the resolute Inquisitors managed to destroy one of Karcist’s daemonhosts, only Inquisitor Corina, his right arm withered to the bone by the touch of a daemonhost’s scabrous claw, managed to escape.

News of the Holy Ordos’s defeat, no doubt disseminated by carefully placed cultists and traitors, spread like wildfire though Malfi’s upper echelons of power. The nobility isolated themselves, abandoning the people to fend for themselves. For a brief time the whole planet seemed to cower in terror, and a great world tottered on the brink of the abyss -- the Bloody Solstice had begun.

Madmen and warp-tainted freaks erupted onto the streets killing and burning with wild abandon, seemingly without pattern or purpose. Temples were attacked and their congregations massacred, and within the central Adeptus Arbites Precinct Fortress, a Charnel Daemon was unleashed, killing scores of loyal arbitrators before it was finally destroyed by concentrated cannon fire. As riot and panic broke out and killed thousands more of Malfi’s people, PDF detachments and local enforcers were overwhelmed, power was cut and fires raged out of control. The whole structure of Malfi’s continent spanning hive network neared collapse.

Invoking his full authority, the maimed Inquisitor Corina called together a meeting of Malfi’s Great Houses, presenting an impassioned demand for them to lend their weight to the fight or loose everything. He appealed to their faith and their duty first, but it is recorded that it was not until he mocked their injured pride and stupidity for allowing such heresy to fester in their midst that they sided with him. With the leadership, private armies, and even the secretive assassin cadres of the Great Houses to back them, the loyalists fought the rising tide of anarchy and the suicidal fury of the Pilgrims of Hayte head on. For week after week of gruelling and bloody fighting, they held their ground. As further aid poured in from the Holy Ordos and the Battlefleet Calixis, they gained the upper hand, order was restored, and the last remnants of the cult battered itself to extinction against the Imperial forces.

Karcist and several of his subordinate sorcerers were never found during the great Malfian purge that followed, but were sighted leading cults and atrocities in later decades all across the sector. The arch-heretic Karcist finally met his end, not at the hands of the Inquisition, but in the power-fisted grip of the Rogue Trader Harriman Vale nearly a century later. In the final analysis, the “Bloody Solstice” of Malfi provided a deadly exclamation point at the end of seven decades of misrule, discord, unrest, and bloodshed for Malfi. It has since entered the myths and history of that world as the direst moment of a dark age.

The Doom of the Ardent Seeker
One of the most recent major incidents attributed to the cult occurred in 799.M41 in the Maccabeus system. When the venerable pilgrimage-vessel Ardent Seeker translated from the warp off-course into the Maccabeus system and failed to answer hails, it was quickly interdicted and boarded by the local picket ships.

What the naval armsmen found onboard was an utter horror—perhaps fully nine-tenths of its seven thousand passengers had died in the most appalling and violent fashion. The tenth that remained had been driven mad and tortured in body and soul beyond endurance. Direct orders from the Arch Hierophant of Maccabeus prevented the naval commander from carrying out a frantic order to simply blast the ship to atoms. Instead it was held and soon boarded by a strong contingent of the legendary Maccabian Black Priests and their retinues who purged the once great vessel of the damned and the hidden taint of the warp that infested the decks. Piecing together what little evidence remained, the Black Priests discovered that these unfortunates had been doomed by a single deadly influence.

A cancerous demagogue had come aboard and slowly sown first doubt, then insanity and corruption that doomed every living soul aboard the Ardent Seeker -- a False Prophet of the Pilgrims of Hayte. Their investigation revealed that this servant of Chaos had, through his dark arts, infiltrated the first naval boarding party that had stepped foot on the ship and was now loose on the sacred soil of Maccabeus Quintus itself. In an almost unprecedented act, the Hierophant himself went before the planet with the news, and with an impassioned oratory fired the zealous hatred of his people against the hell-spawn in their midst. With a single purpose, the planet rose up and hunted down the infiltrator, along with hundreds of other suspected heretics (and not a few innocents mistakenly “captured”) who were purged in a frenzy of zealotry.

