"...I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds."
- —The Apocrypha Terra
The Ordo Sinister, known formally as the Titanicus Terranic Ordo Sinister, is an elite Divisio Militaris Titan Legion of the Collegia Titanica that employs special psychic weapons and tactics.
The Ordo Sinister is known by the informal cognomens "The Left Hand of the Emperor" and the "Nightmare Titans," and is considered one of the most covert and macabre of all the Imperium's agencies of war and political control.
During the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy eras, this Titan Legion was known to employ weapons of such hidden terror and secrecy, such as the Warlord-Sinister-class Psi-Titan, that few even within the Imperium's hierarchy suspected their existence.
Legion History
"Fools have asked 'Why did the Dark Age of Technology end in the fall of humanity?', and other fools answer back 'Folly' or 'Pride' or 'The Worship of Progress', as if these things alone had any meaning. The answer, as the wise know, is simple. It is because finally humanity had the arts at their disposal to make their dreams reality, and the dreams of humanity have ever been the darkest things in all creation."
- — Introduction to the Emerald Testament, Suppressed work of the Technoarchaeologist Synecius Thorn, M39
A Warlord-Sinister-class Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister.
The forces of the Great Crusade were myriad in nature, and as the Remembrancers were wont to style them, "...as numberless as the stars themselves." This is only befitting, as the task for which the vast host of the Imperialis Militarum was conceived and embodied was for no less than the staggeringly incomprehensible goal of the domination of the entire galaxy.
This required weapons and warriors as diverse as uncounted Pioneer Corps of indentured labourers, hundreds of thousands strong, to the superhuman might of the Legiones Astartes, a purpose-created, gene-crafted transhuman fighting force greater than any in history.
The will and reason of the Emperor divined and designed for the Great Crusade in effect a weapon and a warrior for every conceivable form of war, and even those inconceivable until they had to be fought -- unhallowed wars against powers and horrors beyond Human imagining and beyond merely Human endurance.
One such dark creation, an experiment perhaps in weaponry long forbidden, and carried out not by any Mechanicum Archimandrite nor Strategos Magister, but by the hand of the Emperor Himself, led to the creation of the Ordo Sinister.
Forbidden to All Save One
"There are monsters, and then there are the monsters we make to fight them. Both are the same. The difference is simply a choice of how we see ourselves."
- —The Emperor of Mankind, at the Massacre of Angorite, late Unification-era
A rare pict-capture of a Warlord-Sinister-class Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister in action during the Great Crusade.
The exact genesis of the experiments which led to the creation of the Ordo Sinister is difficult to pin down by scholarly observers in later ages.
As with almost all that began in the prohibited vaults of the Emperor's own laboratory complex beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra, its nature remains sealed by time and by the destruction that was to follow.
Such records that do remain within the Martian Mechanicus, however, who, given the nature of the Ordo Sinister's origins, were seriously perturbed by the project -- or more accurately their exclusion from it -- do evidence certain speculations.
The ancient Mechanicum believed that the project was created either as a tangent of what was to become the Emperor's great project to control and manipulate the psyker factor in Human evolution, or as a direct attempt to develop esoteric weaponry on the macro scale to combat certain encountered menaces which had proven terrible in the cost of their destruction.
These menaces, such as Enslaver Alpha-incursions, the Rangdan Osseivores and the Hellespont Void-forms, all of which had taken the lives of millions of Imperial soldiers and thousands of star vessels to combat, and had broken whole expeditionary fleets and Titan Legions in the past, were menaces to which no sure counter existed save that of Exterminatus.
The purpose of what became the Ordo Sinister was the battlefield employment of macro-level weaponry of terrible potency and of a nature which was expressly forbidden to any within the Imperium, be they Primarch or Planetary Governor, on pain of death.
