Judgement of Kings

## The Judgement of Kings

Unknown agent of the Judgement of Kings, sighted wearing the warband's blue and silver livery. Often agents will eschew these colors for unmarked or camouflaged armor.

## Chaos Warband

### **Specialty**

Subterfuge, sabotage, infiltration, destabilization, assassination, guerrilla warfare

### **Allies**

Various rebel groups across Imperial history

### **Warband Size**

1-2000 Astartes, no known permanent auxiliaries or serfs as of M42

## Pre-Heresy

### **Colours**

Midnight blue or black

"*Is there any engine more perfect than the spiral of the stars? Even when its course deviates, it is precise in its deviation.*"
— attr. Ostratárchos, *The Sayings of the Marshal*, pp.152 s.7
The **Judgement of Kings** (Old Hellenic: *Krísis ton Ánaxin*) is a mysterious band of traitor Astartes of the Alpha Legion who have been involved in seditious and traitorous activities across the Imperium. Specializing in the destabilization and collapse of Imperial local governments, the Judgement of Kings has been tied to countless rebellions and cult uprisings since the days of the Heresy. Though little of the warband is known for certain, its name has become infamous, and mere mention of it is enough to frighten many local governors and magistrates.

## History

Although the first recorded use of the name "Judgement of Kings" dates to the pacification of Lammicar during the Great Crusade, it is believed the organization far predates its moniker, with similar accounts of unmarked Astartes assassinating rulers and bombing government offices appearing as early as 822.M30. Since Lammicar, though, the name has followed the group everywhere they went, and is ironically the only reason anything is known about them at all; without it, there would be no easy way to trace their activities from planet to planet across the years. Why the Judgement of Kings is so liberal with the propagation of its name is anyone's guess, but most assume it is a psychological weapon, a gesture of superiority, or some combination of the two.

All records suggest the Judgement of Kings began its life as a black-ops unit within the Alpha Legion dedicated to the toppling of noncompliant human regimes. Precious little information on the circumstances of their founding or their leadership exists, and many speculate they may have answered directly to the Legion's shadowy primarch or even the Emperor Himself. Either way, nearly all that is known about them is gathered mostly from witnesses to their campaigns, be they captured governors or near-mad fanatics who the unit often employed. Nonetheless, due to the unit's propensity to broadcast their involvement, their deeds can be tracked over the centuries of the Great Crusade through a plethora of shadow conquests and pro-Imperial revolutions across the galaxy.

Only two recorded instances exist of the Judgement of Kings working alongside Astartes from other legions, both of which are now primary sources on their operational practices: in the Hamzari campaign, with the Space Wolves, and the Ioannesia Insurgency, with the Raven Guard. Neither campaign lent much to their reputation, with Marines of both legions describing them as cold and secretive, with a calculated disregard for human life and a strange, soulless professionalism with which they approached both their work and one another. Both campaigns were successful all the same, though the first saw the cousins nearly come to blows.

### The Last Mission

In 969.M30, after their victory against a rebel kingdom in the Shuruf system, the Judgement of Kings simply disappeared from the records of the Crusade, and remains absent from Imperial accounts until long after the Heresy. This would be the unit's last successful mission under the command of the Emperor.

Following the defeat of the Shuruf insurgents, it is now known that the Judgement of Kings was assigned another mission of the utmost importance, presumably under orders to maintain total secrecy. Around 970.M30, with almost their entire complement of Astartes and accompanied by a Mechanicum explorator fleet, the Judgement of Kings was dispatched to a far-off group of worlds in the fringes of the Segmentum Obscurus known as the Nichiran Cluster. Their mission was twofold. Firstly, the Nichiran worlds were under the rule of an independent warlord state known as the Dominion, and had to be brought to Compliance. But the Nichiran Cluster had also once been the site of an impressive and highly advanced society from the Dark Age of Technology, many of whose secrets were still preserved in enormous monolithic spires known as the Archival Towers. The second mission, and one which was only known to the highest echelons of command, was the recovery of invaluable STC data from the Archival Towers, and the return of that data to the Imperium.

However, due to some sort of catastrophic accident, it appears most of the Judgement of Kings' fleet was lost in the Warp. Only a single Legion light cruiser survived long enough to escape into realspace, crashing on the outlying planet of Nichira Minor in a desperate maneuver which killed most of the force's commanding agents, including the operation's overall leader and top Mechanicum advisor.

The Judgement of Kings had been completely devastated. The vast majority of the unit's Astartes had been killed, along with most of their mortal ship crewmen. Of the explorators, only a few techpriests of any significance remained, the rest having been on board the Mechanicum barges which were lost to the Immaterium. However, the Judgement of Kings was used to operating in small numbers on enemy-held worlds; far from demoralized, a new agent stepped forward to take control, and complete the mission as intended.

### Ostratárchos

The Nichiran campaign marked the ascension of the figure known as Ostratárchos to the helm of the Judgement of Kings. It is unknown what his name was originally; the former leader is known to have had a codename separate from his title as Marshal, though the unit's practice of regularly changing identities makes it difficult to assign any single one to him. However, all sources suggest Ostratárchos insisted he only be known by his title, the Marshal, and that over time this became his name (*"O Stratárchis"* being "the Marshal" in Old Hellenic). To M42 it is unclear whether the Ostratárchos sometimes referenced in later accounts and the Ostratárchos of the Nichiran war are the same person or a series of Marshals taking on the title. Either way, his ascendency marked a break in tradition for the unit which remains to this day.

Ostratárchos was originally a senior agent of standing within the unit, though his exact rank remains unknown. Following the crash, it is likely he was one of, if not the highest-ranking agent still alive on the planet; either way, when he seized control of the operation, there was little to no protest or internal strife, and leadership transferred smoothly to him within a few days. Around this time, the Judgement of Kings were first contacted by local civilians, who were in awe of them; from questioning them Ostratárchos gained a sense of the situation on the planet.

Nichira Minor, known to its inhabitants as Kaikoa, was a post-cataclysm wasteland which had been destroyed in some long-forgotten event which ruined the whole Nichiran civilization. Now it was one of the main battlegrounds of a systemwide war between the outlying planetary states and the Dominion, a local stellar empire which ruled from its seat on Nichira Prime. Unlike many of the other outer worlds, though, Kaikoa had once been unified under the rule of the Kingdom of Kanno; now, the kingdom was destroyed, and its remaining supporters were embroiled in a losing battle against the Dominion. However, the civilian population was overwhelmingly against the rule of the Dominion, and thus the rebels still remained impossible to permanently remove.

What happened next is unclear, but it is known that the crash site was of great interest to both sides. One way or another, it is likely Ostratárchos scattered his agents to perform reconnaissance and attempt to gain some idea of the situation, because when a battalion of Dominion soldiers arrived to seize the shipwreck the officers records claim they were gutted in a multi-hour struggle against little more than a handful of Marines. Shortly afterward, the Judgement of Kings scavenged all the supplies they could and abandoned the crash site, and through one means or another Ostratárchos was brought to make contact with the leaders of the Kanno rebels, who eagerly welcomed him as a hero.

