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THE SINFUL STARS: TEACHINGS OF THE DARK Introduction "In 2723, the Prophet saw the Holy Flame."

This ingenuous, ingenious litany, all-encompassing in its simplicity: This has ever been the maxim to which I, Bishop Xavier Holst, have endeavored to direct my thoughts and channel my deeds; and though I as much as any Shadow-tainted wretch have erred, have sinned, have mistaken and misinterpreted, it has ever been this immortal credo that has guided my dimming eyes back into the Pancreator's grace. Now, O celestial muses and disincarnate intelligences, guide my hand also, and let this humble scribe forever keep his covenant.

Surely some adage of truth, of meaning, of stability and permanence is needed in this forsaken age, when the worlds drift one from the other, and the rulers cast humanity into the cauldron of war, and terrible shapes waft from the abysses between the stars, and even the suns fade. Moreso than ever, in this, the Year of the Pancreator 4976, the Shadow waxes strong, and its demons laugh from their inky thrones at the tragedy playing itself out beneath them. The people mutter, the nobles tear the worlds Page 1

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asunder for the right to rule, the Guilds grow ever bolder, and even, yea, I shall dare speak it!, many of mine own ecclesiastical brethren, in hubris or folly or quiet despair, turn ever away from the Prophet's wisdom, seeking desperate solace in dubious inner (or outer?) whispers.

The Avestites rage and damn and burn; the Eskatonics lose themselves in their erstwhile inner luminance; the Heyschasts cloister themselves in all manner of secret crannies, while the Amaltheans blind themselves to the evil without by submerging their cares in the pursuit of works they deem good. I am none of these; I am but a country bishop, raised according to my mother's Omega Gospels and the wisdom of the Orthodox creed; and so I say, "Teach." By the works that invigorate, by the litanies that inspire, by the texts that inform, let the Church illumine the Celestial Sun in the souls of the masses, lest in despair they turn to others all too eager to offer seductive substitutes.

Certes the Guilds readily uphold all manner of false idols, that they might profit thereby. Their god, to which all too many of Urth have flocked, is that dubious deity named Technology; his servants stalk slyly among the people of Terra, lulling them into inaction and iniquity. For the Orthodox Litany the Page 2

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priests of this god substitute the mumblings of physics and the subliminal cabalisms of mathematics deriding our species as insignificant.

To replace the divinely inspired works of the Holy Church they offer a potpourri of strange engines, all the while promising us bizarre and questionable powers. And in place of the Eight Virtues these acolytes would offer us the very idleness and hubris that brought down the godless Second Republic.

Nor are these vices the greatest danger offered us by the Guilds and their works. At its worst, technology can blot out the soul-light as readily as any demon, and it is well documented in various ecclesiastical tomes (see The Journal of the Vorili, Expostulations of Kantos, etc.) that certain cunning demons actually disguise themselves as the products, rather than the progenitors, of occult science. Certes those amoral enough to seek wrongful dominance over their fellows care little whether the source of such dominance comes from Light or Shadow. The Church, as Palamedes preached in the Pentateuch Sermons, is the only source of light; and thus it follows that ultimately the products of technology are synonymous with Shadow, designed to enslave the weak and seduce the strong.

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And so I offer this grimoire to describe and categorize technology's manifold manifestations, even as a work of medicament enables the practitioner to identify, diagnose and cast out more visceral illnesses. Let this work serve as a lesson, as most books do, and as a warning of sorts.

Recorded herein are my own unworthy observations, as well as a commonplace smattering of erudite lore, dread superstition and various snippets in between. Let this mosaic of diversity coalesce in the reader's brain to a single pattern; just as the Pancreator has woven a wondrous tapestry out of a myriad disparate elements, let his servant convey an unadulterated message from a multitude of media.

For, despite the admonitory tone of this work, I wish it known that I adhere not to the Avestites' injunctions. All humans, be they Reeve or Scraver or even warlock, can be reforged in the Pancreator's Holy Flame. If this work, this codex, this divinely inspired labor should lead one penitent back to the way of the Celestial Sun, then I shall ascend to the Empyrean happily.

Herein I have recorded both my own unworthy observations and a compendium of lore gleaned from sources holy and profane alike. I have Page 4

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occasionally inserted parenthetical notes as well, lest the reader grow beguiled by the poisonous words of a heretical work whose text I cite solely to serve as an example and warning to the reader, much as the scarlet genital pouch of the Ul-Vathi tree-gulper serves as a banner repelling the wary traveler from its venomous hide.

And so now let the reader turn the page, and may the Empyrean wed my thoughts and pen. Let this work come not into the hands of those for whom it would serve as merest titillation or temptation toward further study of the very arts I adjure. Let those who would ignorantly descend into darkness stray from the left-hand path, and let the godly grow wiser in the ways of evil, that they may more readily purge it from our midst.

May the Invisible Sun shine upon ye always,

Bishop Xavier Holst Vau In any work dealing with the black science of technology, how can the scrupulous author not but begin with its chiefest purveyor?

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There are those who say the race known to us as the Vau is directly responsible for the darkening of the suns, and despite myself I cannot help but wonder at this rumor. For there can be no denying that where walk the Vau, the immanent faith of humanity ebbs. How, the doubters cry, can we bear to face such as these; how can we be aught but grik-slugs before them, shivering and shriveling in the cold yet blazing light of their supremacy? Yea, the Vau do not merely wrack our bodies with their demon-science; their very presence is an affront to our souls, our wills and our destiny.

I shrink not from the Vau; from their distended, wrinkled frames and vij-fruit pates; from their lacquered clothes and lacquered countenances; from their burning lances and chilling stares. They are not the Pancreator, to humble His chosen willy-nilly; they, like all creatures, have their function and ordained role. And I aver that the Vau were placed in our cosmic sphere by the Pancreator as a challenge and a riddle to be overcome. Just as the antiquated Urth tale of the Sphinx's riddle features the "insurpassable" conundrum which is in fact a mere statement of identity, so the Vau are the inscrutable chimeras placed before us to delude us, to plague us with self-doubt, in short, to test our Page 6

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resolve. Foolish the person who strives to emulate them, to fathom their errant ways; for by such trials does the Pancreator weed His true children from those whose souls are merest transient fireflies.

Few heretics are more dangerous than those apostates who would have us toady to and worship the Vau; who would cast our species' manifesto as cordwood upon an alien pyre. "The Vau are older than we," they shrill. "The Vau are the chosen," they hoot. "Gaze upon their technology, upon how they brush us aside like children. We must approach them humbly, as errant pupils to the teacher, so that we might learn from them, emulate them, and become old and wise as they have become old and wise."

Old and wise? We would become another G'nesh, merest gardeners to prune the Vau's kururu-trees and keep their paths free of debris. Certes I know of no other race with whom the Vau profess equality.

Recall the words of the G'nesh, before our species' first fateful meeting: "It is not allowed." So, it would seem, do the Vau truck with all who cross their path.

Most humans, awed into quiescence by the Vau's puppetry and light-shows, accept their accompanying hauteur as irrefutable proof of Page 7

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superiority. I view it as weakness, or shame, or perhaps worse. Certes the Church of the Celestial Sun, confident in the correctness of its doctrine, does not hide its cathedrals and priesthoods away like Madocian fruj-toks cowering in their carapaces.

Yea, like the gokk-lizard of Istakhr, the Vau puff and spit and spew their iridescent saliva, lest we march into their dens and discover that the display was merest bluff.

It is evident even to the densest bureaucrat that the Vau are ill at ease with the thought of Urthkind viewing their vaunted wonders. And so, having sought to cow us with a few pyrotechnic victories against conscripted levies on backwater planets, they mark an invisible line, like children playing hop-theej, daring neither to allow us into their realm nor to cross into ours. Nothing in the Pancreator's purview is that lassitudinous, save creatures paralyzed with doubts and fear.

Or is the riddle of the Vau perhaps a darker one? Do the unchanging visages of the Vau conceal, not weakness, but strength sent from the abyssal hells?

Certes the Vau do not act as overtly malignant as, shall we say, the Symbiots (of whom I shall discourse later); but the demons of the wastes come in many guises and serve many purposes. Most of Page 8

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learning are aware that the primal source empowering the Vau's occult artifacts manifests as a sort of radiance, and yet the Vau are manifestly not servants of the Empyrean. From whence, then, do the Vau draw their cunning flames? It is a question several of Temple Avesti have posed in the halls of the monasteries, and though I am no devotee of crusades conceived in haste, I often find my thoughts wandering down the same road.

And in truth, if the Vau are so righteous as their demeanor indicates, why then have we not been allowed to parley with their leaders? Yea, we have seen their soldiers aplenty, and felt the sting of their demon-weapons; the Guilds deal through emissaries with their lower classes; and their "mandarin" caste agrees to sully its digits with us, using specially designated "quarantine" worlds for the purpose. But what do all these blinds screen? It is a widely known secret, if I may use the expression, that the mandarins are but the merest figureheads for echelons of administrators as yet unknown to us. Perhaps, just as the Vau employ members of less advanced races as their helots, so the Vau themselves are but tools in the talons of incomprehensible powers.

I have claimed that the Vau prefer to hole Page 9

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themselves away from such as we, but this is not entirely so. Recently, Church agents among the Guilds have informed us of a clandestine trade whose participants are as dubious as its nature. In a gesture completely at odds with the customary policy of the Vau, certain devious (or perhaps deviant) low-caste members of the breed have entered into traffick with their noxious counterparts among the Guilders, and thereby have allowed to trickle into our realms certain relics of their infernal science, in exchange for equivalent items of Guild-craft. This trade is apparently conducted surreptitiously, on neutral worlds and always through intermediaries, and thus one is led to surmise that the Vau mandarins would not look kindly on such mercantilism.

Or is this, too, merely what they would have us think? Is the whole interdiction but another ruse, another Vau blind to make us crave their wares all the more, just as a noble brat most desires the sweetmeat her nurse has forbidden her? Who can read the Vau's nearly featureless visages, or garner meaning from those placidly staring eyes?

Wicked or weak, or perhaps both? I do not profess to understand the Vau. I do, however, understand what needs to be done. In this age of sorrow and Page 10

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war, when foes shamble from the stars to batten on the weakened nations, we of Terra cannot afford to let the Vau squat on our borders as they have for millennia, weaving their snares unseen just beyond the jumpgate's reach. We must address the Vau not from humility, but from strength, and bid them come to terms, our terms, the terms of the Church of the Celestial Sun. But now, it seems, having solved half the riddle of the Vau, humanity has ceased to struggle with the rest. Now we maintain a truce, or at least a stalemate: an invisible demarcation line with the Unknown. I vow that naught but ill can come of this, and exhort my secular brethren to settle the question of succession all the more swiftly, the better that we can scrutinize this lurker without, and, should it prove cancerous, excise it from the Pancreator's demesne. <<bkil05.pcx>> Symbiots The Pancreator is a beneficent god, yet we must be worthy of the tasks set before us, and to this end He tests us, that we may grow strong and capable. I have already averred that the Vau represent a test of our faith and will; now the Pancreator tests our Page 11

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bodies and courage with the hell-hordes known as the Symbiots of Chernobog. Embodying the worst aspects of predator and parasite, disease and madness, malignant evil and ravenous hunger, these monsters howl at our jumpgates, as if the Shadow Outside had incarnated itself tangibly.

The origin of the Symbiots is perhaps better left unknown. My own research amid the Church's most ancient archives has revealed the merest referential hints among the texts of the Second Republic, implying that even our reckless Promethean forebears found the Symbiots too unnerving to catalog more fully. Nay, according to the hints I have gleaned, the fearful scientists of the Republic clandestinely quarantined any world infected with the Symbiot taint, lest their population fall into paroxysms of terror and despair.

Such measures proved as futile as they did transient. For now, in this ruined age, the devils of Chernobog have returned from the void, descending in their animate spacecraft upon the worlds of men to ravage and slay and, worst of all, reproduce.

Verily, these blasphemies are tenfold worse than the Vau; for while a soldier sent to his reward under the Vau's pikes may at least hope for rest in the Page 12

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Empyrean's embrace, the fate of those taken by the Symbiots is horrid indeed. Ye who would war with the Symbiots, pray that ye merely die shredded beneath their cartilaginous blades or corroded into paste by their acidic war-slimes. For the fate of those captured by the monsters is to become as they: to suffer a vile usurpation of body, and to have one's very soul-light extinguished, replaced by inky strands of Shadow binding one inextricably to the Symbiots' demonic masters.

Horrid the experience of the soldier who sees his companion, thought slain in a Symbiot ambush, miraculously return to camp, and then realizes, as osseous spikes erupt from the former friend's innards, and seductive blandishments issue from lips suddenly transformed to clacking jaws akin to those of the extinct white shark of Urth, that the companion is no more, and that the thing that slavers and reaches for him with outstretched palms turned to razored talons has become but another Symbiot: another enemy to destroy or be destroyed by. Little wonder that those haunted wretches returning from the garrison on Stigmata are mere shells of themselves, their souls dimmed nearly as gray as the Symbiot-spawn themselves.

And, as if this were not horror enough, the newly Page 13

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born Symbiots have the temerity to claim that this excommunicative conversion is a willing one, and that we, not they, are the blasphemies. They would have us come willingly to their embrace, as a lover returning to the connubial bed. Indeed, their very name, "Symbiot," is a deliberate deceit, implying a willing union of predator and prey rather than the violation it assuredly is. Little more will they say about their theology and philosophy; certes, the two captured specimens whom the Avestites put to the iron in 4919 were characteristically reticent and unhelpful on this point. It matters little; all true followers of the Pancreator know the stink of a devil when they smell it.

It is perhaps understandable that Symbiots have so little regard for the bodies and souls of their victims, for their own corporeal structures are as malleable and amorphous as iuk-candy in the sticky paws of a Decados child. A Symbiot may assume any shape its demonic master orders. And so their spies walk among the cities of Urthkind now, in the shapes of the bodies they raped, to spread deviltry and terror in their wake.

Symbiots at war are not so deceitful, but just as terrifying. Any vestige of trickery or proselytizing is discarded, as are the deceptive shapes they wear. I Page 14

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have seen sketches of warrior-Symbiots: spiky, ropy, chitinous things, lurching forward upon many-jointed limbs to rip and devour. And once battle is joined, they are terribly efficient murderers, for Symbiots are the sin of Invention incarnate, sprouting a thousand virulent weapons from the stuff of their own bodies. Nerve-scarred survivors of the battles on Stigmata and Daishan mutter of soldiers impaled on barbed spikes that once were limbs, strangled and lashed to death by living viscera vomited from needle-toothed maws, scissored into pieces by mandibles sprouted from the creatures' midsections, liquefied by gobbets of catalytic enzymes, and slain in a thousand other grisly fashions besides.

And some of these were once men! Yea, Most Reverend Palamedes spoke truly when he averred the malignant presence of demons between and behind the ebbing stars. Into the maw of horror we children of the Diaspora have been thrust, and only by throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Church shall we be saved.

But I digress. There are evidently several different species or broods of Symbiots, but such fine distinctions matter little, save that they may prove of use in finding more effective ways to eradicate the Page 15

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lot of them.