Official records state that the False Prophet was destroyed, but persistent rumours within the Holy Ordos say that the Black Priests managed the seemingly impossible and captured the diabolist alive to hand him to a secret Malleus Conclave. However, the truth of this is likely to never be revealed.

Tenets, Goals & Heretical Beliefs
At the core of the true beliefs of the Pilgrims of Hayte is nihilism of the spirit, utter hopelessness, and despair for humanity’s true place in the universe as they perceive it -- that of a squalling, blind creature utterly at the mercy of a deadly cosmos and a hungering warp. To them, civilisation, reason, faith, love, family, morality, hope, pleasure, and honour are all lies and stillborn dreams, strangled at birth by uncaring and implacable reality. The answer, as far as they are concerned, is total destruction -- the violent self-immolation of mankind’s carefully wrought web of lies and deceit. It is to embrace the madness, suffering, and despair that are humanity’s only real truth. It is to hate and kill and tear down, until nothing remains.

Those brought into the cult are selected chiefly for a seed of bitterness or resentment that they carry within them, some remembered slight or injustice -- incidents only too common in the oppressive crush of Imperial society. The cult works on this flaw to erode the recruit’s inhibitions, morality, and conscience to the point where his hatred and sense of outrage and betrayal consumes him. As he progresses through the cult’s outer layers of lies and deceit, the initiate is granted hideous revelations and subjected to horrific suffering and daemonic rituals designed to further strip away his sanity and damn him completely, leaving him most likely either dead, murderously deranged, or irrevocably tainted by the corrupting influence of the warp.

Those few cultists that survive long enough, or show particular promise, are taken under the wing of a False Prophet and directly tutored in the arts of the sorcerer and the demagogue. It is then that their masters show them that even the worship of Chaos is a lie—a tool to be used, as the beings of the warp would use them. If these aspirants survive such dark wisdom and the dangers of their tutelage, then they may become False Prophets in turn, and carve their own bloody path across the stars.

Cult Structure & Activity
In structure, the Pilgrims of Hayte are considered the very epitome of what some theorists in the Holy Ordos refer to as a “cancer cult,” which is introduced to a population or locale much like a disease and spreads from a single point of infection. The machinations of a False Prophet work to corrupt an ever widening circle of victims and endanger the lives and souls of all those around them. The growth of the cult often follows a disease-like cycle as well—first the infection, then a period of secrecy while the cult slowly grows in number and power analogous to an incubation period. Finally there is the terminal stage, as the cult, having reached a critical mass, runs rampant in a destructive frenzy.

The cult’s structure, particularly in the early stages of the “infection,” is centred entirely on its charismatic leader. These False Prophets often masquerade at first as genuine pilgrims, travelling preachers, or even charitable worthies who gather the downtrodden to them. They secretly gain their first converts by appealing to those who feel betrayed or ignored by the local authorities and, in particular, the Ministorum. With their first followers in hand, they coat their spiritual poison with honeyed words and false truths, dragging their victims down in a spiral toward damnation.

Once safely and secretly established in an area, they will found a cult cell, selecting new members from the dross of humanity and those already downtrodden or embittered, fanning the flames of their victims’ hatred and preying on their grief and despair. Before their followers realise it, they have lost their souls to the cult’s lies and, so damned, are plunged into a world of inhumanity, madness, and the worship of Chaos.

Once the cell is fully established and has achieved its own dreadful momentum, the False Prophet withdraws, sinking behind levels of secrecy while chosen converts continue to expand the cult by drawing new followers to the cause. Protected by this outer ring, the False Prophet directs matters from behind the scenes while he begins his true work—the establishment of a temple to the warp where he can work his sorceries and summon foul entities from beyond to do his bidding.

The False Prophet orchestrates this descent into madness, thriving off this destructive spiral of Chaos worship and channelling the cult’s hatred and violence at targets of his choosing. It is then that the nightmare for the wider world begins in earnest. What may have been disquieting rumours and a rash of mysterious disappearances and suspicious events erupt into a campaign of terror the likes of which few can imagine.