In every account of a Judgement of Kings operation, the marines have been known to build cults around themselves to spark mass movements and destabilize a government; Nichira was no different. Perhaps Ostratárchos was playing a part, or perhaps he was revealing his true ambitions. Either way, he welcomed the locals' enthusiasm, and quickly earned the trust and admiration of the Kannoan officers, serving as an advisor and spymaster, apparently having managed to scatter agents across the entire system. As is now apparent, the Nichirans believed Ostratárchos to possess some measure of divinity; his arrival and his stature to them suggested some great demigod from far away had been delivered to them, and Ostratárchos did nothing to break the illusion. To the contrary, he encouraged it, and even now almost all information on him and the Nichiran campaign is known only by studying *The Sayings of the Marshal* (Nichiran: *Hanjisama-no-Kakugen*, lit. "Honored Judge's Sayings"), a Nichiran pseudo-religious text written by an anonymous author which details his exploits.

### The Nichiran War

So began a thirty-year struggle between Ostratárchos and the Dominion. Under his counsel, the Kannoans won battle after battle against the local Dominion army, using information which Ostratárchos claimed to have been given to him in visions. Most likely, he had drawn on his now-entrenched network of spying agents; however, no evidence suggests the Kannoans were ever aware of this, and they became thoroughly convinced he was a prophet. With their trust in him absolute, in 983.M30, Ostratárchos then declared he had another vision which told him that the rightful heir to the throne of Kanno was alive. He named the prince to be the young Kannoan civilian Mono Tazai, who had recently been rescued from a Dominion slave barge; his apparent discovery created an immense boost in morale and stirred the people of the planet into a mass uprising. By 984.M30 the Dominion general charged with the conquest of Kanno had been captured and executed and the capital fell firmly into Kannoan hands. In the aftermath of the battle, to great celebration, Mono Tazai was crowned King Kanoi-Mono, the rightful King of Kanno. The former rebels also retook control of the capital's Archival Tower, which Ostratárchos further awed the locals by having his remaining enginseers unlock. Though an imperfect process, and though they accessed little more than crumbs of the vast knowledge stored within, the opening of the Archival Tower was performed with great pomp and ceremony that only further assured all of Kanno of the Marshal's divinity. More importantly, though, among the data recovered were several manufacturing facility templates, which were put into use to renovate and convert the city's factories into their most efficient forms, and pieces of a terraforming machine blueprint which Ostratárchos promised to use to bring life back to Kaikoa once they had won.

Word spread quickly through the system of the Kannoan victory, inspiring new fervor in the assortment of local forces which opposed the Dominion. No doubt they had been encouraged and supplied by agents themselves; nonetheless, Ostratárchos spent the next several years traveling covertly from planet to planet with his small council of Kannoan officers in a show of gathering allies to the cause. By 992.M30, two more successful military campaigns on wasteland worlds had left the Dominion reeling, and Ostratárchos had veritably raised an army of near-cultlike followers, who absolutely revered him, calling him *Hanji,* "the Judge." It is unclear if any of the Kannoan leaders felt reservations as to the Marshal's immense power and influence, which now extended beyond the borders of their kingdom and had become thoroughly independent of it; if they did, little record of their resistance remains, and likely nothing came of it. Ostratárchos at this point had the support of nearly the entire population, to say nothing of the young and pliable King Mono. Moreover, the conquest of other planets brought with it the promise of new technology unlocked from their scattered archives, granting the kingdom of Kanno and the Judgement of Kings all manner of new advantages. Most infamously, the world of Jei would prove to be a treasure trove of easily accessible war-automata designs, which the newly furnished factories of Kanno were more than able to begin laboriously producing. These war machines would become a staple of Ostratárchos's forces in the system and out, and served to provide much needed competition against the unusually advanced weapons possessed by the Dominion. Ostratárchos himself would begin to appear in person less and less, instead using a number of remote slave-automata in his place, earning him the title "The Sage of Seven Faces."

In 994.M30, the Taishogun of the Dominion died under unknown circumstances, apparently in an aircraft accident; whether or not it was sabotage, his successor, the Taishogun Noriyasu, attempted to bring the Kannoan-led rebel coalition to negotiations. All his messages were ignored, and a combined outerworlds army invaded the Dominion heartland planets in early 995. Ostratárchos continued to lead with unerring precision and foresight, and it is said no battle he fought in was ever lost; in time even the citizens of the Dominion on the worlds he had attacked began to fear and admire him, and in 997.M30 a large group of Dominion officers defected to his side, believing him to be some sort of prophetic savior and fearing what might happen to their souls should they oppose him. By the turn of the millennium the Judgement of Kings had very nearly brought about the subjugation of the Nichiran Cluster, with only the core worlds of the Dominion still in opposition to them.

### The Heresy and the New Order

News of the Horus Heresy did not reach the Judgement of Kings until around 007.M31, years after the Drop Site Massacre. At the time, they were embroiled in the support of a military campaign on the central Dominion fortress world of Semou. However, the revelation both of the state of the Imperium, and their own legion's part in it, shook the unit to its core. Many ranking agents, still loyal to the Imperium, believed that the unit should abandon its mission and return for a new assignment; others argued that they must finish the mission. Ostratárchos, though, advocated for independence - for the unit to break ties with the Imperium and never return. He reasoned that the mission had to be completed, but with their legion having turned on the Emperor, it was likely they would be killed on sight if they ever re-entered Imperial space. Instead, they would carry out their task on Nichira, then determine what course to go next.

The Nichiran war ended officially in 011.M31, with a great show of the Taishogun Noriyasu tearfully repenting at the Marshal's feet following the conquest of the Dominion capital. With the Dominion scattered and defeated, Ostratárchos reunified the Nichiran Cluster under a new empire headed by King Kanoi-Mono with a legislature composed of regional leaders from across the system. None would oppose his will; if anything, the people were devastated at the thought that Ostratárchos himself would not be ruling over them. But the Marshal had ambitions beyond Nichira, and almost as soon as they had won began planning to depart.

### A Meeting of Minds

First, though, Ostratárchos, both for himself and at the request of the masses, had his techmarines and enginseers unlock the capital's Archival Tower, eager to discover more of the secrets which the Dominion had used to such frightening effect. Their cities, it was clear, were much more advanced than those of the Kannoans or other outworlders, and likely had it not been for Ostratárchos and his spies the war would never have been won, fanaticism or no. With the tower opened by some arcane techno-ritual, Ostratárchos descended into the spire alone. What he found within is still not fully understood, but is speculated to have been some kind of ancient artificial intelligence. When he emerged, his ambition had been strengthened and his mental abilities seemed to have accelerated to levels which were superhuman even for a Space Marine; in the *Sayings* he becomes increasingly mathematically-minded, and constantly begins referencing simulation and experimentation. Whatever it is he must have taken with him, because later expeditions, though they found many templates for weapons, armor, vehicles, automata, and industrial equipment, were unable to reach whatever it was that Ostratárchos originally discovered.

### The Scouring of Nichira

The Judgement of Kings stayed in Nichira for around seventeen years; though Ostratárchos seems to have continually insisted on leaving, there was enough resistance among the senior agents to keep them in the Cluster for a time. While there, they continued to enjoy heroic status as the saviors of the system throughout; the victory over the Dominion remained a point of great pride, and all agents were seen with at least part of the divine reverence afforded to their marshal. In fact, many of the agents were happy to stay, and seemed to take comfort in the idea of a settled life, something totally alien to the soldiers of the unit. All records from their interactions with other Marines suggest complete and cold professionalism within their ranks; agents didn't even have real names.