And, despite the woeful moans of those faithless soldiers who have battled them and despaired, this feat can indeed be accomplished! Remember, if you will, who won the Symbiot War. It was not the Imperial soldiers, boast though they will; nor, contrary to warlock propaganda, was the victory the work of foul psychics. It was the doing of the Church's own Eskatonic Order, who by their victory proved their holiness in the sight of the Pancreator.

(Let history, then, serve as a lesson in truth; for not with their beams and bombs will the nobles prove themselves supreme in their righteousness, but only by the Pancreator's grace divinely directed through earthly works.)

Despite this victory, however, the Pancreator would test us more; and so the Symbiots vex us still. From the streets of Byzantium Secundus to the wastelands of Stigmata they lurk, and raven, and lust to ravage our bodies and infect them with their own tainted seed. Only when we of Urth have given ourselves to the Pancreator in full will this plague be lifted from us, and yet only by striving against these devils with every fiber of our being will the Pancreator take pity on His children.

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I can find no fault with the words of Archbishop Lycrecia, who has ordained the Great Interdiction against all Symbiots, and decreed their slaying a holy duty. Look not kindly upon these abominations, even should they stare at you from the visage of father or brother or daughter; for their form, like their function, serves as the merest Shadow-tainted lie.

Byzantium Secundus Yes, well, what can a humble cleric write about the Dolorous City, the Axis Astra, the orb from which the destiny of a thousand suns is decreed? What words, so carefully chosen, so woefully inadequate, can do aught but be eclipsed by their opposites; for in truth Byzantium Secundus embodies convolutions and conundrums and contradictions as innumerable as the race it oversees.

Little wonder that the residents of the world ofttimes seem mad, dwelling there is an experience at once transcendent and horrific. Byzantium Secundus is the seat of government, and yet none rules there for more than a fortnight. Our very astronomical measurements are calculated in terms of distance from it, and yet the planet itself is so turbulent that nothing concrete can be ascribed to it. It is the pinnacle of Urthly civilization, and yet wars of indescribable savagery wrack its surface and Page 17

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slaughter its cultured residents by the thousands.

I shall endeavor to present a few disparate images, which in and of themselves are as inadequate as the fabled narrative of the blind monk who, discovering the palp of the Chernobogian Slitherer probing beneath his cassock, saw fit thereby to describe the entire beast and thus sent a coven of Avestite Inquisitors to their doom; but which might provide the rudiments of a mosaic by which the astute reader can discern somewhat of the Dolorous City's nature.

The planet itself is of a size with Urth, and is temperate and mild as planets go, with a variegated surface. In the early days of the Diaspora it proved quite habitable in comparison to such hellish orbs as Sutek and Pyre, and so it was that the seat of the Second Republic was founded on the soil of this world. Besides its clime, Byzantium Secundus' system provided the Republic an additional boon, for the vast bronze ellipse that is Byzantium Secundus' jumpgate leads the astute traveler to more worlds than any other gate does.

And so it was from Byzantium Secundus that the lords of the Republic built their legacy. It was from Byzantium Secundus that adult humanity, having left Terra's embrace, surveyed the void which the Page 18

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Pancreator had mandated them to master.

Byzantium Secundus was the staging ground for the jumpships that carried human colonists and missionaries to a thousand worlds, and Byzantium Secundus became the surrogate home to which the waifs of the Diaspora could look for guidance.

When overweening pride corroded the Second Republic, Byzantium Secundus became the symbol of that, too. The skies hissed with the emissions of bizarre engines; animate golems and artificially conceived freaks lurched through the fields and streets; the very air and soil became saturated with the toxic residue of countless ill-starred sorcerous experiments. And so, to the increasingly discontent vassals of an uncaring suzerain, Byzantium Secundus became synonymous with the Republic's folly and blindness.

And thus it was that on a dark night in the year 4000, beneath the stars whose ebbing had provoked the populace's outrage, the Dolorous City fell to the allied forces of the Ten Houses, whose names any schoolchild can recite.

In the ruins of the senate chambers the Ten met with high officials of the Church Universal, and a mandate condemning the obscene artifices of the Page 19

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Second Republic was put into place. Alas, the Ten could no so readily agree on a constitution to replace the godless structure they had overthrown, and what was finally implemented was a regulatory patchwork quilt contributed to by all and suitable to none. Such a mosaic, whose spheres of influence heaved and grated one against the other like the volatile continents of Istakhr, could prove naught but unstable; thus it was not long before the fractious Ten were at each other's throats. And then there were Nine... and then Eight... and then Five...

And the strife continues to this night, despite the Church's best efforts to arbitrate; and, woefully, Byzantium Secundus, as befits its lofty sobriquet of Axis Astra, is at the center of the maelstrom. Rare is the hour that Byzantium Secundus' lanes and colonnades fail to rattle with the concussions of bombs and the crackle of beams. Hostage-taking is as common a pastime as hop-theej; nobles must rely on war-craft merely to travel to their embassies; and wickedly incited mobs roam the streets in search of victims. Yea, I am told that the very waters of Byzantium Secundus rise constantly, as though the tortured planet itself sought to rub soothing balm on its infected skin.

Notwithstanding, most noble factions maintain Page 20

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holdings of one sort or another, on one or another of the planet's continents; and I misspeak not, I think, when I say that in the building of these embassies the warring parties attempt to deny the ongoing turmoil through sheer brazen extravagance. From the manors of the Hawkwoods to the fortified villas of the Decados, from the quaint chateaux of the Li Halan to the deceptively spare loggias of the al-Malik, Byzantium Secundus' skies smile upon some of the most elegant, sumptuous and opulent edifices ever to grace the worlds of the Diaspora.

Even the palaces of the Guild-spawn are hard pressed to rival the domiciles of those nobles who have long dwelt at the Axis Astra.

I presume the reader has heard the stories of the nobles' debauches. Such excesses are perhaps understandable, as the war-weary nobles attempt to deny the peril without by indulging every sensual delight and decadent whim. I am told (though, of course, have no desire to know firsthand!) of 20-course feasts of such ostentation that it seems an entire planet has been depopulated for the gastronomic delight of the rulers; of slave children forced into unspeakable tableaux with aliens for the amusement of countesses and marquis; of unarmed captives pitted against savage Vorox in barbaric gladiatorial spectacles. The depravities, I am further Page 21

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told, are most monstrous among those families who have long inhabited Byzantium Secundus.

And then there are the poor; and I misspeak not, I think, when I aver that their proximity to the jaded elite makes them only the poorer. Byzantium Secundus' many cities, though vast and superficially majestic, oft remind me of the vij-fruit of Icon, whose sweet and luscious core is surrounded by layers of stinking slime. So the palaces of the nobles spire amid endless expanses of tenements and hovels, and amid these slums countless humans scuttle like lice and die like mayflies. It is said that of those desperate brutes constituting the ranks of the Scravers, the Musters and other vile criminal syndicates, one in three boasts an origin from Byzantium Secundus.

Perhaps the only thing uniting Byzantium Secundus' disparate populace is a healthy contempt for all those not fortunate enough to have been born onworld. And so I warn the prospective visitant: Despite its civilized veneer, Byzantium Secundus is as hostile and unforgiving as the jungles of Stigmata. Nay, Byzantines are not quite so haughty as the Hawkwood, so savage as the Vuldrok, so avaricious as those of Leagueheim, so treacherous as the Decados; yet the soul of the Byzantine is a Page 22

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cauldron blending all of these dubious qualities, and many more besides, into a potent and unhealthful brew.

So: glittering palace and guttering slum. Zenith of human achievement and nadir of despair.

Power-maker and fortune-breaker. Garden of tranquillity and cauldron of carnage. Whatever Byzantium Secundus may or may not be, she is the Axis Astra, the weathered but still proud Queen Mother of human endeavor, and he who would assume the mantle of the fading suns must reckon with and tame her if he would have any hope of victory.

Holy Terra We are children of the Diaspora, seeds spreading the Pancreator's truths hither and yon across this bleak cosmos; and so it is fortunate that we may still gaze longingly, across the night skies of a thousand worlds, toward the stellar madonna that nursed our species to adulthood. She may still be seen, though she too has ebbed in the manner of her celestial sisters: yellow Sol, beacon blazing all the more gloriously in her faintness.

I can still remember the exercise that every seminary student had to undergo beneath the Page 23

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watchful eye and ready cane of the chartophylax. I remember myself as a lad, reciting those hoary names: Mercury, Venus, Urth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. And though I was born amid the fields of Ravenna, separated from my race's cradle by unfathomable gulfs, those simple names permeate me with simultaneous longing and serenity.

Or rather, I should amend, one name among them.

The other eight planets are little known to me, save as words to be recited: orphan waifs of memory.

Urth, though: third planet from the sun, that superficially undistinguished sphere on whose primordial seas, eons past, the Pancreator chose to smile...

Ye who peruse this humble work, ye are a scion of that third planet, no matter what star shines upon ye now; and so I challenge thee, can ye read of the mother-sphere without shedding a single nostalgic tear? Do the ancient names, Afric, Roma, Nova York, Pontus Pacifica, the Amazon, fail to tug your thoughts ever so faintly, across unimaginable gulfs of time and distance, toward that lone and flickering star?

Take heart: For though we have been weaned and Page 24

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grown and matured, and finally left the ancestral nest, as all children do when they have entered adulthood, do not imagine that we have abandoned Terra to the abyss. No, the Church has sanctified her as Holy Terra, and if Byzantium Secundus is the regal queen of secular power, then Holy Terra is the aged but honored matriarch overseeing the disposition of our souls.

There are, of course, those who interpret much too literally the Church's reverence for the natal soil.

These "geomancers", byblows of an Eskatonic garbling of Book 23 of the Omega Gospels, would uphold the planet itself as some sort of sentient dominion, even going so far as to pay it worship and invoke its blessing in magical formulae. This is clearly false: Do not the Omega Gospels speak of the Pancreator's "single and supernal godhead" and warn against false idols?

Nonetheless, no planet, not Pyre or wondrous Pentateuch, does the Church hold in such reverence, and so Terra has been given over to Holy Church, the better that those who love her might preserve her beauty forever. And this task her curators have accomplished admirably: Terra has been transformed into the idyllic garden sphere of her youth. Her continents are lush with flowering Page 25

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shrubs and aromatic pines, her monuments have been restored and weathered against the elements, and no planet is as radiant with cathedrals praising the Pancreator's bounty.

This is not to infer has Terra been left entirely destitute, a revered but purposeless astronomical obelisk, in our quest for the heavens. On the contrary, over two billion faithful still walk close to the Pancreator's timeless blessing. Terra is a garden, yea, but a living garden, one complete with industrious and contented denizens happily going about their works, treading the very soil, sowing the very fields, plying the very streams that their ancestors trod, sowed and plied in the dim eras of time's beginning.

And so naturally, as with any garden, the Church must faithfully prune the grounds, encouraging the Pancreator's flowers to bloom while uprooting the weeds and poison toadstools, and in so doing suffer nothing to spread beyond its preordained bounds.

Just as a dutiful son would never enter his mother's house with mud soiling his boots, so the Church must safeguard lest prodigal children bear to Terra some alien sin, some occult taint from the far reaches of outer space. Thus, the Church sternly but wisely forbids all Urthlings but the holiest from Page 26

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returning to Terra, save through the vicarious auspices of winecups and melancholy songs.

Certain agitators, ignorant of the Church's wisdom, decry this regulatory policy prohibiting homecoming.

Their anger is understandable, but ultimately foolish and misdirected. They must realize that the Church's sapience on this matter exceeds their shortsighted needs. They must accept that humanity, as children of the Diaspora, needs must pay their penance in the void before returning triumphant to Terra, not as dutiful children, but as conquering spouses. Yea, only when all is cleansed, when the race is reunited under one banner, when the Symbiots and the Vau and the Ukar and the Krakens and all the other servants of the hells have been purged in celestial flame, only then may humanity return as one brotherly congregation and repopulate the seat of origin, and lift their voices to the immaculate heavens in exaltation of the Pancreator's work.

And so I adjure those who dissent: Turn thy tongues from ill speech, but go amid the heavens, and rest ye not until your humble star, your verdant planet of genesis is universally acknowledged as supreme in the Pancreator's esteem, until the Vau, the Ukar, the warlocks themselves come one and all to pay Page 27

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tribute amid the nurturing soil of Holy Terra.

Leagueheim And so, departing the elysian meadows of Holy Terra, I needs must beg the reader's indulgence, for we are to sojourn to its polar opposite, the nadir to its zenith. Alas, no work depicting the perils of technology can be whole without some reference to blighted Leagueheim, lair of the godless Guilds and engine churning out the Shadow's works at a devilish pace.

Here the Guilds' overseers prance and caper like mocking imps, brandishing their Sceptres of Regency as a noble's jester waves his fool-stick.

Here all that is sacred is profaned, and all that is profane is upheld and worshipped. Here technology is venerated, and nature the reviled abomination.

Leagueheim is the seat of the Guilds' commerce, the capital of such government as they uphold, and the bazaar, or shall I say brothel?, where they hawk their iconoclastic wares. (That we are forced to share the Regency with such as they!!)

How to describe the unspeakable, to categorize utter blasphemy? The reader has no doubt heard tales of Urth's ancient "sin cities": dens of vice, Page 28

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depravity and moral turpitude, the ruin of countless ingenues. A few names from the ancient days, Gomora, Tartarys, Vaygas, Naw'leens, raise their heads like horned dragons from the pages of yore: molochs which, even millennia after their ruin, still cause a shudder to wrack the frame of the virtuous.

Now, if the reader can swallow his righteously outraged gorge by imagining all these cities and many more besides, all placed on the same tortured planet and extruding outward and upward and downward, so that the entire world's face is erased in a noxious cesspool of sin, and then multiply that picture by a quintillion sordid, lewd, salacious and otherwise pernicious acts, performed in basement dens, tower eyries, bridges, public works and everywhere in between, at all hours of the day or night, perhaps the reader might glean some inkling of the abomination that is Leagueheim.

The approaching traveler, scrutinizing the descent to Leagueheim from the viewing portal of his transport, might well imagine that he is approaching that celestial phenomenon the Charioteers describe as a "nebula"; for does not a miasmic cloud hover in the blackness before him? In truth, however, this foetor is not starborn, but is the mephitic union of innumerable smokes, fogs, smogs, gases, hazes, Page 29

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mists, stenches, vapors and other atmospheric violations; for Leagueheim is if nothing else a cyclopean cauldron wherein brews and festers the machinae of the Guilds.

But now the traveler prepares to disembark; and so he takes to the shuttle, and his craft detaches itself from the body of the star-swimming vessel and plummets into that seething effluvium, and through it, sparks flying from the pitted hull of the shuttle, and at last hovers over the world and city of Leagueheim.

Endless, endless, endless! Buildings, a maze, a jungle, a plateau, a canopy of buildings, spiring and stretching and arcing beneath and behind and above and sprawling unto the curve of the planet; burrowing into the groaning world's core; crazily towering in every direction unto the very horizon.

Yea, if the atmosphere has been swallowed by the work of man, then the ground has been choked out of existence entirely. And even so there is little room for all the Guildsmen and their works, and so the buildings arc halfway to the Guilds' noxious substitute for clouds.

