Chaos Knights - Chaos Knight Transformations: It is not only the pilots, but the Knight suits themselves that are warped by the corrupting power of Chaos. Daemonic energies course through the weapon systems and ancient circuitry of these dread war machines, and their tortured Machine Spirits (artificial intelligences) growl like wounded beasts. Over time, even the armour plates and bristling armaments of the Chaos Knight are mutated beyond recognition.Chaos corruption seeded into a Throne Mechanicum spreads into the rest of the Knight like rot. Machine Spirits that drive the Knight's massive actuators are bent to the insane will of the pilot and the spectral inhabitants of the Throne. No longer does the war engine march with bold and purposeful strides, its every colossal movement the result of generations of discipline and training within the Noble houses.Instead, the Chaos Knight lopes forwards with predatory haste, eager to drink in the deaths of its next band of foes. Gone is the imperative to protect its allies, to form the immovable centre of a defensive line or the unstoppable speartip of a combined charge.The Chaos Knight's Machine Spirit cares nothing for those alongside whom it fights -- whether they live or die is of little concern, so long as it can engage in rampant slaughter.Ancient mechanical joints that had been ritually oiled for scores of centuries now spark and crackle as they are driven into motion. Plasma Reactors roar with fury as they are fired into overdrive to supply the Chaos Knights with the immense power they need to loose their wrath.Gouts of scintillating flame burst from exhaust ports, scorching the surrounding metal with their jagged tongues and warping the very air around the Knights' immense carapaces. As the Chaos Knights advance, they tilt their Ion Shields to the fore, the better to ward off the enemy's incoming fire before they charge headlong into the fray.Gone are concerns of strategic forethought or target prioritisation, and in their place is the predatory desire to wreak indiscriminate slaughter, to torment those too weak to fight back, or to claim the most magnificent trophy from the enemy in the name of personal glory.If a Loyalist Knight is akin to its Noble's valiant steed, Chaos Knights are closer to rabid warhounds, their Fallen Noble pilots fighting constantly to retain dominance over their hate-filled war engine and force it to obey their will.Drooling blood or acidic oils, ocular lenses burning with murder-lust and hulls wreathed in miasmal fumes or crackling hellfires, it is clear to all who look upon Chaos Knights that whatever nobility resided within these deranged war engines, it has long soured into hate and madness.Some bodies within the Imperium stringently resist the notion that Chaos Knights could possibly exist, and more than one internecine doctrinal conflict has erupted upon Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Worlds whose Tech-magi found themselves divided on this point.Regardless of such wilful self-delusion, the Ordo Hereticus has produced grimoires in which war engines have been declared Questor Traitoris in High Gothic and subsequently redesignated. In part this is necessary because Fallen Nobles soon abandon the age-old doctrines of armament obeyed by Loyalist houses, choosing instead to arm their Knights with whatever combinations of weaponry best suit their preferred methods of murder.Chaos-tainted Armigers are known as War Dogs. The lightest walkers of the Fallen Noble houses, they are also the most wanton in their savagery. They seek out unprotected flanks and isolated enemies, and crush whatever resistance can be brought to bear against them.Questoris Pattern Knights are reclassified as Knights Despoiler. Making up the bulk of many Iconoclast and Infernal houses, their thick armour and punishing arrays of weaponry allow them to wreak untold havoc on any battlefield. Often it is the pilot of a Knight Despoiler who reigns as the despot of a Fallen house, directing the house's murderous campaigns and charging at the head of each brutal assault.Corrupted Dominus Pattern Knights are designated as Knights Tyrant, and it is these who are most likely to have fallen to Chaos in the throes of endless combat. Practically Titan-class in size and resilience, it is the task of entire armies to fell such a towering engine of destruction.The longer a Chaos Knight has been corrupted, the more physically warped it becomes. Internal mechanisms burst through its outer carapace, winding together to form rows of irregular spikes. Gun muzzles sprout teeth and gauntleted fists curl into cruel claws.In extreme cases the structure of the towering machine contorts into new configurations, legs bending backwards on mutated joints, Vox grille splitting into a snarling maw. Known as "Abhorrent-class Knights," these deformed engines are nightmares of metal and flesh. They lope hungrily towards wherever the fighting is thickest, annihilating all before them with streams of gunfire and brutal swings of their close-quarters armaments.So twisted are these Abhorrent-class Knights -- both in form and spirit -- certain Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors have speculated they may have been created from STC machines corrupted by the Dark Mechanicum.As grotesque as the exterior of a Chaos Knight becomes, the cockpit where the pilot sits enthroned is even more horrific. In many Knights, the Fallen Noble is fused bodily to the Throne Mechanicum, their flesh melding with the surrounding metal, their neurons parasitised by manifold dendritic relays. As the mechanical suit around them absorbs ever-more corrupting psychic energy, the pilot is physically warped into a being of pure Chaos.Some are absorbed completely by their Throne Mechanicum. Their body peels open like a rotten carcass, forming a cage of splayed ribs and exposed organs inside which the next pilot can be seated. Over multiple generations, such corrupted Thrones take on the appearance of a morbid rose, with layer upon layer of fleshy fronds sprouting from them, each with a dim portion of the original pilot's sentience remaining.Others pilots devolve into Chaos Spawn while atop their Thrones. Transformed into amorphous beasts comprised of horribly mutated muscle and bone, they thrash in a state of abject insanity. Yet a portion of their consciousness remains held within the Throne, allowing them to still control their Knight suit and experience the true horror of their own existence.