Twisted Trueborn with Blaster
Ottawa
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This is the tale of the founding of my custom Adepta Sororitas order; the Order of the Bone Altar.
The Order in brief: The Order of the Bone Altar is small and relatively young, having split off from the Order of the Valorous Heart in the late 41st Millennium. Despite their aloof temperament and their morbid tradition of carving trinkets out of the bones of their dead, they are noted for their concern for civilian lives and their contempt for the "kill them all and let the Emperor sort them out" mindset so prevalent among the Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition. When they launch a crusade or expedition, they do not go in search of foes to destroy, but people to rescue. Their homeworld is the desert planet Palmyra, in the Eastern Fringe.
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THE LADY OF BONES
She came from the Salt Wastes—alone and on foot. She was young and her clothes marked her as an off-worlder. Her lips were as cracked as the earth and her skin was badly sunburned. She collapsed just as she reached the edge of the encampment. Her only word before falling unconscious was “water”. The refugees debated whether they had any to spare for a stranger. In the end, curiosity won out. Four people each poured a minuscule part of their daily allotment down her throat, if only because they wanted to know who she was and where she came from. They searched her for valuables as “payment” for the water, but only found a few coins, an empty bolt pistol, a fleur-de-lys pendant, and a small canvas bag containing what looked like fragments of human bones. The latter, they allowed her to keep; Emperor knew there was no shortage of bones on Palmyra nowadays, so why she held onto those in particular was a mystery.
She was carried into old Azran’s tent, where she fully regained consciousness shortly after nightfall. Her first reflex upon waking up was to make sure her bag of bone fragments was still with her. Anything else seemed like a secondary concern.
“Who are you?” asked Azran point-blank.
“I am Leonora,” she introduced herself, as if this were a meaningful answer to the many-layered question. “Thank you for taking me in. Are you a leader of sorts?”
Azran shrugged. “Closest we got, I s’pose. Didn’t ask to be in charge; they left me no choice in the matter.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’ve got the camp buzzing with excitement. We haven’t seen a lot of strangers lately. ‘Specially from off-world.”
“No, can’t imagine you have,” said Leonora, sitting up. “Your people must be under the impression that the Imperium has abandoned them.”
“They have abandoned us!” replied Azran with sudden vehemence. “They come far too late, when almost everyone’s been eaten… they kill the bugs from orbit by scorching half the planet… and then they just go. We tell them: give us water, give us food! Bugs ate everything green and even drained the whole damn ocean! But they tell us it ain’t their problem anymore and we ought to be grateful. They got other bugs to kill elsewhere. Tell me, what does it matter that they got us rid of the bugs? They bought us a year or two, maybe. At the rate we’re dying, there sure ain’t gonna be another generation.”
Leonora listened to the tirade patiently, then spoke, her voice measured and full of confidence. “The Imperium at large may have abandoned Palmyra. But rest assured that the Emperor has not. I come in His name. There is still water on your planet that the Tyranids haven’t stolen. He will show me where.”
A wild hope surged in Azran’s heart, but he did his best to suppress it. This was how swindlers and false prophets got to you; they told you what you wanted to hear.
“The Emperor, you say? He will show you?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes.”
“And no one else? Pray tell, what makes you so special, off-worlder?”
“I’ve dedicated my life to the Emperor,” said Leonora. “I belong—I used to belong to the Adepta Sororitas; the Sisters of Battle. Order of the Valorous Heart. Shortly after I passed my last trial of faith, I began having dreams… prophetic dreams. I saw a dying world on the Eastern Fringe. Vast plains of sand and bones under the light of the Red Widow star. Millions of refugees praying for water. The Emperor told me to take the relic bones from my holy order’s Tomb of the Unknown Sister and bring them to the dying world. The bones will show the way to water.”
“The bones in your bag, I assume.”
“Correct.”
“And your order just let you borrow their sacred bones?”
She licked her cracked lips. “Ah—no. I, um, took them without permission. Stole them, if you will. I imagine I’ve been tried, excommunicated and possibly sentenced to the pyre by now. But I have faith that I’m doing the Emperor’s bidding. This world is exactly as I saw it in my dreams.”
Azran grunted. “You find water so far?”