Everywhere the phosphorescent insignia of the Guilds blaze like the crazed cipherings of a mad Page 30

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god, and everywhere the stench of unchecked commerce wafts; for here, it is said, everything in the universe save the Eight Virtues can be purchased. At all times the air reverberates with the snap of a Muster's lash, the opiate-moan of an Analdyne prostitute, the whine of a vibrophilia engine, the wail of a vendor hawking klaj, the whirring of countless hovercraft skimming like minnows amid the gargantuan edifices, engaged on missions of trade; for, more than anything else, Leagueheim exists to buy and sell. He who descends to Leagueheim without mantises, claws or the like is as helpless as one who, ignorant of how to swim, decides to sport in the Madocian deeps.

Yea, Leagueheim is admittedly awesome, impossibly colossal, majestic, true, but then so, I am told, is a Void Kraken. I have no desire to measure the span of the ship-eater's tentacles firsthand, and I have even less inclination to view the Guilders' hive from anywhere but the pages of a distant book. I desire least of all to view its masters.

For amid Leagueheim's vertiginous eyries and pitchy corridors skulk and slither the dregs of the Guilds, the devils overseeing this hell: the Charioteers, navigators of the abyssal wastes and half-consumed with Shadow at their best; the brutes Page 31

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of the Muster, equally eager to haul a load or chain a slave or split a skull so long as the firebirds are ready; the Scravers, whose tongues are as light as their souls are dark; the Engineers, who choose to defile even the Pancreator's most fundamental gift, their very bodies, through mechanical intercourse; and behind them all, the Reeves, so eclipsed by Shadow that even the vast profits of their endeavors cannot force a smile or a laugh to lighten their countenances.

The whole is led, if such a term may be applied to such a motley and cacophonous mob, by a supreme criminal known as the Guildmeister. This individual governs the dispensation of the Guild's Regency votes. Naturally, competition for the spot is rife among the Guilds; and so naturally, blackmail, extortion, assassination and every other form of treachery taint Leagueheim's "politics." I have heard it said that in her lifetime a sceptre-holding Matriarch, anointed to her spot through the Pancreator's grace and holding it until the Empyrean calls her home, will likely make the weary acquaintance of a dozen Guildmeisters, as one after the other falls victim to the selfsame betrayal that won them the office in the first place.

Aye, I say: Let the nobles finish their struggle; and Page 32

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every day I pray that the one who takes the throne prove friendly to Church and fearful of Pancreator, that Emperor and Patriarch may unite in a great crusade to excise the cancer that is Leagueheim from the universe. <<bkil06.pcx>> Warlocks Take care, ye warring houses, for a blight greater than any temporal and temporary enemy walks among ye. Li Halan, drop thy scope against thy Hawkwood brother; Hazat, unclench thy ceramsteel cestus; embrace thy prodigal siblings, that ye may stand bold and resolute against the taint of the warlocks in our midst.

Who has not heard the tales of these apostates?

Who has not heard of their stealthy descents into unhallowed sites anathema even to the godless Second Republic, there to emerge with all manner of obscene artifacts? Who has shut his ears to the whispers of their diabolic arts, their demon-bequeathed sciences? I am no Inquisitor, nor do I wholly support their crusades, but if ever the Avestites are needed, it is to purge the innocent of these.

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They truck with demons and cavort naked under the abyssal skies; they descend into the desecrated ruins of laboratories, there to entertain succubi and conclude all manner of unhallowed pacts; they scorch the souls of the faithful with hell-flame and deaden the minds of the righteous; they play host to abyssal devils and chthonian golems; no sin is too great for them. They revile the Pancreator with their arts, which in a mockery of the Holy Names they dub Antinomy, the way of the Anti-Name.

These warlocks are also lovers of all manner of blasphemous technologies, avenues of exploration from which even the scientists of the Second Republic turned their cybernetic eyes in horror.

Verily, they care little whether they corrupt the virtuous with technology or magic, so long as their masters' purposes are advanced.

That warlocks serve and venerate the monstrous demons beyond the stars is evident to even the simplest among us; yet for all that, their specific aims remain as mysterious as the foul ends by which they achieve them. Perhaps it is just as well, that children and the feeble may sleep soundly of nights thereby.

The Synod has killed many, but has had less fortune in securing some for interrogation. Captured Page 34

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warlocks rarely stay imprisoned long, for they are as cunning as jala-vipers; I have heard rumors that one warlock, bound and writhing under the Avestites' shock prods, spontaneously gave up the ghost in a puddle of deliquescing slime, causing all present to flee the dungeon lest they be overwhelmed by the rancid stench.

I must now warn the gentle reader; for warlocks are often fair of face, and readily mingle with the innocent when they must come among us in pursuit of their goals. By certain signs may ye know them, for their blasphemous practices leave a taint upon their bodies. Yea, the Pancreator does not lightly dismiss these prodigals' deviation from His will, and causes their sins to be made manifest upon their flesh. All have heard, no doubt, of the "witch-marks" by which warlocks may be detected in our midst, the third nipples, cataract-plagued eyes, pus-bearing tumors, hidden horns and other signs of the Empyrean's displeasure. When a stranger bearing such signs comes among ye, contact the Inquisition at the first opportunity; for warlocks seek nothing less than to contaminate and defile all whom they encounter, and they take particular delight in debasing the holy.

I remember the days before my ordination, when I Page 35

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was sent to study and pray at the great Cathedral on Pentateuch. I became fast friends with a fellow student, a devotee of the Eskatonic Order, one Brother Marcos; we held lengthy discourse on all subjects theological and exalted the Pancreator in the pursuit of all manner of manly sports. Marcos was as fair as I am dark, and so perfectly formed that one might well imagine him blazing forth incarnate from the Celestial Sun itself. A great bond formed between us, and the bishops thought us nigh inseparable.

His fall came at the hands of a warlock, the infamous harlot Kylena Decados, disowned even by that iniquitous house. Even at this age I cannot bear to speak aught of it, but I must tell that his corruption was so complete that he spat upon me as I wept at the auto-de-fe. It was Marcos' voice that wailed and gibbered as he died on the pyre, but his soul had been taken by the Decados and replaced by that of a demon. I only pray he has found the Empyrean's peace.

I repeat: This is one cancer that must not be tolerated among us. These are no Ur-Obun, to be scrutinized and warily tolerated; warlocks, any and all, are naught but a cosmic sickness, a tangible dimming of the Empyrean. They give the godly no Page 36

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respite and must thus expect none in return. Display only sufficient mercy to give them an opportunity to recant; should they refuse, send them to their reward with as little regret or compassion as ye would display to a stinging swamp-fly. <<bkil23.pcx>> Inquisition When a soldier falls wounded on the battlefield, or a farmer is smitten by plague, it is often necessary to bleed the injuries, lance the boils and press the glowing iron to the mortified flesh, the better that it may heal. Certes none save the mad or those addicted to the vices of the Guilds would claim that this process is pleasurable, or that, given the choice otherwise, they would seek to have such done to them. Nonetheless, there often is no choice: The patient is sick, she must be saved, and in order to do so she must endure a measure of agony. Thus is our Inquisition justified.

I myself have no stomach for it; I am but a country bishop and, though I revile heresy and loathe wickedness, still it sickens me to view the wretched witch writhing on the stake, or the warlock casting out his demons under the caress of the propane torch. I freely confess my admiration for those of Page 37

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sufficiently steely resolve to carry out these disagreeable tasks, though it is an admiration not unmixed with pity: Spending such a measure of their lives gazing upon the works of Shadow, Inquisitors' own souls seem often to grow chill and wan, like the spark of a magnesium flare or the radiance that glows from the drij-fungus at night. Heavy the burden to bear, so that others might bask in the Pancreator's joyous warmth.

You see, contrary to ignorant peasants' superstitions, not all clerics of the Pancreator are Inquisitors (praise be to the Pancreator!). Inquisitors are ordained by a special synod of righteous Urthlings, currently housed at Pyre; this body, upon determining the suitability of a candidate to assume the robed mantle and the need for such a role to be assumed, bestows upon the invested one a seal bearing a symbol of the Sacred Flame. By such a sign do the folk of the galaxy know that one of the Pancreator's avenging angels walks among them.

Also, contrary to what the unlettered masses whisper, seals are not bestowed randomly, or even to all of the cassock who desire one. The synod generally bestows seals only for specific aims, and for only a specified period. But, yes, there are those fanatics who seemingly harbor a greater affection for Page 38

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flamegun and shock prod than for Pancreator and Prophet; and, sadly, their numbers wax by the week.

The reader must understand that in older, less turbulent times, the synod comprised members of all sects, yea, even the Amaltheans, and was reined and guided by the devotees of our own Orthodox sect. Now, alas, in these chill and dismal days, the leaders of men will have nothing save extremism; and so the synod is almost entirely dominated by the zealots of Temple Avesti, and the wartorn skies reverberate yet again with the sizzle of the flamegun and the wails of the scourged.

I need not trouble the reader with twice-told tales, those countless bogey-stories of the robed prophets of doom, with their brands and their flameguns and their tortures, which are known to every peasant in the Regency, but there is more to the Inquisition than that. The Inquisition serves several functions, predominantly punitive ones, may the Pancreator have pity. In all fairness to my brethren, a myriad verifiable accounts of Inquisitors selflessly defending the faithful from very real evils are perhaps less popular in most quarters than are lurid ballads of straps and flames and wretches shrieking up their damned souls on the rack.

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The first task of the Inquisition is to discover heresy or protoheresy festering among the faithful. The Inquisition, upon hearing rumors of such a crime, elects a seal-bearer, as I have already detailed. This priest then infiltrates the suspect group (and from this process no one is immune, not the electors of a village, not the Hawkwood Court, not even the upper echelons of the Church) and ascertains whether the rumors of anathema are in fact true.

Occasionally the Inquisition finds naught amiss, and the seal-bearer returns to the synod; alas, in this wicked age, all too often the verdict is guilty.

Guilt in this instance can consist of a multitude of sins: consorting with demons or hostile aliens; employment of forbidden technology; corruption by any technology, anathema or otherwise (the reader may now understand why I say that any invocation of technology is problematic at best!); and practice of sorcery are but a few. Contrary to superstition, however, the Inquisition does not deign to punish secular crimes; the starving peasant who pilfers a loaf of bread from her Hazat master has naught to fear from the Church, though she may well dangle from a noble's gallows come the morrow.

Upon ascertaining the guilt of the accused, the Inquisitor decides whether the danger is sufficiently Page 40

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great to require reinforcements: usually several more Avestites, occasionally an entire squadron of Brothers Battle. Inquisitors in distant areas may have no recourse to such things, and in such circumstances the hunter may indeed become the hunted. I have heard more than one harrowing tale repeated amid monastic alcoves and cathedral naves, and it is perhaps understandable that Inquisitors subjected to such life- and soul-threatening combats often become prone to a zealotry bordering on the paranoiac.

Following the decision to wait or proceed with the trial, the Inquisitor confronts the guilty parties, informs them of their crimes against the Church (yes, this is a necessary step) and bids them recant. Effort is also made to induce the guilty to confess, the better that the Inquisitor might ascertain the extent of the crime, the purpose and means, and whether other sinners remain at large. In so doing the Inquisitors often extend the scope of the trial to the sinner's compatriots, fellow villagers and the like.

I confess that this policy of collective responsibility, though permitted by Church law and sanctioned by all secular authorities, causes me no small amount of distress. Just as a jug of Pandemonian eylo-oil has varying degrees of viscosity, from the near-liquid Page 41

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fringes to the colloid center, so the taint of sin does not always diffuse itself equally among all in proximity. Cast the warlock to the flames, yea; but for the Prophet's sake, spare the son, the niece, the dutiful wife. Teach them of their error; let them understand the folly of their beloved, for it is often love that leads them into sin along with those dear to them; and let them return to the fold cleansed and purified in the crucible of grief.

Sad it is, however, that those penitents on the verge of turning to the way of the Pancreator are so often brutally purged by the very agency that would save them. The Inquisition oft reminds me of the grenades lobbed by our Brothers Battle: absolutely effective, blindly hasty, and completely indiscriminate.

Yea, I adjure, cultivate the Inquisition as ye would a Pyrian cactus: Bred to grow small and pruned meticulously, such a plant may serve ye well; but should ye neglect to regulate its growth, allow it to sprout thorns and branches willy-nilly, and guard not thine own palms when handling, its spines may turn on the innocent, or even on the godly.

Regency There are as many accounts describing the Page 42

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character of the late Vladimir Alecto as there are suns in the sky. Architect of peace or brutal warlord? Stern judge or bloody tyrant? Hero or monster? A thousand histories grace the libraries at Pentateuch, and I can attest that no two tell the same story.

Whatever Vladimir Alecto may have been, he was emperor, and his assassination sent the realm spiraling aimlessly and out of control, like a war-vessel damaged by cannon fire. Years of campaigns had left him no time to sire an heir (despite a number of strumpets' claims to the contrary), and so no sooner had his corpse cooled than the hungry scions of the Ten circled in, eyes gleaming and tongues lolling like feral scavenger-gokks, homing in on power as their bestial counterparts trail the scent of blood.

And thus a peace of weeks once again erupted into years of flame and blood. Every pupil knows the rest: Five of the Ten Houses fell into ruin or ignominy, the Guilds violently declared their sovereignty, and we of the Church tried as best we could to mitigate the damage to an already weary cosmos.

Finally, praise the Pancreator, simple attrition Page 43

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succeeded where diplomacy failed. The barbarians still swept across the borders to loot and burn, and increasing numbers of holdings fell to poorly led raiders simply because no forces could be spared to defend them. And so peace was declared, and it was decided that, as no contestant was equal to the task of rulership, a substitute should be elected by a tribunal of politically significant electors.

This substitute, henceforth known as the Regent, was to rule in the accustomed fashion from Byzantium Secundus. During his tenure of office he could do as he would; but never would he reign for longer than 10 years, at the end of which time he would abdicate and a new successor would be chosen. (I have heard rumors alleging an outrageous suggestion made by the Decados envoy to the proceedings, namely, that the retired Regent be ritually sacrificed at a great gala, in the manner of certain ancient cultures of Urth, but the rumor concludes that this Decados was shouted down by outraged Hawkwoods.)

And so the sceptres, those symbols representing one or more electoral votes, were manufactured and distributed. Each party of political stature, regardless, it seems, of equivalent moral stature, was presented with this tool. Every 10 years the vote Page 44

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would be cast, and the chosen candidate would ascend the seat of absolute (in theory) government for a decade.

Of course, the greedy nobles would not suffer themselves to be barred from such an arena. The evenhanded division of sceptres among them was aided by the fact that, of the Ten who had initially competed for the throne, a scant Five remained.

These Five, Hawkwood, Decados, Hazat, Li Halan, al-Malik, were each given custody of sceptres, and so the intrigues began almost immediately, and have not ceased since.

Alas, too many imperial warriors had succumbed to the vices and military luxuries proffered by the Guilds, and so a certain allotment of sceptres went to the lords of Leagueheim. Thankfully, internal squabbling among the Guilds often stymied any individual Guildmeister's sordid aims, and so the Guild often abstained from voting, or used its influence only to block the rise of a candidate detrimental to its goals.

