Ocularians

“He that knows the future, controls the present;
He that controls the present, owns the past.”
–Maxims of the Sigilite, Cantos CXII
Of all the factions of the Calixian Inquisition, the
Ocularians (literally ‘they who see’) are among
the strangest and most unfathomable, even to
their peers. They are united not simply by doctrine but by
obsession---knowledge of the future; of predictions and
omens, patterns of events, divination and destiny, and above
all, in keeping their own secrets. The faction’s detractors
range in their accusations from charges that the Ocularians
waste their attentions on meaningless and futile attempts to
predict future threats to the Imperium while blithely ignoring
present dangers, to attempted witch hunts raised by hardline
puritans against Ocularians they believe have courted
damnation in their desire to know the unknowable.
Ocularians are a sect whose provenance, exact origins and
age are shrouded in a tangle of myth, apocryphal data, and
outright contradiction. Those few that know of the Ocularians
in any detail consider them to be a paranoid faction of diviners
and scholar-Inquisitors whose obsession with prophecy and
prognostication has long skirted outright heresy. Ocularian
Inquisitors and their tightly-knit coteries of Acolytes, (who
feature a preponderance of Adepts and Sanctioned Psykers
among their ranks) are generally regarded by the Conclave
Calixis’s powers-that-be as a useful if often erratic resource.
The Ocularians’ abilities and skills make them asset enough
to remain tolerated despite their eccentricities and adherence
to internal secrecy. This status quo does not however sit well
with many of the Conclave’s puritans however, and over
the centuries internecine strife has occurred on numerous
occasions. The Ocularians often emerge as the victor, much to
the shock of the firebrands who have challenged them.
The true nature of the Ocularians’ power, their history, and
goals are more subtle and more terrible than even the most
rabid Witch Hunter would dare believe.
==Current Conspiracies==
“The inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents is mankind’s saving grace and most potent weapon, for the truth is indeed a terrible thing to know.”
–Attributed to the Arch-Remembrancer Hasred Wedlore
The conspiracies and concerns of the Ocularians within the
Calixis sector are many. According to their secret fractalciphered
records, the Ocularians stood shoulder to shoulder
with the sector’s founders, worked their patterns of destiny
in the shadow of the man who would become Saint Drusus,
oversaw the fall of the ten traitor captains, and by their own
lore have long stood sentinel over the dark marches of the
Hazeroth Abyss to ensure things were not disturbed there
that otherwise would one day set a thousand worlds burning.
Regardless of the truth or falsehood of these claims they make
within their own ranks, the Ocularians continue their vigils
and their machinations in the Calixis sector to this day. They
take care to work as far as possible in total secrecy, their actions
hidden even from their fellows in the Holy Ordos, standing
outside and aloof from what the see as the petty squabbling
and infighting of their peers. Given to intrigues than might last
generations, long-distance interference, and seemingly random
interventions that may pre-empt or nudge the course of events
one way or another, much of the Ocularians influence in the
sector is hidden or hard to detect simply by its disconnected
and often bizarre nature. Few but the Ocularians are able to
glimpse the pattern among the confusion.
The Widening Gyre
To some observers the Calixis sector might seem as a relative
realm of stability in a wider Imperium riven by star-spanning
wars and endless bloodshed, but the Ocularians have long
known the truth of the many sins and terrible dangers that
fester here, a fact that they see as central for their faction’s
very cause and existence. The Parliament of Whispers has
seen a steady increase in the number and potency of the
threats than have risen up in Calixis over the years. They
have seen a spreading, devouring stain of unknown cause
that they have come to refer to as the Widening Gyre. With
each day, it seems to consume more possible avenues of the
future. By their divinations and esoteric researches, there is
the indication of some coming darkness that threatens to
engulf far more than a single sector of humanity’s domain,
an event that many prophecies and shadowed visions of what
is to come reflect as a total blackness in which nothing, even
light survives. Conspiracies and cults, daemon visitations, and
xenos infiltrations have seemed to intensify at a startling rate
in the Calixis Sector over the last two centuries—perhaps as
part of this threat, or simply an unhappy coincidence. The
Parliament of Whispers—whose power extends across this
reach of space—has been blindsided repeatedly or seen
events move simply too fast for them to control. Caught off
guard, the Ocularians have seen their predictions fail and
their vaunted wisdom prove inadequate to the threats that
have appeared like thunderbolts from a clear sky—a situation
they refuse to tolerate.
In response to these failings and the growing threat, the
Ocularians have recently sought to greatly strengthen their
covert and martial assets in the Calixis sector. They have
accelerated plans for expansion into neighbouring sectors
and are actively supporting ever more drastic means to ensure
they may influence events more rapidly than they have been
elsewhere accustomed, bringing with it a new militancy and
willingness to kill that few can guess at. The Parliament
of Whispers has decided that the entire Calixis Sector is
expendable, if needs be, in order to safeguard the fate of the
wider Segmentum and perhaps the Imperium itself, and it is
laying its plans accordingly.
