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They are the Green Templar: hunters of forbidden relics, executioners of knowledge, and the hammer that keeps the Dark Age of Technology buried forever. Successors of the Salamanders, they strike where the Imperium dares not tread, leaving nothing alive that could betray what they hunt.

FINAL COGITATOR ENTRY OF CAPTAIN SÉBASTIEN YORKE:

They came aboard without ceremony.

No warning chime. No challenge from the augur decks. One moment the Gloria Invictus drifted on idle in Imperial voidspace, her holds full and her ledgers clean. The next, the boarding alarms screamed like dying things.

Green armor. Not Salamanders green—colder, somehow. Bone-white pauldrons marked with a templar cross. Two chapters merged into one impossible purpose. I could only guess who these Green Templar really were.

I invoked my Warrant.

“I am a Rogue Trader—Sébastien Yorke—of the Imperium,” I said, forcing steel into my voice. “By the authority of the High Lords of Terra—”

They did not answer.

They advanced, deck by deck, methodical, unhurried. Not butchers. Not raiders. Auditors. Sealing bulkheads, marking crates, tagging cogitator cores with red sigils that pulsed once and went dark.

My armsmen fired. Some died screaming in fire that clung to flesh and armor alike. Others vanished under bolter fire so precise it felt personal. No warnings. No demands.

Only collection.

They found the vaults.

I followed them, flanked by my Seneschal and what remained of my honor guard, shouting words like talismans: Warrant. Sanction. Cold Trade. I told them the artifacts were catalogued, secured, studied under Mechanicus charter. I told them I had saved worlds with the technologies they now sealed away.

A warrior turned toward me. His helm lenses burned like coals.

“You have saved nothing,” he said.

That was the only sentence any of them spoke.

They brought the seized relics to the docking bay—xenos engines wrapped in null-shrouds, crystalline cogitators older than the Imperium, weapons that hummed with sleeping suns. My life’s work. My legacy.

And then Vulkan He’stan arrived.

I recognized him at once. You don’t trade the stars for three centuries without learning the faces of legends. The Forgefather walked among my cargo in silence, the Primarch's Spear mag-locked at his side, his gauntlet brushing dust from devices that had cost me entire systems to acquire.

Hope flared in my chest. Fool that I was.

“Lord,” I said. “You see—this is sanctioned. This is lawful. This knowledge—”

He stopped before a device I had never dared activate. He studied it for a long moment. Then he shook his head.

Just once.

No condemnation. No command.

He turned and left my ship.

I understood.

The Green Templar waited until his vessel cleared the hangar before they began the purge.

They did not destroy the artifacts first. They destroyed the records. My ledgers burned. My cogitator banks were slagged. Servitors dismantled into wet meat and scrap.

I was seized, restrained, pulse-bound—not by mercy, but by necessity. The Apothecary moved among the wounded, scanning every survivor, preparing his tools. He would ensure no trace of forbidden knowledge survived.

When he finally approached, I would've sworn I saw the disgust through his helmet as he recognized what was buried within me—the source of my long life.

For the briefest of moments he studied it—buried, ancient, alien.

The narthecium unfolded. Pressure. Heat. A wet shock. Gone.

Four hundred years collapsed in seconds.

The Apothecary crushed it in his gauntlet.

Strength drained. Vision dimmed. The last thing I saw: green armor moving past me, methodical, unconcerned, as the charges finished counting down on the remaining vaults.

I had thought the technology kept me alive.

I was wrong.

It only postponed the moment I became unacceptable.

☆☆☆

PERSONAL LOG: SEREN KORRAN, STORMRAVEN PILOT — DAY 47, ALPHA RIM PATROL

I did not look at the ship as it burned.

Hands steady on the Stormraven controls, the engine hum drowned out the void-detonations behind us. Auspex returns flared and died as Sébastien Yorke’s vessel came apart, compartment by compartment, exactly as planned.

The Forgefather stood behind me, silent.

I knew—everyone in the forge-clans knew—that he despised the Green Templar. Not for zeal, but for certainty. They were a tool he would never claim, only point toward the rim and loose like a blade.

Because they were the best.

No one hunted forbidden tech more thoroughly. No one left questions.

I had seen the cargo. Xenos engines bound in prayer-chains. Devices whose light bent the air. Knowledge that could have fed worlds, healed atmospheres, ended wars I had already fought.

Vulkan He’stan inspected only what he must.

Human craft. Provenance traced. Lineage confirmed.

Anything born of alien thought he did not touch. Anything that might have helped all mankind—destroyed.

That was the limit of his mercy.

The Promethean Creed teaches fire tempers. That what survives is stronger. I had repeated those words a thousand times on Nocturne.

But there was no tempering here.

Only selection.

Only annihilation.

As we cleared the blast radius, the ship’s death registered on my displays. A brief flare. Wreckage scattered. Then nothing.

No life signs.

No records.

I said nothing.

That is my shame.

The Forgefather remained silent behind me, a presence like cooled steel.

He had done what he could.

The rest, he left to monsters.

☆☆☆

AFTER-ACTION RECORD: GT-RIM-4471

Subject: Void-vessel Gloria Invictus — Cold Trade contamination confirmed.

Disposition: All artifacts, records, and biological carriers purged. Vessel expunged. No recoverable legacy remains.


Somewhere in the void, as my life faded and the Green Templar disappeared into the dark, I thought I heard a whisper of my name—but no one would ever speak it again.