Wisely, if surprisingly, the guardians of Urth's souls were deemed worthy to exert some measure of control over the race's secular destiny, and so the Church currently holds a number of sceptres. (I Page 45

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sometimes question the amount of good such a gesture does, for such is the moral turpitude of most candidates that abstention often proves the only ethical way to vote.)

But in the end, I suppose, it matters little; for the Regent himself (or herself; there have been a few female rulers) was, and is, a relatively impotent figure, ruling as he does at the behest of powers that would sooner dance naked in the pits of the Voroxi malga-beetles than see their personal interests stymied for the welfare of the whole. Would the Regent raise taxes on the Byzantine populace?

Would he deploy the Imperial Navy against Malignatian belt pirates? An excellent decision, my liege, the nobles cry. Would the Regent dare to conscript Hazat levies for use in the Vuldrok campaigns, or demand that the Decados account for the contents of the Imperial granaries built on Cadiz?

He would be dead within the fortnight.

And so, in lieu of a contender strong enough to unite the children of the fading suns by dint of might, the Regency continues, decade after weary decade.

Because all parties of power vote, none can agree on any candidate of real magnetism or magnitude; and so the Regency is but a puppet-show of weak Page 46

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diplomats and figureheads without any real purpose or power. I am no lover of tyranny, but I would almost wish a despot, so long as said tyrant proved subservient to the will of the Pancreator, upon the throne of Byzantium Secundus. At our borders our enemies array themselves, and they are many. I aver that a chilly peace would be preferable to these centuries of endless war.

Jumpgates There is a maxim of our species, more ancient even than the words of the Prophet: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." One need but look about in these discordant times, when nobles spread fire and strife, the better that they and they alone be allowed to look after the welfare of all, to evince the veracity of this statement. Nothing is simple and true; all things have become a maze of mirrors within mirrors, and the very h'naa-lizard that devours the Karangian ass is also the dray animal bearing medicine to the provinces.

And so what to make of the jumpgates? Beloved of the Prophet; way stations of the barbarians and Symbiots. Windows to a thousand paradises and gates whereby demons can emerge from nighted hells. Tools built by unknown hands, bearing the virtues of Zebulon and the vices of Leagueheim Page 47

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indiscriminately.

Much has been written of these structures since their discovery in the dim eras before the Diaspora.

Nobles, priests and Guilders alike have acted, if for no other common purpose, to understand these artifacts, at once utterly enigmatic and completely essential. And yet all Urth's collective efforts have gone for naught; the gates are as much of a conundrum now as they were millennia ago. Who created them? For what purpose? What logic behind the intricate web of stellar leaps? Ah well, perhaps it is the Pancreator's will that they should remain a riddle.

The gates themselves hover in the astral night at the fringes of certain solar systems, evidently those which the Pancreator desired us to claim for Him. However, just as the Pancreator requires His servants to prove their devotion through earthly works before He deigns to allow His angels to bear their soul-sparks to salvation, those who would dare the jumpgates must first free themselves of their planetary ties, traveling to the fringes of their solar systems through the harnessing of often recalcitrant spacecraft. This journey to the gate itself can take as long as a fortnight, during which the travelers are at the mercy of pirates, rival houses, Void Krakens and Page 48

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a host of other horrors. One indeed needs the favor of the Pancreator even to attempt such a trek.

And perhaps the gates are indeed the work of the Pancreator, simultaneously allowing humanity to carry His message to the stars and instilling Everyman with a much-needed sense of humility; for I personally aver that it is impossible to approach one of these structures without a sense of awe evoking itself in the witness. Certes the approaching traveler, viewing the vast metallic ring, hovering in the void like a hollow moon, and I use this simile deliberately, for many jumpgates are indeed of lunar proportions, becomes consumed with a profound sense of humility, as she can do naught but tremble before one of the universe's greatest works and most fundamental mysteries. Nor is this wonder diminished when, awakened by the call of the star-pilot, the gate begins to throb and pulse, and luminescent orbs play up and down the arcs of the metal hoop, and the entirety of the inner circumference is litten with a lambent radiance, as if a sun had erupted new-formed from the abyss.

And so the gate, newly roused from slumber amid the silence of the void, awaits its passengers as the leviathan anticipates its meal of krill. Of the gates' inner workings, few know much save the heathen Page 49

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Charioteers. Of their operation more is understood.

These gates mystically connect disparate tapestries of space, allowing a traveler to enter the glowing portal at the heart of the jumpgate ring and thereby "leap" across vast cosmic distances in a matter of moments.

The time of travel remains the subject of heated conjecture; most travelers agree that a jump, while not precisely instantaneous, transports the users across vast gulfs over a period of mere seconds at most.

What, then, transpires during those moments of bodilessness, adrift in an incorporeal state? Those of learning will recall the suppressed Sathra heresy of the early Diaspora. The devotees of this cult, jumpgate pilots all, claimed to be elevated into ecstasy by passage through the gates, and to have heard disembodied voices bearing messages of paradise. Ever seeking further enlightenment, Sathraists indulged in frivolous cosmic jaunts and all manner of dangerous practices, until they came to seem less like mystics and more like addicts. The early Church, recognizing the Sathraists as foolish degenerates likely deluded by demons, put a swift end to these false revelations, and prevented further experimentation by ordaining the installations of Page 50

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wards dampening the astral narcosis: wards which still grace spacecraft to this day. A few Sathraist rants yet survive in the depths of the Church archives, but offer less insight concerning the jumpgates than about the addled brains of the authors.

More enlightening are the epistles of our Most Holy Zebulon, who himself was a student of the jumpgates, but toward a nobler end than the unfocused rapture of the Sathraists. In his writings he often speaks of the peculiar "ephemeral" state of the jump, and about its relationship to both the Pancreator's Empyrean and those hells housing the dwellers that wait between the known cosmic gulfs and the Outer Darkness (which is to the void we know as the dinosaur is to the gecko).

In the end there is little more that can be explained, and so the jumpgates remain as they have always been: monuments to powers greater than we can hope to explain. I add only that vigilance is critical; for the jumpgates are the bridges to celestial and infernal powers alike, and in this treacherous age it would serve us well to monitor closely what sorts of beings travel freely in our midst. <<bkil20.pcx>> Plague (The Great Moax) Page 51

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There are malignant intelligences between the stars. On the howling abyssal winds they soar, to descend like carrion birds upon the hapless worlds of men. Their passage, ofttimes invisible, serves as a harbinger and a precursor of their demonic masters, who bid their servitors siphon the life from the cosmos' inhabitants as they do to the suns themselves. Yea, all about us loom omens of the impending apocalypse, when the suns will finally flicker and die, and from the spaces between the stars will fall the demon-legions, to disport amid the ruins of the Pancreator's chosen.

Certes it is that those who scoff at the pious' accounts of demons have never found their world visited by the Great Moax, the Ravener, the Scourge of Suns. I could list a thousand other names, uttered in horror by the hapless victims of a thousand ravaged worlds; but, lest I mystify the reader, I shall simply state that this demon manifests as a disease, an illness, a plague of unsurpassed virulence and uncertain cure.

Plagues aplenty infest the stars, true; but none so hateful, none so relentless as the Moax. Accounts of the Moax's passage taint the pages of countless codices, tales of continents turned to necropoli in Page 52

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one lunar cycle's time; legends of entire peoples dropped lifeless amid decaying fields; stories of garden worlds reduced to endless expanses of crumbling gray rock. Neither stellar expanses nor Amalthean prayers can check the spread of this cancer, which has decimated the worlds of men since the early Diaspora, and its recent resurgence can only be interpreted as an omen of the doom that the Shadow's demons would have engulf us all.

Upon arrival on a world, the Moax displays a sentience, indeed, a cunning. It lies in wait, purposefully haunting inhabited areas, and can be transmitted through nearly any vector. Ingestion, inhalation, contact with living or dead victims, merely being in the same vicinity, any or all of these can spread the plague, as can a thousand other methods besides. Nor is there any reliable defense by which the Moax may be resisted. Staves of oko-wood clutched in deliquescing fingers; pinches of noma-powder dusting the undersides of swollen tongues; the hedge-cures of a thousand worlds: all lie withered beside their erstwhile practitioners.

The Moax is exceptionally abhorrent, for though it is immediately and irrevocably fatal, it is neither painless nor quick. An index of symptoms, while loathsome, might help the wary reader recognize an Page 53

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infected area and thus hopefully avoid the loathsome illness that laid her fellow humans low.

The first signs of the Moax's presence are a dizziness and loss of coordination, as the demon invades the psyche and unleashes its assault on the victim's soul. Loss of vision is next, as the inner soul flickers and dims under the Moax's onslaught. Would that blissful release follow immediately anon; but alas! the victim has only begun to suffer.

The joints begin to calcify and swell, and agonizing pain gnarls the victim's extremities into things resembling Pyrian cacti moreso than limbs. Nor does this initial pain mark the terminus of the victim's suffering; nay, the demon has only begun its cruel sport. A series of purplish blotches discolors the skin, as the Moax marks its own, and as the disease progresses these maculations spread and swell, until the victim's entire epidermis is livid and violet.

A strange duality occurs, as the demon within dries the victim's orifices to withered holes, akin to those on the visage of a Suteki mummy, while simultaneously bloating the victim's extremities into sausages of stinking yellow pus.

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piteous, made all the more so by nightmarish hallucinations that begin to bedevil him, as the cerebral cortex dissolves and the myriad minuscule threads connecting the various regions of the brain fray like ikju-weeds in a strong wind. Anyone with a trace of mercy or human compassion can do naught but rush to succor the devil-plagued wretch, or at least to end his suffering.

Alas, this is just what the Moax anticipates! For this stage, the second instar, as the Amaltheans dub it, is when the demon is at its most fecund, and the plague thus at its most virulent. The lustful demon impregnates its host with pustulent cysts, which froth and bubble to and through what shreds remain of the epidermal layer. These seeds of foulness are most contagious, most easily disturbed, and thus it is that the hapless victim spreads his infection to the ones most dear to him.

After the bursting of the pustules and the contamination of the entire vicinity, the enervated victim at last enters the third and fatal instar. The demon's lust to procreate transforms into a ravenous hunger, and so the Moax begins to devour its host from the inside out. The victim's innards and bowels rupture and desiccate, finally liquefying altogether, and this effect quickly consumes the Page 55

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muscles and bones as well. Finally, when the skin itself deliquesces to a viscous paste resembling the trail left by a grik-slug, the sated demon departs the victim, who at last expires.

And thus even proper burial is stymied, for, though the Moax does not prove contagious at this stage, how does one inter a mass of seething pus, or perform the last rites without gagging at the deceased's stench?

As if this were not sufficient horror, occasionally a few proximate individuals are spared the Moax's kiss, that they may lament the demise of their families, their cities, their very world.

Yea, O my feuding brethren, aroint ye to this invisible enemy, this sentient weapon more malignant than any stratagem of your rival. That the Moax walks so strong is surely a sign that the end times are nigh, and that the final Armageddon between Light and Shadow is soon to be fought. If ye must make war, let your battles be earthly mirrors of the celestial struggle, and turn your weapons against the Adversary that would engulf us all.

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I mistrust those academes who would study the carriers of the million Invisible Deaths. They would have us believe that the pestilences which bedevil Urthkind are not the work of demons, but are inflicted by a host of rapacious animalcules minuscule but otherwise normal components of a planetary ecosystem.

By such works do the very demons of which I have spoken cast doubt upon sinners' souls, as a laborer shovels dirt onto an open flame, that it may ebb.

Hospitals " charnel houses where the dead prey on the dead, and the leprous children of the plague defile the air with their rotten stench and choking wheeze, mausoleums whose halls are haunted by moaning night-crackers and stained scarlet by crazed vivisectionists dubbing themselves chiurgeons." from Friar Amergo's Travails of Ormu (An interesting depiction, no doubt, though thankfully not all hospices resemble Amergo's grim picture. Certes the monasteries of the Amaltheans are sanctums of solace and light, though I daresay those odious institutions operated by the Guilds might well inspire Amergo's sort of feverish rant.)

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Immunology And so man, in his arrogance, presumes even to dictate the death which the Pancreator has preordained for him! The medics of the Guilds would presume to allot our destinies to us, sticking their needles into us and promising panaceas.

Yea, even Zebulon, even Palamedes fell at the preordained hour; and while I heartily support efforts to reduce the torment and suffering that are man's lot in life, I exhort prideful man to bear ever in mind that the Pancreator will have His way, as those hubris-tainted fools of the Second Republic they who scoffed at illness, laughed at pain, mocked death learned to their humility and sorrow. <<bkil19.pcx>> Pharmaceuticals "And so it came to pass that the Most Holy Rebbun Zebbuk went into the dens of the salacious Guildmeister Sheddoom, seeking by example to bend even this miscreant to the Way. And such a sight was His Holiness impelled to endure: For amid sligskin divans and carven alcoves cavorted a Dionysian throng such as might have leapt from the pages of Thifune's Ebon Grimoire. Loathsome to his eyes was their aspect; but more loathsome still were Page 58

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the soporific substances that they inhaled and chewed and drank and sucked and inserted into unspeakable orifices.

A multitude of madmen assailed the Holy One: Cowled figures of dubious shape howled as lysys-demons carried their minds to dark and unknown planets; naked lunatics ran hither and yon as the klaj they had imbibed spasmed its way through their bodies; Musters in the throes of jaij-sickness cried out to wicked and forbidden gods; and slaves silently wept as they chewed the stems of a strange alkaloid herb found growing only on the dark side of Algol V at eclipse." from The Trials of Rebbun Zebbuk Psychopharmacology " and, as all of learning are aware, that which we call sentience, consciousness that which the fools of the Celestial Church dub the "soul" is in reality as fluid and amorphous as the cytoplasm of the Ravennian Writher. A plethora of methods all of them quite physical, I assure the good reader exist whereby those qualities the fanatics dub "unchanging" and "Pancreator- inspired" can in truth be molded, imbued and erased at the implementer's whim.

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"Herein I shall list an array of formulae whereby the seat of intelligence may be loosed from its mooring; whereby eternal love and unholy fear wait at the end of a needle; whereby the soul may be plunged, a passive spectator, amid a thousand hells, a million heavens, and a host of earthly, psychic and astral vistas besides.

"Yea, with a pinprick, a dollop of fluid, a pinch of powder, I have made men love me and children run screaming one from the other; I have goaded sons and daughters to slash apart the very breasts on which they suckled; I have turned the most prideful of noblewomen into my fawning slaves." from the grimoire of the warlock Xiphius, preserved in the Archivum Interdictum on the Cathedral at Pentateuch <<BKIL01.PCX>> Combat Drugs On the subject of narcotic chemicals, I cannot help but pen my thoughts regarding the practice of certain legions of the Celestial Sun's own Brothers Battle.

These worthies, before a battle with barbarians or Symbiots, often inflame their passion and heighten their quickness through the ingestion of a certain synthetic powder known in League parlance as klaj.