These were weapons born of the science of the Dark Age of Technology and perhaps ancient relics of alien civilisations which had risen and fallen before life had even begun on primeval Terra. These were weapons forbidden to all but those under the Emperor's direct shadow and control, and even then only under the greatest possible conditions of secrecy and failsafe.
The Ordo Sinister was the cadre set up to build, maintain and use these weapons, classed as their name suggests as Sinistrum. This word has long stood as the Terran tech-arcana classification for prohibited technologies designed to artificially amplify or weaponise the psyker's gift, usually at the cost of the psyker himself, body or mind.
Examples of Sinistrum technology, such as the "Culexine-shackles" used by the narco-enslaved psyker covens of the Caucasus Wastes subjugated by the Emperor during the Unification Wars, had long since been bywords for the true evils of the Dark Age of Technology.
The Oblation
It is not known just how long the Ordo Sinister had existed in the Emperor's shadow, but their first prominence came in 967.M30 when a Writ of Compulsion was issued by the Emperor requiring the deliverance of a grand total of twenty-five fully operational Battle Titans of the Warlord-class to the Vault Imperialis, in perpetuity.
This extraordinary request caused a strong reaction in the ancient Mechanicum's hierarchy, splitting it between those who fervently considered the Emperor to be the living incarnation of the Omnissiah, and therefore immediately entitled to any of His servants' works, and those who saw with a more political eye, deeming the demand to be a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Treaty of Mars which bound the Mechanicum to the Imperium and guaranteed its rights.
To this latter group, the spectre of potential Titan Legions being formed without the sacred imprint of the Mechanicum at their inception or control was the start of the end of Mars' independence.
Schism threatened, but after an audience between the Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal and the Emperor, the colossal demand was met and any further open malcontent within the Machine Cult's ranks over the issue was suppressed, though what ill-feeling remained in secret can only be speculated upon in light of later events.
Mars herself bore the brunt of the burden, delivering eight Warlords from her reserve, while new production and requisitions from the Forge Worlds of Metalica, Pharon, Arachnus, Caradryn Magna and Voss made up the rest.
The transfer was viewed as a crime by some and a blessing by others, but of this event, or the "Oblation," as the followers of the Machine Cult named it, nothing would come to pass for several standard years
The requisitioned god-engines were swallowed up as if without trace on Terra despite their scale and power. Twenty-five of the most powerful war machines ever fashioned by Humanity simply vanished.
The King of Terrors
A Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister in combat during the Great Crusade.
Skagan VI was a largely unremarkable Human-occupied world upon the southern border of the Segmentum Solar. Rendered Compliant in 860.M30 by the IV Legion in a relatively bloodless action, it had grown rapidly in population, seeing waves of migration brought in from overcrowded worlds closer to the Segmentum Solar core, as well as the rapid increase in hive city-style urbanisation and industrialisation which followed.
The result for Skagan VI was political instability, simmering insurrection and the threat of full-scale civil war by the year 946.M30, when the local lord-arbitrator requested aid from the sector overlords, saying that the world had become a factionalised powder keg ready to ignite.
The response to the lord-arbitrator when it came was an unexpected one; a flotilla of vessels sent from Terra itself, comprised of a single unmarked Titan conveyor, flanked by an escort of Saturnyne fleet Solar Auxilia cruisers and, most shocking of all, an Augur-frigate in the scarlet and gold panoply of the Imperial Household Squadron.
A single lander-crucible deployed from the unnamed Titan conveyor and descended to the starport of Decorah Breaks near the capital city-plate of Skagan VI. Its cargo upon dismounting was to be a single Warlord Titan liveried in deep green-black verdigris and bearing a snarling lion head in cold argent as its sigil.
Upon its armourial was featured no symbol or sign recognisable as belonging to any Titan Legion of the Imperium, instead it bore the words "Ordo Sinister - Pavore Dominetur" and what was judged to be the Titan's blazoned name, Polaris-Albedelach.
