Psi-Titan

A Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister in combat during the Great Crusade.

A Psi-Titan is an extremely rare grade of Imperial Battle Titan that is capable of unleashing psychic weaponry, utilising the powers of the Immaterium to defeat its foes.

Psi-Titans are only deployed by the unique Titan Legion of the Collegia Titanica known as the Ordo Sinister.

Only one class of Psi-Titan is yet known to exist -- a modified Warlord-class Titan called the Warlord-Sinister-class Titan. The Warlord-Sinister was only seen in small numbers before the onset of the Horus Heresy. However, rumours persisted at the time of as to the existence of other prototypes and experimental patterns hidden even from the eyes of Imperium's high officials.

In place of a standard Titan weapon configuration, a Psi-Titan is equipped with highly forbidden psychic amplification technology dating back to the Dark Age of Technology known as the Ciricrux Anima which allows it to project psychic abilities out into the environment with increased potency and scale.

A Psi-Titan is manned by damned Human psykers surgically wired into the war machine's heart and locked in place against their will. They are in effect slaved to the Psi-Titan's commanding princeps who bears the title of "perceptor-intendant," and is always a psychic Blank. It is the role of the perceptor-intendant to control their psychic charge and prevent them from losing control of their abilities.

The Ciricrux Anima allows a Psi-Titan to project its suffering internal psykers' powers externally, meaning that a Psi-Titan can unleash waves of abject fear, wield psychokinetic abilities, leech away the life forces of other combatants through biomancy, and even distort the flow of time to heal itself.

The most potent of a Psi-Titan's weapons is the Sinistramanus Tenebrae, colloquially referred to as a "Psi-cannon." This device focuses the psychic suffering of the Titan's bound and cybernetically-linked psykers to rip open a massive Warp rift in realspace that is as destructive as a Vortex Weapons.

Warlord-Sinister-class Titan

A Warlord-Sinister-class Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister.

A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan is properly classified as a Terranic Pattern Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan. It is a standard Warlord Titan that has been rebuilt around a psychic amplification matrix device called the Ciricrux Anima that was designed by the Emperor Himself during the Great Crusade using ancient technology.

The Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan is ultimately a thing that should not be. A fusion of one of the mightiest god-engines of the Adeptus Titanicus with the weaponised power of numerous bound alpha-grade psykers, and commanded 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. Rather than the the moderati that would normally help operate a Battle Titan, the Psi-Titans were instead crewed by what might be considered the damned -- bound psykers surgically locked in place and slaved to the will of the preceptor-intendant who commanded the god-engine in place of a princeps.

By direct cortical control, the psychic power and life force of the bound psykers were siphoned off and focused by the arcane technologies of the Ciricrux Anima, the baleful device that truly made 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 selected it would seem 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.

In testimony given to the Council of Terra during the Great Crusade by an Ordo Sinister officer named Prefect Kelner Anahat, he stated 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 the bound psykers were exhausted by the process.

Through the use of the psychic amplification technology provided by 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. 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 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 bound psykers into a fracture in reality -- a fracture, 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, as what was there is disassembled and hurled bodily into the Empyrean molecule by molecule until the mercifully brief 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 Warhead 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 the bound psyker on board of the Psi-Titan lasts to power it.

Warlord-Sinister Psychic Powers

The Warlord-Sinister Psi-Titan possesses a number of unique psychic powers known to no other Titan pattern, including the following.

• Shroud of Terror - 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.
• Necrotechica - Ghostly light courses across the Psi-Titan's hull, re-knitting shattered armour and broken machinery. Meanwhile, the discordant screams of those psykers trapped within the Titan echo in the minds of all nearby -- for the price is that those damned within have years bled from their own lives to shore up the bars of their prison.
• Death Pulse - A seething pulse of psychic energy that represents the hatred and murderous torment of the psykers trapped within is unleashed from the Titan that assails the very soul of anything it touches, causing great damage.
• 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.

Wargear

• Belicosa Volcano Cannon (right arm)
• Sinistramanus Tenebrae (left arm)
• Apocalypse Missile Launchers (carapace mounted)
• 2 Ardex-defensor Mauler Bolt Cannon turrets
• 2 Ardex-defensor twin-linked Lascannon turrets (rear mounted)
• Ceramite armour
• Void Shields
• Ciricrux Anima
• Sunfury Plasma Annihilator (Optional replacement for Belicosa Volcano Cannon)
• Mori Quake Cannon (Optional replacement for Belicosa Volcano Cannon)
• Saturnyne Lascutter (Optional replacement for Belicosa Volcano Cannon)
• Arioch Power Claw with built-in Mega Bolter (Optional replacement for Belicosa Volcano Cannon)
• Macro-gatling Blaster (Optional replacement for Belicosa Volcano Cannon)
• 2 double-barelled Turbo-Laser Destructors (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 twin-linked Vulcan Mega Bolters (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Titan grade Plasma Blastguns (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Reaver Laser Blasters (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Reaver Melta Cannons (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Reaver Gatling Blasters (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Vortex Missile banks (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)
• 2 Incinerator Missile banks (Optional replacement for both Apocalypse Missile Launchers)

Hereteknica of the Psi-Titan

A rare pict-capture of a Warlord-Sinister-class Psi-Titan of the Ordo Sinister in action during the Great Crusade.

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 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 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. On rare but notable occasions, such as the Kalidar War, even Orks have been documented deploying Psi-Gargants.

Notable Psi-Titans

• Borealis-Thoon - A Warlord-Sinister-class Titan that took part in the War Within the Webway and was destroyed by the daemon horde that assaulted the Impossible City of Calastar.
• 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.

Sources

• The Horus Heresy - Book Seven: Inferno (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 132-137, 280-282
• Warhammer Community: Shadow and Iron - Crusades of Vengeance (Image)
• Adeptus Titanicus - The Horus Heresy: Shadow and Iron (Specialty Game), pp. 10, 12, 14-15, 44-47, 68
• Ordo Sinister (Short Story) by John French