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I applaud the valor of the Brothers, and certainly advocate the Pancreator's stalwarts utilizing whatever advantage they can attain against the forces of iniquity. But take care, O my Brothers, that in so doing thine own actions do not prove more deleterious than the snares of the enemy; for what is it to gain one's life if in so doing one sacrifices one's soul? <<BKIL03.PCX>> Wetware And so I would caution the warring nobles, who ever seek advantage over their rivals, that violation of the body marks the first step toward ultimate pollution of the soul.

Ye who in your ambition would graft all manner of artifices upon the frame the Pancreator has provided for you, reflect upon this: Did the Empyrean wish ye to bear a retractable blade, a cleverly implanted needle gun, a subdermal cuirass, would these things not have been provided for ye upon thy exit from the womb? And if these things be not the Pancreator's will, then by whose grace are these gifts bestowed?

Look upon the loathsome Engineers; remember how Page 61

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you shudder as their red-litten, glassy optics impassively scan you; recall your revulsion as their metal claws twitch and click upon the styluses of their think machines. Would you be as they? <<bkil15.pcx>> Cyberpilot "When I send my Archangel into Immelmann rolls over the terrain of Byzantium Secundus when I press the copper stud into my skull when my sight is made transcendent by the visor on my VR helmet when I feel the throbbing pulses from my ship's brain ejaculate themselves into my skull, and I engage in intimate congress 10,000 meters above the curve of the world. Yea, I shall say it! I am communing with the Pancreator, and who are ye to gainsay it?" testimony of Praetor, a former Brother Battle tried for and found guilty of heresy by the Inquisitorial Synod, 4955 Genetics "And, at the angel's bidding, I peered through the lenses salvaged from the lost city of the Second Republic. And a potent Sign revealed itself unto me.

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Hawkwood from harlot, Decados from derelict, and understood by what a fragile thread did the nobles retain their lofty seats. And the angel spake unto me, saying, This Sign is the puzzle the Pancreator has set for ye, by the deciphering of which ye may become as the Pancreator, and in truth be reabsorbed into the Empyrean, as is the Pancreator's will." text of On the Ascension of the Second Prometheus, a heretical work expunged by the Avestite Inquisition <<bkil17.pcx>> Genetic Manipulation Brother Manuel of the Eskatonic sect (whom I find a fascinating conversationalist despite his bohemian views and annoying lisp) has discoursed with me concerning an esoteric field of scientific endeavor, whereby he claims the Pancreator's very blueprint, the matrix of human biology, can be laid out, warp and woof, and unraveled like a skein on a loom.

Manuel has regaled me with enchanting fairy tales: stories of artificial warriors, of beauteous dancing girls and perfectly pitched divas sprung newly formed from the scientists' vats; of the blind given sight, the lame arisen, the flower of the myriad noble Page 63

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families amalgamated into one Prophetlike composite.

I have heard other stories: horror-tales of the freaks of the Second Republic, and of how the grand city of Vorool fell one rainy night to a slithering horde of unbirthed abominations.

Nay, Brother Manuel, these speculations I must pronounce anathema. Learned ears may take an invigorating, if guilty, pleasure in filtering them; but such as this can do naught but harm should the masses learn aught of it.

Viral DNA And how, in these dark times, can we ascertain who is man and who is monster? Verily, the spores of transformation lie greedy and ravenous in a multitude of carriers, from the cyst-bombs of the Decados to the demon-spells of the warlock; and so the unsuspecting victim can, suddenly and without warning, fall writhing; and, when she once more gazes upon her horrified compatriots, it shall be from the face of a beast.

Dormant Virus And those who yet doubt the work of black sorcery in humanity's midst should recall the boast of the vile warlock Simeon D'Arcade, who, when brought Page 64

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to bay by the 666th Battle-Brethren Legion, laughed into the faces of his accusers, and even under the strappado's kiss remained defiant.

"O ye fools," he cried, "thy doom is upon thee, and upon all denizens of thy pawkish sphere, even unto the labor-racked mother who, prompted by the midwife, drank of the cooling Avernian Springs, or the children who innocently splashed in the bay of the Spav."

And it was so, for D'Arcade had trucked long thence with legions of invisible demons, and had bid them enter into the planet's water, yea, from expansive ocean to tiny cistern. And at his inaudible beck they burbled forth in the form of the Argent Contagion, and all of that unlucky world's denizens dropped like sacks of grain, faces withering and bodies cocooned in slimy silvery membranes. And thus did the entire planet of Xylloth become Simeon D'Arcade's necropolis.

Advanced Bacteriology The study of the unseen worlds can be most unhealthy, as those of the Second Republic learned to their dismay. Nay, far better that the peasant continues to presume that flies breed from dung, and that ergot-visions are induced by divine providence, Page 65

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than to learn of all the loathly, invisible imps surrounding them from birth-swathing to grave-shroud.

Guardian Bacteria And in their arrogance the apothecaries of the Second Republic made all manner of ward-pacts with incorporeal guardian daemons, inoculating them within their very flesh, that they might thereby be spared the wrath of the myriad other infernal powers they had evoked, enslaved and enraged.

Rumors have reached my ears concerning the rediscovery of these arts by the "healers" of the Guilds. O ye nobles who would partake of such magick: Need I remind ye of the fate of those who first employed these occult techniques?

Spore Delivery Verily the Decados are clever and treacherous adversaries. Their latest military advancement, I am told, came from the observations of the line's young scion Annele as she sported with her hounds in the palace garden.

The dogs, following a scent into the undergrowth, came upon a noxious drij-fungus, squatting phosphorescent and loathly in the shade. The dumb Page 66

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brutes pawed at it, and so the drij, as is its wont, exhaled a cloud of toxic spores upon the animals; and they whined, and bent nearly double, and stiffened, and slowly expired.

The guards sent to summon Annele for dinner found her chortling with childish merriment over the corpses of the hounds; and nothing would do but that Annele be entertained thereafter by a cunning execution engine built to emulate the drij.

When the war with the Van Geldens erupted, a few modifications on the original design were all that was necessary to concoct a terribly effective weapon of mass warfare as that platoon blasted by grenades carrying the Yellow Demise could attest, had any lived.

Necrosis "And from the pitchy shadows twixt the stars let the Dark Crawler fall and stalk unseen among thee; and let none not a man, not a woman, not a newborn babe escape the Crawler's wrath; and ye shall lament loudly unto the heavens, and falsely implore the Immanent even as thy praying fingers wither and drop about thy deliquescing ankles; but it shall avail thee not; for the hour is upon thee, and judgment is at hand."

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curse of Holhoon the Patriarch, delivered to the inhabitants of Jalehl, one week before that city's depopulation via Necrosis (An odd aside. Is this "Necrosis" but another sobriquet for the Moax, or another breed of plague-demon altogether?)

Cure for Necrosis "For the Pancreator has smiled upon thee, and has ordained us to proffer this manna and distribute it among the suffering; and when thou takest it into thy bodies and recite the holy phrase "UZ-OBLEN," the Pancreator's mote-angels shall descend upon thee and, with beneficent caresses, shall abjure thee of thy sickness. And the demons that have wasted thy lands shall be banished into the outer dark from whence they came. And thou shalt anoint one another with fragrant oils and praise the Pancreator with loud rejoicing, and thou shalt cause the temples to be thrown open, and let the smell of burnt offerings permeate the skies." from the Testament of Byzael, Book Two (Many of my more sentimental colleagues are overfond of this story, shedding merciful tears as Page 68

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they contemplate the Pancreator's bounty. I certainly appreciate this rustic sentiment, but must needs wonder: Can one so readily dispel the work of demons without in truth being in league with them?)

Xenobiology " and let death be the reward also of those ghouls who, smugly citing Rebbun Zebbuk's famous Autoeminencine Canticle, disport amid alien necropoli, seeking thereby to glean the unholy sorcery of the Symbiots, the Ukar, even the Vau themselves! Suffer no such warlocks to come among ye, but raise your fists against them, and steel your ears from their blandishments and harlot's promises of power." from the sermon given by Archbishop Lycrecia to the people of Criticorum (I can find little fault with the archbishop's sentiment, I might add.)

Barren Environment " for, even as the Patriarch Palamedes went naked and destitute into the dunes of Pyre, and in privation found communion with the Pancreator, so you too, O soldiers of al-Malik, may through your ordeal beneath these twin suns above you purge the taint Page 69

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of Shadow from your luminous soul, and emerge a company of blazing radiance eclipsing even the glare of the Doruman Ravines." from the inspirational sermon of the Most Holy Gazim al-Safa Frozen Environment And, girded by their solar parkas and pitons, they marched ever southward, into the austral wastes of Zaieed, where the polar fields sloped cracked and blue under the Great Cyan Rings, and monstrous talons of ice spired crazily into the black, magnetic sky. And it was woefully cold; and at times they heard a cracking, clicking noise, high and far on the wind, which they knew was not the radioactive muttering of the sky-demons.

So, fearfully remembering the terrible crystalline claws of the Lesser Zaieedan Eviscerator, and recalling the aborigines' tales of its mythical larger cousin, which was reputed to haunt the polar wastes, the company huddled together for more than mere warmth.

Jungle Environment And the beggar capered before the appalled host and, displaying a mass of gum from which protruded Page 70

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but a single yellowed tooth, began to whisper in a voice that resembled the gurgle of mating grik-slugs.

"Chernobog? Aye, lords and ladies, I know of Chernobog!" The guards moved to shoo away the unsightly wretch, but he eluded them with hell-borne speed.

"I was a member of the Lost Legion of Chernobog. I remember disembarking I remember the xok-trees that bent and audibly muttered Symbiot blasphemies I remember the evil birds that flocked and mocked, as if we were already carrion.

"We had been tutored by the most stalwart warriors and knew all there was to know about fighting under the jungle canopies. But to no avail! I remember the night half the company disappeared, and then returned changed! I remember the hungry stares from the undergrowth, the tendrils spraying from their mouths, the spiky bludgeons where faces had been!

"Aye, the Symbiots overwhelmed us that night! And I alone have returned to tell ye!" And, so finishing, the beggar shed his rags and his skin with one tentacular burst, and leapt shrieking among the company in a maelstrom of barbed palps and razored bone.

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Neurocellular Surgery Some might name me uncharitable for decrying this admittedly wondrous technique, which my Eskatonic colleague Schwartzen avers outright is the kiss of the Pancreator made manifest for, he posits, is not this restoration of bodily workings a tangible manifestation of their spiritual counterparts reelevated to their perfect form in the Empyrean's grace?

While I certainly respect the philosophies of the Eskatonics, I myself (a simple Orthodox devotee for whom the words of the Prophet must needs serve as transcendence enough) prove somewhat more skeptical. Certainly history and theologic discourse bear witness to innumerable incidents of demons assuming fair guises, even performing good works, to seduce the innocent into wickedness.

Advanced Physiks And now to the crux of my dialogues: Where, precisely, does one differentiate between humankind gainfully putting the Pancreator's works to good use as Holy Zebulon himself ordained, and warlocks perverting these selfsame components to all manner of fiendish ends?

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When does the invisible hand that raises nourishing kwij-fungi from the Salathian fields, or carries the messenger-kites aloft through the heavens, become the monstrous talon that scatters demon-seeds of plague amid the groaning worlds, or dashes temples asunder with radioactive hellfire?

Megachassis I myself have seen the skeleton of one of the great automata preserved in the Great Cathedral at De Molay, intact save for the slag-marks inflicted by the Direwolf that laid it low.

What a fearful thrill, to see the great metal frame stretching up and up, nigh unto the dome of the nave; to touch, fearfully, the great block of the motor, formerly a cauldron of animating hell-flame; to hear, faintly, the creak of the cables and ceramsteel cylinders, as if the spectre of the fallen beast yet moaned for life.

Energy Physiks The Light is, of course, unknown and unknowable; and even as one who stares into the heart of a sun succeeds only in blasting his sight into eternal Shadow, so those souls of pure intent who seek to transcend the preordained limits of enlightened cognition may instead find themselves overwhelmed Page 73

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by the Darkness Beyond All. Surely those who seek to chain the Light into the sophistry of shape, theologically refracting it into such finite embodiments as "particles" and "waves," "gamma rays" and "radio waves," commit the same fatal error; for in categorizing that which is Immanent, one succeeds only in affirming, however inadvertently, the false divinity of the all-encompassing Shadow.

My most learned colleague Brother Hargravane often disputes with me on this point, averring that just as souls are myriad manifestations of the omnipotent Light Within, so can the Light Itself manifest in an unending array of avatars, becoming simultaneously creator and created, finite and eternal. I need not dwell overlong on the similarities between the good Brother's postulations and the expurgated Vorinox Heresy of the Multiplicity, sent to the Shadows of its origin in 4843 by the efforts of our Most Holy Inquisition. <<BKIL02.PCX>> Electron Microscopes "I have stared into the face of the Pancreator!

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planets of sourceless light whirling through radiant planes and inscribing cabalistic ellipses; and I have heard the music of the spheres! Truly I aver that the Pancreator seethes among us and amid us and within us and through us not merely spiritually (as the pedants of the Urth Orthodox would have the lumpen believe), but tangibly embodied and thus continuously incarnate." revelation of Father Byelya Vostok, one week before being denounced for heresy, tried before the Avestite Inquisitorial Court and sentenced to the stake.

Monopols And I have even read that the inventors of the Second Republic, in their callous disregard for the Pancreator's will, would through sorcerous arts cause the primal ley lines of metal and earth and sky to bend together, one to the other, and weave conjointly like a great invisible skein. And this unnatural pattern they called MONOPOL, for to them it represented the One of their Invention, an idol they venerated in place of that One who had ordained all things. And, in a further gesture of contempt for the Pancreator's way, the scientists dared to ascribe morality and will to their creation, dubbing it "positive" or "negative" according to the readings of Page 75

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their unholy instruments.

Hovertech "And so it came to pass that (the Eskatonic mystic) Diophora, lecturing to (the tyrant) Kurgari'i Alecto, spake unto her, `Wilt thou be as the hovercraft, which, so long as the terrain is easy and sure, bears its master aloft on invisible wings of false hubris, detached thereby from man and Pancreator; but, upon coming to a great and lightless abyss, fails in its boastful endeavor, and sends both itself and its erstwhile suzerain spiraling down into the void?'" second-to-last canto of The Martyrdom of Diophora Cyclotron And now I am told of a sinister cauldron that reputedly blasts apart the very light-motes of the Pancreator, spinning them hither and yon into the Shadow. So, then: They of the Second Republic would go so far as to attempt to slay the Pancreator's angels! Is any further proof needed that the fundamental essence of this technology is rooted in evil, and that at best we clergy and nobles tread a perilous road in its use?

Singularity Tech And so the Eskatonics pore greedily over the Page 76

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Engineer's book, and whisper of secrets wrested from the very clutches of the Guilds. The students whisper of a Point That Is No Point, and a Line That Is Not, and all manner of other formulae and gibberish.

I myself can make naught of the book; it appears to speak of wonders created from light-motes at the heart of invisible whirling orbs that in turn enough!

Tertus calls the time to recite the Selucian Litany draws nigh. Let the Eskatonics squabble over their tawdry "truths" I shall commune with the Pancreator in the time-honored way.

