Menagerie - Last Masque of House Orsini: It cannot be said with certainty when or how the Menagerie first came into being, but its earliest recorded activities hail from within the dark recesses and opulent courts of the world of Malfi in the Calixis Sector. The first mentions occur in the years of relative peace that followed the disastrous Reign of Terror and the destruction created by the birth of another deadly cult, the Pilgrims of Hayte.Forced out on the margins of power was House Orsini, a once great and powerful noble family who had had a stranglehold on the Malfian Senate and whose influence ranged wide across the sector. The civil anarchy caused by the Pilgrims of Hayte's Red Solstice had seen them vacillate and their rule found wanting. Unable to sustain such a loss of face, the Orsini's power base crumbled and they barely survived the intervening solar decades. With the house a crippled and failing shadow of its former glory, the Orsini would have done anything to regain their prestige and power. So it was that when an enigmatic stranger came to them, offering glories and truths undreamed of, they proved easy prey.The stranger called himself "the Revelator," and as he insinuated himself into the house, he poisoned the sanity and corrupted the bodies of the family and its servants. To the rest of the world, the doom that had come to House Orsini remained unknown. Then one day invitations began to arrive asking the great and powerful of Malfi to attend a masquerade at the Orsini's remaining palace, where "singular and wondrous entertainments and revelations" would be provided by "The Menagerie of Fate."Such events and diversions among the intrigue-ridden and jaded nobility of Malfi were commonplace, but given the Orsini's fallen status few deigned to attend. Most that did only did so for the chance of scandalous pleasure and mockery of what they assumed would be the dying gasp of the once-great house.What actually occurred at the last masque of House Orsini is sealed under the highest security protocols of the Holy Ordos and the secret records of the great houses involved. However, a casual study of the official record states that scores of the Malfian nobility's lesser scions are recorded as having died unexpectedly that year via accident or illness. Others simply disappear from all records as if they never were.Rumours still abound to this day, Terran centuries later, of the great and the beautiful driven to utter madness or warped into mutating tides of screaming flesh. Stories are told of locked chambers in the cellars and towers of noble estates where abominable things were shut away to live out their lives, clawing desperately at walls, or were put down like rabid dogs by their own kin.In the planetary archive, all mention of House Orsini ceases, and merely to mention their name in some circles is to court bloodshed and vendetta. The burned-out and empty remains of the palace of the Orsini and the district surrounding it stands still as an abandoned and shunned part of the Malfian hive city's spires, a testament that some wishes come with too high a price. This event was the first great show attributed to the revelations of the Menagerie in the Inquisitorial annals, but sadly it was far from the last.