“No. I only just got here. I was left on the surface by a water-smuggler, and I followed the bones for three days and three nights to reach your encampment. I’m here to tell you that you will find groundwater, not far from here. You only need to dig where I tell you.”
“Why should we believe you?”
Leonora’s gaze did not waver. “What have you got to lose?”
“Let me tell you what you’ve got to lose,” replied Azran, jabbing a thick finger at her. “If you are a peddler of false hope—if we dig and find nothing—my people will tear you limb from limb… and possibly eat you. And I won’t be able to stop them, even if I wanted to.”
A smirk appeared on Leonora’s face. “Well, then, you’ll get fresh meat. So I’ll at least have brought you something.” She reclined on her cot to return to sleep.
At dawn, Azran called for strong volunteers, promising them an extra ration of water for the day. Five were picked among the many who presented themselves. Half the camp crowded around Leonora and watched in silence as she scattered the bones on the sand and peered at them for a minute, her lips moving soundlessly as if in concentration or prayer. At last she gathered the bones and confidently led Azran and the digging party south, into the hills.
They walked for the better part of the morning. Several times, Leonora stopped to scatter the bones and read them again. Whether she was truly leading them to water was anyone’s guess, but she did have an uncanny ability to predict where any bug stragglers were hiding in ambush. Every time they were attacked, their pickaxes were ready to meet the foe. Not a single man was lost to the bugs, and that alone was nothing short of miraculous.
After her seventh reading of the bones, Leonora tapped the hard ground with her foot. “This is where you will dig,” she declared. “At dusk, you will find water.”
And so they dug and dug under the Red Widow’s merciless heat. Even with the extra water rations, their throats were parched. The shadows grew long. Just as the scarlet sun dipped beyond the horizon, a great cry arose from the men at the bottom of the pit.
“Water! Water!”
“The Lady of Bones was right!”
“Praise the Emperor!”
Azran gazed at Leonora in wonder. “You may have saved my people.”
“The Emperor, with me as His instrument, saved your people,” Leonora corrected him humbly, gazing down at the rapidly-filling new well. “There will be enough water not only to drink, but also to grow some crops, if you are frugal. I have seen your crops in my visions. I have seen the village that you will build here—the first village of a reborn Palmyra.”
“We will name it after you.”
“Please do not,” said Leonora. “All I ask of you is a week’s worth of food, a gun with ammunition, and any means of transportation you can spare. There are other camps out there in dire need of water.”
The next morning, a rifle strapped to her back, the Lady of Bones rode out into the desert on a motorcycle. In Azran’s camp, all drank the new water to her success as they watched her disappear in the distance, trailing a cloud of dust.
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TIMELINE OF THE ORDER OF THE BONE ALTAR
741.M41 – The Devastation of Palmyra
A tendril of Hive Fleet Behemoth sets upon the isolated world of Palmyra and quickly overwhelms the planetary defenses. By the time the Imperial Navy arrives and destroys the Tyranids from orbit, the once-verdant Palmyra has been reduced to a wasteland, with only 15 million survivors out of a pre-invasion population of 1.3 billion. Many worlds away, recently-initiated Sister Leonora of the Order of the Valorous Heart has dreams of vast plains of sand and bones where refugees pray desperately for water.
742.M41 – The Lady of Bones
Sister Leonora lands on Palmyra with a set of relic bones stolen from her order. By reading the bones as they fall on the ground, she divines the location of many underground lakes, saving throngs of people from thirst and starvation.
744.M41 – Palmyra Saved
Two years after the arrival of Leonora, the falling population of Palmyra has stabilized at 8 million and civilization is being rebuilt. Leonora herself has become a quasi-religious figure, variously known as the Lady of Bones, the Water Diviner and the Osteomancer. Though many want to meet her, she remains elusive, always moving from place to place wherever her relic bones lead her. She gathers around her a following of orphan girls, to whom she teaches the arts of warfare, healing and osteomancy. Once all Palmyrans have enough water to drink, Leonora embarks on a new mission: exterminate all Tyranid stragglers still roaming the planet.
747.M41 – The Water Tyrant
A local warlord by the name of Brucken wrests control of several wells and imposes a hefty ‘water tax’ on the population of the area. Any who oppose his iron-fisted rule are denied water. Within a fortnight, Leonora and her young followers ride out of the desert and crush Brucken’s ragtag gang of thugs and bandits. Brucken himself is locked up in a cage and left to die of thirst in the sun. Leonora decrees that such will be the fate of any who would seek to monopolize water for profit or power.
