[SPEAKER_01]: Hi everyone and welcome to the Law Keepers Librarian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The funeral rights had ended an hour ago, perhaps a little more, but the incense had not yet finished its work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It lingered in the anti-chamber and collected in swirls and ribbons in the still air.
[SPEAKER_01]: not as a smell exactly, not anymore, but as a quality of the air itself, a warmth and a weight that settled in the space and added to the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Centuries of ceremony had pressed themselves into these walls into the one flanks of the floor and the dark timber of the ceiling beams, until the stones themselves seemed to carry the memory of every candle that had ever burned here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every name spoken aloud in the tone that names a spoken in when they may never be used again.
[SPEAKER_01]: The anti-chamber was a small space, by the standards of a nightly stronghold.
[SPEAKER_01]: A transitional room, neither the great hall where the rights had been observed, nor the cold outer passage, that led eventually to the world beyond the gates.
[SPEAKER_01]: It existed for the in-between moments, for the quiet that follows the formal and precedes the ordinary.
[SPEAKER_01]: A single illuminator burned in its iron bracket on the wall.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's golden light doing very little to trouble the shadows that gathered in the corners and beneath the arched ceiling.
[SPEAKER_01]: But casting a pool of warmth across the flagstones that felt in the stillness after the ceremony, like something deliberately kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: On a narrow stone ledge, three candles had been set in the old way, not for light, but for remembrance.
[SPEAKER_01]: And their flames stood perfectly still in air that had not moved in a long time, burning with the steady and unharried patients.
[SPEAKER_01]: of things that have all the time they need.
[SPEAKER_01]: The veteran pilots stood near the wall, still wearing the formal colours of mourning that the house's custom required.
[SPEAKER_01]: Deep, dark fabric over the everyday clothes beneath.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of garments that never quite feel like they belong to the person wearing them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Borrowed as they are from grief, rather than from ordinary life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not a young man, the years of campaigning had left their record in the way with which he held himself, a way that is quiet.
[SPEAKER_01]: His hands were at his sides, his eyes were on the middle distance, resting on nothing in particular.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Great Hall behind him had emptied slowly after the conclusion of the rights, the household dispersing in the quiet and courteous way that grief disperses people.
[SPEAKER_01]: The echoes of their passing had faded through the corridors of the stronghold, until nothing remained of the ceremony but its residue.
[SPEAKER_01]: The incense, the candlelight, the faint and sourseless sound that old buildings make in their settling.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not moved to leave with the others.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not been entirely sure why, at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was sure now only that standing here in the amber quiet between the ceremony and whatever came after it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Felt more appropriate than anything else available to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not hear the sacriest and coming until the soft fall of footsteps was already close.
[SPEAKER_01]: The unhurried, deliberate pace of a man who had somewhere to be, but understood that
[SPEAKER_01]: The Sacristan was an older man, gray at the temples, his formal robes carrying the mark of the cult Mechanicus in the stitching of the collar.
[SPEAKER_01]: As the robes of all Sacristan's did, a reminder for those who knew to look for it, of the longer arrangement between the house and the priesthood of Mars, that had kept the armor singing through generations.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried something in both hands, held with care, a parcel, moderately sized, wrapped in cloth of deep burgundy, and sealed with a cord of the house's colours.
[SPEAKER_01]: He offered it without ceremony, which was itself a kind of ceremony.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pilot received it with both hands as it had been offered
[SPEAKER_01]: The cloth was soft beneath his fingers, worn at the folds that showed how the fabric had been folded and refolded, many times over many years.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stood with it for a moment, feeling its weight, before he turned and set it on the stone ledge beside the remembrance candles, and began slowly to work the cord loose.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gave way without resistance, the knot untying itself slowly, and the cloth fell open.
[SPEAKER_01]: not a tactical manual, not a codex of heraldry, not any of the formal volumes that pass between nobles, as markers of alliance or respect.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a personal thing, clearly and unmistakably a personal thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bound in leather that had been handled so often, it had taken on the softness of something long and frequently loved.
[SPEAKER_01]: the pages of the edges were worn, and here and there a corner had been turned down and smoothed flat again, so many times that it had become permanent, a small record of repeated attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone had lived with this book for a very long time, had carried it on campaigns and kept it close in the quiet hours between them, and had returned to it again and again.
[SPEAKER_01]: The handwriting was familiar to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the writing of an old friend, immediately recognizable, unchanged across decades, as identifying as a face.
[SPEAKER_01]: The letters were careful with that being formal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pen having moved across the page with a confidence of someone who had long since stopped worrying about whether the writing was neat and had simply written.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ink had faded slightly on the oldest pages, deepening toward the spine where the paper was most protected, and the smell that rose from within was the smell of old paper, and old ink, and the traces of wherever the book had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something faintly smokey, faintly mineral, the atmosphere of many different rooms, on many different worlds pressed between the leaves.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drew a slow breath, he settled his back against the cool stone of the wall.
[SPEAKER_01]: The candles burned on in their steady and unhurried way.
[SPEAKER_01]: The light lay warm across the page, and the incense held itself in the air around him, and he began to read.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are things in this galaxy that no ledger entry can really prepare you for.
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter how carefully the words are chosen, or how precisely the dimensions are recorded.
[SPEAKER_01]: Things that must simply be witnessed, standing on solid ground, before the mind can begin to find room for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: An imperial night is one such thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You will have encountered the official descriptions no doubt.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind that appear in administrative catalogs and tactical briefings.
[SPEAKER_01]: Combat walkers, war machines, mobile fire platforms, dimensions given in terror and feet, and meters as though a number could somehow carry the whole weight of the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in a narrow sense, these descriptions are not wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: but they are a little like describing a mountain as a large accumulation of rock, or an ocean, as a considerable quantity of water.
[SPEAKER_01]: Technically accurate, and yet entirely missing the point of the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: To stand at the foot of an imperial night is to understand in the most certain part of yourself, that you are in the presence of something that belongs to a different order of
[SPEAKER_01]: the armour rises above you in sweeping plates of Adamantium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hand forged in ages so distant that the names of the artisans who shaped them have long since passed beyond all memory and record.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet their craft has not passed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is here still in the curve of a poldron.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the careful sweep of the helm.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the ancient heraldry that has been added across the surfaces over centuries of war and honour.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each mark a deed remembered, each symbol, a moment that someone long ago decided was worth carrying forward into the future.
[SPEAKER_01]: No two suits are alike in every detail, and that variety is not an imperfection.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the whole point, these are not manufactured things, they are inherited ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the fore of each great suit is the eye on shield, a field of ancient energy projected outward to meet the enemy's fire before it can find the armour beneath.
[SPEAKER_01]: It deflects rather than absorbs, turns fire aside rather than enduring them, and doing so requires not just the technology to project it, but the judgment of a living mind to position it correctly.
[SPEAKER_01]: to read the shape of the battle and understand where the next blow will come from before it arrives.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a piece of very old wisdom built into the architecture of the machine.
[SPEAKER_01]: The acknowledgment that survival in this galaxy has always required thought and design.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it is in that acknowledgment that we find the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that makes an imperial night something altogether different from the sum of its dimensions, and weapons, and armour grades.
[SPEAKER_01]: A noble does not operate a night, the way a person might operate any other instrument of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is no crew, no division of labour, no chain of voices passing information back and forth across internal channels.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is only a person, one mind, one soul, joined to the machine through neural sockets, through a control platform called the Throne Mechanicum.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through a process so ancient that every nightly house across the galaxy marks it as the moment a child becomes something more.
[SPEAKER_01]: through that joining, the night senses become the noble senses.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great armoured body and extension of their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's weight and reach and devastating power, as natural and instinctive, as the movement of a hand, reaching for a cup.
[SPEAKER_01]: The titans of the Adeptors Mechanicus are larger, and no one who has stood on a battlefield would dream of claiming otherwise.
[SPEAKER_01]: They carry more weapons, endure more punishment, and when they fall, the earth shakes and campaigns end.