However, as time went on, Ostratárchos had begun to further develop a philosophy which would come to define the course of the now-independent unit's life, one which begins to show through even in his earliest conversations in the *Sayings* but clearly becomes more exaggerated after the war's end. Believing his soldiers were gaining too many worldly attachments, he resolved to break away from the settled life and pursue his grand ambitions of universal order. And thus, about seventeen years after the Dominion surrendered on Nichira Prime, Ostratárchos called together his agents and his closest Nichiran allies and offered them a choice: stay on Nichira as settled men, or follow him to a galactic odyssey in search of the divine order which governs all things. Many chose to join him, whether sympathetic agents, those unable to adjust to civilian life, or even masses of Nichiran fanatics whose devotion to him had not waned with time. From them he gained control over several naval vessels and perhaps half of his remaining agents. The next few weeks were spent massing supplies and copying data from the Archival Towers to serve his great mission.

When at last they were prepared to depart, Ostratárchos made the final decision. Intending to sever his ties with the worlds once and for all, he deployed a terrible weapon from the ancient Nichiran past to the surface of the planet, which the *Sayings* only call a great plague, and over many weeks burned the whole cluster to the ground while his men waited in their ships. Every planet in the system was very nearly scoured of all life, their cities destroyed and their flora and fauna consumed. Later investigations by the Imperium arriving on the Nichiran worlds would suggest they had been attacked by some sort of self-replicating war machines; the designs for which, most likely, had been procured from the data-vaults of the very planet they were used to destroy. With the work complete, the Judgement of Kings left Nichira, never to return.

### In Search of Order

After Nichira, the Judgement of Kings entered a dark period of their history; few writings of them exist, and they only appeared sporadically as infiltrators throughout the aftermath of the Heresy and beyond. These infiltrations, though, carried similarly obsessive patterns. They acted as statebuilders and destroyers; agents would incite revolutions to build new societies, then incite others to tear them down, over and over seemingly into eternity, or until their activities became compromised. It is unclear what they hoped to gain from this, though from the vague words of the *Sayings* the most likely reason is to gather information concerning the building of societies in and of itself.

The Nichirans remained with them as loyal auxiliaries for over a thousand solar years, with the last recorded encounter with them appearing in 741.M32. Though they rarely accompanied agents on infiltrations, Nichiran soldiers were commonly reported in acts of piracy or other small-scale incursions, presumably acting on behalf of their Astartes handlers. In the rare cases that the Judgement of Kings deployed full force to a planet themselves, the bulk of their troops on the ground were normally mortal Nichirans, with Astartes never appearing in groups much larger than ten or twenty. It is unknown how or why they parted with these humans, and their equipment; either way, after M32, the Nichirans were never seen again, and all future encounters with the Judgement of Kings suggested a warband which completely lacks permanent human serfs.

During the period between M31 and M34, the Judgement of Kings notably fought frequently with the forces of Chaos, and battles against Chaos-worshipers and warp cults mark some of the only times the warband deployed major military force to a world or group of worlds. This animosity toward Chaos seems to have been entirely on the part of Ostratárchos himself, whose personal philosophy held that divinity and good was found in the universal laws that bound the world, and who thus held the physics-warping and pandemonium of the Immaterium to be a perversion, so much so that his warband would sacrifice many of its tenets in order to mount campaigns against the Archenemy. One of these campaigns, the Bastila War in M33, was the third and final time the Judgement of Kings ever cooperated openly with loyalist Astartes, once again allying uneasily with a wayward group of Space Wolves in a protracted battle against a Dark Mechanicum forge world and their daemon-possessed Magos. This alliance, far more tenuous than the first, did break down into blows, resulting in violent infighting and the two groups parting ways following their first decisive victory. However, the campaign does serve as another vital insight into the workings of the Judgement of Kings and the attitudes of their leaders.

### The Fall

All was not well in the highest echelons of the warband's command, however. Sometime between M34 and M35, it is believed that warp corruption began to take hold in the leadership of the Judgement of Kings. The prevailing theory holds that Ostratárchos may have become aware of his own mortality, and sought desperately to escape it, or perhaps that Ostratárchos was only a title, and eventually a corrupted agent was appointed to take it, leading the warband into a vastly different future. Either way, by late-M35, reports of Judgement of Kings agents with obvious marks of Chaotic influence began to appear across the Imperium, marking the transition of the warband into its currently recognizable form.

From that point, it has become totally unknown what the warband's aims or intentions are; they have become less obsessive in their statebuilding efforts, instead seeming to focus purely on overturning Imperial governments with little concern for what comes next. Perhaps their goals have been wholly subverted, and they now seek only to cause discord; perhaps, in the absence of a strong leader, their agents have simply reverted to what they know how to do best. Either way, the Judgement of Kings remains every bit as dangerous as it was before, and investigation of the warband has become a high priority for many Imperial officials.