Within only solar days such a strange-sounding title was replaced with one far more appropriate in the whispers of the natives of Skagan VI -- they called it "the King of Terrors" after the psyker-tarot card of the same name. For where the god-engine walked, fear walked with it.
Of course, such towering colossi of destruction rightly engender fear in those who look upon them, such is their inherent quality of awe and warlike splendour that even the most jaded soldier cannot but quake when in the presence of such a terrifying machine of destruction or while contemplating what it is capable of.
But the fear this monstrous newcomer inspired was something else.
Fear bled from it like a miasma, flowing out to chill the bone and still the heart. Crowds fled from it in unreasoning panic, while others could do nothing but fall prostrate in abject terror as the Titan passed through the city's great arterial travelways, never firing its hulking weapons nor sounding its war siren in anger.
Where it walked the world was stilled, and where its shadow passed upon the horizon, the sleep of the just and the guilty alike was wracked equally with cold dreams of death and oblivion.
Would-be revolutionaries were silenced, insurrectionists abandoned their arms and dispersed to outlying districts, their causes and grievances ashes upon their tongues. The "King of Terrors" brought Skagan VI to heel without firing a shot.
The Witch-Idol of Magc'Sithraal
The second time the Ordo Sinister would take to the field would be a far bloodier and more terrible affair, as part of a protracted series of battles that has since come to be known as the Defence of Helioret.
The Helioret Sector had, since the opening years of the 960s.M30, been under escalating attack from Aeldari Corsairs and marauder forces based upon a half-shattered Asuryani craftworld known as Magc'Sithraal.
These Aeldari were by any example of their species who had been encountered insane, tortured creatures, still reeling from the fall of their ancient power, driven by grief and suicidal with bitter hate for all other intelligent species of the galaxy.
They had fallen upon the worlds of the Helioret Sector with merciless violence, burning planet after planet, unleashing strange synthetic plagues that fused flesh into bloodied crystal, and fractured moons and orbital void stations to tumble down upon worlds below.
The Imperium's response to the onslaught soon escalated until scores of regiments of the Imperialis Auxilia had been mobilised against it, with them Mechanicum Taghmata forces from Anvilus and Incaladion, supported by a demi-Legion of the Tiger Eyes Titans who contested bitterly to hold the line against the splinter-bone Phantom Titans of the Magc'Sithraal Aeldari at Luxor and Ratep.
Utter loss of those key worlds was only averted when a full third of the strength of the Blood Angels Legion took to the fray with their Primarch Sanguinius at the fore.
Not even this apocalyptic force could win outright victory though, but instead it saw the Aeldari forced back to a defensive ring around their sundered and debris-trailing craftworld.
It was as the angelic Primarch girded his forces for an all-out attack against the Magc'Sithraal craftworld that he was unexpectedly joined by a squadron bearing the Seal and Writ of Terra and the Imperial Household.
With it were a dozen Black Ships carrying within them cohorts of the Silent Sisterhood and with them a trio of unmarked Titan conveyors with the Warlords of the Ordo Sinister within their holds.
The battle which followed was shocking in its intensity, with the barbed, swift hulls of the Aeldari warships set burning across the void as they fought both the steel-grey war-barques of Anvilus as well as the proud, white-hulled battleships of the Armada Ultima.
As the void battle raged, the sleek Black Ships and the crimson predators of the Blood Angels fleet dove straight on to their quarry.
Crashing through the decaying spires and force-domed atmosphere of the desolate Craftworld, the invaders were met by Magc'Sithraal's army of the dead; thousands of Wraith war constructs ranging from swift-footed assassins to towering warriors and Titan-walkers, all powered and animated by the vengeful souls of that haunted realm.
Reality rippled and shuddered as the Aeldari distortion weaponry rent the air, tearing crimson gunships from the skies, while below, ancient colonnades and towers that had stood for centuries toppled, hammered by remorseless shellfire -- and as missiles rained down in detonating waves, the landing was forced.