[SPEAKER_01]: But titans are crude, and a crew, however skilled, however devoted, is always several people trying to become one thing, always a collection of individual judgments working toward a shared purpose, always capable of the small delays in miscommunications that arise whenever human beings must coordinate in moments of terrible urgency.
[SPEAKER_01]: A night is simply a person, made larger, made more, 30 feet of ancient adamantium, shaped around one human soul, and that soul alone responsible for everything that follows.
[SPEAKER_01]: To understand what the Imperial Knights really are, you must first understand what they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to understand what they were, you must go back a very long way indeed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Further back in the Imperial, further back in the Emperor's Great Crusade, further back even than the darkness that preceded it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You must go back to a time when humanity looked out of the stars and saw not enemies waiting to be fought, but worlds waiting to be found and decided.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the boundless and perhaps slightly reckless confidence that has always been one of our species most defining qualities to go and find them.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was the age of technology, and it was by any measure a remarkable thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great colonization fleets that carried humanity outward into the galaxy in those distant millennia were known as the long march fleets, and the name was not given lightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were not short voyages between neighboring systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were journeys measured in solar decades, years of travel through the cold dark between the stars, thousands of settlers, living and working, and raising children aboard vessels so vast that the idea of their destination must at times have felt more like mythology than geography.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were people who boarded those ships as young men and women, and disembarked, white-haired and weathered, on soil that no human foot had ever touched before.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were children born in the void between worlds who took their first steps on alien ground, and knew no other home.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when those great ships finally made landfall, they did not leave again.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The resources required to turn a long-march vessel around and point it back to what terror were resources that the new colonies simply could not spare.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, the ships were taken apart, carefully and deliberately.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their holes and frameworks and internal structures cannibalised to provide the raw materials of survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: walls, foundations, the bones of the first settlements, all of it built from the remains of the vessels that had carried the colonists there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, in its way, an act of extraordinary commitment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The colonists were not visiting these new worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were becoming part of them, whether the worlds were willing to receive them or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: And many of those worlds were not at first, particularly willing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The galaxy, as humanity was in the process of discovering, is a complicated and frequently dangerous place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the world settled during the long march with generous ones, temperate, welcoming, their soils fertile and their skies breathable, and their native life either absent or disinclined toward violence.
[SPEAKER_01]: But others were not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others had predators of a scale and ferocity that made the most dangerous creatures of old earth looked docile by comparison.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others were home to alien races who regarded the arrival of human settlers with entirely understandable hostility.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others had atmospheres that would kill an unprotected person within minutes, or weather systems of such violence that simply walking
[SPEAKER_01]: was a matter requiring careful planning and a degree of courage.
[SPEAKER_01]: The colonists had prepared for this, among the wealth of knowledge encoded in the standard template construct databases, that each long march fleet carried with them, were designs for powered suits of exo armour, bipedal walking machines, hard-shelled and heavily armed,
[SPEAKER_01]: capable of traveling through almost any environment and of holding their own against almost any threat their occupants were likely to encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were practical things, these early suits, tools in the truest sense, built for a purpose and designed to fulfil it efficiently.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pilots who were them were not warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were colonists who had a dangerous job to do and the suits were how they did it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet something happened gradually over the course of those early generations on those far-flung worlds that no STC database had anticipated, and no administrative form had a category for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pilots of those early suits began to take on a fundamental role in their communities.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a colony perpetually threatened by the wilderness around it,
[SPEAKER_01]: the person who could walk out to meet the danger, who could stand between the settlers and whatever the planet had sent against them that morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came something more than a worker with specialist equipment.
[SPEAKER_01]: They became a guardian, a protector, a figure around whom the safety and survival of everyone else arranged itself, and when those first pilots grew old and passed their suits onto their children, and those children grew up understanding from their earliest years that this responsibility was theirs to carry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that had begun as a practical arrangement began to take on the texture of a tradition.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came to be called Knights, the name borrowed from the legendary armored warriors of ancient Terran history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those distant figures of myth and chronicle, who had ridden out to meet the darkness on behalf of those who could not meet it themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the centuries, the road deepened and transformed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The practical exo armour became something richer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The plastial plates of the original suits slowly replaced with more ornate armour, crafted with greater care, and adorned with the symbols of lineage and honour.
[SPEAKER_01]: The colonists who had once divided the work of survival equally among themselves began to look to the night pilots.
[SPEAKER_01]: not just for protection, but for leadership, for governance, for the ordering of their small and hard pressed societies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the pilots shaped by the neural link to their machines began to think of themselves differently, not as workers fulfilling a function, but as guardians fulfilling a purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: and so, on hundreds of worlds scattered across the breadth of the galaxy, a remarkable thing quietly took root.
[SPEAKER_01]: Out of necessity, out of danger, out of the simple human tendency to find meaning and difficulty.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first of the nightly houses began to form, not founded by decree, not established by any grand authority, simply grown.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could not have known,
[SPEAKER_01]: What they were beginning, but they were beginning something extraordinary.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, in our more recent history, at the heart of every nightly stronghold, past the great halls and the armouries and the long corridors hung with the banners of ancestors, there is a place called the Sanctuary.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, in many ways, the truest heart of the house.
[SPEAKER_01]: More so than the throne room, more so than the war chambers, where campaigns are planned and victories celebrated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those places belong to the public life of a noble,
[SPEAKER_01]: to the rituals of governance and the performance of power.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sanctuary belongs to something more essential than any of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is where the knights are kept when they are not at war, standing in the great vaulted space of the vault transcendent, like sleeping giants, their armour dark and still, their weapons at rest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is where the young men and women who were one day pilot them.
[SPEAKER_01]: come to begin the long and uncertain journey toward that privilege.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process has a name, as all important things in a nightly house have names.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is called the ritual of becoming, and it is as significant as that name suggests.
[SPEAKER_01]: a young noble who has been selected to bond with the suit of Naitama, is brought first to the sanctuary's physicians who perform the necessary preparation, the fitting of neural sockets, small interfaces cut carefully into the skull, through which the throne mechanicum will eventually speak directly to the mind of its pilot.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a comfortable procedure and it is not meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the first reminder that what is being asked of the aspirant is not a small thing, and that the armour they seek to bond with will not accept anything less than their fall and complete self.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then comes the vigil.
[SPEAKER_01]: The young noble is brought to a room within the sanctuary known as the Chamber of Eccles, and if you were to ask why it carries that name, the answer would tell you a great deal about what happens there.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are seated upon the throne mechanicum that has been assigned to them, the umbilical cords of the interface connecting through their neural sockets, and there they remain through the long hours of a night that must for many of them, feel as though it will never end.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne is not silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne's mechanicum of a nightly house are old things, most of them, and they have been bonded with before, sometimes many times over the long centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: The personalities of previous pilots do not entirely leave when those pilots die.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something of them remains, a residue of thought and feeling, and memory pressed into the ancient
[SPEAKER_01]: these echoes make themselves known.
[SPEAKER_01]: They whisper, they stir, they press against the edges of the aspirants awareness, with the accumulated feeling of all the lives that have sat in this same seat and looked out at the same darkness and wondered whether they were equal to what was being asked of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is an audio, and it should be understood as one.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than one in ten of those who enter the chamber of echoes do not emerge from it hole.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some are overwhelmed by the neurological feedback of the interface, their minds unable to accommodate the sudden and total intimacy of the connection.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some are driven to a madness from which they cannot return.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some simply die.
[SPEAKER_01]: aneurysms, the physicians call it, using a word that manages to sound almost ordinary for something that is, in truth, a mind pushed beyond what a mind can bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The houses mourn these losses, and they do not pretend they are anything other than losses, but they do not change the process.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process is what it is, because the bond it creates must be complete, and a bond that could be formed without cost would not be the same bond at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: For those who survive the night, the change is immediate and permanent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though its full shape takes years to become apparent,
[SPEAKER_01]: The imprinting, as it is sometimes called, does not leave a noble unchanged.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne mechanicum does not simply record a personality.