## Notable Campaigns

* **Boffa Insurgency (822.M30-823.M30)** - Though no official mention of them in the file exists, this campaign is now believed to be the first confirmed Judgement of Kings covert operation. A rogue pre-Imperial bishop on Boffa in the Yod Sub-Sector of the Segmentum Solar had taken over the major cities on the planet's primary continent; mere solar months later, following several bombings, his own congregation turned on him. Evidence suggests his followers had been stirred to the support of the Imperial Truth by Astartes.
* **Pacification of Lammicar (849.M30-851.M30)** - The campaign which gave the warband its name, the Lammicar system was a large independent human empire in the outer fringes of the Segmentum Solar. When the King of Lammicar Alpha refused to join the imperium, the warband's agents staged a mass rebellion on the system's primary agricultural world. The system was devastated by famine, and by 851 was in a state of total collapse. The impotent Lammicar government was easily brought to the negotiating table, surrendering to the Imperium in exchange for desperately-needed relief.
* **Pacification of Hamzari (868.M30-869.M30)** - A small group of Judgement of Kings agents worked alongside a Great Company of the Space Wolves as scouts and spies against the Hamzari worlds, which were at the time ruled by several pre-interstellar human warlords. Though their relationship was strenuous, the two forces completed their mission quickly and with relative ease; most of the warlords were awed by Imperial technology and those who resisted were quickly assassinated or crushed in combat. One of very few times the Judgement of Kings ever worked alongside fellow Astartes from other legions. Jarl Ironmaker, the Space Wolf praetor charged with the campaign, described them as "untrustworthy" and declared that the leading Judgement of Kings agent, Bóreios, "lacks honor."
* **Ioannesian Revolt (891.M30-894.M30)** - The Ioannesian General Metamokon unseated the Imperial governor of the planet in 890; the Judgement of Kings began an operation against him alongside the Raven Guard in 891. Unfortunately for the loyalists, Metamokon enjoyed great popular support in the cities and the guerrilla war against him lasted far longer than they had predicted. Worse still, despite their similar skillsets, the loyalist commanders did not get along at all, and by 892 the two groups of Astartes largely went their separate ways, leading and supporting human forces, mostly rural or mountain-based insurgents, in their own respective regions. In the midst of the long war, Metamokon was eventually assassinated outside his vacation home; both Space Marine commanders claimed credit for his death, and the truth was never found. Following his death, pro-Imperial forces gain ground and eventually retake the capital, narrowly avoiding a second civil war between the organization backed by the Judgement of Kings and the one backed by the Raven Guard.
* **Phoraed War (916.M30-927.M30)** - One of their most difficult campaigns, the Phoraed War saw the Judgement of Kings pitted against a ruthless secessionist warlord, Orii Nagotov, known to most only by his alias Dyavolovich. Formerly an Imperial spymaster with the loyal government, Nagotov had broken away from the government and incited a long and bloody revolt which spread across the whole Phoraed Sector and caused the total fall of two planets to the secessionist side. The Judgement of Kings arrived mainly to serve as advisors and spies for the loyalist Phoraean government, which had been waging a frustrated war effort against Dyavolovich's insurgents, but his skills in deception and investigation proved to be a serious challenge even for their duplicitous tactics. What began as a simple covert operation would drag out into an eleven-year campaign which consumed far more of the Judgement of Kings's resources and manpower than they could ever have predicted. To this day Orii Nagotov remains the only mortal man to ever strike a decisive blow against the warband's command structure, estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of an unparalleled 700 field agents, including at least two successive operational leaders and the entire operational staff of at least one major attempt on his life.
* **Shuruf Insurgency (965.M30-969.M30)** - The last successful mission the Judgement of Kings underwent as an Imperial unit. Led by an agent called Ptyários, a small team of Astartes arrived at the capital of the Shuruf System. Shuruf had been conquered by the Ahrarites, monarchist rebels who sought to restore the system's pre-Imperial royal dynasty, the House of Ruh, backing the formerly imprisoned Prince Korad ibn Ruh al-Shurufi as the new ruler. Ptyários and his agents infiltrated the planet's major cities and spent years building enormous criminal enterprises to destroy the local economy. By 968, black markets had starved the city governments of tax revenue and brought about widespread infrastructure decay. The Ahrarites attempted to crack down on crime, leading to a brief street war, but the vast collateral damage caused turned the civilian public against them. The resulting mass uprising brought about the eventual collapse of their government.
* **Nichiran War (980.M30-011.M31)** - The Judgement of Kings, stranded on the worlds of the far-off Nichiran Cluster, backed a coalition of rebels from the outlying worlds against the Dominion, a stellar empire based on Nichira Prime. Through fortune and charisma, the Judgement of Kings's new leader, Ostratárchos, drew on local superstition to convince the inhabitants of the system that he was a prophet. Drawing on the ranks of the faithful and devoted, he raised an army with which to fight against the Dominion, defeating them one world at a time in a war that lasted over thirty years. The campaign marks the warband's breakaway from the Imperium.
* **Dark Age of Memneth (085.M31-191.M31)** - The Memneth Worlds were brought through a long period of rapid political change and upheaval during the period between 85 and 191; it is now believed this upheaval was fueled by the actions of agents of the Judgement of Kings. Memneth experienced over 62 revolutions and countless governments, most of which lasted little more than a few years before being overthrown; most of this period the cluster of planets and moons was under the decentralized rule of local warlords and magistrates. Eventually, after a 6-year war from 186 to 191.M31, they were unified again under the Great Doyen Elhi of Memneth, and subsequently were re-taken by the Imperium in a military action in 205.M31. It is believed the Judgement of Kings stopped its involvement by some time around 183, and by the time of Elhi's takeover had departed the planets entirely.
* **Bastila War (411.M33-434.M33)** - The Bastila War began as an Imperial attempt to destroy the daemon-forge on Bastila II, whose rogue Archmagos Io-7 had conquered over 40 of the nearby planets with his legions of daemon-engines. The campaign to defeat them was spearheaded by the Space Wolf Thagrun Thunderfoot's army. The Judgement of Kings arrived in 418, and, after several tense meetings with Thunderfoot's council, were uneasily accepted as allies in the battle against Io-7. Together, these two forces turned the tide against the Bastila forge, eventually killing Io-7 and destroying most of his strongest forces at Cuvecara in 429. However, disputes over the Judgement of Kings allegedly using Thunderfoot's marines as bait led to a violent falling out in which several Space Wolf leaders were killed at a ceremonial banquet. The Judgement of Kings fled the system before it could escalate into another war, and the battle for Bastila would go on for another five years before the Space Wolves finished their conquest of the forge.
* **Kosta Uprising (652.M36-654.M36)** - A massive Chaos cult uprising caused under cover of the warp storms which wracked the galaxy during the time, the Kosta Uprising is believed to have been incited by agents of the Judgement of Kings and is one of the first major operations of the new corrupted form of the warband. The Kosta cult worshipped a Space Marine as an ascendant demigod and seemed to seek to become more like him; it is suspected the Judgement of Kings may have drawn recruits from this world to reinforce their numbers.
* **Gashpar-Ahwai Crusade (300.M38-669.M38)** - During an Imperial campaign against the Chaos-held worlds of the Gashpar-Ahwai Industrial Sector, the Judgement of Kings appeared to lend limited field support to the Archenemy warlord. Starting in 357.M38, Judgement of Kings agents began to appear in small fireteams on the Chaos side. Imperial intelligence later confirmed that the warband was also managing secret camps in which Gashparite soldiers were trained and drilled in conventional and guerrilla tactics by agents. Once Imperial victories began to stack up toward the end of the crusade, it appears the warband simply abandoned their erstwhile allies, with reports of blue-armored Astartes on the field becoming few and far between until they disappeared entirely around 640.M38. No significant damage was ever inflicted against the warband, though Imperial estimates range between 60 and 300 agents confirmed dead.
* **Eight Risings of Gallus (787.M38-004.M39)** - In 787.M38, the barbarian kings of the feral worlds of the Gallus sub-sector mounted the first of many uprisings against the rule of the Imperium, having been supplied Militarum-grade technology by unknown supporters later revealed to be agents of the Judgement of Kings. In a manner not dissimilar from Orks, the feral kingdoms spent a great deal of this period fighting amongst themselves, with the titular "Eight Risings" referring to eight distinct and non-consecutive wars in which they were able to unite under one particularly powerful ruler and launch an assault on the planets beyond their borders. In between these major wars, the barbarian kingdoms were saved from the full wrath of Imperial retribution by the mere fact that the Imperium was stretched so thin, allowing them to infight sometimes as long as they had been united or longer while the authorities struggled to gather enough resources to mount an offensive. The crusade did come eventually, though, and once the Eighth Rising of Gallus concluded in 951.M38 the Imperium mounted a heavy-handed counterattack which devolved into a half-century-long purge of every pre-technological world in the sub-sector. The Judgement of Kings, although they provided material and logistical support to the barbarians for nearly the whole period, seem to have shied from actual combat; very few agents were ever seen on the battlefield.
* **Second War of Wabforrika (022.M40-103.M40)** - Wabforrika was a medical supply world and the site of a previous rebellion, driven by a Slaaneshi cult embedded within the planet's ruling aristocracy. The resulting conflict, which spilled over into neighboring star systems, would become known as the First War of Wabforrika, and ended with Imperial soldiers massacring the heretical noblemen and their families until over 150 noble houses had been annihilated. Rulership of Wabforrika had been transferred from prominent members of the now-eradicated noble bloodlines to a bureaucratic organization from the neighboring system; needless to say, this angered the local population. A second revolt would occur only thirteen years later, this time led by a worker's union backed by the Judgement of Kings; within months of their first attacks in the capital, similar movements would be sparked all across the planets of the first war, a ragtag assortment of cults, political organizations, rogue magistrates, and criminals, all apparently spurred on by a scattered but coordinated group of agents. The resulting anarchy would only be quelled by a nearly century-long military operation by the Imperium which included elements of three Space Marine chapters and countless Guard regiments. By the end, it became apparent that the Judgement of Kings had largely used the uprising as a front to steal medical supplies and equipment en masse from Wabforrika; they had also seized several factories to mass-produce and immediately export industrial machinery and spare parts. They rarely appeared in battle on the enemy side, and it was evident they abandoned their holdings long before the Imperials arrived.
* **Tandas Crusade (M42)** - The Judgement of Kings intervened in a post-Rift war between the planet of Setheka, occupied by a Chaos-worshipping empire, and the Imperial government of the Tandas System. Their agents were responsible for uprisings which unseated Imperial rulers in several Tandas system worlds, which subsequently joined Setheka as tribute colonies. Agents in the Tandas war were seen serving many roles, including political and military advisors, training officers for Archenemy soldiers, field scouts, and assassins, though still rarely seen in numbers greater than five at a time.