A score of Aeldari Titans rose up from the depths of their ancient vaults, and at the head of them was a Warlock Titan, filled with the souls of Magc'Sithraal's fallen seers and prophets.
The Imperium had encountered it before and named it the "Witch-Idol," and where it had walked, no Imperial victory had yet been won.
Against this massing of force, the Imperial assault first faltered and was checked, as even the Titans of the Legio Fureans landing with the second wave were swiftly torn apart by the "Witch-Idol" and its kinsmen, though it is said that Sanguinius destroyed one of their number himself, tearing open its head with his bare hands and sending it crashing to destruction before being struck a grievous blow by the Warlock's Psi-Lance from which none other would have survived.
It was then that the three Titans of the Ordo Sinister made their landing, and at their footfalls the very fabric of the craftworld was said to have shuddered as if in revulsion.
From their carapace weapons poured volleys of rocket fire and searing Turbo-Laser blasts as might have been expected from any Battle Titan, while their right hands were vast Arioch Power Claws which twitched in expectation of the close-quarters kill, but from the baroque and strange weapons that served as their left arms, there spat a silent darkness.
These bolts of black nothingness slammed through the ranks of the Wraith-constructs, devouring everything they touched. While in the aftershock of their detonation, scores more Wraith-kind simply fell like severed marionettes, never again to stir.
Howling a great chorus of grief and outrage, the Aeldari Titans rounded on the newly arrived giants and let fly, Pulse Lasers cutting the sky apart between the two while the "Witch-Idol" conjured forth a tempest of eldritch Warp-lightning, its coruscating wave of destruction suddenly met by an ice-white blaze of force emanating from the god-engines of the Ordo Sinister and shattered.
The backlash of the forces negating each other shook the craftworld like an earthquake, tumbling Space Marine and Wraithguard alike to the ground like toys. Empyreal force had been met with empyreal force and it was clear to every spectator to this clash of colossi how; the god-engines of the Ordo Sinister were Psi-Titans.
The conflict that followed was a true battle of the gods, and the recovering Primarch Sanguinius had wisdom enough to withdraw the warriors of the Legion to give the Titans a wide berth for what was to ultimately follow.
For three solar hours the Psi-Titans fought, unleashing destructive forces on a scale enough to break a dozen cities; Pulse Laser slashed metre-thick ceramite Warlord armour, only to have it melt and reform whole in the wake of the destruction, though not even such occult protections could hold back the lethal strike of a gigantic Aeldari Power Blade plunged deep into the reactor-fuelled heart of one of the Ordo Sinister's number.
Ghostlike holo-fields flickered and shuddered as the Aeldari Titans danced the dance of death with impossible grace, and fusillades of screaming rockets found only empty air, but not even such mastery of speed and confusion could stop the ravaging darkness of the Warlord-Sinister 's baleful primary weapons.
Slowly but surely for the Aeldari Titans, four became three, became two, became only the wounded "Witch-Idol" beset still by two of the Ordo Sinister's Warlords, although both were damaged.
Its lance shattered by a blast of ravening emptiness, it sang its defiance across the Empyrean but was answered by prisoning hurricanes of psychic force against which its superior manoeuvrability became nothing more than the struggle of a battered scarecrow caught in a storm.
One of the Warlord-Sinisters then seized the Witch-Idol's broken shoulder, holding it captive while its dark companion tore off the Warlock Titan's head.
With the Witch-Idol's destruction, it was as if the soul of Magc'Sithraal had died as well. Lights flickered and died across the ruined craftworld, systems failed and the end began.
The last remnants of the Aeldari who had not already fled their dying home came on in a suicidal frenzy, but found only the fury of the Blood Angels Legion and the cool savagery of the Sisters of Silence waiting for them.
The Psi-Titans of the Ordo Sinister did not wait, instead they bore up the remains of their fallen comrade, and without further communication departed the battlefield.