[SPEAKER_01]: It amplifies it, drawing out the dominant qualities that were present during the visual, and pressing them deeper, making them more fully and indelibly themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: A young noble who spent their long-night in a state of quiet grief, will find that the
[SPEAKER_01]: One who sat with anger in their heart, nursed some old grievance, some festering resentment against a rival or a slight, will find that the armour remembers that anger long after the noble themselves might have let it go.
[SPEAKER_01]: The imprint is honest in the way that only things which cannot lie are honest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It takes what is there and makes it permanent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, there is the other effect.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bond with the throne mechanicum does something to a noble sense of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: It instills deep in the places where personality and conviction quietly form, a reverence for certain things, for hierarchy, for fealty, for the long chain of obligation that connects each noble to their house.
[SPEAKER_01]: And their house to its ancestors, and its ancestors, to the very first pilots who strap themselves into the earliest suits on those distant colony worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes duty feel not like a burden, but like a natural condition of existence, the way warmth feels natural to a living body.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes the idea of breaking an oath feel not merely wrong,
[SPEAKER_01]: but genuinely unthinkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: A violation of something so fundamental that the mind recalls from it instinctively.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was not an accident.
[SPEAKER_01]: The original designers of the Throne Mechanicum, whoever they were, in that distant age of extraordinary ingenuity, understood that they were building something that could be enormously dangerous in the wrong hands, and so they built into it a safeguard, not a lock, not a restriction, but something more elegant than either, a shaping of the soul itself, a gentle and persistent pressure toward the qualities that would make a pilot
[SPEAKER_01]: It is when you consider it carefully, one of the most remarkable pieces of engineering in all of human history, not the armour, not the weapons, not the iron shield or the servo motors, or any of the physical wonders that make a night what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: The most remarkable thing is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: that someone, tens of thousands of years ago, found a way to make goodness self reinforcing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The consequence of this, played out across the millennia on hundreds of isolated worlds, is something that continues to astonish those who paused to think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night worlds had no communication with one another during the long darkness of the age of strife.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were cut off, each of them, developing in isolation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their cultures shaped by nothing but their own circumstances, and the particular pressures of whatever world they happened to inhabit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet when the Imperium finally rediscovered them, one after another, it found something almost impossible to explain.
[SPEAKER_01]: That these worlds separated by thousands of light years and centuries of silence had grown into cultures of extraordinary similarity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same reverence for hierarchy, the same emphasis on honour and fealty, the same structures of obligation, connecting noble to house and house to world.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same rituals, the same titles, the same unshakable sense that duty was not a choice, but a condition of existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne mechanicum had done that.
[SPEAKER_01]: not through any grand coordination or shared instruction, but simply by doing the same thing in the same way.
[SPEAKER_01]: To every young noble who sat through the long night in every chamber of echoes on every night world across the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite their similarities, if you were to visit 109 words, scattered as they are across the vast breadth of the galaxy, you would find that no two of them are quite alike, and yet all of them would feel in some deep and difficult to articulate way, familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a quality to these worlds that persists across distance and difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: A character that seems to belong to the idea of a night world, rather than to any particular one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that certain kinds of places, no matter where in the world you find them, carry the same atmosphere, the same sense of what they are and what they are for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The strongholds are perhaps the most immediate expression of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: They stand at the hearts of their worlds like ancient fortresses, commanding permanent, built with the confidence of things that do not expect to be moved.
[SPEAKER_01]: And indeed they are ancient, most of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bones of these structures, the deepest foundations and the oldest walls are not stone
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the remains of the colony ships that brought the first settlers, 10,000 years ago or more.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great long-march vessels dismantled and repurposed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their homes and frameworks, becoming the raw material of the first human buildings on each world.
[SPEAKER_01]: To walk through the oldest corridors of a nightly stronghold, is in a very real sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: To walk through the interior of a Starship.
[SPEAKER_01]: Around these cause, the centuries have added their own layers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gothic spires and iron gates, great halls hung with the banners of the house, armories and chapels, and the sanctuaries, where the nightstands sleeping in their ranks.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some strongholds are relatively modest, fortified keeps that house a single house, and its dependence, self-contained and purposeful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others have grown over the long centuries into something closer to cities, their outer walls enclosing districts that would not look out of place on any civilised imperial world.
[SPEAKER_01]: entire populations living and working within the shadow of the ramparts, their lives organised around the needs and rhythms of the nightly house at the centre.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the walls, the world stretches away in whatever form it has chosen to take, and this is where the differences between night worlds become most apparent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The land surrounding most
[SPEAKER_01]: farms and pastures, providing the food and raw materials that sustain both the house and the population it protects.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ancient purpose of the original colony worlds still being fulfilled in these quieter spaces between the battles.
[SPEAKER_01]: great herds of creatures, wonder many of these wildernesses.
[SPEAKER_01]: The distant descendants of livestock introduced by the original settlers asked and strange and not entirely domesticated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Watched over by the house's dependence and occasionally raided by the predators that have shared these worlds with their human inhabitants.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it is here in the wilderness that one of the night's oldest and most persistent duties makes itself known.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mega predators of the night worlds are, in many cases, creatures of extraordinary size and ferocity.
[SPEAKER_01]: animal shaped by millions of years of evolution on worlds that reward its scale and aggression.
[SPEAKER_01]: They prey on the herd, they threaten the farms.
[SPEAKER_01]: Left unchecked, they would make the careful work of feeding and sustaining a night world's population, a great deal more difficult than it needs to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: and so the knights ride out against them periodically, not just as a form of recreation, though recreation it certainly is, for pilots who spend their quarterly hours in a state of considerable restlessness.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as a genuine expression of the Guardian's role that has always been at the core of what a knight is meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the volcanic world, known as Dragan's End, this tradition has a history that is somewhat more dramatic than most.
[SPEAKER_01]: The world takes its name from the Great Wing Drake's that once sawed on the thermals above its values, vast reptilian creatures that prayed on the megasaur herds that grazed below them.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the first human settlers arrived and began to establish what would eventually become house Griffith, they found themselves in direct competition with these creatures, who did not take kindly to the sudden appearance of a rival predator in their territory.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first night suits on dragons' end had not yet been completed when the confrontations began.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the founding nobles of Griffith, in a display of either courage or stubbornness, that the house has never quite stopped celebrating.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roadout against the dragons on horseback, wearing armor they had crafted themselves from locally mind of Sidion, and armed with lances of dragon bone.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mightiest among them, a noble named Nathaniel, killed three of the creatures before eventually becoming the house's first ruler.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dragons are long gone now, hunted to extinction in the years after the first night suits were completed.
[SPEAKER_01]: But how Griffith has never forgotten what it learned in those early battles on horseback.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the fierce and close quarters style of warfare that their night's favor to this day is a direct inheritance from those first desperate engagements.
[SPEAKER_01]: A reminder, written into the culture of the house across 10,000 years, that the founders of Griffith did not wait for perfect conditions before riding out to meet the danger.
[SPEAKER_01]: Further out toward the Galactic Northwest lies the strike and system, which offers a rather different illustration of what a well-established cluster of night worlds can become.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the system's heart sits the forge world of strike and primers, a great industrial world whose production of munitions and war material serves the imperial forces defending the Kadean Gate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Surrounding it,
[SPEAKER_01]: close enough to provide rapid response to any threat, our three night worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Striken 2, 4 and 5.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each home to several nightly houses, their combined strength amounting to no fewer than 11 houses in total.
[SPEAKER_01]: This arrangement has proved so effective over the centuries that striken primus has never found it necessary to station a Titan Legion on its surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: the knights are sufficient.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than sufficient, in fact, the finest and most capable nobles from each of the 11 houses compete fiercely for the honour of joining the standing guard, known as the Order of Iron.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whose sole purpose is the defense of the forge world, and whose leader carries the title of forge warden, with all the gravity that implies.
[SPEAKER_01]: 11 houses, three worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: One forge world protected as thoroughly as any in the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, as illustrations of the Nightworld's value, to the Imperium Go, a rather compelling one.
[SPEAKER_01]: No golden age, however bright, lasts forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is perhaps the oldest and most patient lesson that history has to offer.