## Warband Organization

Most of the organization of the Judgement of Kings is vague and nebulous, and it is doubtful that they have any formal organization above the platoon or company scale. Almost all operations, even those which span entire star clusters and include hundreds of agents, are undertaken by many pseudo-independent small teams, each rarely exceeding ten or twenty Astartes. Overall, the warband is highly decentralized and depends on effective coordination to successfully complete larger missions.

### Ranks

Rank in the Judgement of Kings is based on seniority and merit. The more successful missions an agent completes, the higher they will advance in rank, being given control over increasingly large operational areas the higher in rank they progress. Rank and operational assignments are handled almost exclusively at the highest level by the Marshal, who oversees all operations at once; it is believed the Marshal may be the only agent who ever knows every agent's identity and task at any given moment. Because agents lack real permanent names, and because they, being of Alpha Legion gene-stock, all look nearly identical, the Judgement of Kings relies on coordination by the Marshal and coded implants to discern the identity of individual agents and ensure that only the agents who are meant to be promoted are giving orders in the field. Without these systems, it is possible any suitably deceptive agent could pose as a higher-ranking comrade and deliver illegitimate orders to their new subordinates.

The basic rank of the Judgement of Kings and the backbone of the warband is the field agent. Field agents will undertake most ground-level work acting in all manner of roles from direct combat to spycraft, infiltration, and diplomacy. Within the Judgement of Kings, all agents are highly trained in both combat and non-combat disciplines - they must be expected to be capable of taking on varied missions completely alone, and therefore have wide-ranging skill sets to support them. There are more than a few cases of a single agent bringing a whole planet into anarchy with a few well-placed words.

Above this rank is a nebulous web of 'senior agent' titles, which are believed to be codified but remain largely unknown. It is generally understood that the rank of field agent is very broad, and often senior field agents will receive no formal change in rank when they are, for instance, assigned to lead a fireteam. The higher agent ranks seem to be exclusively operational; agents leading ground forces are normally still just field agents with delegated powers. Agents who coordinate regional or planetary takeovers, on the other hand, normally have some sort of honorific attached to their rank, such as Lead Agent, Agent-in-Charge, or Senior Agent. The relative positions of these ranks to one another is still largely unknown, and most Judgement of Kings communications are so vague and deeply encoded that it is extremely rare if not impossible to find rank mentioned explicitly in them.

The only other "confirmed" rank is that of the Marshal himself, which, in a manner strange for a Space Marine, seems almost entirely a background role. The Marshal seems to rarely, if ever, appear in person to lead operations, and since the Nichiran War scant few instances are recorded where anyone under the name Ostratárchos has gone to the field in the flesh, with even fewer of those believed to not be decoys or body doubles. Of course, such rumors can only be speculation, as all agents look so close to identical that any of them could accurately pose as Marshal if needed. However, if one is to assume that the Marshal has simply lived for an unusually long time, his primarily logistical duty would certainly lend support to such a theory. Space Marines, of course, usually have their exceptionally long lifespans cut short by war.

### Order of Battle

The Judgement of Kings, true to their roots as a covert-operations unit, is primarily an infantry force, and seem to employ few vehicles of their own beyond the size of reconnaissance bikes. Only a single armored formation belonging to the warband has ever been sighted, a company-sized unit of medium tanks, and a few instances exist of agents using Rhino transports to move around. Most heavier units deployed by the warband consist of Nichiran battle-automata, which they appear to have some capacity to produce or repair, as they have used them extensively in support roles during military actions and continue to use even in the absence of their old human allies.

On the subject of human allies, the warband relies heavily on them for any larger military operations. Throughout the period before their fall to Chaos, it was most frequently Nichiran human forces which were deployed by the warband at the operational scale. These auxiliaries were organized into more traditional military units up to the army group level. The Nichirans favored fleetborne and airborne operation and were most known for their elite void-naval infantry, the KJSGN, an abbreviation which in Nichiran stands roughly for "Naval Landing Operations Corps of Nichira." On land, they tended to employ shock tactics and possessed vast fleets of fast open-topped transport vehicles and skimmer tanks, all presumably Dark Age designs.

Since the warband split from their auxiliaries, they have not used most of the Nichirans' equipment or technology aside from their mechanical soldiers. They have not stopped leaning on their allies for combined-arms operations; however, the composition of the human forces they tend to back varies wildly from planet to planet.

### Recruitment

It is not currently known how, if at all, the Judgement of Kings recruits new members; it is generally assumed they draw possible inductees from the populations of planets they mount operations on, and that after enough indoctrination and the implanting of the gene-seed these recruits become unrecognizable from the people they would have become. It is also possible that the warband maintains some sort of permanent homeworld or base, as their uncanny ability to fund and supply vast rebellions suggests the possession of large production facilities somewhere. It is also possible that they simply have far more active operations than would appear, and that they are more than willing to live in the shadows and siphon resources slowly from planets completely under the Imperium's nose, rather than upset the local order with cult uprisings or fabricated revolutions. In any case, Judgement of Kings agents typically operate in such small groups that it is hard to see them suffering from lack of manpower anywhere in the near future, though they almost certainly would need to bolster their numbers after ten thousand years or more of regular operation.

## Combat Doctrine

Although they are skilled combatants, agents of the Judgement of Kings are most known for their soft talents - deception, diplomacy, and infiltration. Even in its heretical state, the warband remains a covert operations unit first and a military force second, and their operational and tactical doctrine reflects this.

### Strategy

#### Operational Security

The Judgement of Kings goes to great pains to conceal the nature of their operations, and are masters of misdirection. In fact, the only piece of information the warband does not guard carefully is its name, which agents spread prolifically on every planet they operate on, perhaps as a psychological tactic. All other elements of an operation are protected closely under several layers of deception.