The last of the slaughter was not long in coming, and the final act of the Defence of Helioret was for the wreckage of the broken craftworld to be hurled into a nearby sun to die its final death.
Ordo Sinister at Present
"Despise infantry if you must. Crush them underfoot, by all means. But do not ignore them. Battlefields are littered with the wreckage of Titans whose crews ignored infantry."
- — Grand Master Ferromort, Ordo Sinister, Divisio Militaris
The Ordo Sinister continues to function as an elite, special purpose Titan Legion. Comprised of an unknown number of Battle Titans under the command of the renowned Grand Master Ferromort, the purpose of the Ordo Sinister is simple -- to inspire terror and obedience in those who are in danger of disrupting the Pax Imperium, to lend the weight of steel to the words of the Mechanicus' ruling magi.
In this respect the Ordo often works in conjunction with the Adeptus Arbites, the Inquisition and the Ecclesiarchy, providing transport and fire support for their ground troops in innumerable short, vicious campaigns.
The carefully planned assaults of Grand Master Ferromort are famous for their precision and flawless execution. Great pains are taken to use the Titan Legion as an example of impersonal and faceless Imperial efficiency.
In persuading truculent Planetary Governors to submit to the Imperial will, the Ordo Sinister has destroyed hundreds of supposedly impregnable fortresses and allegedly unassailable palaces.
However, this Titan Legion remains an instrument of precision for the Imperium -- a well-honed sabre rather than the sledgehammer of an Imperial Navy planetary bombardment or the scalpel of a Space Marine intervention.
Deeds of the Ordo Sinister
The account of the Ordo Sinister's involvement in the Defence of Helioret contained within the battle chronicles of the Blood Angels remains the most detailed and certain account of the secretive Titan Order in battle.
There are perhaps a dozen other such incidents of less certain variety or of little detail elsewhere, but each also features the account of some vastly potent enemy to be contested, usually possessing great psychic power, or conversely as with Skagan VI, a fractious world brought back to peace through almost preternatural terror.
The most important perhaps of these is the passage of three Titans of the Ordo Sinister within the Imperial host despatched to censure Prospero, a fact which appears was kept even from Leman Russ until well after the fighting had already begun.
What does seem certain, however, from all these accounts was that very few Titans were ever fielded at once by the Ordo Sinister, and when they appeared, it was often without the foreknowledge of any of the forces on whose side they intervened.
The Ordo was never despatched to the frontiers of the Great Crusade, and never left Terra for any length of time that can be discerned. Nor, unless by some far more secret means, does it appear that any more Titans were added to their number.
To many Imperial savants, this has led to the belief that the Ordo Sinister all through the latter days of the Great Crusade was an experimental field trial, an unfinished project still in its testing stage when the wars of the Horus Heresy upset many destinies and intended courses of action.
Tellingly, even before his treacherous fall from grace, never once was the Ordo Sinister placed at the disposal of the Warmaster Horus or any other independent Imperial commander, but it always remained in the shadow of the Emperor's authority.
When the Horus Heresy came, a representative of the Ordo Sinister did present himself to the Council of Terra when requested and answered various questions of the force's structure and command during the period of the Emperor's self-sequestrage; a meeting from which some of the details of this account are drawn.
But citing express orders from the Master of Mankind, the Titan Order was then not included in the general preparations for the wars of the Heresy that came afterwards. Instead they waited, as part of Terra's last line of defence, until almost the end, or at least such is the official record.
By their own words, the Ordo Sinister was to remain on Terra until called upon by the Emperor Himself and thus few records speak of their conflicts across the galaxy, both during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy that followed.
Claims of their inactivity are to be taken with some skepticism, for reports speak of unsettling Titans walking upon battlefields across the galaxy during the Horus Heresy, silent god-engines striking against the servants of the Warmaster.
The strength of the Ordo Sinister also stands in doubt, for scattered tales speak of Titans forged in all manner of designs unleashing powers far beyond mortal ken.