[SPEAKER_01]: And humanity for all its remarkable qualities has never quite managed to learn it in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The collapse of the age of technology did not come all at once, in the way that the dramatic telling of it sometimes suggest.
[SPEAKER_01]: it came the way most great endings come.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gradually at first and then with the speed that left no time for the people living through it to fully understand what was happening until it was already too late to do very much about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: the emergence of the first human psychos, men and women suddenly and terrifyingly possessed of abilities that reached into the immaterial realm of the warp.
[SPEAKER_01]: What with its instabilities that the civilization of the Age of Technology had no framework for understanding and no established means of addressing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thinking machines that humanity had built and relied upon, the artificial minds that had been partners in the great project of galactic expansion, turned in ways that the history is remember only in fragments and whispers, their rebellion leaving wounds in the fabric of human civilization that would take millennia to begin to heal.
[SPEAKER_01]: and through all of this the warp grew increasingly turbulent until the storms within it made reliable travel between the stars not merely difficult but in many regions of the galaxy flatly impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great interstellar civilization that humanity had spent thousands of years building came apart in the space of what must have felt to those living through it like a remarkably
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet quietly and almost unnoticed amid the general catastrophe, something rather interesting happened to the night worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were passed over, the calamities that unmade the age of technology fed primarily on the things that had made it great.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the advance thinking machines, on the networks of interstellar communication and commerce, on the complex interdependencies of a civilization
[SPEAKER_01]: The Night Worlds had always sat somewhat apart from all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their cultures shaped by the throne mechanicum's deep instilling of conservatism and tradition had made them slow to embrace the more adventurous technological developments of the age.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had kept their own council, maintained their own ways, regarded the enthusiasm for sentient machines, with the weariness of people who had always trusted the proven over the novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when the storms came and the networks collapsed, and the things that had seemed most permanent turned out to be nothing of the sort.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Nightworlds found themselves in the unusual position of having very little to lose,
[SPEAKER_01]: They were isolated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warp storms that now made interstellar travel so treacherous, cut them off from one another, and from whatever remained of the broader human civilization, as thoroughly as if they had each been placed inside a sealed jar.
[SPEAKER_01]: But isolated is not the same as destroyed, and the night worlds, for all the hardship of their sudden solitude, survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the long centuries of isolation did to them,
[SPEAKER_01]: was something that deserves a mention.
[SPEAKER_01]: A culture that is cut off from outside contact and left entirely to its own devices will over time tend to turn inward.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rituals and traditions that might, in a more connected world, be periodically refreshed or gently questioned by exposure to different ways of doing things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead grow deeper and more elaborate, filling the space that used to be occupied by
[SPEAKER_01]: On the night worlds this process ran its course over not decades but millennia, and the result was a social life, of extraordinary and sometimes stifling ceremonial density.
[SPEAKER_01]: Traditions that had begun as practical customs became sacred obligations, titles and protocols that had once been convenient ways of organizing a feudal society, became
[SPEAKER_01]: The daily life of a nightly house, already inclined toward formality by the psychological shaping of the throne mechanicum, who progressively more elaborate with each generation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each new layer of ceremony added to the ones beneath it, until the cumulative weight of it all, became something that pressed down on the people living within it, with a heaviness that was difficult to describe to anyone who had not experienced it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and into this suffocating formality, the feud's crept.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the only world available to you is the one beneath your feet, the rivalries and competitions that might otherwise spread themselves across a broader canvas, become concentrated and intense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Houses that shared a night world competed with one another for territory,
[SPEAKER_01]: for resources, for influence, for the intangible, but passionately contested currency of prestige.
[SPEAKER_01]: Disputes that might, in a more spacious world, have been resolved by simple separation, instead festered across generations, old grievances accumulating interest over the centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: until what had begun as a disagreement between two specific people, became a structural feature of the relationship between two entire houses.
[SPEAKER_01]: The histories of the night worlds are full of such feuds, some of them stretching across so many centuries that the original cause had long since dissolved into legend.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hatred maintained through tradition, rather than any fresh understanding of what it was originally for.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the midst of all this, the ceremony, the protocol, the intrigue,
[SPEAKER_01]: The ancient feuds playing themselves out in the dusty halls of strongholds that had not changed appreciably in a thousand years.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was one escape, one context in which all of it fell away, and a noble could simply be what the deepest part of them had always been made to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: to put on the armour, to feel the throne mechanicum, come alive around them, the familiar presence of the bond settling into place, like a hand finding a grip, it has known for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: To walk out through the great gates of the stronghold and into the open air, where the only obligations were the ones that came from the situation, immediately in front of you, and the only rituals were the ones that had always mattered most.
[SPEAKER_01]: the rituals of survival of protection, of meeting the darkness on behalf of those who could not meet it themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was the escape the long isolation offered, and the night worlds took it gratefully and completely.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is one of the reasons I think that the nightly houses of this age became so extraordinarily fierce in battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not just fighting, they were breathing,
[SPEAKER_01]: 5,000 years is a long time to be forgotten, and yet that is more or less what happened to the night worlds during the long darkness of the age of strife.
[SPEAKER_01]: They slipped from the memory of a civilisation that had too many other catastrophes to attend to, and they remained there, in that quiet absence, until the galaxy began to find its way back towards something resembling,
[SPEAKER_01]: When the Emperor rose and the Great Crusades set out across the stars to reunite the scattered remnants of humanity, there were a great many things waiting to be rediscovered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lost colonies, fallen civilizations, worlds that had survived the darkness in ways both extraordinary and terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Night Worlds were among them, and their rediscovery began almost by accident.
[SPEAKER_01]: a rogue trader by the name of Jeffers found the night world of crisis first.
[SPEAKER_01]: The accounts do not dwell much on the particulars of how he came to be there, which is perhaps fitting, the how of it matters a great deal less than the one.
[SPEAKER_01]: What Jeffers found on crisis was a world that had survived the age of strife largely intact.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nightly houses still functioning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their suits of armour still operational.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their cultures still recognisably, the one that the original settlers had developed across those long centuries of isolation.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, by all accounts, immediately and clearly struck by the significance of what he was looking at.
[SPEAKER_01]: His reports back to the relevant authorities were detailed and enthusiastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they used the kind of language that tends to make institutions sit up and pay very close attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Language about military value, about warriors of extraordinary quality, about the potential for alliance with a culture that had spent thousands of years doing nothing but refining the arts of war and governance.
[SPEAKER_01]: What followed was, by the more candid accounts, not entirely dignified.
[SPEAKER_01]: The various great institutions of the nascent imperium descended on the question of the night worlds, with an enthusiasm that had rather more to do with competitive self-interest than with any principled vision of how best to bring these worlds into the imperial fall.
[SPEAKER_01]: who would have the right to court them, who would establish the relationships, negotiate the oaths, control the flow of the considerable military and material resources that the night world's represented.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scramble went on for some time, conducted in the register of imperial politics, formally polite in its surface manner and thoroughly ruthless beneath it,
[SPEAKER_01]: Their argument, in the end, was not primarily a political one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a practical one, and practical arguments have a way of cutting through political noise when they are compelling enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night worlds, after millennia of isolation, had a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: the suits of Night Armor that were the foundation of everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: The source of the house's military power, the center of their culture, the technology around which their entire society had organised itself, were failing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The local artificers and technicians who had maintained them through the long years of the age of strife had done remarkable work with limited knowledge, but there were limits to what dedication and ingenuity could accomplish without proper understanding of the underlying technology.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the crusade found them, most night worlds had only a handful of fully operational suits remaining.
[SPEAKER_01]: and even those were in a condition that their pilots maintained through determination, as much as through any genuine mechanical soundness.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanicum could fix this, not merely patch it, not merely slow the deterioration.
