Isstvanian

“The price of our survival is pain, suffering, and death.”
–General Cradtz at the Golgenna offensive
Even more extreme in their views than the Recongregators
is the Radical faction known as the Isstvanians. Taking their
name from the infamous bombing of Isstvan III, said to have
been the spark that ignited the Horus Heresy, they seek to
ferment conflict and crisis wherever they tread. It is their
belief that the Imperium requires constant strife to survive
(a reasonable assumption given the galaxy’s state of near
total war), and if it were ever to find itself at total peace, it
would collapse and decay. To this end, Isstvanian Inquisitors
seek conflict head on, instigating discord within and without
the Imperium, starting wars, leading invasions, and stirring
discontent into rebellion. Where the flames of war burn,
more than likely an Isstvanian can be found fanning them.
Isstvanians are not uncommon within the Calixis Sector, as
its proximity to both the Eye of Terror and the galactic fringe
makes it a ripe location for turmoil.
== Isstvanian Domains ==
Like much of the Imperium, the Calixis Sector is no stranger
to war, and it is to these zones of conflict that the Isstvanians
flock. Less interested in local, isolated struggles, such as the
constant fighting on Iocanthos or the civil war on Acreage,
Isstvanians seek out places where the fighting may spill out
across star systems, setting countless worlds ablaze with
carnage and strife. Such Inquisitors commonly travel the
fringe where the rule of the Imperium is most in dispute, and
xenos forces, renegade worlds, and the slow seep of Chaos are
strongest. The Halo Stars, in particular, are a breeding ground
for conflict, one which the Isstvanians have been known to
nurture when it suits their purposes.
== Isstvanian Operations ==
Across the sector, Isstvanians and their agents seek to stir
up conflict and tear down weak leaders and regimes. In
the process, they have been known to invite invasions and
cover up small, benign problems until they mutate into large,
malignant ones. Isstvanians also work covertly within the
networks of the Recongregators, ostensibly appearing to aid
them in their efforts, only to send carefully engineered events
spinning out of control at the eleventh hour. This has earned
them a dire reputation among both the Recongregators
and the Amalathians, who both have, intentionally and
unintentionally, ended up working on the same side against
the “unpredictable” Isstvanians.
Certain fringe followers of the Isstvanian doctrine are known to employ Imperial Diviners to foretell the future.
== Isstvanian Inquisitors ==
The Isstvanian faction attracts a certain kind of Inquisitor,
such as the merciless and cruel Inquisitor Amaros. Having made a name
for herself in the Ordo Xenos purging indigenous life forms in
the Josian Reach, Inquisitor Amaros was repeatedly appalled
by the lack of action that local sector authorities were taking
to combat what she saw as the spread of potentially dangerous
xeno-forms. To remedy this problem, she manipulated a cabal
of smugglers and bio-pirates into modifying and distributing
gene-engineered aliens as pets and guard-forms. The result
was the Trygor Xeno Plague, which led to the deaths of
countless citizens and the Euthanous Edict which in turn
led to the purging on a dozen worlds of all non-human life.
Amaros’s whereabouts are currently unknown.
== Isstvanian Secrets ==
The Isstvanians prefer not to waste excessive efforts on
concealment or moving behind the scenes in the same way
the Recongregators or Amalathians are known to do. Rather,
they act swiftly and decisively, bringing with them fire and
ruin. In years past, Ork invasions have cut through the Calixis
Sector, spreading destruction in their wake and rallying the
sector’s forces against them. Some Isstvanians believe that
the time is almost ripe for another such invasion. Through
rumor and divination, they have begun to get an idea of
where and when a strike might occur. Rather than try to avert
the disaster, they are, of course, creating havoc in its path.
They are destabilizing worlds that they perceive as weak and
diverting questionable military commanders to the area. Thus,
when the hammer blow of the Ork attack is felt, it will ringout
loudly across the entire sector.
==The Crusade into the Calyx Expanse==
Not all wars have at their heart the conspiracies and designs of
an Istvaanian, but the war that created the Calixis Sector did,
according to those Istvaanians who passed the torch to their
successors within the Conclave Calixis today. For millennia
before a crusade was launched to claim it, the Calyx Expanse
was known thanks to the writings of the Rogue Trader
Solomon Haarlock who declared it to be a “chalice of great
and ancient wickedness” that would only be purchased for the
Imperium with a “great effusion of blood.” It was this malign
reputation that drew the notice of Istvaanians, who saw it
as a cauldron of wrath and fire into which servants of the
Imperium could be plunged, and so be tempered by a war of
the bloodiest kind. Of those Istvaanians active in Segmentum
Obscurus at that time, it was the great and notorious Inquisitor
Lord Stark who saw the possibilities of the Calyx Expanse
as a field of trial. He used the patronage and the alliances
he had assembled over hundreds of years to draw together
a conspiracy of Inquisitors of Istvaanian convictions. Under
the direction of Lord Stark, these disparate Radicals bent
their will to create a movement for war to be waged in the
Calyx Expanse.