The Shadow of the Hereticus Tenebrae
The interest of the Ocularian faction in the baleful phenomena
known as the Tyrant Star predates the foundation of the
Calixis sector, and over the centuries, it has amassed in secret
a store of information, prophecy, and direct evidence on the
subject that the Tyrantine Cabal cannot guess at—and would
kill to possess. As to just what ‘Komus’ is, the Ocularians do
not claim to know, at least not fully. But they have some very
terrifying suspicions indeed, and for many in the faction’s
ranks, it is the prime suspect as the so-called ‘widening gyre’
that threatens this area of space. To this end, the Ocularians
have further focused their attentions on the Tyrantine Cabal
and the secret Tenebrae Collegium in particular, and they
have not liked what they have found. Formerly dismissing the
Cabal as hopelessly divided by factional infighting and better
suited to cleaning up after catastrophe than averting it, several
of the Ocularian’s hidden masters have more recently come
to see the Cabal as a risk factor in itself, a fertile breeding
ground for dissention, plot, and corruption. A force that in
the future could itself become as great a threat to the sector
as any it attempts to counter. For the moment, the Ocularians
are making inroads into the organisation’s structure and
operations, and has already succeeded in having several of its
hidden Inquisitors join the Cabal’s ranks whilst its more open
members have made use of a few minor revelations from the
Ocularian’s store of knowledge—which has led to the Cabal
slavering for more. As for the Ocularian’s ultimate purpose
for the Cabal, only time will tell whether they will seek
to manipulate its destiny into something more fitting with
the faction’s purpose or lead it unknowingly to destruction.
Perhaps the Ocularians are playing with a greater fire than
they know.
The Child of Midnight
Within the Ocularian faction, there are numerous smaller
splinter groups varying in size and influence who have taken up
their attentions and manipulations in the pursuit of a particular
pattern of foreshadowing, or more rarely the fulfillment or
thwarting a single prophecy. Once such splinter group is based
around the elderly Inquisitor Katuwe Orne and his former
Acolytes, several of whom have since risen to the rank of
Inquisitor or occupied other positions of power themselves.
For nearly three centuries, Orne’s obsession has been with
averting a prophecy he first learned of amid the deep vents of
the warp-touched world of Sleef while battling a necrophagic
witch-cult that had travelled there after foretelling of the birth
of a prophesied child. This so-called ‘child of midnight’ would
be a true abomination, an alpha-plus level psyker with the
power to enslave millions and carve an empire of its own out
of the Imperium’s bloody carcass. Orne’s vision on Sleef has
led him to spend his life’s work against this dark future. The
relentless path he has taken has seen thousands put to death.
His detractors argue that Orne’s actions were without just cause
or recourse to saving souls for the Black Ship’s due. Now laid
low by advanced age and infirmity, he has been forced to give
over much of his body to augmetics in order to survive. Orne
seldom strays now from his private estates in Hive Tarsus on
Scintilla and can work now only though intermediaries and
those few of his former servants that share in his fanatical
purpose. But despite his eccentricity and infamous bile, he
remains an acknowledged authority on Calixian witch-lore and
the sector’s prophetic cults past and present. He is also known
to keep one of the finest coteries of mystics and diviners in
the Segmentum. Orne is an open proponent of the Ocularian
doctrine in the Conclave and (unknown to his often deriding
peers) one of the masters of the Parliament of Whispers. In
secret, the hidden strength of his faction still travel from world
to world at Orne’s direction, their hands dipped in blood,
ensuring the child of midnight is never born.
The Legacy of Blood
A name mentioned in whispers even among the Holy Ordos
is that of Inquisitor Silas Marr. Attendant on Solomon’s
notorious Chancellery Court, Marr is a mysterious figure who
seems to sit entirely outside of the power structure of the
Calixian Inquisition, and follows no known dogma, faction or
sub-Ordo. Whilst some high in the Conclave accord him the
respectful title of ‘Lord,’ others refuse to even acknowledge
his existence, at least publicly---some hint darkly of the nearmythical
Ordo Sicarius and worse. Nor is Marr a member
it would seem of the Ocularians, hidden or otherwise, but
he does know them, and has long entertained an alliance of
sorts with the Calixian arm of the faction. Like a spider at
the heart of a vast web of agents, Marr possesses a seemingly
limitless resource for information gathering whose true
extent and backing remains a mystery even to the Parliament
of Whispers. Marr trades facts and figures, correlations and
covert murder with the Ocularians in return for the more
esoteric services of their diviners, and it seems, his tolerance.
One of Marr’s key concerns in recent times, and one use to
which he has extensively tasked the Ocularians to aid him,
is in the matter of the bloodline of the infamous and long
vanished Rogue Trader House of Haarlock. The matter of the
Haarlock Legacy is a truly dark one, and already several of
the Ocularians’ finest diviners have gone mad or died simply
by bending their gifts toward its end. The Legacy seems to be
a whirlpool that is rapidly drawing in cults and conspiracies
that it touches, and it is spreading death in its wake on ancient
worlds across the Calixis sector. It is an affair in which Marr
himself is interfering through various cat’s-paws within the
Inquisition itself, but to what end even the Ocularians do not
know and await in dread to discover.