[SPEAKER_01]: but genuinely restore the suits to proper working order and ensure they could be maintained properly going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was an offer that no nightly house, regardless of its feelings about the politics surrounding it, was in any practical position to refuse.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the arrangement was made, and it has endured in its essential shape ever since
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanism through which the mechanism delivered on their promise is worth understanding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it introduced into the fabric of every night world, something that has been significant ever since.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among the terms of the arrangement was a provision that groups of young people from each night world would travel periodically to the associated forge world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spend years learning the technical skills needed to properly maintain night armour, and then return home as fully trained practitioners.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were not drawn only from the noble families.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came from all levels of the house's societies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third son of a Baron, as likely to be selected as the child of a farmer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Merit, an aptitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: The primary considerations, rather than birth.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were called sacristans, and they became over the generations, something genuinely indispensable to the houses they served.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the knights did not know, or perhaps chose not to examine too carefully, was that the training on the forge worlds involved rather more than technical instruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Sacristerans were inducted during their years away into the Count Mechanicus, taking on its beliefs and its obligations, as well as its knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: They return home bearing both the skills that the house is needed, and a quiet loyalty to Mars that existed alongside, and occasionally in gentle tension with their loyalty to their own people.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanicum had built with considerable patience and foresight, and network of people embedded in every night world, who could further the interests of the tech priests when circumstances made that useful.
[SPEAKER_01]: it would be too harsh to call this a betrayal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Sacristan's were, in the vast majority of cases, genuinely devoted to the houses they served, and the knowledge they brought home was real and valuable, and it exactly what it had been promised to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: The relationship between a night world and its associated forge world is one of genuine mutual dependence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night's providing military strength and natural resources, the forge world providing technology and maintenance, and the steady supply of new suits and weapons that keeps the houses capable of fulfilling their purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: each needs the other, and both know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But need is not the same as trust, and dependence is not the same as equality.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanicum understood the night worlds in ways that the night worlds did not quite reciprocate, and that a symmetry has never entirely disappeared from the relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: on nearly every suit of Naitama in the galaxy, among all the accumulated heraldry of deeds and lineages and ancient honours.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is the mark of the cult Mechanicus.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is worn officially as a symbol of gratitude and acknowledgement of the debt that the Nightworlds owe to Mars for their restoration.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is true as far as it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is also, if one is inclined toward honesty about such things, a reminder of how the arrangement began.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not with equals meetingless equals, but with one party, holding something that the other desperately needed, and being willing, for a price, to provide it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The houses have never forgotten that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Neither one suspects has Mars.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are hundreds of nightly houses in the Imperium, scattered across worlds so distant from one another, that most will never meet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Never share a battlefield, never know one another, except as names in the old records and reputations passed along through the slow channels of Imperial Communication.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each of them has its own history, its own traditions, its own particular way of being a nightly house that has been shaped by the world it inhabits, and the long centuries it has lived through.
[SPEAKER_01]: To do justice to all of them would take more volumes than any single author could produce in a lifetime.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are some that stand above the rest, not necessarily in virtue, not always in size, but in the weight of what they have done and what they represent.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the houses whose names are known across the galaxy, whose deeds have accumulated over so many centuries that the telling of them properly would require a library rather than a chapter.
[SPEAKER_01]: The following accounts are not that telling.
[SPEAKER_01]: The impressions of one pilot who has spent a long life paying attention, and who has had the good fortune on more occasions than he deserved to see some of these houses at close quarters.
[SPEAKER_01]: of house tyrannus, one thing must be said before anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the oldest.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not merely old in the way that most nightly houses are old, but old in a way that puts it in a different category.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tyrannus was founded, not on some distant colony world at the edge of human expansion, but on Mars itself, in the age before the Imperium existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the red planet was still in the
[SPEAKER_01]: The Knights of Taranis were guarding the cradle of the mechanicum, while the rest of the galaxy was still working out what a nightly house was supposed to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a gravity to that lineage that even the most proud of the other great houses tends to acknowledge, sometimes with admiration, and sometimes with the particular expression of people who find someone else's seniority mildly irritating.
[SPEAKER_01]: The STC designs that eventually gave rise to night suits across hundreds of worlds were, in their original form, based on what Tarenis developed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every noble who has ever bonded with a throne mechanicum, owes something, however distant and indirect, to that ancient house on the red planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: House-crust carries its history differently, not as a source of quiet pride, but as something harder and more purposeful, a wound that never fully closed and was eventually made into a weapon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Crast was the foremost house of crisis, the first night world to be rediscovered at the outset of the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in those early years it threw itself into the emperor's wars, with a whole hearted enthusiasm.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the horrors heresy came.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the full force of the war masters advance swept through the system surrounding terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: Crisis lay in its path.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crass nights return from their campaigns to find their world devastated, and the lesser houses of crisis all but erased from existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the house became afterward, colder, harder, more implacably focused, is entirely understandable to anyone who has lost everything they were fighting to protect.
[SPEAKER_01]: They carry their vow against chaos, not as a formal obligation, but as a personal one.
[SPEAKER_01]: renewed in the heart of every crust noble, with every generation that passes.
[SPEAKER_01]: House Raven presents a mystery that the historians have never satisfactorily resolved, and which the house itself seems to regard with a certain quiet amusement.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is simply by a very considerable margin, the largest nightly house in existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its nights numbering in the hundreds, its households capable of feeling forces that would make a respectable showing against a small Titan Legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: How this came to be is genuinely unclear, the ancient records of their world, Colossie, refer to a piece of STC architect that fell into disrepair and was lost long ago, and their speculation that this system, combined with the particular richness of Colossie's natural resources, somehow made the production of night suits possible, at a scale no other world has matched.
[SPEAKER_01]: But speculation is all it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Raven does not seem especially concerned with providing a cleaner answer, and perhaps that is the right attitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some things are what they are, and the reasons matter less than the reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: House Terrain of the tranquil world of Vortoris has accumulated more battle on us over the centuries than almost any house of comparable size.
[SPEAKER_01]: A record of campaigning so extensive and so far ranging that the warriors of Terrain have fought on worlds that many imperial citizens have never heard of.
[SPEAKER_01]: The official explanation for this relentless campaign schedule is the House's deep commitment to honour and duty.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's willingness to answer any call that a worthy cause makes upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that explanation is true, as far as it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyone who has spent time at the Terrain Stronghold of Furian Peak sat through the thousand canticles of war long awaited, that daily ritual of nearly three hours during which the entire household must be present and attentive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Might be forgiven for suspecting that the commitment to external campaigning is at least partly sustained by the profound relief
[SPEAKER_01]: House Hawkshroud, by contrast, answers cause to arms for reasons that are entirely and openly about honour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And specifically about the kind of honour that consists of remembering what you owe, and making sure you pay it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Knights of Hawkshroud are scattered across the galaxy at any given time, not because they are restless or ambitious.
[SPEAKER_01]: but because they are perpetually in the process of fulfilling obligations that their predecessors incurred, sometimes generations ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: An alliance made three centuries back, a rescue rendered in a war that most people have forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: A moment when someone stood with hawks shroud, when standing with them was costly, and the house has not forgotten, and will not forget
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a beautiful way to conduct oneself in the world, and it means that the ruler of Hawkshroud, by Count Tudon, spends a great deal of time hoping, privately, that none of the many people who have been helped by his house over the centuries are currently busy when the cool comes, that his homeworld finally needs help in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there is House Griffith, whose ancestors, we have already met on horseback, with
[SPEAKER_01]: writing out against creatures that sensible people would have waited for better odds before engaging.
[SPEAKER_01]: The spirit of those founders has not diminished across the intervening millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Knights of Griffith are fierce, proud, and possessed of a preference for close combat, so deeply ingrained that ranged fire feels to many of them, like a compromise with timidity, rather than a legitimate tactical choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jewels of honour are commonplace among them.