It took a decade of maneuvering in every branch of the
body Imperium before their objective was at last in sight:
the raising of a warrior to the rank of Lord Militant and
the granting to that warrior of a writ to persecute a crusade
within the Calyx Expanse. The design of Inquisitor Lord
Stark and his fellow Istvaanians was a success in all but one,
crucial detail. At the last minute, the High Lords of Terra
decided to pass over Lord Stark’s carefully groomed choice
for Lord Militant and instead invested Golgenna Angevin as
Lord Militant of the crusade. So it was that the Istvaanians
succeeded in creating their crucible of blood and fire but saw
the forces plunged into it led, not by a fierce and blooded
warrior of their choosing, but by a weak and vain man
obsessed by status and patronage. No matter what great
qualities lying poets would later give him, to the Istvaanians
Angevin’s weakness was plain enough that it would require
no testing to be proved. To them Angevin’s slow decline and
the rise of a stronger figure was inevitable, for the only other
alternative was that the crusade would turn to a slaughter and
the Calyx Expanse remain a place still of darkness.
== The Fenksworld Calamity ==
The Fenksworld Calamity lives in infamy as one of the
greatest disasters of the Angevin Crusade. Its consequences
can still be seen in the towering mausoleums on the world
of Orendal’s Tomb, to say nothing of the decades it took to
complete the conquest of the Calyx Expanse. In 359.M41, a
second front of the Angevin Crusade was opened by a fresh
army group gathered from the core worlds of Segmentum
Obscurus. Commanded by High Admiral Vaakkon, the new
front was intended to link up with Lord Militant Angevin’s
forces in the central worlds of the Calyx Expanse and shorten
the crusade by years. Such was the intention, but from the
outset the Vaakkon’s forces were beset by warp storms that
threw battle groups off target, causing a terrible toll in ships
and troops who were lost to the warp. Intelligence on the
strength of enemy forces and hostile worlds also proved
terminally inadequate, as the 100,000 troops lost in an
attempted landing on Woe attested. Despite these setbacks,
Vaakkon’s forces moved forward inch by blood-bought inch,
and it seemed to all on the second front that matters could
get no worse. In fact, they were very wrong. The eventual
misjudgment, although none knew it, was the product of
premeditated design by servants of the Holy Ordos.
The planet of Fenksworld had been established as the
crusade’s primary staging point. The space above the planet
swarmed with loaders, troop transports, and spear-prowed
warships, all gorging on the fuel and supplies fed to them
by the installations that had been towed into the system and
anchored in high orbit. The life blood of the second front
flowed through the docks of Fenksworld, and its loss would
be disastrous---but also nearly impossible, given its defenses.
Impossible, that is, as long as one ignored the possibility of
treachery. The Istvaanian cabal that shadowed the crusade
had so far been most satisfied with how the Admiral Vaakkon
and his forces had risen to the challenges on the second
front, but in Fenksworld they saw an opportunity that could
not be wasted to grant the man either death or glory which
would see the endeavor of the crusade “put back on the
right track.”
It took months of careful work by covert agents to
introduce just enough terminal stress and potential flaws
into the systems controlling the movement of craft around
the Fenksworld docks, and considerably more effort to get
suicide-programmed tech-priest and assassin Acolytes aboard
the Apocalypse-Class Battleship Tempest’s Child. Then, as the
vast form of Tempest’s Child approached Fenksworld, several
crucial scanning and communication systems were crippled,
the bridge crew massacred, and its engine and reactor output
locked to maximum. As flocks of craft jostled in confusion
around the docks, the stricken warship ploughed into them.
Over fifteen warships, twenty mass conveyors, and countless
other craft were lost in an expanding cascade of destruction.
The Fenksworld life line was cut, and hundreds of thousands
of troops scattered amongst the hostile stars had their support
stripped away.
The Fenksworld Calamity did not destroy the second
front, but cost the lives of millions and extended the crusade
by years, even decades. For the Istvaanians, their actions were
later vindicated when the unbreakable warriors that came out
of the hell of the second front became the keystone of the
battle against the dark forces that were to beset the Crusade
in later years as it pushed ever onwards into the Hazeroth Abyss and the Adrantis Nebula. They would say that such
heroes were bought by fire and calamity in the void above
Fenksworld.
==The Mara Landing Massacre==
The Mara landing massacre was, apparently, one of the greatest
tragedies of mis-navigation ever to occur within the Calixis
Sector. The ice world of Mara is a cursed place where no
man is permitted to set foot. A frozen world devoid of life,
Mara was once home of a number of Imperial installations,
including a mining facility. Through a series of incidents so
dark and terrible that their details are held under seal by the
Holy Ordos, Mara was stripped of all living souls and left alone
in the cold void to be a place of secret legends and tales of
madness. It remains quarantined to this day, patrolled by ships
from Battlefleet Calixis.
The tragedy of the Mara landing massacre began when the
troop transport Vervilix, bound for the war on Tranch, suffered a
critical navigational error and dropped out of the warp close to
the ice world of Mara and within the cursed world’s quarantine
zone. Disaster might have been averted had the ship’s engines
and communications not failed and left it drifting alone and lost
above one of the most dangerous places in the Calixis Sector.