Notable Campaigns
- The King of Terrors (946.M30) - The Warlord-Sinister-class Titan Polaris-Albedelach arrived on the unstable Imperial world of Skagan VI, which was rife with simmering insurrection and political instability. Wherever this god-engine walked, fear walked with it. It soon earned the far more appropriate title of "the King of Terrors" from the local populace. The mere presence of the "King of Terrors" brought Skagan VI to heel without firing a shot.
- Defence of Helioret (960s.M30) - The second time the Ordo Sinister took to the field during the Great Crusade proved to be a far more terrible affair. The Ordo Sinister deployed three Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titans to the Helioret Sector to fight Eldar Corsairs and other marauders based on the half-shattered Craftworld of Magc'Sithraal. Supported by regiments of the Imperialis Auxilia, the Taghmata Omnissiah, a demi-Legio of Legio Fureans Titans and a full third of the Blood Angels Legion, the Imperial forces launched an all-out assault on Magc'Sithraal. They were unexpectedly joined by a squadron bearing the Seal and Writ of Terra and the Imperial Household, along with a dozen Black Ships bearing cohorts of the Silent Sisterhood and a trio of unmarked Titan conveyors that contained Warlord-Sinister Titans. The Imperials took to the field upon the sundered and debris-trailing Craftworld itself. Upon their deployment, the Ordo Sinister Titans fought a titanic battle, unleashing destructive forces on a scale previously unseen which successfully destroyed four Eldar Titans.
- Battle of Prospero (734.004.M31) - The Razing of Prospero was one of the names given by later scholars to the sanctioned Imperial military reprisal against the XV Legion's homeworld of Prospero before the formal start of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. The action was carried out by the Imperial Censure Host, which was personally led by Primarch Leman Russ, and spearheaded by his Space Wolves Legion. The Chamber Occidentalis of the Ordo Sinister deployed five Psi-Titans in support of the Terran Censure Host raised to prosecute the Thousand Sons' flagrant violation of the Emperor's edicts against the use of psychic sorcery made at the Council of Nikaea.
Note: This following campaign discusses material that was once considered canon but whose canonicity is now questionable.
- Retallus IV Campaign (Unknown Date.M41) - On the ancient Ork planet of Retallus IV a WAAAGH! on a colossal scale gathered pace as hundreds of Mekboyz directed the labour of thousands of Human slaves to raise the towering forms of gigantic Mega-Gargants over Retallus IV's desolate plains, and, inspired by this effort and the promise of war, countless Greenskins rallied to the world in preparation for this crusade. The Imperium was determined to prevent the birth of such a devastating WAAAGH!, and by the Emperor's direct order, the twelve Imperator-class Titans comprising the entire strength of the Ordo Sinister were dispatched to Retallus alongside other Imperial forces, tasked with smashing the WAAAGH! before the green horde spread and drowned the galaxy in blood.
Notable Psi-Titan Classes
Warlord-Sinister-class Titan
In information given to the Council of Terra before the Heresy by the Ordo Sinister's representative, an officer of the Ordo named Prefect Kelner Anahat, it was confirmed with authenticated patents that the organisation of the Ordo Sinister was arranged and provisioned entirely to an exacting framework laid out by the writ and dictate of the Emperor, from which it could not deviate nor innovate upon pain of destruction.
It comprised four allied but self-contained fortress crypts -- each with their own defences, support staff, menials and techno-arcanists, all in support of a "chamber," each comprising five specially-modified Warlord Titans.
These god-engines, properly classified as Terranic Pattern Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titans, were each rebuilt around an Emperor-designed psychic amplification matrix device called the Ciricrux Anima.
The Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan is ultimately a thing that should not be. A fusion of one of the mightiest god-engines with the "weaponised" power of numerous bound alpha-grade psykers, and crewed by a soulless Untouchable, a Warlord-Sinister was constructed with methods only the Emperor Himself could permit.