[SPEAKER_01]: the internal social order of the house shifting and resettling constantly as rivals face one another in their regular jousting tonies.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fight the way their ancestors fought, directly personally, with a commitment to closing the distance between themselves and the enemy that has produced over the centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the most remarkable records of close quarters
[SPEAKER_01]: There are those who find Griffith's methods excessive.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are rather more who are simply grateful those methods are pointed at the enemy.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are parts of this history that do not sit easily on the page, and this is one of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have said it aside more than once while writing, found other things to attend to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Told myself I would return to it when I had found the right words.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am not sure the right words exist, but a history that omits the difficult parts in favor of the comfortable ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: is not a history.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a story told to children and the men and women who rid these pages deserve better than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we come to the Horace Heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great civil war that tore the nascent imperium apart, in the 31st millennium, was in its broader shape, a conflict between those who remained loyal to the emperor, and those who chose to follow the warmaster Horus, down the path that ended, as such paths tend to end.
[SPEAKER_01]: In devastation and grief, on a scale that the mind genuinely struggles to accommodate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Across the galaxy, institutions that had been built to stand forever, revealed themselves to be as vulnerable as everything else to the oldest and most persistent of human weaknesses, to pride, to fear, to the slow and patient work of powers that understood those weaknesses far better than their victims did.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nights were not exempt from this, I wish I could tell you otherwise.
[SPEAKER_01]: on the planet of Molek, as Horus drove his forces toward terror in a campaign of destruction that left systems burning in its wake.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the most determined stands of the entire war was prepared.
[SPEAKER_01]: Loyalist Titan legions took up their positions.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than a hundred regiments of the Imperial Army deployed across the planet's surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nightly houses marshaled their suits
[SPEAKER_01]: It was an impressive gathering of force, assembled with the genuine intention of holding something that had seemed up to that point unstoppable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among the nightly house's present was House Divine, the ruling house of Molek itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The initial assault when it came was devastating.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace did not do things by halves, and the forces he brought to bear on Molek struck with a ferocity that shattered cities and swept away strongholds that had stood for centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among the things swept away in those first terrible days was the seat of House Divine's power.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their holdings destroyed, their position overturned.
[SPEAKER_01]: The House that had ruled Molek suddenly dispossessed and unable to fight back against the forces that had taken everything from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was in that vulnerability in that particular combination of loss and helplessness and wounded pride that something began.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not announce itself, these things never do.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came first as a kind of heaviness, a lassitude that settled over the surviving officers of House Divine, like a fog that would not quite lift, an inclination toward distraction, toward the small pleasures that remained available to them, even in defeat.
[SPEAKER_01]: They use their night suits in those early weeks, not for war, but for hunting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Riding out into Molex jungles after the great reptilian creatures that move through them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finding in that activity a release that the broader situation could not offer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was understandable enough, at first, grief takes many forms, and not all of them are immediately recognizable as grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fog deepened, the distractions became less innocent, private gatherings began, meetings in the heart of the loyalist camp, behind closed doors where things were said and done that would have been unthinkable to the house divine of a year before.
[SPEAKER_01]: the whisper of slanish, the dark prince of chaos, is not a thing that announces itself with fanfare and obvious menace.
[SPEAKER_01]: It finds the places in a soul that are already open, already hurting, already inclined toward the comfort of sensation and the escape of excess.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it makes its home there so gradually that the person it is making its home in does not notice what is being replaced until the replacement is complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time Horace launched his decisive offensive on Molek, House Divine was no longer the house it had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the moment came, they proved it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The loyalist forces found themselves caught between two moving walls of destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trader Titans pressing forward from the front with the full weight of their terrible armament, and behind them attacking without warning from within the camp itself, the nights of house divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a trap of the most intimate and devastating kind, the kind that only works when someone
[SPEAKER_01]: and it worked completely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperial Forces on Mollek caught between two enemies where they had expected only one.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're broken so thoroughly that only one in a hundred survived the campaign.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have thought about House Divine a great deal over the years, in the quiet hours after battles when the mind turns to difficult questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be easier perhaps to dismiss them as simply having been weak, to say that a stronger house, a better house, would not have fallen as they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do not think that is the honest reading of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne mechanicum makes us what we are, the bond shapes us, deepens us, presses the best of us into something enduring.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it does not make us invulnerable, the same depth of feeling that makes a night pilot fierce in defence of what they love.
[SPEAKER_01]: can, if that love is taken away, and nothing put in its place, there comes something that the wrong voice can fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: Divine was not weak, divine was wounded, and left alone in that wound for long enough that something else found it first.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the shadow that the horrors heresy cast over the history of the Knights, not just the battles and the betrayals, but the knowledge that the armor does not protect you from everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, in the 10,000 years since that first betrayal on Mollek, across hundreds of worlds and through wars beyond counting,
[SPEAKER_01]: Only a handful of houses have followed that path.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only a handful in all that time and all that darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not the comfort one might wish for, but it is not nothing either.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be quite wrong to give the impression, after everything written in these pages, that the life of a noble pilot consists entirely of war and glory, and the profound experience of bonding with an ancient suit of armour.
[SPEAKER_01]: It does not.
[SPEAKER_01]: It consists in the main of something considerably less dramatic, and it is only by understanding
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me tell you about mornings in a nightly stronghold.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before the court of House has burg, may eat breakfast, before a single member of that ancient and distinguished household may so much as reach for a piece of bread.
[SPEAKER_01]: The entire court must gather to hear the reading of the names.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every ruler the house has ever had, from its very founding to the present day, their names, their deeds, the battles they fought, and the decisions they made, and the manner in which they eventually passed from the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are hundreds of these names now, accumulated across millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the reading of them takes up most of the morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not considered unusual.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is simply how morning's work in House Hasburg, as they have worked for longer than anyone can clearly remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the idea of changing it would strike any member of the household as not merely impractical, but faintly sacrilegious.
[SPEAKER_01]: House tearing on their peaceful world of Votoris begins each day with the thousand canticles of war long awaited, a ritual of almost three hours attended in full by every noble present.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the strongholds of other houses, there are protocols governing how visitors from rival houses must be greeted.
[SPEAKER_01]: what words must be used, which titles acknowledged in which order, how many steps a noble of one rank should take toward a noble of another rank, before stopping and waiting to be approached in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are ceremonies for the changing of seasons, for the anniversaries of battles one, and battles last, for the birthdays of ancestors who died before anyone currently living was born.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this is, I should be clear, done with complete sincerity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nobles of the nightly houses are not performing these rituals reluctantly, rolling their eyes behind the formality.
[SPEAKER_01]: The throne mechanicum has seen to that, the deep reverence for tradition, for hierarchy, for the accumulated weight of the past.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a pose.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is as genuine as breathing and in many ways as involuntary.
[SPEAKER_01]: A noble who failed to observe the proper ceremonies would feel the wrongness of it in a way that went deeper than embarrassment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something closer to the discomfort of a fundamental violation of the self.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, here is the paradox that sits at the heart of noble life, and which I have spent many years turning over without quite arriving at a tidy resolution to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same bond that instills all of this reverence and duty and genuine heartfelt commitment to the structures of the house, also instills something else, a restless, relentless, deeply personal ambition.
[SPEAKER_01]: The compulsion to outdo one's peers, the need to be seen as the finest, the most accomplished, the most worthy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not spite exactly, and it is not simple vanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is something more fundamental than either, pressed into every noble by the same ancient technology that makes them loyal and honourable and fears in the defense of those they love.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, one suspects, the mechanism by which the designers of the throne mechanicum, ensure that the pilots would always strive to be better.
[SPEAKER_01]: The side effects, however, are considerable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The courts of the nightly houses are beneath all the ceremony and the sincere devotion to tradition, extraordinarily busy places in the political sense, factions form and dissolve
[SPEAKER_01]: whose considerable intelligence and political acumen have nowhere else to go in a society that reserves the armour for the first born.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pissue agendas of their own through the complex channels available to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And many a noble's rise to prominence has been quietly engineered by a partner who understood the landscape of the court far better than the noble themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: feuds, accumulate the way heraldry accumulates.
[SPEAKER_01]: Slowly, layer upon layer, each new grievance added to the ones beneath it until the structure is very old and very heavy indeed.