Jump Drives " ... constructs whereby those versed in the proper protocols may call unto the jumpgates and, provided the plea is couched respectfully, be heard. Mayhap these devices serve as altars or menhir-stones of sorts; certes all who have approached the gates without bearing such a talisman have been rebuffed or worse." from the Criticoran Compendium <<bkil11.pcx>> Composite Armor "Look on this shell, ye unbelievers! Look on this Page 77

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war-mail of the tyrant Ashur-baal, whom ye dreaded more than the coming of the Musters. See the spiked helmet, wherefrom he would issue commands and order punishments, now rent tripartite; view, O newly liberated, the cuirass, which turned blade and beam alike, now collapsed as paper before the Pancreator's fury; look upon the gauntlets and greaves, with which he would smash the innocent and trample the defenseless, now slagged nigh to unrecognizability."

(Revised) Omega Gospels, chapter 38, verse 6 (An invaluable lesson to those of overweening worldly conceit; one of my favorite parables, as well as one of the more practical.)

Ceramsteel "Upward the Republic's folly towered. To the heavens spired endless plates of opalescent ceramsteel, mirroring and refracting the twin suns into a palette of rainbow hues. Flawless as any diamond was its surface, and so perfectly had the ceramsteel been worked that each viewer saw its face completely undistorted by arc or dullness.

"But judgment from the Empyrean came upon invisible wings, and the ceramsteel that had been Page 78

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the Senate's pride collapsed like paper, and for miles could be heard the woeful crash of metal on stone, like the cymbals of a celestial band crashing out a dirge. " untitled prose poem of Raza Lysander Nanotechnology "And so these warlocks whom I have already adjudged guilty would have me give credence to the absurd postulate that these forbidden devices were built from nothingness by legions of infinitesimally tiny golems working in unison like the ants of Terra.

Nay, I know demon-conjured goods when I see them, and so shall send them and their masters to the pyre together." testament of Brother Pallas, Temple Avesti Monofilament "Be as the monowire, my child: impregnable in thy frailty; for, though the merest pressure could snap thee, yet it matters not, for even the strongest fingers cannot grip thee, and rend themselves upon thee." maxim of the Koto combat school Web Missiles Page 79

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" these infernal shells consecrated to the red demons of war that haunt the seventy-second hell, and which rend metal, stone and flesh with little discrimination. From their fiery malediction nothing is safe, nothing is sacred: not the monastery at De Molay or the cathedral at Pentateuch." from the Daemonomica of Sutek <<bkil24.pcx>> Wireblades " and, laughing, the infidel Decados did taunt the most righteous Battle-Brother, and utter all manner of blasphemies, and in so doing called unto him to humble her through fire and sword. And raising her hand in a mocking salute, she lunged forward, weaving that selfsame hand widdershins and cruciform, as if mad. And woe! For in truth the Decados invoked magick most foul; a coven of invisible demons came at her summons, and the Battle-Brother fell at the heathen noble's feet, hewn sorcerously into gobbets." from the Narrative of the Gazim Protocols (The book doubtless speaks of the wireblade weapons which the heedless nobles procure from Page 80

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the Guilds even now: wondrous but foul tools whereby an armored soldier can be invisibly hewn asunder.)

Cyber-Robotics Verily one might argue that a divine of sufficient learning can command the metal golems of the Lost Age, even as Suleiman the Ancient sported with demons and wrestled the afreet of the Zylok Wastes. Yet Suleiman thou art not: Mind ye that metal animated as flesh yet retains its nature unyielding and opaque, so that even the veriest Light merely reflects distorted images from its brazen hide. And by these signs may ye become aware of the golem's nature.

Advanced Nanotechnology I have heard that on the lost and benighted worlds of the Baeleejin Nebula the covens have so enthralled the populace that they willingly serve the warlocks, and have given over their entire world to the animate metal-plagues of the Second Republic's last nights. Those few refugees who have escaped the sorcerers' lair speak of entire cities vomiting themselves forth from the slaty beds of the dead seas surely the work of thousands of devils, who toil with bent backs and folded wings at the whims of their masters.

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Neumonic Camouflage And despite their vaunted powers, most warlocks are afraid to test their mettle on the battlefield; thus they cloak themselves with all manner of trickery and illusions. The most blatantly demonic of these I cite from an account by Brother Pallas, who describes one such warlock, Pazu'ul by name. This worthy, ignominiously defeated on the dueling grounds by the Li Halan champion Procrustes, spoke words of power and made signs to his demonic master, whereupon his mail shimmered like the fireflies of Severus' marshes, and the fiend vanished forthwith into the very firmament.

Polymorphonic Carbon And look ye to the barbarian worlds beyond our frontiers, for, despite their savagery, the purveyors of forbidden technology would move among them and forge the hordes into a vast and implacable Dark Empire.

The Vuldrok, I am told, speak of certain cunning and warlike barbarians dwelling beyond even their own tribe's far frontier. These heathens are said to travel in enormous craft that bear the stamp of both vessel and golem. For the barbarians have mastered a wondrous metal which has been Page 82

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imbued with an unnatural life, enabling a vessel forged from it to transform its carapace into a multiplicity of shapes. And thus can the same craft perform a variety of military functions, merely by invoking its transmogrifying power.

Discontinuity Field Generator And so the Guilds have entered into an unholy alliance with the Alecto, whereby the tyrant's forces have received the fruits of Leagueheim's most heinous works: among other sorceries, a contrivance that through occult science warps the very abyss into an enfolding cocoon, in the manner of the Void Kraken's sepia ink. This enables the Alecto's war-vessels to pass through the vacuum unseen, the better to steal upon their prey and gain by stealth what might be denied them through dint of puissance.

Cold Fusion Cells I look on these canisters, so deceptively innocuous, and I shudder. My scribe Demetrius, who is learned in the arcane script of the Engineers, has deciphered the glyphs on these cylinders, and tremblingly informs me that herein the Guilds have trapped the incorporeal souls of those demons who haunt the lowest hells: those malignant entities who bring the tumor-sickness and scorch entire worlds in flame of Page 83

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such virulence that the planet is thereafter anathema to Urthly life.

Fusion Beams "And, thus concluding, the Prophet gestured scornfully, and the Pancreator answered his call. The infidel was lifted as if by an invisible hand and hurled headlong into the fusion beams he had sorcerously evoked; and there was a mighty clap, and a lightning-stench, and a terrible hiss; and then naught remained of the infidel but the thinnest, wavering mist, dimly illumined by the mocking crackle of the beam." from the Omega Gospels, chapter 44, verse 43 Fusion Rifles "But this time the minions of the Reeves had readied themselves, and from the knapsacks on their backs they withdrew slender tubes of a crystalline metal; and, aiming them at the assailants, invoked blasphemous NAMES and made dubious SIGNS, as the Engineers had instructed.

"And the air began to spark and sting, as though a swarm of Pandemonian firewasps had initiated the mating discharge simultaneously; and from the leveled cylinders gushed a draconian roar, and the Page 84

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fires of the hells poured in an infernal stream at the Guilders' bidding." testimony of Oblate Zoe, Brothers Battle <<bkil21.pcx>> Meson Cannon "I shall give thee fire and ruin. From the jumpgates my armada shall descend upon thy system. I shall call down the wrath of the meson upon thee, and thy children shall curse thy names as they burn, ye who dare to defy me.

"Yea, I shall scourge thy cities with the meson weapon, so that not one granary or hovel stands, and all that remains of thy palaces shall be clouds of hissing ions. Thy flocks I shall incinerate, and thy fields, and thy servants and slaves. Thy oceans I shall boil in thy beds, and thy mountains level to plains, and thy forests shall be made anon into hills of ash. But ye I shall yet spare, so that ye may look upon my work and despair.

"And when all is ended, and thy world is as lifeless as the Malignatian Belt, to the meson I shall condemn thee as well, so that ye will know full well the power of the Gesar kings."

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speech of King Borijov van Gesar VI, from the Canticles of the Longest Dark <<bkil28.pcx>> Powered Ceramsteel Armor And despite the Church's admonitions, the nobles, scenting the succession is nigh, traffick with all manner of dubious powers; and few are more loathsome than those nobles who, dissatisfied with mere ceramsteel, don cuirasses artificially empowered with Guild-magick. At first the pact seems favorable: The wearer of the mail becomes nigh akin to a war-golem, gaining strength sufficient to rend steel; and great glory on the battlefield is his for a span.

But such vassalage extracts a terrible price, for the particular breed of demon that fuels the mail is a rapacious one, and after a time begin to eat away at the wearer's very body; so that within a decade after first donning the armor, the chivalrous flower is but a withered weed: covered with tumors, hairless, scabrous and foul.

Psychosocial Engineering I have oft heard Eskatonics and Amaltheans discourse on this field of endeavor; I have witnessed some of the most learned divines under the Page 86

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Celestial Sun dispute its validity; still I deem its practice to be dangerous rubbish. It is the purview of the Pancreator alone to tamper so with the minds of his chosen. Friar Elzbeita has proved in her Empyrean Dialogues that the mind is but the skin veiling the corpus of the soul; thus he who would divert another's thought-flows, as an engineer rechannels water for the grist mill, in truth imperils the victim's soul.

Fractal Metaphysics Oh, I would not commit the error of many of my brethren who casually dismiss all of the Eskatonics' lore as merest parlor tricks. I knew one worthy, a Brother Philo, who in an instant could calculate all manner of astronomical sums, as if the numbers were conjured whole from the Empyrean; and lo, regardless of the problem's difficulty, Philo was always correct.

This divine could, if given a single situational parameter concerning a given event, glean a multitude of conjugal factors and probabilities occluded from other minds. It was folly to dissemble to Philo, and even more foolish to lie; his eyes were lanterns of the Pancreator, discerning the most infinitesimal mote of light in a sea of shadow.

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His excommunication was a sore blow to me, and a decision I believe was made in error. Let his intuition fail him not, and let him stay one step ahead of his deluded pursuers until such time as the Pancreator sees fit to demonstrate his innocence. <<bkil29.pcx>> Prana-bindu Now, in opening oneself to the Light, one must take care to avoid the enticing snares of a legion of dubious thrones; for in so doing one can easily replicate the folly of the Prana-bindu mystics of the Soma path. These worthies, mistaking clever disfigurement for enlightenment, willingly perform fleshly manipulations such as the Pancreator never intended, and contort themselves into shapes such as scions of Urth were never meant to assume. <<bkil27.pcx>> Psychosonic Manipulation And the warlock grinned most evilly; and turning his baleful gaze upon the adept, he spake a single occult NAME, with which I shall not blacken these pages; but, upon hearing this NAME, the righteous one felt her soul eclipsed by the forces of the Outer Darkness, and fell shrieking to her knees lest her very soul be wrenched into the ebon vacuum.

Alien Psychology Page 88

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To humans the Pancreator's mandate was given. To humans the Prophet's truths were bequeathed. To humans the Diaspora was decreed, that all the universe be seeded and furrowed to the glory of the Pancreator's chosen.

Shall we now truck with those freakish chimeras whom the Pancreator has intended merely as obstacles to righteousness? Shall we open our ears to the siren-whispers of those whose inner corruption exceeds even the loathliness of their outer countenance?

Vau Psychology Can the Vau be comprehended? Most assuredly; indeed, they encourage it, though they admit it not.

For to understand the vicissitudes of the Vau is to reject all that is human, to shed one's soul for a numbing yoke. Certes, no scion of Urth who has gone among the Vau has retained the Pancreator's manifesto, but has instead become enraptured with the deceitful race and has returned, if at all, as their merest dupe. <<BKIL05.PCX>> Symbiot Psychology "Reason with the Symbiots? Shall ye traffick with a Page 89

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supernova, or attempt to parley with the Void Kraken even as it crushes your craft to flinders? Yea, they have sentience and speech stolen, like all of their other noxious gifts, from the violated corpses of their reanimated victims. Like the Cadavan Ape, their soliloquies are the merest parroted lures designed to gull men to their doom; and so I deal with the Symbiots the way I would such a Cadavan Ape: an incendiary shell through the brain, swiftly, accurately and mercilessly."

Gorgor the Tamer, a Brother Battle assigned to the Stigmata Garrison Parapsychology That which is Immanent will be revealed to us in due time by the grace of the Pancreator. Are not the Elysian Mysteries, Zebulon's Three-and-Twenty Sacrosanct Liturgies and the Rite of Sapient Silence enough to satisfy the curious? Must every shadow be litten, every abyss plunged, every mystery dispelled?

I adjure thee: I have visited the sanitariums of the Amaltheans, and there, locked fast in cages and strapped to linen-padded frames, lie the gibbering shells of those who sought to know that which the Pancreator has mercifully veiled from our sight. We Page 90

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do not look on the world with the eyes of the Ukar, and based on my eyes' own evidence I would have to conclude that this is a blessing most compassionate.

Theurgy My mystic counterparts have told me much of these vaunted "miracles" and yet I stand firmly opposed to placing all the Church's hopes upon the auspices of strangely empowered relics. These items are best used as symbols, not as incarnate weapons.

Furthermore, I question whether the "inner light" such relic-wielders boast of is truly the benefice of the Pancreator; one dulled by klaj-juice may well experience a transient transcendence, but it is a false one, as the spasmodic convulsions upon a klaj-addict's return to consciousness well attest.

Likewise, I think, with this "theurgy." Its practitioners claim that their ability to empower and animate the great relics of the cathedrals is a sign of the Pancreator's grace. Now certes, the theurge who is able to channel his belief through these relics and thereby heal the sick with but a touch, or place the pilots of the fleets in communion with celestial thrones, or divine the plots of wicked counselors, or smite the sinful to the ground with but a gesture, is as worthy of the Empyrean's grace as any under the Page 91

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Invisible Sun. Yet, just as in the parable of the ancient terraformer who sought to forge the Spav River with a bridge constructed from the waxen nests of the kili-fly, the means to a goal, if wrongly conceived, can often prostitute the most noble of ends. And mayhap this is the case with theurges and other such cabalists, for they tread perilously close to the left-hand path.

Indoctrination Clever illusions and demon-spawned lies (By such as these is the warlock concealed) To snuff all the stars from the dolorous skies (Only with this is the warlock content) Vigilant heed to the Innermost Light (By such as this is the warlock revealed) The pyre, the flamegun, the unerring smite (THUS is the warlock to damnation sent!) chant and choral response, spoken by an Avestite prelate to her pupils (Such zealotry on the part of the Avestites has scourged many a fiendish warlock and unleashed Page 92

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brutal pogroms on no few innocent worlds, but la, who is a lowly Orthodox bishop to question the Avestites' most righteous methods?)

Liturgical Ritual What Guild-spawned vice, what illicit pleasure compares to the serenity induced by the Somnolent Mantra, by the intoxicating aroma of incense and the frescoes of the Eight Saints, by the sussurant drone of the liturgist as she recites parables from the Omega Gospels every action ordained, every response choreographed? Let the hermits go amid the wastes; let the Eskatonics plumb their brains alone in blackened cells. For me are the tenets of the Church, and the holy books, and the traditions passed from Pancreator to Prophet to disciples, and the blissful communion of a thousand souls united in radiant song. <<BKIL22.PCX>> Holy Warriors And the Pancreator ignited a flame in the bellies of the Battle-Brothers, and surrounding bystanders averred that the company's very eyes blazed with celestial fire, so that they could see no falsehood, but only what the Pancreator inspired them to see.

