Introduction:

+++ Report to Honored Inquisitor Leander Cydnor, Ordo Hereticus +++  

At a rendezvous point within the Segmentum Ultima, I was invited to parley with the honored sisters of the Order Of The Sanguine Thorn, a minor order of the Adepta Sororitas chamber militant. Since M39.510, the order has served as the military guard for the Ocularian Schema, a hermetic sect within the Ordo Hereticus. The Inquisitor-Monks of the Schema and their Rassophores are largely occupied with perpetuating the fearsome art of witch-seeking using the Emperor’s Tarot, a ritualistic psychoactive divination technique that determines the quarry to be set upon by the sisterhood.    

The order is quartered aboard the Blackship “Agonia Perpetua, where roughly 750 Sisters maintain a cathedrum, armory and reliquarium under the administrative command of Prioress Ithell Sanguinata and her appointed Canonesses. Much of the Prioress’s time is spent organizing logistics to dispatch witchseeking parties on behalf of the Inquisitorial cloister, as well as managing the needs of the segmentum’s Ecclesiarchy for military strength in their faithbringing duties to the Emperor’s subjects. 

The order distinguished themselves with their role in the Purgation of Gatha (M40.408). After years of internecine conflict between rival mining clans, the victorious syndicate attempted to extort the planetary governance for leverage in their negotiation over generational mining contracts. The assassination of several Imperial officials led to fierce reprisal against the manufactorum slums, which caused open revolt culminating in the seizure and ransom of a rare mineral extraction site. The occupation held for months against the local Planetary Defense Force, but was ultimately broken by the arrival of a battalion of the Sanguine Thorn led by the young Canoness Atama Sortilegia, accompanied by two oathbound Knight-Armigers, and a fearsome siege engine known as “The Ecstasy Of Martyrdom” – an heavy ordinance platform equipped with a Demolisher battlecannon, adorned with devotional ikons and effigies of the order and brutal penance-constructs.   

After mere hours, the Sisters breached the fortifications and rounded up the surrendering militants, breaking their leaders upon the wheel and burning the rest alive upon a pyre. The Sisterhood and the assigned Legate Inquisitor Jolyon then conducted a vicious sweep through syndicate-associated hab-blocs, interrogation during which revealed that a prominent land-owning families within the ruling caste of the planetary governance had spent years funding the cartel war to secure bribes beyond the tithing of the Ecclesiarchy. This resulted in the purging of four full bloodlines of aristocratic families for their hand in treason, conducted in the public square of the manufactorum slum – which to this day is the site of an Ecclesiarchical Mission concerned with reinstilling the value of toil to the masses.   

The Sanguine Thorn’s standard hangs above a balsam-and-incense-perfumed ossuary and proclaims the grim aphorism “There Is No Sainthood Without Death”, attributed to the late Canoness Helene Immaculata. It is carried into battle along with other ikons and holy relics among battalions of Sisters armored in claret and black plate, accented with gold and carved bone inlays. Sisters who undergo the ecstatic rite of the Zephyrim clad in black armor with pure white cloaks. Canonesses are often gifted bone-white artificier armor and relic weapons such as anointed power lances and chain-polearms.  In addition to ritual scarification and tattooing as part of their acculturation to the order, Novitiates take on the discipline of the cilice for the first several years, to allow them to reflect upon the passion of Sanguinius and the agony of his martyrdom, for which the sisterhood holds special reverence. Upon taking their solemn vows, they are presented with the bones of their fallen, engraved with prayers to the Emperor and consecrated in perfumed oil.  The skulls of these fallen Sisters are often repaired with golden joinery and adorn the votive altars of their armored vehicles.  

The Ocularian Schema is of great interest to the Inquisition – their experimentation with the entheogenic trance-states used in their cartomantic practice has potential for greater instrumentalization, but also courts the potential for witchery. Their distrust of various other ideological tendencies (including our own) within the Inquisition naturally welcomes suspicion upon them in return…  

+++ Ankala Gyre, Legate Inquisitor, aboard Navis vessel Bellonaire, 644.M41 +++