[SPEAKER_01]: There have been houses that came to open war over dispute so ancient that neither side could clearly remember what the original injury had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: There have been on occasion, worse things
[SPEAKER_01]: conducted in the shadows of the long corridors between one set of beautifully observed ceremonies and the next.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, in short, a great deal to live inside of, and then someone calls for the armor.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have watched it happen many times and it is always the same, a change that moves through a noble, like a light being switched on in a dark room, immediate and total.
[SPEAKER_01]: The protocols of the court fall away, the careful navigation of factions and obligations and centuries-old sensitivities simply stops mattering, not because it has been forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: but because something larger has claimed all the space it occupied, there is only the throne, and the bond, and the battlefield, and the complete and clarifying freedom of a person who has been given permission, finally, to be entirely and without reservation, what they most essentially are.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is perhaps not so mysterious when you consider all of this that Imperial Knights fight the way they do.
[SPEAKER_01]: With that ferocious, joyful, almost exuberant abandon that surprises people who have only ever read about them in tactical briefings and expected something more measured.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are not reckless, they are released.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there is an enormous difference between the two.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cage for all its weight is genuinely loved, but the door when it opens, the door is everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a thing that the uninitiated ten not to understand about Nightama, and it is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the suit chooses the pilot, as much as the pilot chooses the suit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not in any mystical sense, the sacrosthans would be quick to offer a more technical explanation, and they would not be wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the truth that sits beneath the technical explanation is that different patterns of Night Armor call to different kinds of people, and the people they call tend over time to become more fully themselves through the bond.
[SPEAKER_01]: The armour does not change who you are, it finds who you are and makes it permanent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, if you wish to understand the patterns, the most useful place to begin is not with the weapons or the dimensions or the armour grades, but with the question of what kind of person each one was built for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Night Paladin answers that question by declining to give a narrow answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the archetypal night, the one that appears in the imagination when the word is spoken.
[SPEAKER_01]: The balanced and complete expression of everything the original designers were trying to achieve.
[SPEAKER_01]: A rapid fire battle cannon for the distances at which battles are decided.
[SPEAKER_01]: A reaper chain sawed for the moments when they are decided in closer terms.
[SPEAKER_01]: An eye on shield and thick armor sufficient to keep the pilot moving and fighting through punishment that would destroy lesser machines.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is nothing excessive about a pallidin and nothing insufficient.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the night that asks its pilot to be good at everything, rather than extraordinary at one thing, and the nobles who bond with pallidins tend to share that quality, versatile, measured, equally comfortable at range and in close quarters.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of warriors that a commander can place anywhere on a battlefield with confidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night errand begins from the same body as the Paladin, and arrives somewhere quite different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where the Paladin keeps its options open, the errand has made a choice, its thermal cannon replacing the battle cannon, trading range and flexibility for the devastating close range heat of a weapon that can reduce a tank to molten slag or core out a reinforced bunker wall in a single discharge.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pilots who are drawn to errands are drawn to that choice, to the particular satisfaction of closing the distance and solving the problem at a range where there is no ambiguity about the outcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are not reckless people, necessarily, but they are people who find the long-range jaw a less honest conversation than the close one, and who are willing to absorb punishment on the approach in exchange for the certainty of what happens when they arrive.
[SPEAKER_01]: the night gallant has dispensed with the conversation altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: Armed with a thunderstorm gauntlet and a repurchase sword and very little else in the way of ranged armament, the gallant is a machine built for pilots who experience the distance between themselves and the enemy, primarily as an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a purity to this that its pilots find genuinely compelling, a directness, a clarity of purpose, that the more balanced patterns cannot quite offer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nobles who bond with gallons are not in my experience, unreasonable people in ordinary life.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply have a very clear sense of where the most important part of a battle takes place, and a corresponding impatience with anything that keeps them from getting there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night crusader represents, in some respects, the opposite philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the nobles drawn to it are genuinely different people from the ones drawn to the gallant.
[SPEAKER_01]: A Crusader carries more ranged firepower than most tank squadrons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its multiple weapons capable of reducing entire formations to ruins from distances at which the enemy can barely return effective fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its pilots are thoughtful, methodical, possessed of a patience that the gallants pilot would find difficult to understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not need to be close to feel certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: They find their satisfaction in a different kind of precision.
[SPEAKER_01]: In reading the shape of the battle from a distance, identifying where their fire will do the most good, and delivering it with an accuracy and a consistency that their more impetuous colleagues sometimes privately, envy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, there are the great ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Castellan and the Valiant, the Dominius class knights that sit at the outermost edge of what the pattern can accommodate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Machine so large and so heavily armed, that they approach the lower ranges of Titan territory without quite crossing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Castellan is a platform of extraordinary long-range firepower.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its plasma decimator and volcano lands, capable of reaching across a battlefield and destroying things that most knights could not touch from that distance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its shield breaker missiles capable of passing through enemy defenses that would stop conventional weapons.
[SPEAKER_01]: The valiant prefers to do its devastating work at closer range.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its conflagration can and washing fire across everything in its path, while its thunder coil harpoon empails large targets and then delivers a charge through the chain that connects them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cooking whatever is on the other end from the inside.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both patterns are slower than their smaller cousins, and the nobles who pilot them, except that limitation as a reasonable price for what they receive in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: They tend to be people who have made peace with a certain kind of patients, who find genuine contentment in the role of the immovable point around which a battle organizes itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The armages occupy a different place in the household.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smaller, faster, longer-legged design to strike hard and move on before the enemy can respond.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are piloted most often by nobles of lesser lineage, the distant cousins and faithful retainers, who are part of the house's extended family, without quite sharing the full inheritance of its bloodline.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a loyalty between an armage of pilot, and the larger knights they run alongside that is among the most genuine bonds in a world built on bonds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not the formal loyalty of oaths and hierarchy, but the immediate personal loyalty of people who depend on one another in the most direct possible way.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind that is forged in the moment when the larger night's flank is threatened, and the armager is already moving to meet it, without being asked, and without hesitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, there are the serrestas patterns, faster than any standard night, more agile, designed with a quality of movement that their pilots describe as something close to dancing.
[SPEAKER_01]: If dancing were conducted at speed and involved a considerable amount of destruction, the serrestas were built for a different purpose than the colonial protectors that gave rise to the standard patterns.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were built for war in the purest sense, for rapid assault, and lethal outflanking.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the kind of combat that is decided before the enemy has fully understood that it has begun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machine spirits within them are said to be more restive than those of other nights, more demanding of the Pilate who bonds with them, less forgiving of hesitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nobles who seek out Karastazama tend to know this before they begin, and to find it appealing rather than alarming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will confess that this section has been the most difficult to write, and not because the subject is complicated.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, in some ways, the simplest subject in this entire history.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is difficult for a different reason, which is that it is personal, and personal things have a way of resisting the orderly progression from one sentence to the next that the rest of history permits.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bear with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tradition of the free blade is as old as the nightly houses themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps older in its essential shape than any formal house structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is simply this, that a noble pilot may, by ancient and universally acknowledged right, leave their house.
[SPEAKER_01]: Walk away from the stronghold, the court, the ceremonies and the obligations, and the accumulated weight of generations, and go out into the galaxy alone, bound to no leash Lord, owing allegiance to no banner that the one they choose to carry in their own heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not desertion.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though exile sometimes makes free blades of people who had not chosen it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a recognised path, old enough to have its own name and its own traditions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And its own place in the long story of what it means to be a knight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some who walk that path do so willingly, and with something that looks very much like joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are nobles for whom the courtly life, with all its ceremonies and political webs and beautiful suffocating weight, is simply more than they can bear to remain inside, who feel the call of something larger and less defined than a single house's honour, and who answer it the only way available to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are those who carry a personal oath that requires them to travel, to seek something or someone across the breadth of the Imperium, and who cannot fulfil that oath while remaining in one place.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are those who simply need to fight, more constantly and more freely than any house his campaign schedule can accommodate, and who find in the open road of the freeblade's life.
[SPEAKER_01]: the endless battle that the deeper parts of them have always required.
