Chaos Knights

Across the feudal Knight Worlds, not every noble line kept faith with the Emperor of Mankind. For every household that marches beneath the Imperial aquila there exists a darker reflection, a lineage that broke its oaths, turned upon its neighbours and fled into damnation. These are the Chaos Knights, the Fallen Nobility, and their god-machines are as ancient and as deadly as any that serve the Golden Throne. Where a loyal Knight is a monument to honour, a Chaos Knight is a monument to betrayal, its heraldry defaced, its hull scored with blasphemous sigils, its machine-spirit screaming with the corruption of the Dark Gods.

The manner of their fall is as varied as the houses themselves. Some turned traitor during the Horus Heresy and were never redeemed. Others were swallowed by the Great Rift, marooned amid the warp-storms of the Eye of Terror, where centuries of exposure to the immaterium leached the loyalty from their bloodlines. A few were seduced slowly, by ambition or grief or the whispering promises of daemons, until the day their oaths meant nothing at all. Once fallen, a house can never return, for the Imperium hunts the Traitoris with a special and unquenchable hatred.

The Long Fall[edit]

When a Knight House turns, corruption spreads through every rite and relic it possesses. The Sacristans who once tended the god-machines become Dark Sacristans, grafting daemon-engines and forbidden technologies onto the ancient frames. The Throne Mechanicum, that sacred seat which binds pilot to machine, becomes a conduit for something far worse than ancestral memory. The scions who ascend it are flooded not with the counsel of honoured forebears but with the ravings of the damned, and only the strongest emerge as masters rather than slaves. In time the machine itself changes, its armour weeping rust and ichor, its guns barking with unnatural malice.

Iconoclasts and Infernals[edit]

The Fallen Nobility follow one of two dread traditions. The Iconoclasts despise all masters, gods and Emperor alike; they are nihilists and destroyers who wage war to tear down every idol and topple every throne, trusting in their own wrath rather than the favour of daemons. The Infernals, by contrast, embrace the Dark Gods utterly, binding daemons into their war-suits and hulls until engine and entity become one damned whole. An Infernal Knight is a walking reliquary of the warp, its every step an affront to reality itself.

Dreadblades and Dread Households[edit]

Some Chaos Knights ride alone. These are the Dreadblades, exiles and oath-breakers who owe fealty to no lord, selling their ruinous strength to warbands and Dark Mechanicum cabals across the galaxy. Others march as entire Dread Households, whole fallen lineages that descend upon the Imperium in howling war-hosts of desecrated god-machines. Whether alone or in legion, the Chaos Knights fight with a ferocity born of grievance, hurling themselves at the works of the Emperor to grind ten thousand years of bitterness into the dust.