Chaos Knights - Path to Damnation: Where each Loyalist Knight represents a long history of honour and self-sacrifice, the Chaos Knights come from a lineage of horror and depravity. Only through unspeakable atrocities and malefic rituals were these Knightly lines able to be corrupted, and the tally of slaughter has only been added to since their fall.Those who pilot Imperial Knights are brave and noble warriors, drawn from ancestral knightly houses. In their eighteenth standard year, aspirants face the Ritual of Becoming, a strange rite where the mind of the Noble is fused with the Knight's Machine Spirit (artificial intelligence), allowing the pilot to occupy the machine's Throne Mechanicum and control it with their thoughts alone.For a Noble to bond with their Throne Mechanicum is a harrowing process. Only the most worthy individuals -- women and men possessed of formidable physical, mental and even spiritual strength -- are able to survive the Ritual of Becoming. Those who do are forever changed.In the fastness of each Noble house there is a sacred room known as the Chamber of Echoes. Within the Chamber of Echoes the would-be pilot is wired into a Throne Mechanicum and left in isolation so that their worth may be judged.Residing inside the Throne Mechanicum are the gheist-like remnants of each of its former occupants. Every one of these electro-spirits was once a Noble, and it is they who assess the new supplicant's worth. Coursing through the neural sockets directly into the Noble's mind, they are able to pry open the supplicant's innermost thoughts and closely guarded secrets.The ritual lasts long and terrible hours, and those Nobles who are found wanting are utterly consumed by the process. But those who are deemed worthy are bonded eternally with the Throne Mechanicum, and with the digital echoes of their forebears who dwell inside it.The Ritual of Becoming is not only the means by which a Noble becomes a pilot, it is a necessary defence against corruption. A Throne Mechanicum is a shield to prevent the awesome power of a Knight being wielded by one capable of treachery. From the moment they Become, a pilot's thoughts are influenced by their Throne, even when they do not sit upon it.Notions of fealty, obligation and hierarchy are emblazoned at the forefront of the pilot's mind, as is a deep and undivided respect for the Noble's ancestors and their household traditions. Such organic mental conditioning should make treachery impossible, but the will of the Dark Gods is strong, and their corruptions truly insidious.To believe any person is immune to the temptations of Chaos is dangerous arrogance. There are many ways that a Knight may stray from the true path laid out in the Code Chivalric, or else be driven from it by force. Most common are those times when Freeblade Knights -- those who have already forsworn their knightly houses due to some shame or tragedy -- find themselves driven to commit ignoble acts to survive.The ghosts of the Thrones Mechanicum are uncompromising and unforgiving, and the judgemental voices of ancestors long passed will lambaste such a fallen Knight mercilessly. Some pilots take their own lives, or abandon the Throne forever -- to a Noble pilot, there is little difference between these two terrible ends. Those who do not, or worse, cannot, are driven swiftly mad.It is this insanity that the Dark Gods prey upon, claiming the Nobles' lost souls and twisting the Machine Spirits of their mechanical steeds into ravening beasts. In recent years, covens of Warpsmiths have taken to capturing lone Knights and giving them over for torture until this horrible end is achieved.There are even whispered rumours that some Renegade Knights no longer contain living pilots at all, but are instead the unwilling hosts to parasitic possessor Daemons who clad themselves in the war engine's adamantium plates as a mortal warrior might don a suit of armour.Rarer and more terrible are those instances when an entire lance, or even a whole knightly house falls into damnation. During the dark days of the Horus Heresy, this was a tragedy that played out many times, most famously with the once glorious House Devine who fell to the temptations of Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure. With the Cicatrix Maledictum now splitting the galaxy, such wholesale corruption has become a hazard once again.Here, a compromised Sacristan creeps from one Throne Mechanicum to the next, tainting them with daemonic ichor brewed to drive the Knights' pilots to madness and mutation. There a Baron leads a noble crusade to purge a world of Chaos taint, only to become so immersed in blood that he and his followers degenerate into the very berserk beasts they strode out to slay.Many Fallen Nobles have been seduced by the poisoned promises of the Chaos Gods, just as the Traitor Legions were before them. In some cases, entire Iconoclast or Infernal houses devote themselves to a single deity. They daub that god's sigils upon their Knight suits, raise profane temples and idols to their chosen patron and dedicate the souls of those they slaughter to their empyric master.Others are pantheistic in their worship, with individual Fallen Nobles choosing different patron gods to the remainder of their household, or offering dark prayers to whichever deity they believe will aid them in any given moment.The Chaos Gods are vast entities whose gaze spans all of time and space, and to catch their fleeting regard for even an instant requires deeds so ghastly that they will stain their perpetrator's soul forevermore. Yet for those damned few who earn the gods' blessings the rewards can be great.Suddenly flourishing psychic abilities, boons of physical might or unholy fortitude, even the sudden conjuration of daemonic armies to fight alongside the chosen Noble -- such are the gifts of earthly power for those who sell their eternal soul to the Chaos Gods.The Inquisition's agents have gone to great pains in their efforts to suppress reports of traitorous knightly houses, for the mere notion of such loyal warriors turning Traitor is every bit as horrifying as the concept of Renegade Space Marines. Yet more Knights fall with every passing Terran year, and their devastating rampages have become difficult to conceal.