For a Warlord-Sinister, fear is its constant companion, bleeding those around it of hope and joy with its very presence.
In place of the standard Titan configuration of Mind Impulse Units, it was this which controlled and empowered the Warlord-Sinister and in place of the moderati that would normally crew a Battle Titan, the Psi-Titans were instead crewed by what might be considered the damned -- bound psykers surgically locked in place and cybernetically slaved to the will of the "preceptor-intendant" who mastered the god-engine in place of a princeps.
By direct cortical control, the psychic powers and life forces of the bound psykers were siphoned off and focused by the arcane technologies of the Ciricrux Anima, the baleful device that truly makes the Psi-Titan what it is.
This energy was controlled by a techno-arcane interface quite unlike that of a standard configuration Mind Impulse Unit, while much of the Psi-Titan's other functions were slaved to sub-automata systems and Machine Spirit homunculi (artificial intelligence routines).
Set at the heart of the storm of these energies, the preceptor-intendant sat in a shielded command crucible in the Titan's head. But even this was insufficient to entirely protect them from the psychic forces at play, and so each Titan commander of the Ordo Sinister was a psychic Blank, an Untouchable.
But each preceptor-intendant was selected on entirely different criteria from those who served within the Sisters of Silence or the Culexus Clade, and cybernetically augmented to allow for Human-machine interface.
Although in his testimony Prefect Kelner Anahat would not be drawn out on his or his comrades' recruitment or training, he did state that of the psykers bound within the Warlords-Sinister that "...for some, it was a punishment for their crimes, and others, a blessed relief from their torments, and that...a balance was maintained in order that optimum conditions were met." He would also not be drawn out on the rate at which the bound psykers were exhausted by the process.
Through the use of the Ciricrux Anima, a Warlord-Sinister is able to project psychic phenomena on a truly gargantuan scale, although without any of the nuance or fine manipulation available to an individual trained psyker.
These phenomena include waves of preternatural fear, psychokinetic effects, biomantic leaching of life in the immediate area and even the temporal distortion-based reversion of damage to the Titan itself.
Roused to anger a Warlord-Sinister is a terrible beast, able to project psychic phenomena on a truly gargantuan scale through its Ciricrux Anima. Despite this, the most devastating power a Warlord-Sinister can draw upon rests in its left arm.
Known as the Sinistramanus Tenebrae in High Gothic, literally translated as the "Left Hand of Darkness," each Warlord-Sinister possesses such a weapon.
This is a hybrid of strange technologies, more akin to a mutilated Warp-Drive in design than a conventional armament, but it serves to use the psychic potential of the Ciricrux Anima by focusing the psychic antipathy of the Titan's bound psykers into a fracture in reality -- a rift much like the forced Warp-breach inherent in Vortex Weapons which is then channelled and released as a projectile of nightmarishly destructive psychic force.
Where the projectile -- which manifests as a sphere or bolt of "darkness" as it eats the light of whatever medium it passes through before striking dense matter -- detonates, it causes complete annihilation in the immediate impact area.
What was there is disassembled and hurled bodily into the Empyrean molecule by molecule until the mercifully brief Warp rupture self-seals.
Those in the wider area of the impact are simply struck dead, their bodies left unmarked as if their souls had been sheared from their bodies.
While Vortex Missile ordnance is both more powerful in its blast and limited in range only by its function, the Sinistramanus Tenebrae Psi-cannon has the advantage that it may be fired repeatedly, at least while the psychic strength of those on board the Psi-Titan lasts to power it.
Warlord-Sinister Psychic Powers
Such is the psychically amplified shroud of soul-deep terror that hangs about a Psi-Titan that even the strongest-willed soldiers will break and flee in panic if close to the war machine.
The very air of the cities in which they tread becomes haunted by the nameless dread of their presence.
The Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan possesses a number of unique psychic powers known to no other Titan pattern, including the following.
