The Menagerie

“Come and see, you must come and see.”
—Last broadcast of Eldred Krane, Acolyte Aventine District, Malfi
Of all the threats facing the Ordo Malleus in the Calixis Sector, few are more dangerous, stranger, or as little
understood as that posed by the cult known as the Menagerie. There are even those within the Inquisition that
insist the cult is a phantom---a paper threat, a thing without
substance, a conjecture woven from half truths and overactive
fear. This, in turn, has led to fears by some that even the Holy
Ordos has not been beyond the cult’s corrupting reach, and a
few Daemonhunters have engaged in unsanctioned operations
in order to destroy it.
The horrific truth is far worse. The Menagerie is very real,
and its threat goes far beyond that of a few hundred lost lives,
or a thousand or a billion. It seeks to undermine the very nature
of reality itself with its revelations and to pitch the Calixis
Sector into an abyss of Chaos from which none shall escape.
The Menagerie has such sights to show, and all are invited to
come and see.
== The Path of the Revelator ==
The name of the Menagerie is one whispered fearfully by
warp-dabblers and those that traffic in forbidden lore; its name
is a thing of terror, a dark legend and an enemy to be more
feared than even the Holy Inquisition. It is a cult of secret and
matchless power that deals in physical corruption and madness,
whose touch blights the flesh with the twisting mutation of the
warp and whose sorceries can sunder reality and remake it.
The Menagerie, as its name suggests, is a collection of
secrets, tangled intrigues, and horrors undreamed off. It is all
these things, but it is also a display, a hellish show that reveals
to its audience what it claims to be a glorious vision of the
true nature of the universe, an unveiling of glories and terrors.
Such revelations come with a terrible price to sanity, body, and
soul, and few survive their message. Those who do are forever
changed.
The cult’s plans and workings remain obscure even to those
aware of its existence. However, the dreadful suspicion by some
within the Ordo Malleus is that the Menagerie’s seemingly
random plots and corruptions are all working to a vast and
singular plan, a plan to undermine reality itself by undermining
the sanity and altering the perceptions of humanity to better
encompass the “reality” of the warp and bring the barriers
between the real and the unreal crashing down. Few that have
survived exposure to the Menagerie doubt that the true nature
of its plan, as it unfolds, is likely to be something so terrible
that no sane mind could grasp it.
== Sundered Flesh and Twisted Realities ==
''
“...he wears no mask... he wears no mask... he wears---"''
—Suspect apprehended after the murder of Prefect Strabo, Gunmetal City, later declared insane and terminated
The cult of the Menagerie is a cavalcade of madmen, sorcerers,
insane schemers, deranged murderers, and the sculptors
of flesh known as the Revelators, who are its masterminds.
They are all without doubt true believers in their cause,
fanatical adherents to a creed almost incomprehensible to
outsiders. Their beliefs are focused around the mystery of the
revelations that they have been exposed to and the wonders
and beauty of unrestrained physical and mental change. They
plot endlessly to bring about a “great revelation” so all of
humanity can receive the blessings of the sights they have
seen. They commit seemingly random acts of violence and
destruction, forcing events into one pattern or another, and
spark outbreaks of madness and misery by their actions. With
the fervor of true converts, they take great delight in sharing
their gifts with others, often spawning a genuine menagerie
of warped creatures and pets, many formerly human, in
the process.
The cult possesses an insane certainty in the rightness of
its cause and is more than willing to make sacrifices in the
pursuit of its goals. The cult members are able to maintain a
veil of secrecy through their power to change flesh, tamper
with minds, and even warp space to their desire. By these
means, the cult hides itself from outside eyes and avoids direct
confrontation with the Imperial authorities (unless it should
wish it). In the past, the cult has been encountered lurking
behind fronts such as theatres, hostelries, and venues in run
down areas or at the edges of the underhive. The cult has
even been found behind sanatoria, alms houses that cater to
the dregs of humanity, side shows, and (savoring the irony)
even menageries and exhibits of more commonplace beasts
and alien creatures.