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cancer be excised fully, cut down all among them infected with the demon-taint, yea, to the last babe.

(Yet another example of Avestite mercy but none can gainsay their thoroughness.)

Meditation From ancient times we of Urth have utilized a number of techniques for communing with the Empyrean through the purgation of the Self. From the holy man who wanders alone in the desert, to the abbess who silently prays beneath the cruciform circle, such psychic keys enable humans to cast off their worldly vestments and bask in the spiritual radiance of the Pancreator. Take care though, for meditation in all its forms is a doorway to the soul, and the improper practitioner may open himself to the Light or the Shadow.

Raider Stealthship Yea, I adjure all righteous sons and daughters of Urth to take up the crusade against the minions of the Guilds, those infidels who would now go so far as to war with Mother Church. It was their handiwork which smote the Church vessel Zebulon's Flame upon its emergence from the jumpgate at Pentateuch. The last transmission from the beleaguered ship spoke of pods of small, swift Page 94

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warplanes appearing sorcerously from the vacuum to strafe fire and rockets upon the defenseless craft, only to vanish again when their stings were launched.

So: The League would war with the Church over the payment of a tariff? I call upon the children of the Pancreator to give them a tariff of brimstone and blood! sermon of Patriarch Akemotoi Space Frigate And so now I tell of those vessels whose nitrous wings ply the abyssal seas between the ebbing stars, and which, being to all accounts fractious and prone to rampages, are kept in check only by the devilish adeptry of the Charioteers.

The least of the breed, the Space Frigate, is doubtless familiar to the learned or traveled reader, being often seen hovering over planetary horizons or casting its shadow over the disks of the Byzantine moons. I am told that the Frigate is a common enough traveler of the void, being easily summoned through relatively simple Engineering formulae. Though dwarfed by its greater and rarer cousins, the Frigate is nonetheless a dangerous and ruthless beast, and those who would test it in the Page 95

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deeps it calls home do so at their peril.

Space Destroyer Next in size, and exponentially superior in ferocity, is the Space Destroyer, aptly named; a vast and ravenous astral predator which, reined only loosely by its Charioteer pilots, seems to delight in spreading wanton carnage, even as the scalpel-eels of the Madocian seas randomly attack fellow aqueous denizens for nothing more than the satiation of bloodlust. Indeed, the Destroyer's habits mimic the scalpel-eel's in many respects, for the Space Destroyer also travels in schools, and excels at indiscriminately taking down prey of all sizes, greater and smaller alike. <<bkil12.pcx>> Space Cruiser Greater yet than the Destroyer, that astral behemoth known as the Space Cruiser plies the jumplanes like one of the extinct cetaceans of Terra. It is more sluggish than the Destroyer, and less prone to rash attacks. Nay, the Cruiser is a methodical and malignant beast, preferring to strike from a distance and then glide slowly and implacably toward its crippled prey.

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chase, so the Cruiser prefers to ambush its prey upon its emergence from the jumpgates. And if its attack is perhaps less immediately effacious than the Destroyer's, it is more certain in the long term; few vessels struck and stalked by this monster return to their ports to tell the tale.

Space Dreadnought And now my narrative comes to the greatest of the astral juggernauts, the rorqual of the breed (if you will permit my indulgence), that monster which the Charioteers dub "Space Dreadnought."

How to begin? Shall I say that a mountain was calcified in layers of glimmering metal, and wrenched from its moorings by the hand of a god, and hurled bodily into space? Shall I speak of the myths of Old Urth, and the primal titans whose bones were worshipped as progenitor deities? And this brings to mind an archaic proverb from the ancient nights of Holy Terra, to the effect of "Shalt thou tame leviathan with a hook?" Yea, O apostates of the Guilds, I think that disporting with such brutes as these will prove your end one dark interstellar midnight, and I shall shed no tears.

Yet, just as in the ancient seas of Urth, the leviathan alone could descend into the lightless depths to Page 97

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battle the terrible squids therein, so can we children of the Diaspora but hope that this questionable tool might one night cleave the starless darkness and scourge the Void Krakens that bedevil the spaceways.

Space Carrier Let the Pancreator adjudicate the succession with all due haste, for it seems that the nobles would depopulate the entire cosmos in the pursuit of their endeavors. What sorts of battles do these tyrants fight, that they needs must deploy such a craft as this Space Carrier? This gargantuan engine seemingly lifts an entire city's population into the ether, then transports its conscripts to fight and die on alien soil.

Battle Carrier "From the mouth of the jumpgate glided the great Battle Carrier, and the pirates were stricken with woe. From its gleaming sides detached swarms of fighting craft themselves too small to travel the gate unaided which blazed among the hapless marauders like animate buzzsaws; and those pirates who escaped the fury of the children were blasted into nothingness by the weapons of the parent craft; and thus were the Aragonese Marches made secure."

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Seraphim Space Fighter And so now they would have men and women plumb the Stygian gulfs in one-person fighting craft, like silvery foam cresting a typhoon-wracked sea. Even in this age of sorrow, are the houses so eager to throw away the flower of their youth? The Guilds, damn them, dub this new star vessel the Seraphim; surely as a black jest, for those who take to the void in this weapon must assuredly enter the realms of the angels ere long.

Like its cousins, the Seraphim is incapable of passage through the jumpgates without the auspices of the Carrier vessels; once it has entered planetary space, however, it is the absolute master of its domain. I would not be surprised if flocks of Seraphim sought to extinguish the very suns they ostensibly guard, such is their arrogance.

Archangel Space Fighter Greater than the Seraphim, and more lethal by far, is that haughty machina christened Archangel by the impious Guilds. I am told that so intractable is the Archangel that any who would command its flight must submit themselves to a dubious surgical procedure at the talons of the Engineers. Once complete, the pilot-to-be is half a golem himself: as Page 99

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steely and uncaring as his metal companion and steed.

Oh, one may not deny that the Archangel in flight is a graceful and wondrous sight: its sulfurous jets spitting brimstone as it comets through the night like a meteor bearing ill omen. But when I gaze upon a flock of these vessels in flight I cannot help but recall the words of the Omega Gospels: "And in the end times shall rocket forth from the hells the firebats of Ba'alzin, the heralds of the demon legions. And they are of exceeding swiftness, and fair to look upon; but they bear carrion in their mouths, and their talons blaze with the flames of damnation."

Prophet Space Torpedo Bomber Verily, these are among the most unforgiving of the new automated abominations. Is there a day that the mantle of Byzantium Secundus fails to rattle to the stings of these merciless machinae? They are aptly named: They are prophets of war, of death, of discord, of the buried Shadow that strives to overwhelm our disunited ranks.

Oh, but that these hell-wasps could be tamed and unleashed on the deserving, so that the Symbiots might cringe in fear at the whine of the descending marauder, the hiss of the torpedoes as they exit Page 100

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their docks, the roar as the ground beneath the attacker geysers in a column of flame. <<bkil25.pcx>> Martyr Fanatic Space Torpedo Bomber " and so the pilot, having mounted and tamed the craft, turns its nose full unto the target. And then man and mount plummet from the heavens to smite the infidel not with conjured beams and war-rockets, but with the craft itself. Thus Holy Church has usurped the sorcerers' crafts and turned them on their masters; for in this way the very technology that they use to accomplish their ends is destroyed in the undertaking. Certainly the Pancreator must smile on such heroism, and I aver that the awful explosion of the pilots' demise is in reality the instantaneous transubstantiation of their soul-matter into purest celestial flame."

Adept Hazel, Brothers Battle Assault Landers And the priests fell to their knees and beseeched the Pancreator, for surely it appeared that their hour was upon them; but, just as the Symbiots readied themselves to breach the cathedral's doors, there was a roar, and a pillar of flame turned the gloom to brightest day.

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The priests rejoiced, for succor descended from the heavens, in the form of a great transport captured from the infidel Guilds, now repainted with the cruciform sphere. The Symbiots broke off their attack and loped like dogs to the landing site, but this day the Pancreator would suffer their evil no longer; for the ship wed itself to the ground, and the ceramsteel sides dropped to reveal a legion of Brothers Battle, amply supported by Eskatonic theurges. So the priests voices hosannas on high as the rescuers poured from the craft and waded into the evil swarm, and the Pancreator gave the victory to His own that day.

Freighter The symbol of all that plagues the cosmos; verily, I fear these more than the war-golems. For while the latter at least annihilate the wicked with the good, the Guild Freighters are the veriest parasites, touching down on planet after planet like ticks lancing a babe's vulnerable hide.

Into these creatures' stomachs the vermin of the Guilds stuff all manner of filth, that they might transport their poisons across the abyss to pollute yet more of the innocent. Most Freighters prefer to transport only one sort of good; thus, fleets of Page 102

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Freighters often touch down on untainted planets one bearing narcotics, another carrying slaves, and yet a third hauling illicit manuscripts of all kinds.

Bulk Hauler If the Freighter is the wandering priest of the Guilds, then these floating fortresses are surely the very temples of evil! These hives of vice crawl from one defenseless world to the next, bearing the League's tainted poisons. Yea, everything from the Manual of the 523 Indecorous Positions of Vritna the Scourged, to the pornographic tracts of Lun-shansi the Defrocked, to the soporific nectars of the Cadavan Breweries are stowed and smuggled on these floating brothels.

The Church has time and time again petitioned the Regency to outlaw such licentious commerce, but mere matters of the soul are not given overmuch consideration in these times, and so not a day goes by but that some world's atmosphere chokes on the stink of the Bulk Hauler, as it lands like a pustulent cyst to vomit out its wares.

Starbase Is not the bounty of the Pancreator enough? Are we not content with an entire universe of worlds, that we must now construct artificial ones? Oh ye fools Page 103

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how can ye expect the Pancreator to stay His hand, when ye mock Him so? It is meet that we divorce ourselves from the world of our birth and go among the stars, such is His will, but must ye spurn the spheres ordained for habitation in favor of these orbiting metal abominations, which cannot even support human life save by technomancy?

Patriarch Edwin's speech to the senators of the Second Republic, preserved in the archives at Pentateuch Starbase MkII And so not merely for the myriad worlds do the nobles war, but for the forbidden constructs of the Second Republic: the great floating metal war-spheres from which the godless hosts rained fire and ruin on defiant worlds. Perhaps the most heinous products of that lost realm's hubris, these constructs were not designed to harbor life, but to deal death. Verily, I have heard innumerable accounts of hapless cities, nations, worlds decimated by these hulking fortresses, at the whim of a power-mad noble who cared not that she incinerated the very sphere she sought to possess.

Blademaster Look upon the valiant Fatima al-Malik! Her stance is Page 104

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without flaw; she glides fluidly yet relentlessly across the training circle like a Madocian razorfin; her parry is as subtle as the movements of a Severan stick-beast, yet her lunge evokes the image of a Voroxi octoped pouncing at its prey.

Dervishes Among the strangest of the destroyed infidel sects were the Dervishes of Grail bizarre flagellants and child-killers who claimed devotion to the false prophet Zegai. Zegai instructed her followers in the performance of strange magical arts, no doubt rained on her from those powers lurking in the abyss cloaking the dark side of some forgotten asteroid.

Victims who fell into the Dervishes' snares suffered from all manner of bizarre spasms and fits, as their inner light literally collapsed upon itself. Their reason clouded, the victims would confusedly wander off into the wastes of Grail, singing mad songs and speaking of possession by supernatural intelligences.

The Dervishes' destruction in 4833 was a blessing to all virtuous persons. Recently the Inquisition has gotten wind of rumors that not all the Dervishes were destroyed, but these rumors are likely hateful propaganda, undoubtedly spread by the Guilds in an attempt to weaken the suzerainty of Holy Church.

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<<bkil10.pcx>> Assassin "And this I see: The wars are nigh unto their end, and it shall be Vladimir, of House Alecto, who claws his way onto the throne. But the Alecto will not long enjoy the spoils of his victory; for from the darkness will fall the tyrant's judgment, in the form of a stealthy assassin. Whether the emperor's doom will be the virus or the blade, the beam or the spell, I escry not; but la, the assassin shall strike true, and so the houses will once more plunge into the cauldron of war." from the Prophecies of Nebt (For a heretic, Nebt was uncannily accurate in her prophecies, and so one cannot help but conclude that the sibyl was in league with the very forces that laid Vladimir low.) <<bkil16.pcx>> Doppleganger In those dark days one could not trust even the viziers, for among the nighted city stalked the dopplegangers, those unholy amalgams of flesh and abyssal matter; they would often come among the court and, first slaying a courtier and assuming his Page 106

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likeness through foul adeptry, commit all manner of hideous crimes. And when the hounds at last began to bay, and the gendarmes discovered the deception, the dopplegangers would steal back into the night, becoming one with the anonymous masses only a cloak, a mask, a ruined life remaining to mark the phantoms' passage. <<bkil26.pcx>> Special Forces From house to house, villa to villa, hovel to hovel the commandos of the Hazat move, as though the Pancreator's Ebon Seraphim were made manifest on the earthly sphere. From their vengeance nothing is safe; they strike swiftly and invisibly from the darkness, and into the darkness they vanish once more, leaving only charnel houses where once had dwelt families. <<bkil14.pcx>> Cybercorps Woe and mercy unto the Ghazi Cybercorps of Li Halan, for the burden they must bear! How selflessly they assume the disfiguring affliction of technology their noble gaze forever shut behind mirrored panels, their manly thews replaced by wires and servos.

Truly these stalwarts, whose devotion is unquestioned, embody the virtues of the penitent; by Page 107

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their actions they assume a mantle of bodily purgatory, that they might more readily defend the realm.

PTS Fusion Cannon No abomination is too vile for the magicians of the Guilds. These fiends, unsatisfied with the evocation of living war-monsters, would even cannibalize the corpses of those giants fallen on the fields of battle.

Through the artifices of the propane torch and the arc welder these villains evoke a bizarre form of necromancy, whereby the skeleton of one such brute is grafted to the frame of another, and the composite given a horrid undead life thereby.

Such beasts perhaps gain power from their peculiar state; I have been reliably informed that certain of the creatures can actually vomit energies of such potency that they scorch the very atmosphere of the planet on which they reside, and tear rifts in the fabric of the void.

PTS Meson For the cunning Decados, having overwhelmed the Li Halan defensive position and captured their sorcerous meson weapon, thereupon retreated into their fortress. And for a fortnight naught was heard save a feverish humming and clanking and whirring, Page 108

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and though the engines of the Li Halan hurled all manner of volatile projectiles against the defenseless walls, the siege went unanswered.

And then, on the night of the new moon, the Decados opened their gates; and therefrom, surrounded by legions of suicide troops, rolled a monstrous construct; for the Li Halan meson had been cleverly fused to the skeletal remains of one of the Decados' own golems; and this unholy hybrid went among the paralyzed soldiers, belching dragon-flame into the very abyssal skies and scattering the proud hosts like quail.