- Necrotechica: Ghostly light courses across the Psi-Titan's hull, re-knitting shattered armour and broken machinery.
- Death Pulse: A seething pulse of energy is unleashed from the Titan that assails the very soul of anything it touches.
- Quickening: Ætheric conduits in the Titan's limbs glow with power, driving the god-engine forwards at an unnatural pace.
- Antipathic Tempest: The Titan's head is crowned with a halo of unhallowed lightning and hurricane-force winds that, when unleashed, scatter man and machine alike with ease.
Other Psi-Titans
While the Warlord-Sinister appears to be a singular creation in form and function, the concept of the "Psi-Titan," however, is not an entirely unknown one, at least in the annals of the Great Crusade's foes, and even the more obscure reaches of the ancient Mechanicum's own Titan lore.
In the depths of pre-Unification Wars history, there are numerous occluded references of what might be described as "Psi-Titans;" in this case, Titan engines designed to be piloted by and amplify the powers of a single psyker as experiments and unique relic engines of war.
Though now long suppressed by the tech-orthodoxy of the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars, what became of the machines themselves or the sub-cults of the Omnissiah who created and piloted them remains unknown.
Among the psychically potent xenos species with which Humanity has warred, psi-construct war engines were known to be possessed by both the Aeldari and the Fra'al, and more tenuously by the now-exterminated Vaxal'rek, some of which easily matched the Titans of the Imperium in scale if not always in form.
Notable Titans
- Borealis-Thoon - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the War Within the Webway and was destroyed by the daemon horde.
- Occedentalis-Chirion - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the Crusade of Iron and was destroyed during the battle for Drooth II.
- Occedentalis-Eurytus - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the Crusade of Iron and spread dismay and ruin among the Titans of Legio Mordaxis and the Knights of House Ærthegn during the defence of Tyros.
- Occedentalis-Damysus - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the Crusade of Iron and was destroyed by the Titans of Legio Audax during the battle for Espandor.
- Occedentalis-Sabaktes - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the Crusade of Iron.
- Polaris-Albedelach - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that had the honour of making the presence of the Ordo Sinister known to the wider galaxy during the Great Crusade in 946.M30.
Notable Personnel
- Grand Master Ferromort - A grand master of the Ordo Sinsiter renowned for his precisely-planned assaults and their flawless execution which contributed to the Legion's upholding of the image of impersonal and faceless Imperial efficiency.
- Grand Master Volkus - A grand master of the Ordo Sinister.
- Dominus-Xelatcus Thrane Esmark - Commanding princeps of the Chamber Occidentalis.
- Prefect Kelner Anahat - The officer of the Ordo Sinister who made a presentation concerning the existence and purpose of the Titan Legion to the Council of Terra at the very start of the Horus Heresy.
- Hydragyrum, Prefect of the Chamber Borealis - Fourth initiate of the Fourth House, master of the Warlord-Sinister-class Titan Borealis-Thoon.
Legion Appearance
Legion Colours
The Ordo Sinister's Titans display deep, green-black verdigris livery.
Their Battle Titans' armourial features no symbol or sign recognisable as belonging to any Titan Legion of the Imperium, instead they bear the words "Ordo Sinister - Pavore Dominetur" which loosely translates from High Gothic as "Masters of Fear."
Legion Badge
The Ordo Sinister's badge is a snarling, silver lion head.
Sources
- Adeptus Titanicus (1st Edition), pg. 13
- Adeptus Titanicus - The Horus Heresy: Shadow and Iron (Specialty Game), pp. 10, 12, 14-15, 44-47, 68
- Titan Legions (2nd Edition), pg. 10
- Imperial Armour Apocalypse II, pg. 79
- The Horus Heresy - Book Seven: Inferno (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 132-137, 280-282
- Ordo Sinister (Short Story) by John French
- Warhammer Community - Shadow & Iron Crusades of Vengeance (05 Feb 2020)
Gallery