These false fronts serve to conceal the most foully
changed of the cult’s numbers and allows it to select its
victims from those unfortunate enough to stumble across
one of its lesser “performances.” Operating in accordance
with an unfathomable plan and timetable of its own twisted
devising, the cult reaches out and draws particular victims
to it, manipulating minds and perhaps even the flow of fate
itself to draw them in. These chosen victims, the “favored”
as the cult names them, have been selected to carry out some
part of the Menagerie’s great and secret purposes, and seldom
realize just what has befallen them. Most will go about their
business, seemingly normal but horrifically changed within.
However, they are unwitting pawns of the cult’s conspiracies
and living weapons in the service of the Revelator who has
remade them.
Such is the duplicity and labyrinthine skill of the Menagerie
that often no one connects the diverse victims to having
attended a given performance of a play or having visited
a carnival where they became separated from friends for a
time. Even someone collapsing drunk or drugged in a certain
location, waking days later with no recall of what befell
them in between, is ignored. Each act of inflicted madness
is but one part of a grander design reaching out across time
and space to an unknown but doubtless malign conclusion.
However, whether they work to achieve some dark end or
prevent one, none save perhaps the Revelators know.
== The Last Masque of House Orsini ==
It cannot be said with certainty when or how the Menagerie
first came into being, but its earliest recorded activities hail
from within the dark recesses and opulent courts of the world
of Malfi. The first mentions occur in the years of relative peace
that followed the disastrous Reign of Terror and the destruction
created by the birth of another deadly cult, the Pilgrims of Hayte.
Forced out on the margins of power was House Orsini, a
once great and powerful family who had had a stranglehold on
the senate and whose influence ranged wide across the sector.
The civil anarchy caused by the Pilgrims of Hayte‘s Bloody Solstice
had seen them vacillate and their rule found wanting. Unable
to sustain such a loss of face, their powerbase crumbled and
they barely survived the intervening decades. With the house a
crippled and failing shadow of its former glory, the Orsini would
have done anything to regain their prestige and power. So it was
that when an enigmatic stranger came to them, offering glories
and truths undreamed of, they proved easy prey.
The stranger called himself the Revelator, and as he
insinuated himself into the house, he poisoned the sanity and
corrupted the bodies of the family and its servants. To the rest
of the world, the doom that had come to the Orsini remained
unknown. Then one day invitations began to arrive asking
the great and powerful of Malfi to attend a masquerade at
the Orsini’s remaining palace, where “singular and wondrous
entertainments and revelations” would be provided by “The
Menagerie of Fate.” Such events and diversions among the
intrigue-ridden and jaded nobility of Malfi were commonplace,
but given the Orsini’s fallen status few deigned to attend. Most
that did only did so for the chance of scandalous pleasure and
mockery of what they assumed would be the dying gasp of
the once great house.
What actually occurred at the last masque of House Orsini
is sealed under the highest security protocols of the Holy
Ordos and the secret records of the great houses involved.
However, a casual study of the official record states that scores
of the nobility’s lesser scions are recorded as having died
unexpectedly that year via accident or illness. Others simply
disappear from all records as if they never were. Rumors
still abound to this day, centuries later, of the great and the
beautiful driven to utter madness or warped into mutating tides
of screaming flesh. Stories are told of locked chambers in the
cellars and towers of noble estates where abominable things
were shut away to live out their lives, clawing desperately at
walls, or were put down like rabid dogs by their own kin.
In the planetary archive, all mention of the Orsini ceases,
and merely to mention their name in some circles is to court
bloodshed and vendetta. The burned-out and empty remains
of the palace of Orsini and the district surrounding it stands
still as an abandoned and shunned part of the Malfian hive, a
testament that some wishes come with too high a price.
This event was the first great show attributed to the
revelations of the Menagerie in the Inquisitorial annals, but
sadly it is far from the last.
== Hidden Power ==
One of the most contentious claims made about the cult
of the Menagerie (and perhaps the one many members of
the Holy Ordos find most troubling) is that it actively seeks
out, consumes, or simply destroys other malefic cults. This
phenomenon is not unprecedented, as the disciples of dark
gods rarely have anything but contempt for one another
unless forced together by a stronger power. In fact, many dark
factions are in a perpetual war amongst themselves. What is
remarkable is the seeming ease with which other petty cults
are defeated, swallowed almost in a moment, or snuffed-out
in a sudden onslaught of occult power.
