Pale Throng

“Humanity has reached a dead end! It no longer has the means to sustain itself in the stars. Blind to its own limitations it kills the children that hold the key to its future. We are those children and the future is ours!”
—Broadcast to loyalist relief forces by the rebels during the Tranch War
Rightly regarded as the cause of one of the most
dangerous threats to the stability of the Calixis Sector in recent years, the Pale Throng is a mutant
cult whose origins lay on the bleak and oppressive world of
Tranch. There it led the wave of bloody uprisings that ignited
the infamous Tranch War, whose aftermath still lingers to
plague many worlds in the Malfian and Adrantian sub-sectors
to the present day.
No subtle cult or hidden conspiracy, the Pale Throng is
a crazed and degenerate congregation of shambling horrors
and decayed and sickening witch–breeds guided by sinister
mutant overlords. Its only goal is to throw off the shackles of
its oppression and visit bloody vengeance in an apocalyptic
rebellion to destroy the Imperium and ultimately seize control
of the future of mankind. Born on a world now made infamous
for war and suffering, the Pale Throng has since created and
inspired revolts on dozens of worlds across the Calixis Sector
and beyond. But perhaps greater than the danger that this
amorphous army of monstrosities possesses—in terms of
the threat to civil order---is the fact that the Pale Throng
and what it represents has become a blasphemous rallying
cry for the twisted and disaffected. It has grown to become
something of a heretical ideology that offers easy answers
to the weak and feeds on the resentment and anger of the
oppressed---a rebellious whisper far harder to stamp out that
any mere physical foe.
==Tenets, Goals, and Heretical Beliefs==
At the heart of the Pale Throng is a reciprocal hate for the
Imperium’s own abhorrence of the mutant and the psyker.
Behind this simple hate is another subtler ideology that
(flawed though it may be) guides the propagators and masters
of the Pale Throng to create rebellion after rebellion across the
stars. Theirs is the belief that the future of mankind belongs
to the mutant and the psyker ascendant, and to achieve
that ascendancy the Pale Throng must rise up and smash
the Imperium’s rule by any means necessary. This deeper
motivation is based in a belief in the superiority of the mutant.
The cult’s higher circles believe that the future of humanity is
as a psychic race. The Pale Throng not only denies that the
mutant is a twisted abomination, but believes that the mutant
is a manifestation of mankind’s metamorphosis into something
greater, something of beauty and purpose, and humanity’s
passage to this new life form is to be embraced. The mutant
(from the cult’s outlook) is superior to the mundane human
in any number of ways, sometimes stronger, sometimes able
to survive the worst of conditions untouched, and more. The
mutant is superior, and because of this, it is the mutant that
will inherit humanity’s future.
Expressed in simple terms to the brutalized and ignorant
masses of abhumans, subs, and other outcasts that toil under
crushing oppression, the Pale Throng’s ideology offers the
prospect of liberation and revenge. It promises an end to their
sufferings and, most importantly, a sense of acceptance and an
end to the shame and stigma that Imperial culture heaps upon
them at every turn. This ideology is a heady and dangerous
mix, one that appeals to both the downtrodden and the
malign, whether they seek only an end to their pain or an
excuse to inflict such pain on others.
To many of its adherents, this creed translates into a
spiteful sense of self-deluded superiority over the loathed
masses of humanity untouched by mutation, which justifies
their grievances against the faceless powers of Imperium. This
hubris is amplified a thousand-fold among the cult’s wyrdlings
and witches, who see those “blunts” untouched by the psyker’s
gifts at best as a natural enemy, and at worst as little more than
playthings and cattle to be toyed with, used, and destroyed at
whim. For many at the cult’s higher echelons, the Pale Throng’s
Shroud Masters, mutant demagogues, and petty warlords, this
is a creed worth risking all for and is the price of a victory in
the coming war between human and mutant.
==The Doctrine of the Psychic Ascension of Mankind==
To the Pale Throng, the psyker is no foul “witch” to be abhorred
but a wielder of power more subtle and profound in nature than
any normal human can comprehend. This particular heresy is not
a new one, but a viperous idea that has flared up time and again in
the Imperium’s history. According to such beliefs, to witness the
gift of the psyker is to glimpse the future where man may re-order
the physical, re-sculpt flesh, and see the true hearts of all. These
then, the heretics claim, are the gifts of an evolution of human
form that the Imperium loathes and fears. These heretics believe
that the Imperium fails to comprehend the truth---that psykers
are the foreshadowing of the magnificence that awaits the human
race once it has ascended to its true potential.
==Internal Schism==
From the beginning, one of the Pale Throng’s greatest
vulnerabilities has been its tendency towards internecine conflict
and schism. On Tranch during the uprising, the sheer power
and commanding presence of the Shroud Council was enough
to hold the disparate mutant gangs, sub-cults, and witch factions
together, at least for a time, in deadly united purpose. But in
smaller revolts and other uprisings, various groups and individual
leaders often fall into open conflict over their particular “truth” of
the Pale Throng, their own fitness to lead, or thanks to their own
paranoia and often inherent insanity. This instability can lead to a
catastrophic failure of leadership in the face of Imperial enemies,
leaving the Pale Throng open to manipulation by other, often
darker forces.
