The Dreadwing Sacristy
The Dreadwing Sacristy was the personal sanctum and armoury of the Dreadwing of the Dark Angels Legion during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy, held aboard the Invincible Reason.[1a]
Despite being on a ship that was better known for its unasked questions, it was renowned as a repository for the deadliest arcana to have survived Old Earth’s Age of Strife unused.[1a]
Overview
The Sacristy was held deep within the Invincible Reason, found beyond long flame-lit passages and subtle mazes of corridors that served to turn the uninitiated from the sanctum of the Dreadwing situated at its heart, where the forbidden threshold to the Sacristy stood. The Sacristy itself was immensely well secured; any Knight or Master of the Dreadwing who deigned to enter would first require him to place a gauntleted palm to a scanning fascia plate, where a watery green light would dapple his war-plate as scanning lasers squirmed beneath his fingers. The embedded electronics would then trill with sequential confirmations as they read the hexagrammic runes ingrained upon the gauntlet's ceramite. Once affirmed, the fascia would slide back to reveal an ivory keypad, which was then shunted forward, requiring the Dark Angel to punch in a cryptex sequence that would be re-randomised hourly. This would be followed by a series of increasingly reverberative clunks as bolts were disengaged, followed by pops, fizzles and sub-audial whines as stasis fields, kill-haloes and repulsor locks powered down, whereupon the threshold would finally open to the Astarte.[1a]
The Sacristy itself was a massive chamber filled with a fog of cryo-vapors, hardened by a series of thick, adamantium-ribbed columns which buttressed the chamber at regular intervals, braced and girded as if to survive an Exterminatus-level event: the chamber could withstand the destruction of the Invincible Reason herself. Ropes of cabling snaked across the deck plates, concealed under coolant mists to feed the energy demands of stasis chambers, energy fields and magnetic locks that protected the myriad of vaults present within. The Emperor’s appointed guardians were determined to safeguard His secrets, even from those who had been entrusted to venture this far. It was circles within circles, secrets within secrets, an endless spiral that a functional immortal could walk his whole life and never see the end of. Even the Mechanicum did not know what terrible secrets had been locked away by the Dreadwing in chambers such as these. If the machine-priests of Mars should ever seek to turn against the Emperor’s goals of galactic unity, then it would be the weapons of the Dark Angels that would bring them low.[1a]
Within its multiply secured and ident-locked vaults could be found man-portable atomics, gene-targeted bio-weaponry, unstable plasma devices, singularity drivers, psionic phages – weapons that were so powerful, so cataclysmic in their intent, that the Emperor had deemed them too dangerous for the bulk of His forces to be allowed even to know of their existence. To His First Legion alone had He entrusted the secrets of such relic weaponry. With the arsenal that He had entrusted to their keeping, the Dark Angels had at their disposal the firepower to usher in a new Old Night should they, or He, so desire it.[1a]
Yet despite its’ namesake, the Sacristy of the Dreadwing was not solely home to the terrible armaments of its keepers. Secret Armoriums belonging to certain orders millitant of the Hekatonystika, along with the other wings of the Hexagrammaton were also held within the chamber. As suffice to say nobody could store a secret arsenal aboard the Invincible Reason without the complicity of the Dreadwing.[1a]
Deeper within the chamber were highly guarded vaults whose secrets were beyond even Dreadbringers. These baroque and heavily warded adamantium tombs, akin to a Dreadnought’s armoured sarcophagus, only considerably larger and more secure. They were further protected by many discrete energy barriers, binharic runes and warding sigils in all six letter forms of the hexagrammaton, and bound in heavy duty chains and padlocked. Upon their surfaces’ a warning script was written in the grim lettering of the Dreadwing and the Ironwing, for these tombs demanded both a Forge-Wright of the latter and an Officer of the former to unlock.[1a]
Further still, should the vaults’ systems ever sense the regard of a passerby, their containment pods would emit a binharised shriek of pure, mindlocked insanity, the tomb’s heavy doors forcing against the outer padlock. So horrific was this shriek that even the psyche of a Astartes who’s fear response was carved from them as a Neophyte would feel it go straight for the butchered endings that the Legion’s chirurgeons had left in their place. It was known that not even those of the Legion Librarius were able to resist such a horrific mental assault.[1a]
The Armourium of the Order of Santales
One of the most terrible of arsenals beyond that of even the Dreadwings’ purview, owned by the esoteric Order of Santales, the armorium was composed of a huge adamantium vault whose doors were as ornate as any gateway to a prehistoric city of the dead. The metal was carved with santales vines, the rendered creepers climbing over and over one another in an endless, chaotic spiral. It shimmered with condensation, despite the deep cold, as though whatever was interred within emitted its own almost undetectable heat.[1a]
To enter this bastion, a Dreadbringer would need to present a thick iron key and insert it in a concealed lock. Upon doing so any psykers present would feel an unpleasant itching at the back of their minds, a static tingle that was as distinct from the probing of a true, living psyker as the touch of a servitor was from that of a human being, as the authorisation systems to the vault were backed up by some manner of psi-arcana, even though the Emperor himself had proscribed the use of such dread technologies well before the advent of the Great Crusade. These systems would probe the licence and intent of those who would enter and once satisfied, the vault would emit a flat, atonal chime, whereupon its doors would open.[1a]
Within its walls were a vast myriad of imprisoned Psykarkana[2] weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind’s mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae. There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity’s apogee and never to be repeated since: neural whips, ionophoric eradicators, personality phages, Gemynd blasters, glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside, along with a wide variety of psionic beam, bolter, shotgun, rotary cannon and flamer designs were held among countless other tools and hefty stocks of null-munitions. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind’s supremacy over the laws of physics, they had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim’s physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could.[1a]
Within this vault the Order of Santales were also known to fashion uniquely crafted talismans, helms, cloaks, and other forms of wearable wargear or garb which would shroud them in an anti-psychic field, hiding them from those skilled in the warp. They were crafted by the Order through use of anti-psychic fields generated by sigils inscribed upon their war-plate, and Protean Veils, or Etherium Plaid[1c] woven into worn fabrics, hoods and even the padding of their helmets.[1b]
These anti-psychic garments and gear could also be drawn from the Armorium by those such as the Primarch Lion El'Jonson himself, and other Legion Lords not of the Order during times of need.[1c]