Likewise, local criminal gangs, hereteks, and recidivists
may all find themselves dancing to the cult’s tune, at least
until madness and torment overtake them. Some Inquisitors,
seeking to build up a pattern to the cult’s operation, believe
the Menagerie, or perhaps just the fear of it, is what has long
kept the criminal organization known as the Beast House
from operations in the Malfian sub-sector. The Menagerie has also
been known to violently clash with not only the Inquisition
but also more powerful cults, such as cells of the Pilgrims
of Hayte (who are not easily defeated) and numerous other
petty groups in the past. Notably this conflict is seldom of
the Menagerie’s initiation, but rather spurred on by the fear
or hatred it engenders in other malefic groups. Just why this
should be the case remains unknown.
== The Pandaemonium Carnival ==
One emblematic example of an existing cult that was
seemingly absorbed or suborned by the Menagerie is the
Pandaemonium Carnival. The Carnival was a secretive,
wandering cult that hid among the travelling clans and guilds
of itinerant entertainers common in the Markayn Marches.
For several years, a group of this name served as a haven for
several petty rogue psykers and renegade mutants fleeing
Imperial justice. However, all traces of the cult disappeared
mid-persecution by the Ordo Hereticus, only to reappear a
decade later in a far more sinister form.
The Carnival, currently the subject of an open hunting
warrant by the Ordo Malleus edict, now operates within
the various carnivora, circus camps, entertainment zones,
and festivals on several worlds and has been sighted across
the Malfian sub-sector and as far afield as Iocanthos and allegedly
in Hive Tarsus on Scintilla. Offering “wonders, revelations,
and horrors abounding” for those that dare to enter within,
the Carnival seemingly appears from nowhere to stage its
“shadow shows,” only to vanish, leaving madness and many
missing in its wake.
==The Court of the Radiant King==
Any attempt to discern or understand
the cosmology of the Menagerie’s beliefs
is doomed to failure, as to comprehend its truth
is to become part of it, and to become part of it
is to be destroyed by it. This aside, fragments
of its lore and nature have filtered out into
the hands of occultists and the Inquisition via
the garbled rantings of lunatics, dark allegory,
ancient legend, and the aftermath of its terrors.
One such fragment concerns the Court of the
Radiant King, known elsewhere as the King
in Rags and Tatters, or the Empty Lord’s
Revels. This macabre and frightening legend is
found in myths on Malfi stretching back far
beyond the birth of the sector into that world’s
dim and ancient history, but now is inextricably
linked with the cult.
Abiding in an ancient city, under strange suns that cannot be named, the court is a mythic
place, a realm of wondrous possibility and revelation, visions of which are at the same time a
foreshadowing of disaster, entropy, and destruction. Likewise a paradoxical figure, the Radiant
King is at the same time a thing of awe and terror, illumination and death. He is described
as a patient and implacable force whose footstep brings chaos and madness everlasting for those who
look upon his countenance. It is said by some occult sources and in the whispers of daemons that
the Menagerie serves this strange figure and that they are its harbingers and messengers. Others
state that the King is only a mask, a shell for some shapeless force of boundless insanity and
change from the depths of the warp beyond, pointing to the entity referred to in forbidden texts as
Tchar or Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways and the Render of Veils.
==Inquisitorial Threat Briefing==
The Ordo Malleus, while acknowledging the existence and
threat of the Menagerie, does not (officially at any rate) accept
it as the vastly powerful and potentially reality-endangering
conspiracy that some contend it to be. As a result, while
standing orders are in place to investigate and purge the
Menagerie where discovered or suspected (as with any malefic
cult), there is no greater motion to confront the wider dangers
posed by the cult. The Ordo Malleus has left such prosecutions
entirely up to the independent remit of individual Inquisitors,
many of whom have taken to pursuing the threat of the cult as
a personal crusade. Some within the Ordos are vocal in their
contention that current “official” thinking smacks (at best) of
a dangerous lack of vision, while other more guarded and
subtle observers suspect the involvement of some shadowy
actor, such as the Tyrantine Cabal, in the decision. They
believe, instead, the overt policy toward the Menagerie and
its works hides some other hidden agenda or covert action
nestled within the dark heart of the Conclave Calixis.