Stigmartus - History: The origin and history of the Stigmartus are both shrouded in mystery despite the best efforts of the Inquisition and Astra Militarum intelligence operatives. What little is known comes from the interrogation of captured Stigmartus officers.All that is known for certain is that the history of the Stigmartus begins on the wretched Death World Khazant. Khazant was a world ravaged by perpetual war long before the coming of the Achilus Crusade.What scant historical records survived the onset of the Jericho Reach's "Age of Shadows" indicate the hereditary nobility of Khazant began an irreversible slide into decadence shortly after the disappearance of Lord Sector Designate Masimat Helicos in a devastating Warp Storm in 416.M36.Without a central Imperial authority to enforce order, Khazant's noble houses were free to give in to their ambitions. Political assassinations led to blood feuds. Blood feuds led to civil war. In less than a standard century Khazant was a planet-wide warzone.Khazant's Ecclesiarchy, the last weakening pillar of Imperial authority, shattered under the weight of noble hubris, splitting into innumerable factions each loyal to a different bloodline. The Imperial Creed was perverted to serve the needs of the nobility, each warlord claiming themselves inheritors of the God-Emperor's divine authority.In a few short generations the warlords were considered divine beings, supplanting the Master of Mankind as a focus for worship. By the advent of the Achilus Crusade, the God-Emperor was all but forgotten upon Khazant.Millennia of war left Khazant a withered husk of a world: her mines abandoned, her fields barren, her people weak and broken. In the end, the victors were those few warlords who managed to secret away a modicum of Khazant's dwindling resources. The rest starved in their fortress keeps.Faced with the realisation that Khazant could no longer support their ambitions, the remaining warlords banded together under an uneasy truce and turned their collective gaze outward. A fleet of voidships, their hulls long ago gutted to provide materials and technology for the civil war, were hastily repaired.Taking advantage of Khazant's position along the Araqiel Main, the warlords remade themselves into corsairs, raiding neighbouring systems and bringing new resources to their world.By the time of the Achilus Crusade, Khazant was a world to be reckoned with. Made wealthy by centuries of plunder, her population reinvigorated by slaves captured from across the Reach, her orbital shipyards constructing powerful vessels of war, Khazant was a prize Lord Militant Tiber Achilus could not ignore.The Lord Militant claimed the world in 782.M41 after a hard-won campaign. However, as Achilus moved to consolidate Imperial power in the region, the displaced warlords fled into the Charon Stars to lick their wounds.Within five standard years, elements of the Khazantine warlord fleet returned, deploying the first regiments of the Stigmartus across the crusade front. Taking advantage of the Lord Militant Achilus' untimely death, this highly organised Chaos Cult army broke the Imperium's hold upon several worlds. The Cellebos Warzone was born.