==The Influence of Chaos==
The possibility as to whether there was any direct
involvement of the taint of Chaos or a wider occult conspiracy
within the Pale Throng during the Tranch War remains a
mixed and contradictory picture, open to much debate among
the Holy Ordos. What seems clear is that during the initial
uprisings on Tranch, several of the smaller witch-cults drawn
into the Pale Throng did have daemonic taint in their ranks.
In addition, at least one malefic cult concealed among the
Oligarchs took the uprisings as an opportunity to work its
own ills. But, the conclusion that has been drawn is that
there was no systematic warp-worship or widespread use
of daemonic ritual encountered in the war, simply reckless
hatred, unremitting savagery, and the horrors of the mutant
and the witch unleashed.
==A Thousand Rebellions==
The Pale Throng has been linked to scores of mutant
rebellions across the Calixis Sector and beyond. Some are
simply the razing of an industrial outpost for the loss of a
few hundred souls, while others have claimed the lives of
hundreds of thousands. In the aftermath of the Tranch War,
petty revolts and unrest sprang up on scores of worlds in
the Adrantian and Malfian sub-sectors, occasioning massive
crackdowns and a great loss of life. But these troubles have
not been an end to the matter, as the Pale Throng and its
imitators have risen repeatedly on other worlds to trouble the
authorities.
On Sepheris Secundus, the name of the Dionides Mine
was expunged from records following a rising of the Pale
Throng so powerful that, despite the damage it would do to
the planet’s production, the mine was collapsed by atomic
charges. In the purge that followed, any amongst the planet’s
serfdom who had a connection with the area, however
tenuous, was executed.
Rogue psykers, intent on ramming Fenksworld’s orbital
docks, commandeered the heavy ore barge Borombarst,
causing it to be destroyed by orbital defenses. The subsequent
investigation blamed the crime on the Pale Throng’s
infiltration of the population of abhuman “subs” used to work
the system’s asteroid mines.
On Baraspine, a Pale Throng style revolt by the mutant
castes used to tend the wind-blasted Impellor Towers that
dot that world’s barrens threatened to plunge the hives into
darkness. The Baraspine rising was later revealed to have been
backed and instigated by a secret malefic sorcerer cult, the
Ghol Voluptara. The cult used the anarchy and distraction
caused by the insurrection as a cover for a series of dark rituals
which were only prevented by the combined forces of the
Adepta Sororitas and the ruling executive’s household troops.
From these gross acts of terror and destruction to the
whisper of a witch-kin at work in the depths of the Scintillan
underhives, there are a thousand signs that the threat of the
Pale Throng to the Calixis Sector is not at an end but perhaps
merely beginning.
The cult is known to have been aided in the past by the arch-heretic Coriolanus Vestra.
==The Anatomy of a Pale Throng Revolt==
At the center of all of the most dangerous uprisings where the
Pale Throng has been involved is one of the infamous Shroud
Masters. These sinister overlords select mutant populations
that they consider ripe for rebellion and instigate an
infiltration of that population, be they laboring in mines or
chemworks or festering in the wastelands and rad-pits of the
underhive. With the Shroud Master often comes a following
of other witches and mutants, such as Tranch-bred witch-kin,
veteran killers, and covens of wyrd diviners. Once in place,
the Shroud Master and his minions begin to spread the name
and creed of the Pale Throng amongst the local mutants and
dregs. At this point, any resistance or rival mutant leader is
crushed or assimilated into the Pale Throng. However, the
Shroud Master is not above dealing with underhive criminal
elements and other cult groups in order to trade for arms or
extend his reach where his twisted followers cannot go.
The Shroud Master and his retinue bring with them
tactics and methodologies developed and honed in the
nightmare conflict on Tranch. Chief amongst their tactics
is the “sudden onslaught” where they simply unleash all of
their fury at once, including psychic atrocities, rampaging
hulks, waves of abominations, suicide attacks, bombings, and
unrestrained bloodletting. Such attacks often serve to conceal
and divert forces away from the Shroud Master’s true targets.
The destruction generated by these tactics can be immense,
especially if the Pale Throng is swollen by large numbers of
high-grade rogue psykers. If this initial phase is successful,
the Pale Throng rapidly attempts to consolidate its gains by
fortifying and defending the areas it has seized, using them
as the basis to fight a wider guerrilla war.
If large swathes of territory fall to the Throng’s hands,
an orgy of looting and reprisals will often follow, with
unfocused acts of barbarism and the enslavement of such
unfortunates who do not carry the mutant’s mark often being
the norm. However, the Pale Throng has a very poor track
record in holding ground, due in the main to its own lack of
cohesion. The clashing egos of its commanders and the fact
that most of the Throng’s rank and file are little more than
ill-conditioned, ignorant rabble serves to tear apart what
victories that it may gain.
When faced with superior Imperial forces, the Pale
Throng’s defeat in any particular theatre of conflict is largely
inevitable, particularly if its leaders and rogue psykers can
be neutralized. However, this can present its own dangers.