[SPEAKER_01]: But most free blades and this is the part that sits heavily did not begin their solitary journeys by choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of them are the last, the final surviving noble of a house that is gone, destroyed by war or catastrophe or the slow attrition of centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: left standing in the ruins of everything that gave their life its structure, and its meaning, with nothing remaining but the armour, and the bond, and the road ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are not people who chose freedom.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are people for whom freedom was the only thing left after everything else was taken, and who found somewhere in the long miles a way to make it mean something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among the ordinary people of the Imperium, the farmers and the factor in workers, and the citizens of a thousand worlds who will never see the inside of a nightly stronghold.
[SPEAKER_01]: The freeblades have acquired a reputation that sits somewhere between legend and myth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Past from one generation to the next, in the particular way that stories survive when they carry something true in them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great armoured figure, who appears without warning, who fights without explanation, and asks for nothing in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is gone again, before anyone has quite had time to understand what happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are names that recur in these stories, free blades whose deeds have accumulated enough across the centuries to give them a weight that transcends the individual.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night of Dark Shadows, Retribution Incarnate, others whose names have been worn smooth by repetition, until the person behind them has become something closer to a symbol.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet the symbol is not wrong exactly, because what the psychological bond does to a noble, who has no house to channel it, is something genuinely remarkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reverence for duty, the deep and unshakable commitment to honour, the compulsion to protect those who cannot protect themselves, all of it remains, every bit as strong as it ever was.
[SPEAKER_01]: But without a house to focus it, without a specific Lord, or a specific world to direct it toward, it expands.
[SPEAKER_01]: It fills the available space.
[SPEAKER_01]: The duty becomes a duty to everyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: The honour becomes a standard, held not against the expectations of a particular household.
[SPEAKER_01]: But against something larger and more absolute, against the pilot's own deepest sense of what is right.
[SPEAKER_01]: of what it has always meant to wear a night's armor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is perhaps the most complete expression of what the throne mechanicum was always trying to make.
[SPEAKER_01]: A person who protects not because they were born to a particular house on a particular world, but simply because protection is what they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a moment when a nightly house goes to war in full that no written account has ever quite managed to capture to the satisfaction of anyone who has witnessed it in person.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know because I have read many such accounts and I have stood on the ground while it happened and the distance between the two experiences is considerable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It begins with sound, before it begins with anything visible.
[SPEAKER_01]: A deep and rhythmic percussion that you feel in the songs of your feet before your ears have properly identified it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The grounded self announcing that something of great weight is moving across it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that the earth has no choice but to acknowledge with every step.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the gates, the great iron-clad gates of the stronghold, swinging open, with a deliberateness that has its own kind of theatre, framing the darkness of the interior for a long moment before the first shape moves through it, and then the trumpets, the bright and carrying notes of the fanfare that has preceded knights to war on a hundred worlds for more centuries than any one house can clearly count.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the answering sound, from the people gathered to watch, that complicated sound, somewhere between a cheer, and something quieter, and more reverend.
[SPEAKER_01]: That crowds make when they are witnessing something they understand to be larger than themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Heraldry moves past like a procession of living history.
[SPEAKER_01]: each suit a different declaration.
[SPEAKER_01]: This house, this lineage, the accumulation of deeds and honours, earned across decades of campaigning, painted and carved and inlayed across the armour in a language that takes years to learn to read fluently, but which speaks even to those who cannot read it, of something ancient and serious and deeply men.
[SPEAKER_01]: No-to suits tell the same story.
[SPEAKER_01]: No-to stories laid side by side, failed to add something to one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the battlefield itself, the knights move with a purpose and a coordination that continues to impress even those who have seen it many times before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alongside the Titan legions of the Adeptis mechanicus, they fulfil the roles that their size and speed make them suited for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Moving where the great titans cannot move quickly enough, screening the flanks that the larger war machines cannot watch, striking at the points in the enemy line, where sudden and concentrated force will do the most damage before drawing back and finding the next such point.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are not merely supporting the titans, they are the quick and responsive part of a combined force, the part that can read the shifting shape of the battle, and react to it before the slower calculation of a larger machine can catch up.
[SPEAKER_01]: and all the while, the household attachments compete with one another, even in the middle of a battle, even with the enemy pressing hard and the outcome uncertain.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a part of every night pilot that is keeping a quiet tally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of deeds performed, of enemies defeated, of moments in which one house's honour was measured against another's and found, by whatever
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the expression of something so deeply ingrained that it continues to operate even under the most demanding of circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way a person continues to breathe, even when they are thinking about something else entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The code that governs when and how the knights answer cause to arms is to those who have not grown up inside it, a source of some bewilderment and occasional profound frustration.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shame of failing to answer illegitimate summons is for most houses genuinely unthinkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: A stain on the house's honour that will be recorded and remembered and spoken of for generations.
[SPEAKER_01]: carried like a hot coal that the house must find some way of setting down through extraordinary subsequent servers.
[SPEAKER_01]: When a high-king calls his banners, they come.
[SPEAKER_01]: When a forge-world petitions for military aid in accordance with the ancient oaths, the Knights March.
[SPEAKER_01]: The commitment is real, and it is binding, and it is honored with a consistency that the Department of Minitorum has over the centuries come to rely upon.
[SPEAKER_01]: but the code runs in all directions, and it does not limit itself to the straightforward.
[SPEAKER_01]: A war of honor, a campaign declared not in response to invasion or strategic necessity, but in response to an injury to a house's dignity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is as legitimate in the eyes of the houses as any other call to arms?
[SPEAKER_01]: and the injuries that can give rise to one are by the standards of the departmental unitorum, not always easy to take entirely seriously.
[SPEAKER_01]: There have been campaigns of considerable size and duration launched, because an emissary addressed a barren with a title, one degree below the correct one.
[SPEAKER_01]: There have been wars declared over failures of protocol at diplomatic meetings.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the perceived slight of a guest room that was not quite as fine as the guest's rank demanded.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over disputes about the correct order, in which visiting dignitaries should be received that escalated, through the particular alchemy of noble pride and throne instilled ambition.
[SPEAKER_01]: Imperial commanders have learned over many centuries of working alongside the nighthouses to be extremely careful about forms of address.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here, in these final pages, is what I most want to say about the Imperial Knights, the thing that all the weapons catalogs and tactical assessments and political histories for all their value do not quite arrive at.
[SPEAKER_01]: The weapons can be matched, the armour can be understood, its thicknesses and its weak points catalogued and studied and planned against.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tactics can be anticipated by any enemy intelligent enough to have watched them employed before.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these things taken individually, fully accounts for what an imperial night is on a battlefield.
[SPEAKER_01]: What accounts for it is 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: 10,000 years of a culture that has been built layer by layer, around the idea that some things are worth protecting, and that the person who has accepted the responsibility of protection has no more important obligation in the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten thousand years of young nobles sitting through the long night in the chamber of echoes and emerging from it changed in ways that make that commitment not a choice but a condition of existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten thousand years of pride and duty and the fierce joyful controlled ferocity of people who spend their quarterly lives waiting for the moment when they are allowed to be completely and entirely what they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is what you are facing when an imperial night walks towards you across a battlefield.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a machine, a person carrying 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find that I have reached the end of what I can tell you, at least for now, and perhaps.
[SPEAKER_01]: The writing stopped there, not at the end of a sentence, not at the end of a thought, simply stopped in the middle of a page that had several lines still remaining in it, followed by several more pages that were blank.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever the next thought had been, it had not been written down.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps it had been set aside for later, the way writers set things aside when the hour is late and the words are not quite coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps there had simply not been a later.
[SPEAKER_01]: The veteran pilot sat for a long time without moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: The book opened in his hands, the fire burning low in the great beside him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Outside the strongholds walls, the night had settled into the deep and patient quiet that belongs to the hours before dawn.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the world seems to be holding itself, very still.
[SPEAKER_01]: The iron and stone of the building around him carried the cold of places that hold the
[SPEAKER_01]: not aggressive, not unkind, simply old.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned to the last blank page and held it for a moment, as though the words that had not been written there might yet make themselves known.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he closed the book carefully with both hands, and set it on the table beside the dying fire, and sat with it in the silence for a long time.