Agents of the Judgement of Kings, other than perhaps the Marshal himself, have no permanent name; rather, they are assigned a callsign which rotates at irregular intervals. An agent may have anywhere from one to several different identities over the course of a single mission, and frequently agents will pose as one another or their superiors to further confuse the enemy. Fireteams and operational groups also receive vague, nonsensical, or misleading codenames which sometimes last through the mission and sometimes do not. During the Tandas campaign, for instance, active teams of agents on the planet Nephil were all referred to in communications by seemingly random collections of characters, some of which conformed to local military lexicon but others of which appeared to be complete gibberish. To further obscure their numbers and identities, agents are known to trade armor suits amongst themselves, with single agents sometimes going to consecutive battles in five or more different suits of power armor to give the impression of a larger force, or simply to obscure their identity. The Judgement of Kings is also prone to sending highly-encrypted red herring messages frequently to mask the truth of their operations, and sometimes make their forces seem more or less powerful than they are. Additionally, though it is relevant less frequently, the Judgement of Kings is known to create eerily accurate mimicries of symbols and unit markings used by the enemy, which they employ on vehicles or signs to cause further confusion.

Agent identity, however, is permanently recorded, in the form of an elaborate design present on each agent's body in the form of multiple digital implants. These implants contain an abstract artistic pattern comparable to a bar code which is believed to be an identity; every recovered corpse has had a unique design, though what it translates to has never been understood. Most likely it is an abstract name used to internally track agents and their assignments, but which would have little meaning to an outsider; no evidence suggests that anything related to these codes appear in standard operational transmissions or come up in conversation between agents.

Despite all this deception, for one reason or another, all Judgement of Kings military operations are conducted in an ancient pre-Imperial Terran dialect known as Old Hellenic. This dialect is also the source of nearly all agent codenames. It is not believed that the warband has any ties to pre-Imperial Terra, or that particular region of the planet. Furthermore, the strategic value of using this language, which is still accessible within some Imperial databases and can be reverse-engineered from some modern dialects of Low Gothic, remains unclear. Of course, they heavily employ encryption, and do not rely on the dead language to mask their transmissions. Still, the choice is unusual, and presumably has some traditional or sentimental value to them.

Agents are trained to never divulge their secrets, and every agent encountered has been equipped with a suicide implant for use in the event of capture. With Astartes already being notoriously difficult to break, and the warband's current apparent lack of permanent supporting auxiliaries or serfs, gathering information on them has been a daunting task for Imperial intelligence officers. Very few agents ever survived long enough to reach the interrogation room, and those that did are now suspected to have been compulsively lying the entire time.

#### Operations and Scale

As a whole, the warband is reluctant to commit significant resources to any single campaign. The vast majority of their operations have been undertaken by a group of one to three agents, with any required military support being drawn from local allies. Even when operations involve many more agents, or demand that the Judgement of Kings commit forces to direct combat, they normally deploy similarly small groups of one to three agents, just across a wider area, to act as small long-range raiding parties or scouts. Such agents undertaking field combat roles will often, in a rare sight for Space Marines, camouflage their armor and eschew the warband's iconography in order to remain concealed.

Most operations are not even military in nature, but primarily diplomatic; Judgement of Kings agents in their most infamous campaigns have often acted simply as puppeteers and orchestrators, serving public and shadowy roles in areas ranging from emissary to domestic policy advisor to messianic savior. As mentioned before, in military conflicts the warband leans heavily on their allies, even if only to abandon them a few years later; they rarely undertake campaigns alone, instead setting the stage for their more expendable mortal supporters to do it for them.

### Tactics

Of course, when the Judgement of Kings does go to battle, they do not shy from it. Though they rarely engage on a large scale and often fight in company of large allied forces, Judgement of Kings agents are certainly skilled combatants. They are especially well-trained in fighting alongside their fireteams, and agents perform at their best when fighting relatively small engagements alongside one or two other marines. In these two to three man fireteams, agents work in near-perfect synchronicity, becoming much more dangerous and far more efficient than they are alone. It is no surprise, then, that much of Judgement of Kings tactical doctrine depends on these fireteams, using them as vanguard forces for their more cumbersome allies and the backbone of any attempts to raid enemy territory.

Outside of a few specialist units, Judgement of Kings agents prefer ranged combat to melee; they have little mind for glory and typically will seek to eliminate threats as quickly, safely, and efficiently as possible. Agent fireteams are known to set up complex killing zones for unsuspecting enemies, and are generally armed to supplement these sudden-strike tactics with long-range weapons, most commonly a modified boltgun optimized for sniper fire. When forced to enter close quarters, such as in urban areas, they still prefer to shoot enemies down from point-blank range than resort to hand-to-hand combat, although as Space Marines their capacity to fight in melee is still superior to an average human.

## Warband Culture

Even for the Alpha Legion, the Judgement of Kings began with and has retained a cold, soulless, and professional culture. Agents are trained from induction to follow orders unquestioningly, with the chain of command being the strongest value impressed on most of them. Initially, they were indoctrinated heavily into the support of the Imperium and the Imperial Truth; it is unknown what values are now brought upon new agents in the warband's corrupted form.

Ostratárchos's words suggest that the Judgement of Kings also had a culture of complete detachment from the world, that agents were trained to care about nothing beyond the mission and its successful completion. They do not see one another as family or brothers, even remotely; the unit was no more to them than an organization which served to complete missions. They had little regard for the planets they operated on, as well, and their lack of a homeworld meant they had no heritage or tradition to look back on from their time before their assignment. Furthermore, it is generally understood that agent candidates were either abducted at a very young age or completely brainwashed, as none of them seem to have any recollection of where they come from. The lack of real names also added to this sense of detachment, and most agents likely saw themselves as little more than tools of the Imperium, and later Ostratárchos's Divine Order.

The only connection the warband has to any real culture is their bizarre decision to conduct operations in Old Hellenic, a language which long predates the Imperium and which they cannot possibly have roots in. This is perhaps the only "tradition" the warband maintains which does not have an obvious strategic value, and therefore can be seen as its only source of attachment. Still, the connection is strenuous at best, and likely does little to change the alienated, isolated perspective which most agents are trained to possess.

Off-duty, most field agents tend to be extremely reserved, cold, simple-minded, and antisocial, a stark contrast to the diplomatic personas they present on missions, which are often highly charismatic and outgoing. When they are not under any pressure to lie, agents tend to be blunt and straightforward, seeing no particular value in elaborate words outside of the purely strategic need to convince a political figure or rouse the masses. Most agents do not care for ritual and ceremony, and thus within the unit there is very rarely any of either. Promotions, successful missions, and new campaigns are announced with no particular anticipation or excitement, if they are even announced at all; the deaths of agents likewise is treated only as a practical concern for the current operation, not a personal concern for their fellow agents. The forming of close personal bonds is discouraged and conditioned against; fighting as a coherent unit is seen to them as a scientific matter, as are most aspects of the warband's operation.

As mentioned before, this has also led the Judgement of Kings to hold more or less complete disregard for the lives of those outside their unit. Collateral damage, civilian casualties, and wartime conduct to the Judgement of Kings are also purely scientific and practical concerns, which they see as important only insofar as changing their actions might influence the efficiency of the campaign's completion. If they can easily overtake an enemy by enabling the deaths of millions of innocents, they will do it without question; if such an act would turn the people against their cause, they will simply cause as much efficient destruction as they can within the bounds of public acceptability. It is to them an economic question - the question of whether the benefits to the operation of one more atrocity outweigh the harms. All too often the answer is yes.