Not knowing where they were but detecting structures on the
surface, the officers commanding the 100,000 troops on board
decided to mount a landing onto the surface in an attempt to
gather information on their position and press aid from any
that might live on the ice world. This decision was to cost the
lives of over 50,000 men.
Soon after the landing, all communication with the surface
was lost. First-person reports from breathless dropship pilots told
how the troops deployed to the surface had begun to slaughter
each other, and discordant sounds began to rip through the
communications networks---alongside cries imploring someone
to “make the buzzing stop.” Not knowing how to respond,
the officers poured more troops onto the surface of Mara until
most of the soldiers had been deployed. When the Imperial
Navy patrol ships reached the Vervilix five days later, only a
few hundred survivors could be recovered from the thousands
who had set foot on Mara. An investigation by the Holy Ordos
determined that it was a tragedy of misadventure.
Most of the survivors were executed, and quarantine patrols around
the ice world were doubled. Since the massacre, rumors have
persisted in the Calixian Conclave that the cascade of accidents
and coincidences that lead to the disastrous planetfall were not
the product of chance, but carefully planned and orchestrated
by the renegade Istvaanian Inquisitor Amaros and her close
servants. It is said that Amaros was keen to see whether any
useful survivors could be created and harvested from exposing
untried guardsmen to such a great, unknown threat. The
involvement of Istvaanians in engineering the circumstances
of the massacre has never been proven, although a number
of the survivors who were not executed for potential taint
were quietly drawn into the service of several Inquisitors with
suspected links to Amaros, a fact which may itself have sparked
the theory. This harvest of survivors was bought in the blood
and madness of thousands, but if the stories are true, its creator
likely considered it a small price to pay.
== Current Conspiracies ==
“Our test is crisis; no others are of worth. All life is war, all war is life. It is self-evident. Every human being is born with blood on their hands.”
–Lady Alecto Amaros, On War, Vol I
Istvaanians are commonly seen as rash and headstrong
individuals who will not allow the Imperium a moment’s
respite from strife and conflict. The relative current stability
of the Calixis sector might, therefore, indicate a small or
inconsequential involvement by the warmonger Inquisitors
within the sector. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Istvaanian actions have been woven into the fabric of the
sector since before the Angevin Crusade, and a hardened core
of Istvaanian Inquisitors operates at the heart of the Calixian
Conclave. The current situation is simply the quiet before
the coming storm as far as they are concerned, a storm that
may be unleashed if several powerful Istvaanian conspiracies
bear fruit.
The Hyades Locks
A number of powerful Istvaanians within the Tyrantine Cabal
have discovered passages within the deep archives that speak
of the Hyades Locks, a subject with which they have become
rapidly obsessed. The nature of these devices is uncertain, but
the fragments of ancient legend and prophecy speak of them
as “great locks to the portals through which all shall pass to
endless sleep, held fast by ages and secured by the key,” and
indicate that they are present on a number of worlds within
the sector.
It seems clear to the Istvaanians that opening these locks
will destroy the worlds on which they rest. The efforts of
a number of Istvaanian Inquisitors, including Lady Amaros,
have uncovered indications that one of these devices exists in
the heart of the Golgenna Reach. Using any means at their
disposal, these Inquisitors are racing to discover the exact
location of this and other Hyades Locks, and the keys to open
them. Whether the key is metaphorical, allegorical, or literal
is currently unclear, as the only reference to it is contained
within the Propheticum Hereticus Tenebrae and speaks only of a
“key once held by the herald.” The intent of the Istvaanians,
should they find both lock and key, is simple: open the lock
and let the death of a world shake Calixis out of its dormancy
and content.
Unfortunately for the Istvaanians, the matter of the Haydes
Locks pertains to events and powers already in motion far
outside the warmonger’s usual remit. They are dangerously
late comers to a particularly dark and terrible game and may
well suffer for it.
The Madness of Marius Hax
Sector Governor Marius Hax is a fair and even-handed man who
many believe is slipping into paranoia and tyranny. This change
has not been one of his own making, nor a consequence of some
weakness of mind. It is the product of careful manipulation by
agents serving masters of the Istvaanian conviction, Inquisitors
who see the myriad threats and dark prophesies that are rising
like shadows all around the Calixis Sector as a coming trial by
fire, in which Hax must prosper or the sector must die.
Devoted to ordered rule, and harsh in his judgment of any
thing that threatens it, Hax has had his nature played on by
carefully engineered assessments of the sector’s stability, steered
by incidents which cause him to question the loyalties of his
servants and the Adepta. Moreover, advisors who serve other,
secret masters have been carefully positioned to bend his ear. By
these means, a number of Istvaanians have succeeded in making
Hax increase the military power of the Lord Sector’s office
beyond its direct necessity and secure the armed forces loyal to
him alone, such as the notorious Chaliced Commissariat. These
manipulators are also nudging the Lord Sector’s perception and
mental state further and further into fear of rebellion, sedition,
and conspiracy. Inch by inch, they are creating Marius Hax as
a fanatic who will rise to a crisis at the head of a tide of blood
and iron. Such a deadly crisis is surely not far off.