If defeated but not annihilated, the Pale Throng will often
fragment into small packs of rebels and marauders fighting
their own petty wars. Thus the rebellion can prove hard to
finally put down, short of exterminating every twist, sub, and
dreg in evidence---a solution favored by many Inquisitors
and Adeptus Arbites marshals of a Puritan bent.
==Against the Arbites==
The Adeptus Arbites have become a hated nemesis of the
Pale Throng, crushing beneath their boots the mutant
insurgencies that have metastasized from the rotten tumor
of the Tranch War. The war itself, and the seditious work of
the Shroud Masters since, has taught every Precinct command
the importance of genetic policing, and every fresh Throng
atrocity or unmasked conspiracy brings another sharp lesson.
Precinct commanders whose jurisdictions include mutant
populations have been building up their vigilance against the
twisted mobs, and Verispex and cyber-mastiff units are now
regularly staging snap raids on shipping checkpoints, performing
tissue analyses on travelers and crews alike, trying to head off
the emissaries of the Throng before they can find their way to
a new mutant ghetto and infect it with violent rebellion. Since
the Tranch War a string of senior Arbites across the Hazeroth
worlds have corresponded in detail about the most effective
methods to monitor and control mutant activity, and have begun
publishing collections of these letters within the organization as
a guide for other commands to follow. Lord Marshal Goreman
reputedly disapproves of this (he is on the record as believing
that Arbites who have time to traffic in words are slacking off on
their true work, which is done with a weapon in hand) but has
made no move to stop it so far and the books are appearing as
training texts in Precincts as far spinward as Scintilla itself. It is
this more measured scrutinizing of the mutant underground that
first revealed an ominous new strategy by the Shroud Masters, to
which the Arbites are only just organizing their reaction.
Rather than work on fostering hatred and violence
between mutant and genotypical populations, at least one
new Shroud Master seems to be working to reconcile them.
Careful work by Detectives across two dozen systems has
revealed a spreading trail of foul disinformation and seditious
propaganda. The words are sometimes different, deliberately
paraphrased to suit local idiom and outfox attempts to
link propagandist cells together, but the message is always
the same: tolerance of mutation, a rejection of Imperial
reverence for the classically-defined human gene-template,
and the urging of resistance and violence against those who
enforce the purity laws. The Arbites are inevitably singled
out for denunciation and vengeance, and the author of the
tracts shows a remarkable familiarity with the brutal Arbites
repression actions at Tranch, Piety, Thical, and Junos.
None of this is unusual for Pale Throng agitators, but what
is unusual is the target audience. The tracts are not intended for
the mutant slums but for the literate, prosperous families of the
hive spires and steadholds. These gene-dissident movements are
trying to erode support for mutant repression among those who
are traditionally the bastion of righteous and traditional hate, and
trying to seed sympathy and perhaps even collaboration with the
classes who are so often the Pale Throng’s first victims.
To most Arbites who first learn of it, these tracts seem like a
bad joke. How could anyone openly admitting to foul mutation
simply ask for the compassion of pure-gene folk and expect
to wheedle them into it? The laughter lasts exactly as long
as it takes them to hear about the numbers of sympathizers
the tracts seem to be creating, and the speed with which the
sedition spreads. Perhaps they could if they could handle one
of the tracts themselves, but seized tracts are now immediately
destroyed or sealed for handing over to the Holy Ordos of
the Inquisition. It has become obvious that the source of this
propaganda is an accomplished and subtle psyker, and their
witch-gift is the syringe by which they push their moral poison
into unsuspecting minds. Reliable Arbites have testified that
when they handled an original copy of the tracts they could feel
the sweet words trying to corrode their will, and the outright
heresy and anti-Imperial thought seeming to take on seductive
weight and persuasiveness, as an optical illusion might make a
shape on a page appear to stretch into three dimensions.
In its present form the spread of genetic dissidence
seems to pose little physical threat to the Imperium. This
wandering Shroud Master seems more interested in setting
up disinformation networks and moving on than in rousing
up the Pale Throng’s trademark revolts. However, the moral
threat, and long-term consequences for the rule of law, is
profound. The tracts carrying the Shroud’s taint can cause
Arbites to briefly blanch; their effect on civilians without the
Arbites’ rigorous indoctrination is far more pronounced. On
world after world where this toxic literature has appeared, the
Detectives have unearthed whole networks of apparently stolid
and faithful Imperial citizens who have taken it on themselves
to study the dissident tracts, reproduce them, and circulate
them (although the copies, thankfully, lack the infectious psyk
reek of the originals) and try to pass on their messages. The
treacherous whispers of these dupes drift up into hive-spire
soirees and percolate down into mutters over hand-stewed
liquor after lights-out in the manufactorum barracks. Suspects
in the interrogation cells confess to being swayed into the
heretical belief that a human soul could exist in a mutant body,
and turning a jaundiced ear to the preachings on genetic purity.
The spectre of this sedition reaching an officer of a planetary
Magistratum or worse, a courtier of an Imperial governor,
is growing stronger each time a fresh network of traitors is
exposed. The Arbites are bracing themselves for the day when
the two threats come into alignment, and a Throng revolt
breaks out on a world whose will to oppose it has already been
dissolved from within.