Wanton slaughter, foul murder, and atrocities of every type imaginable are loosed on the world. Often suicidal attacks by insane cult zealots coincide with terrorist incidents and, worse still, the unleashing of daemonic forces against faith and state. Geared to cause indiscriminate carnage as well as destabilise any counter-attack by the authorities, this storm of violence quickly becomes uncontrollable, even for the False Prophet at its centre. Like a pack of rabid beasts, the Pilgrims of Hayte savage and attack all they encounter. Now acting entirely on its own murderous drive to destroy and sow terror, the cult neither relents nor flees even if confronted with superior forces, and indeed will seemingly revel in its self-destruction, content to damage, terrify, and kill as much as it can before it is finally purged. It is at the end of this final explosion of carnage that, unless the Holy Ordos can find and kill the architect of this terror, the False Prophet will discard his insane and corrupted flock and slip away to begin the whole process again elsewhere.

The False Prophets
Though they may go by as many names, titles, and identities as suits them, “False Prophet” is indeed a most apt name for these arch-liars and bringers of strife. Each is a powerful and charismatic leader, a deceiver steeped in death and with the blood of multitudes on his hands. Each is a powerful sorcerer who has at his disposal many dangerous secrets and the forbidden knowledge gleaned both from his own depraved crusades and the bartered utterances of daemons.

These faithless killers have no room in their hearts for anything other than bitterness and hatred for the lies that others call the truth, and while they are more than willing to give the daemon its due, they scorn the true worship of any warp entity, no matter how powerful, as a god. They see the worship of such entities as only more layers of lies, albeit acknowledging that the Ruinous Powers are more generous masters than the “corpse-emperor.” They instead embrace Chaos as a means to an end—that end being the power to tear down the edifice of the Imperium. Reckless in the display of their powers, it is their particular wont to use the warp to further corrupt and enslave their followers, simply for the sadistic pleasure of doing so. Woe betide any Imperial servant that falls into their malign clutches.

The False Prophets of the Pilgrims of Hayte are a terrible foe, and they have claimed the lives of several Inquisitors and thousands of Imperial servants in the past. Combating them is the sworn and absolute duty of the whole Ordos Calixis. Although thankfully very few (the Ordo Malleus is currently tracking around 30, though this number is in dispute), the False Prophets seem to be slowly but steadily growing in number. While each seems to follow his own erratic and destructive path without plan or recourse to others of his kind, some at the highest circles of the Inquisition fear that there may be some single guiding hand behind all of them, some arch-diabolist whose ultimate plan has yet to see fruition.

Ordo Malleus Departmento Analyticus Threat Briefing
The location, pursuit, and destruction of the Pilgrims of Hayte’s cells are regarded as a priority of the highest order for the Conclave Calixis, and for many Ordo Malleus Inquisitors, the “cult” is the priority target. This focus is in no small part because of the cult’s proven ability to create large-scale carnage and the more subtle danger to long term spiritual and moral health of the masses it infiltrates. The cult is also considered highly dangerous to the stability of the sector as it is one of thankfully few cults and heretical organisations with a proven ability to operate sector-wide and perhaps even beyond. It is even willing to actively seek out and attack Inquisitorial forces.

The truth, the full extent of which is hidden from most, is that despite the Holy Ordos’ many victories against the cult, the False Prophets that remain at large are growing demonstrably more powerful and diverse as a group. It seems evident that the sheer abandon and disregard that they hold for their own lives and followers create something of a state of rapid “natural selection” with only the strongest prospering, and doing so quickly -- not by painstaking daemonic bargains, slavish secrecy, and tempered arcane lore, but by crashing and blundering at breakneck speed to power or death. For the higher circles of the Inquisition, this reckless abandon raises a very simple question: given their steady increase in power and their desire to destroy above all others, is there anything these maddog cult leaders would not do? Would not dare, if they possessed the power?