## Warband Beliefs

The beliefs of the Judgement of Kings as an independent warband can be split into two sections, pre-fall and post-fall. Before the fall, they were driven by the personal ambitions and ideas of Ostratárchos. After the fall, it is believed they have begun Chaos-worship, though the extent to which they are corrupted remains ambiguous. Since most agents have very little in the way of personal motivation, it is largely understood that most of the convictions of the warband are concentrated at the highest ranks, with their subordinates merely carrying out orders because they feel obligated to.

### Ostratárchos and the Divine Order

Ostratárchos's personal philosophy, which has survived in the *Sayings*, focused on something which he called the "Divine Order." A hyper-rationalist, Ostratárchos was convinced that morality was objective, and universal moral laws, just like the laws of physics, were defined by complicated mathematical equations. This set of formulae, which he called the "Divine Equation," was ordained by the universe itself, and a society which operated in accordance with that ideal law would effectively become a utopia. The return of the entire galaxy to compliance with the universal law he called the "Divine Order" and made his end goal. This led Ostratárchos to despise the power of Chaos as a perversion of the Divine Order, which bent the desires and motivations of men as well as bending the physical laws of the universe themselves. The eradication of Chaos was part of Ostratárchos's perfect world, and he believed that only in the total destruction of all Warp-influence in the galaxy could it be returned to its primal, divine state.

Ostratárchos further held that the Divine Equation, though once followed, had been lost to the inhabitants of the universe due to their own biases and attachments, which prevented them from being fully rational and thus led them to distort the truth, perceiving different rules and blinding themselves to the reality of the world they lived in. The, could only be found, just as any other physical law, through experimentation and empirical observation; only those who shed their worldly attachments and dedicated themselves totally to logic and rationalism would have the right character to pursue this experimentation without distorting the results. It is believed he arrived at this conclusion during his Imperial indoctrination, being derivative of the atheistic, rationalistic Imperial Truth. Initially he believed the Emperor to be the one being which understood this Divine Equation; however, as time went on, it is evident he broke with this view. Ostratárchos cites the Emperor's love of Mankind, Terra, and his sons as evidence that he, too, fell to worldly attachment, and that such attachments had blinded him.

Ostratárchos instead believed that the Judgement of Kings was best suited to the task of finding and imposing the Divine Order. He felt that the intensive indoctrination and depersonalization of the warband's agents made them ideal for the task, as they had no homeworld or family to be attached to and were conditioned to feel virtually nothing about one another. They were order-followers, and this made them perfect for carrying out the universe's unpolluted will. Ostratárchos felt that he, too, was nothing more than an instrument of the cosmos, and seeing as he had been put through the same training as every other agent he was probably correct.

It is for this reason that the Scouring of Nichira was ordered; Ostratárchos was willing to go to great lengths to preserve the idealness of his soldiers, and thus when it appeared they had settled and were making a homeworld of the Nichiran Cluster, he condemned those who wished to stay to their deaths and burned every planet to the ground. Without doing so, he feared they would merely become stewards of the Nichiran worlds, whose desire to protect the planets and their people would overshadow the sacred task before them.

The search for the Divine Order is generally believed to be the motivation for the Judgement of Kings's obsessive state-building activities between the scouring of Nichira and the warband's fall to Chaos. In their long campaigns of setting up and toppling governments and societies across the galaxy, it is believed the Judgement of Kings were gathering data, observing the course of society to eventually determine empirically what models of government were closest to the Divine Order and to eventually uncover the formula for what laws are closest to the universal ones. To Ostratárchos, a society whose laws were in line with the cosmos would be perfect; thus the constant creation of new societies seemed to him the only way to close in on it, through mere trial and error.

### The New Warband and the Ruinous Powers

Following the warband's apparent fall to Chaos, it seems to have largely abandoned the ambitions of its first independent leader. How this came to be is yet unknown; Ostratárchos may have died and been replaced by a new Marshal, or perhaps was corrupted himself by the influences of his lieutenants. Either way, individual marines are known to adorn their armor with Chaotic signs and sometimes use heretical warpcraft in combat. The extent to which they are corrupted is unclear, though; beneath the armor, few marines show signs of significant mutation or corruption, remaining just as eerily similar in appearance as they were in the past.

The dominant theory holds that the warband views Chaos mostly as a means to an end, and is not fully devoted to the worship of any Warp entity. This is reflected in their operations, many of which remain purely political in nature and do not attempt to inspire daemon-worship among the population; the Judgement of Kings has little interest in proselytization.

## Notable Members

Due to operational security procedures of the Judgement of Kings, it cannot be known for certain if two deeds performed by a given agent are not actually two different agents operating under the same codename; similarly, it cannot be known if two different agents are not in fact the same agent operating under a different codename. For this reason, the list of "notable members" will be listed by operation, with each agent assumed to have kept the same codename for the duration of the campaign.

* **Ostratárchos** (*The Marshal*) - The leader of the Judgement of Kings and the agent responsible for its defection from the Imperium. It is unknown who he was before he took control of the unit, other than that he was a ranking agent by the time of the Nichira crash. With his philosophy so focused on detachment and the purging of sentiment, he has understandably spoken little of his past and does not seem to value it; thus, very little of his life outside his leadership of the unit is a mystery. A brilliant commander, Ostratárchos is credited with the Judgement of Kings victory in the Nichiran War, and it is said that in all thirty years of the campaign he never lost a battle he was there to fight in. It is not too unbelievable - he had masterfully employed his unit's abundance of infiltrators to provide a near-constant stream of intelligence on the movements and plans of the enemy, and no level of opsec seemed to protect the Dominion from his prying eyes. Any battle he could not win he simply never fought. To Ostratárchos's human allies, this was nothing short of prescience; his victories eventually led the Nichirans to believe him to be divine, and Ostratárchos welcomed their veneration as an opportunity to bring them to his way of thinking. Under Ostratárchos, the Judgement of Kings recovered from the disaster of the Nichiran accident and returned stronger than ever, with new ambitions and allies. The Ostratárchos of the *Sayings* and the Nichiran War may now be dead; it has been over ten thousand years since his rise to power. His name is, of course, probably a title, being very similar to the Old Hellenic *o stratárchis* for "the marshal," and may have been passed from each successive Marshal of the Judgement of Kings to the next.
* **Noémvrios** (*November*) - A high-ranking agent credited with the final assassination of Orii Nagotov during the Phoraed War; November's was the sixth attempt. Famously carried out the assassination by organizing a concurrent fake operation to draw Nagotov's attention. May or may not be the same agent as another November who served in the Nichiran War; that agent is credited with convincing several Dominion naval officers to defect to the Judgement of Kings's side. Not to be confused with a senior agent of the same name identified on Nephil in the Tandas System.
* **Mellóntikos** (*The Future*) - A field agent who worked extensively with the warband's Nichiran-made battle-automata, Mellóntikos fought in the Bastila campaign and one of his machines is believed to have slain Magos Io-7.
* **Kharádras** (*The Canyon*) - Served as the warband's Chief Apothecary during the Nichiran War and is mentioned several times in the *Sayings*. Not to be confused with a field agent of the same name identified on planet Asumbra during the Gashpar-Ahwai war.
* **Bóreios** (*The North*) - Led the Judgement of Kings operation in Hamzari, serving mostly as a military advisor and reconnaissance leader to the forces of the Imperial Army and the Space Wolves which also participated. Most known for conquering an entire planet in a one-night coup with three marines, and for being called honorless by the Space Wolf Praetor in the system.
* **Ptyários** (*The Shovel*) - The agent responsible for the downfall of the Shuruf government. Created a criminal empire based on black-market trading to starve the local authorities of tax revenue.
* **Okyprios** (*The Cypriot*) - The agent who represents the Judgement of Kings in the Tandas conflict. Serves primarily as a diplomat and advisor to the emperor of the Chaos-worshipping society on the planet Setheka.