Wolfen The Wolfen is to its larger cousins as a flea is to a ptero-gokk; but take care, for even a flea may carry a deadly sting. I have heard tales from my comrades in the Brothers Battle horrible stories of Wolfen swarms ravening over hills and dunes to overwhelm any who stand in their way. Only the strongest of fortifications may defy them, and the lone infantry platoon who faces the Wolfen might as well consign itself to the void.

Pitbull Tenacious and implacable, the automaton dubbed the Pitbull is not so large as its cousins, but is Page 109

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equally deadly. The Pitbull rarely prowls alone, but travels in like-minded packs, and a swarm of properly directed Pitbulls can overcome much larger war-golems, as the stinging insects of the Iz'djak Selvas through weight of numbers bring down the predacious canopy-birds with which they compete.

A leader is generally chosen to command a Pitbull squadron, and the lesser machinae obey with admirable alacrity. Should ye be forced into contention with these monsters, the sole hope for survival is to cripple the leader, leaving the other Pitbulls misdirected; but even then beware the feeding frenzy that may follow such an action.

Grim Reaper Field Tank And indeed the death-angel took the field that day, embodied in the demonic automaton dubbed the Grim Reaper by terrified soldiers. The Reaper is a particularly loathsome golem, for it is deployed not to do battle with its fellow behemoths, but to stalk and trap and slay foot soldiers, one by one.

It is remarkably efficient in so doing, for it fairly bristles with an array of war-engines: bullets, bombs and beams belch from the Reaper's innards with little discrimination, and it invariably leaves a litter of carnage in its gluttonous wake.

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Mastiff Heavy Tank And in this desperate hour the Church hierarchy has permitted the nobles to draw upon the infernal aid of that war-beast called the Mastiff, that the succession be decided all the more swiftly and attention turned to more pressing concerns.

Verily the Mastiff is indeed a hound of hell a long, low-slung ceramsteel juggernaut, whose armored hide of plate upon plate brings to mind the nightmare fauna of the De Molay Gorges. It knows no retreat; it advances implacably, impassively grinding soldiers beneath its caterpillar treads, and once the Mastiff has scented quarry only a Direwolf can bring it down.

Its fiery emissions harness the fury of the solar storms, and not even a ceramsteel bunker can withstand its blast.

Kestral Hover Tank Over the fields of carnage glides the Kestral, deceptively graceful, a veritable raptor of war. Not so elephantine as the Mastiff, the Kestral surpasses its larger cousin in maneuverability. Flocks of Kestrals confound their quarry through the execution of synchronized and precise flanking actions, and I maintain that the Kestral finds a perverse satisfaction in the terror of a doomed Page 111

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platoon whose members realize they have been irrevocably cut off from the main body.

Then oh, horror! the Kestrals circle in, gradually tightening the arc of their flight, strafing the hapless soldiers with all manner of energies, and the sizzle of charred flesh is as sweet to the predators as is incense to the pious priest.

Eagle Hover ATG "The Pitbull is a formidable foe, and when besieged by the creatures the wise general, setting aside his distrust of the Guilds and their arts, procures the services of that creature the Guild's Engineers dub the Eagle. Like the Urthly bird that is its namesake, it darts and hovers among its slower enemies, lancing them with all manner of sorcerously invoked energies, in the manner of a Pyrian needle-flower using its weaponry to bring down its prey."

Dorian Hawkwood, A Military History of the Diaspora Peregrine Hover AAG Hateful falcon! How many proud pilots hast thou brought down in fire and ruin, to dash in pieces atop the wreckage of their cities? How many of Urth's sons and daughters hast thou scoped in thy malevolent gaze, and calmly glided beneath, and Page 112

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shot thy fiery talons to rend asunder?

Direwolf Heavy ATG "And as the greedy Mastiff crawled forward, intent on devouring the last of the al-Malik defenders, the janissaries urged their slaves on to even greater haste, and the Direwolf was brought to bear. The Mastiff, seeing its peril, evoked the gatling cannon, and the air erupted in an incendiary roar, and fully half the slaves dropped in charred shreds to the flagstones, leaking half-cauterized blood. But the other slaves strained all the harder, and the artillerist invoked a prayer to whatever celestial seraphim would carry the shot true, and focused the scope.

"And there was a crash, and a sound like the gnashing of a giant's teeth. And all gazed in paralyzed awe as the Mastiff shuddered, and swelled, and erupted forthwith, so that of the proud attacker only a shrapnel of ceramsteel shards remained."

Dorian Hawkwood, A Military History of the Diaspora (An interesting depiction of this particular mechanical brute, which I had always heard described as capable of independent mobility. Ah well, perhaps Count Hawkwood refers to a crippled Page 113

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specimen.)

Violator And what district of Byzantium Secundus is not wracked by the roar of that abominable engine called the Violator? Who can sleep soundly of nights knowing that at any moment their tower might be breached and brought down about their heads, or that the last sound they will hear before incineration is the hissing crack as the very air retreats in horror from the Violator's greedily arcing beam? <<bkil09.pcx>> Pestulator Artillery And when we speak of renegades, let us not forget the company of the Ur-Ukar mercenary Baal oj Ak; nay, let us save our most potent maledictions for this one, whose crimes are legion; who has distilled the very plague-spirits of the Ukari Gorges and launched them over the walls of Harthane City, so that all in its bounds, every man, woman and child, fell gasping and reeking of plague and leaking of pus.

Wraith Cloaking Tank The barbarians often enter into unholy pacts with the warlocks in our midst, and from them gain witchy gifts that, while condemning their souls to the lowest of hells, wreak great havoc upon the Page 114

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Pancreator's chosen.

I have recently been apprised of a story from the Vuldrok frontier, wherein a cunning chieftain, having concluded a pact with a notorious witch known to haunt the outer wastes, received from her a contrivance that could through dint of evil magic render a great war-golem imperceptible to godly eyes. And having cast this magic on a captured tank, this chieftain guided his weapon to the very gates of An-Mulok, and brought the walls down.

Xyll Warbeast " for wilt thou grapple with the Xyll? Wilt thou hurl thyself into its viscid pincers, and deliver thy skull unto its rattling mandibles? Wilt thou seek to hide from the unerring watchfulness of its multifaceted eye, or vainly expend thy strength on its unyielding chitin?

"And when the heavens open, and the Xyll swarm forth in their rapacious legions what wilt thou then?

Will thy pride bear thee aloft beyond the predator's droning wings, or urge thy twin legs to fleetness surpassing its six?

"Knowest thou, unbeliever, only the Light canst succor thee."

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from the Psalms of the Prodigals, canto 23, verse 5 Ranger Legion And in your prayers and counsel forget not the wretched garrisons of Stigmata: those stalwart souls who must trek through animate jungle and cast themselves into the maw of the Symbiots.

How bravely they march from the landing site, entering the heart of darkness as though born to survive therein! With what stoicism they conserve their rations and endure swarms of biting flies; with what vigilance they scan the undergrowth for sign of the enemy! And, when the parasites erupt in noxious waves from their dens, how valiantly they throw away their lives, so that the souls of all might remain untainted!

Marauders Oh, take pity on these wretched things! What sort of fiendish intelligence can so calmly survey the tattered survivors of Vau weaponry, Symbiote assaults, fusion beams and a host of other hideous fates and then let these ruined soldiers know nothing of rest, but weld and paste them into lumbering metal shells, that they may go out to make war anew?

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Pity also unto the unfortunates whom the Marauders find in their path, for they know neither reason nor pity. Their human sentience and higher consciousness are perhaps even less intact than the dismembered wreckage of their bodies, and so they gaze upon their former kin from the implacable countenance of a machine.

And so the fighting continues, ever more savage, ever deeper into the vacuum, as though the combatants would dedicate themselves to the Shadow outright.

Last week, a Li Halan Star Legion overwhelmed an Alecto vessel, condemning its crew to the void in the process. I am told they maneuvered unprotected in the abyssal chill, adrift from any enclosing vessel, as though they were quite at home there. Imagine! A squadron of men deliberately trained to battle in space, as though the abyss were but a Criticoran chessboard. <<bkil13.pcx>> Gen Warriors I saw these things, as they entered the Cathedral of Pentateuch to be blessed, and I shuddered. Perhaps it was their lurching gait, which they affected despite Page 117

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the fact that they hoisted their ceramsteel mail as if it were paper. Perhaps it was the cords and knots and ropes of muscle that banded their frames as if they were Suteki mummies.

Nay, I think it was the eyes: row after row of lifeless gray slits in dead, expressionless masks. Oh, no good can possibly come of these vat-born zombies, aborted into existence, never having known the comfort of a mother's womb. Verily, when the litany was spoken I drew back in loathing, as if the blessing were given to the demons' own.

Assault Legion And so it is not enough that the warmongers bring monstrous golems among the noble hosts; now they would encase men and women in evilly enchanted metal, that they might thereby become golems themselves. They would transform thy sons and daughters into the nightmarish embodiments of that ancient Urth folk-rhyme: "Heavy boots of lead fill his victims full of dread."

Powered Legion " and as they came into view I at first mistook them for robots disinterred from the crypts of the Second Republic, for did they not clank and hiss and whir?

Did not the Light recoil in vain from their metallic Page 118

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hides? Were their visages not inscrutable masks of blasphemously animate metal?

"And then they neared, and with a great shudder I realized my folly: For these cacophonous abominations were soldiers, who had allowed themselves to be encased in cast cocoons and ensnared in webs of sparking wires." from the Revelations of the Gazim Protocols <<bkil18.pcx>> Grimsons And there came a mighty wrench, akin to that sound produced by the servos of the war-golems; and lo! the ceramsteel vault door flew from its moorings with a thunderous groan, as of a dirge-bell tolling its doleful paean. And answering that call, in a great unending crescendo, advanced wave after wave of the heathen Grimsons, klaj in their veins and madness in their song and naught but emptiest Shadow in their stare. And the very stars wept and flickered anew, as the Battle-Brothers were borne down under the weight of that Stygian tide.

Infantry Put not your trust in soldiers, be they the cataphracts of the Regency, the skirmishers of the Page 119

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Muster, or the janissaries of the al-Malik; for did not the Prophet write: "Place no faith in warriors, be they the assembled legions of the scattered stars, for only in the grace of the Invisible Sun shall ye be succored, and evil banished into the outermost dark. "? <<bkil08.pcx>> Fanatics "Nay, spare not one, be that one with child or child itself; for a heretic can no more check its evil nature than a nit can avoid becoming a louse, or a Pyrian Hellworm retain its skin upon reaching its fourth instar." command issued by Archbishop Slatha of the Avestites upon the conquest of the warlock-plagued hamlet of Yith-Na (The pleasure in trafficking with Avestites is that one always knows where one stands.)

Tracker Legion And though no house, not even the Li Halan, has completely retained its virtue in the face of expediency, the worst by far is the Decados. May the Pancreator keep these apostates from gaining the throne, for it seems that no stratagem, no tactic Page 120

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is too devious or amoral for them. They harbor warlocks and fraternize with the worst elements among the Guilds; yea, I have heard that they have even trained certain of their commandos in the questionable arts of Soma, whereby they may physically alter their shape and, having thus camouflaged themselves, infiltrate local populaces as saboteurs and scouts.

The lords of the Decados should take heed of the Church's censure, lest their troops transform themselves indeed: from Urthling to demon-possessed fiend.

Plague Bombs And when the frenzied squadron reached the plated walls of Ik-Tva, a ghastly sight greeted their disbelieving eyes. For, though not a stone of the place had been disturbed from its earthy bed, yet all within lay silent and unmoving, as if the Vuldrok had swept among them. Every last inhabitant of Ik-Tva lay strewn like grain: Senators in their cyan robes sprawled broken and twisted upon themselves, beside tattered beggars whose skin was as gray as their rags. Skin sloughed from the skulls of good women mingled with flesh from the nether parts of harlots; the whole obscenely commingled in a noxious puddle that had been bone.

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And as the squadron choked in horror, a tattered, emaciated scarecrow, cowled and robed all in green, emerged from the Great Hall of Ik-Tva. And though the wraithly visitant's countenance remained hidden from them, its voice echoed hollowly, as though rising from the depths of a subterranean tomb. And this it spoke unto them: "Depart this place, for Ik-Tva the Mighty is no more, and the Pancreator's curse has decreed this place anathema, and henceforth its defiled walls shall enclose naught but legions of wailing ghosts."

In Conclusion I pen this litany of horrors and evils not as a prurient grimoire, but as a warning to the wise. The Avestites would enforce ignorance through the flamegun, while the Eskatonics would counsel introspection of such soporific tranquillity that it amounts to the same thing. Neither path offers absolution in an age that requires strength and action against those forces that would engulf us all.

Ultimately, the Pancreator invests all His children with sensibility and free will. And so herein I have delineated the constructs of the technomantic arts in, I think, sufficient detail that those who would seek Page 122

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them out for ill purposes may consider this a guidebook of sorts. If ye would stain thyself in this fashion, such is thy lot, and I can but pray that ye recant before thy soul extinguishes itself. If as I presume ye are a virtuous and godly person, fit to bear the legacy of Terra, then ye will take heed of these lessons, and wisely avoid commerce with that which the Pancreator has not desired us to understand.

Until the stars blaze anew, Bishop Xavier Holst Introduction Vau Symbiots Byzantium Secundus Holy Terra Leagueheim Warlocks Inquisition Regency Jumpgates Plague (The Great Moax) Microbiology Hospitals Page 123

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Immunology Pharmaceuticals Psychopharmacology Combat Drugs Wetware Cyberpilot Genetics Genetic Manipulation Viral DNA Dormant Virus Advanced Bacteriology Guardian Bacteria Spore Delivery Necrosis Cure For Necrosis Xenobiology Barren Environment Frozen Environment Jungle Environment Neurocellular Surgery Advanced Physiks Megachassis Energy Physiks Electron Microscopes Monopols Hovertech Cyclotron Singularity Tech Page 124

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Jumpdrives Composite Armor Ceramsteel Nanotechnology Monofilament Web Missles Wireblades Robotics Advanced Nanotechnology Neumonic Camouflage Polymorphonic Carbon Discontinuity Field Generator Cold Fusion Cells Fusion Beams Fusion Rifles Meson Cannons Powered Ceramsteel Armor Psychosocial Engineering Fractal Metaphysics Prana-bindu Psychosonic Manipulation Alien Psychology Vau Psychology Symbiot Psychology Parapsychology Theurgy Indoctrination Page 125

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Liturgical Ritual Holy Warriors Meditation Raider Stealthship Space Frigate Space Destroyer Space Cruiser Space Dreadnought Space Carrier Battle Carrier Seraphim Space Fighter Archangel Space Fighter Prophet Space Torpedo Bomber Martyr Space Torpedo Bomber Assault Ships Freighter Bulk Hauler Starbase Starbase MkII Blademaster Dervishes Assassin Doppleganger Special Forces Cybercorps PTS Laser PTS Meson Wolfen Page 126

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Pitbull Grim Reaper Mastiff Kestral Eagle Peregrine Direwolf Violator Pestulator Artillery Wraith Cloaked Tank Xyll Warbeast Ranger Legion Marauder Legion Gen Warriors Assault Legion Powered Legion Grimsons Legion Infantry Legion Fanatics Tracker Legion Plague Bomb Conclusion

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