750.M41 – Palmyra Reborn
This year marks the founding of the first planetary government since the Tyranid invasion, as well as the opening of a space port so that commerce with the rest of the Imperium may resume. A village elder by the name of Azran is elected governor, in no small part thanks to his revered status as the first community leader to welcome Leonora on Palmyra. Leonora herself does not get involved in government; rumor has it that she is building a great temple of bone in the desert with her followers.
752.M41 – A New Order
A squad of the Order of the Valorous Heart tracks down Leonora to Palmyra, intent on bringing her to justice for desertion and relic theft. Though they do not announce their arrival, they find Leonora already waiting for them at the landing site, alone and unarmed. When her work on Palmyra comes to light, the Ecclesiarchy is forced to acknowledge that Leonora is truly guided by the Emperor, and grants sanction to her newly-founded Order of the Bone Altar. From this point on, the new order is supplied with all the standard combat gear of the Adepta Sororitas.
757.M41 – The Defense of Tartarus VI
With no Tyranids left to kill on Palmyra, Leonora launches her Order’s first off-planet expedition, using osteomancy to divine where their help is most needed. Two hundred Sisters in bone-colored armor successfully defend the penal colony on asteroid Tartarus VI from a Drukhari raid, with help from both the guards and convicts. Many outside observers are puzzled as to how the Order knew that the asteroid was about to be attacked, or why some of the Emperor’s holiest servants would risk their lives to protect hardened criminals, but Leonora and her forces return to Palmyra without a word of explanation.
782.M41 – The Evacuation of Myler’s Refuge
Leonora is deeply troubled by a bone reading. She makes arrangements for her succession as head of the Order, empties the Order’s coffers to charter a score of high-capacity transport ships, then personally leads a small battleforce to the peaceful, prosperous world of Myler’s Refuge. A mere day after the arrival of the fleet, a vast Necron host awakens beneath the surface of Myler’s Refuge and begins retaking the planet from the human interlopers. The Sisters of Battle tirelessly defend the planetary capital’s space port for twelve hours while the civilians board the chartered ships. The evacuation saves over a million lives, but Leonora is incinerated by the avatar of an ancient star-god during the final stages of the battle. Fragments of her charred bones are returned to Palmyra, to serve in future osteomantic readings.
916.M41 – The Erentas Incident
The Order of the Bone Altar joins other factions of the Ecclesiarchy in putting down an uprising of Chaos cults on Erentas Prime, under the supreme leadership of Lord Inquisitor Volrecht of the Ordo Hereticus. As civil war engulfs the planet, Volrecht prepares to launch an Exterminatus strike to wipe out both the innocent and the guilty from high orbit, but Sister Superior Gaiel of the Order of the Bone Altar summarily executes him via bolt round to the back of the head before the order can be carried out. The incident nearly sparks an all-out war between the Order of the Bone Altar and their Ecclesiarchy allies. When it emerges that Volrecht had personally doctored intelligence reports to inflate the cultists’ true numbers tenfold and justify the use of excessive force, the matter is quietly dropped and all evidence of wrongdoing by either party is expunged from the record. The uprising is quelled via conventional warfare at the loss of only six percent of Erentas Prime’s population. Though her spur-of-the-moment decision saved billions, Gaiel still volunteers to serve a stint as a Sister Repentia as penance.
992.M41 – Return of the Great Devourer
The return of the Tyranids to Palmyra is foreseen in Saint Leonora’s holy bones. A year to the day after the reading of the bones, a tendril of Hive Fleet Kraken makes planetfall, only to be blown to bits by four million landmines and a massive artillery barrage.
999.M41-present – Noctis Aeterna
The Cicatrix Maledictum tears the Imperium in two, cutting off Palmyra from the light of the Emperor. The osteomancers of the Order of the Bone Altar are relieved to find that their bone readings, though harder to make, remain accurate. The Order joins Roboute Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade to help fight off daemonic incursions and evacuate planets that are beyond saving. Their efforts tend to focus on backwater worlds that have been forsaken by the other major players of the Imperium.
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