## Warband Fleet

Despite being fleet-based, the warband rarely shows its full naval strength. Before the Nichiran War, it is believed they had at least three cruisers in addition to many smaller escort vessels; however, most of their campaigns only required the use of a single frigate or destroyer, as they so rarely deployed on a large scale. It is unknown how they rebuilt their fleet in the aftermath of the warp accident; they commandeered several Nichiran naval vessels after the war, but they have since been sighted using Astartes-class ships.

At least seven unique frigates are recorded belonging to the warband since their reemergence after the Nichiran War. No larger ships have been seen in their service since the sightings of two different Nichiran cruisers, one during the Bastila campaign and one during another purge of Chaos-worshippers in the Lafr System.

## Warband Relics

* **The Seven Faces of Ostratárchos** - A set of seven purpose-built slave-automata which Ostratárchos used to remotely present himself to his subordinates, sometimes sending them individually to different parts of a planet or system. It is said they were custom-designed for him by an ancient artificial intelligence, which he recovered from the Archival Towers on Nichira Prime. Some of these remote machines remain in service even in M42.

## Warband Appearance

### Warband Colours

The warband throughout its history has maintained use of the blue and silver colors of the Alpha Legion, albeit with a consistently dark shade of blue. However, during field operations, agents often remove all heraldic markings from their armor and paint it a different shade. Prior to the Heresy, they would most frequently coat their armor in black, or use black-and-grey disruptive camouflage. Now, when field operatives are not wearing the blue-and-silver, they either wear monotone camouflage to generally match their surroundings, or use a plethora of two- and three-tone disruptive patterns, many of which have been classified by the Imperium since their sightings.

### Warband Iconography

When not unmarked, agents of the Judgement of Kings use the sign of the Alpha Legion, the Lernaean hydra, set upon an orange circle evocative of a rising sun. They also frequently employ a symbol which resembles an eye on shoulderpads, kneepads, and cloth, which is believed to be a unit marking of some type indicating what specialization the agent was trained in. The coded implant patterns which each agent carries as an identifier are also depicted in the shape of a stylized eye.

Since the fall of the warband, agents are also known to make use of universal signs of Chaos, such as the eight-pointed star, on their armor.

## Relations

Though forming permanent relationships is not something the Judgement of Kings goes out of their way to do, sometimes such ties are inevitable.

### Allies

* **Nichirans** (former) - A human people hailing from the Nichiran Cluster, a collection of post-calamity worlds settled during the Dark Age. Known for scattered use of advanced technology, particularly automata, and for their total devotion to the Judgement of Kings. They were the warband's only permanent auxiliaries before being inexplicably abandoned somewhere between the 33rd and 34th millennia.

### Enemies

* **Word Bearers** - The warband's initial enmity toward Chaos led them to several conflicts with elements of the Word Bearers Legion and their human allies throughout the years after the Nichiran War. Although the warband no longer seeks out and destroys Chaos-worshipers with extreme prejudice, the grudges remain.
* **Space Wolves** - Ever since the murders of several Space Wolves at the hands of the warband during the Bastila war, many within the chapter have taken it upon themselves to hunt down and destroy them in vengeance. They see the actions of the Judgement of Kings as betrayal beyond their desertion of the Imperium. The two have come into conflict a few times since, but the Judgement of Kings's reluctance to deploy any serious military forces of their own have often left the Space Wolves frustrated.

## Quotes

### By the Judgement of Kings

#### From *The Sayings of the Marshal*

"*Fascinating, isn't it? They would throw their lives away for me, and they do not even know my name.*"
— Ostratárchos on human auxiliaries
"*For in truth, we are not the arbiters, as your people claim. I do not carry out my brothers' will, nor my legion's, my Primarch's, and certainly not my own. I am an instrument of the divine will, the first will, the one which orchestrated the shifting of the cosmos itself. In the face of such divinity I can name myself neither judge nor jury, only executioner.*"
— Ostratárchos
"*They are altogether pathetic. They look upon me as a god; were I to die, they would surely stand in lines to throw themselves upon the pyre, if it meant even the slightest chance of avenging me. They love me and one another, and when they march to war they fight for both in equal measure. Around the fire, they tell stories from their youth, and sing themselves to sleep with the songs of their homeland... In time, I suspect I will see them as my greatest failure. But they would follow my words to the end, and for that they have their uses.*"
— Ostratárchos on the Nichirans
"*Good and evil are long dead. Every man in his eyes is good, and his enemies evil. We must instead consider whether a man is compliant or deviant. Does he live in accordance with the Divine Law, or does he not? Will his actions, in time, bring the universe closer to order, or further towards chaos? It is not a simple question, but it is the only meaningful one.*"
— Ostratárchos
"*The moment of one's death is an insignificant footnote in the era of his life. If his obligations were unfulfilled, death will not fulfill them; neither will it undo the purity of a life lived in compliance. So no, he did not 'die well.' There is no such thing.*"
— Ostratárchos to King Kanoi-Mono, on a slain soldier
#### From other sources

"*You fight well, but we do not have to fight at all.*"
— Last words of an unidentified captured agent
"*They will kill you all. It is not a matter of if, but when. Put down the rosaries, gentlemen. The Emperor will not protect you. He will only watch. Perhaps He will even cheer them on. No one will help you. But you can help yourselves.*"
— Agent Tsakális to a group of soon-to-be revolutionaries
### About the Judgement of Kings

"*I look upon these decades with nothing but regret in my heart. Surely you know that my words are sincere! Surely you have already seen within my soul! And surely, then, you can already hear every fiber of my being crying out aloud, 'Forgive me! Forgive my trespasses, Lord Hanji, and allow this wayward soul a chance at redemption!' Oh, to have swallowed my pride and knelt as I do now seventeen years ago. Search my heart, burn into it if you must, but do not deny my sincerity!*"
— Taishogun Noriyasu to Ostratárchos, 011.M31
"*Even giants, it seems, are men at heart.*"
— Orii Nagotov
"*I had my reservations about working with your Legion, and you have proven them all correct. We may have won, but it demoralizes me to share the victory with you. Your weapons alone reveal your lack of honor. Do you even carry a blade? No, put the dagger away. I almost feel shame on your behalf.*"
— Jarl Ironmaker of the VI Legion to Agent Bóreios
"*I shudder to imagine what may have transpired had he stood at the side of the Taishogun, and not my own.*"
— King Kanoi-Mono on Ostratárchos