Cultists
Once the holds of the Blade of Damnation were a place of order. When the vessel had another name and served under the Golden Throne, the Warmaster's sons brook no mayhem on their ships. Armsmen and navy-thralls knew their place and worked like to the gears of a great machinery. The Crusade had lasted long enough for clans to emerge around the gun emplacements and some sections, guilds and families full of secret. The Heresy had shattered it. As the Legions gave themselves to the powers of the Warp, the shields protecting the crew from the madness of the Sea of Souls flickered and weakened. Now the holds were home to rampaging hordes of mutants and slaves who knew the bloody scratches they had to make around their decks as well as any other aspect of their trade. As the war approached Terra they devolved, each consumed by the voices tugging at their thought. Perhaps in other times they would have been disgorged as a flood of flesh and bones, thrown against the Palace. It hadn't be so. Instead the crimson sons of Lorgar Aurelian had walked among them and bound them in tournaments and ceremonies, rituals and prayers. They had not tried to unite them.
On the contrary they had divided the cults and the sects, identified the seers and demagogues who led them and they had taken these worthies to teach them. They listened to the descriptions of the figures haunting their dreams, compared them to their own writings. Neither the Urizen nor the Cyclops had numbered all the hosts of the Warp, such thing was impossible, but the Primarch had come back from the Eye with a trove of forbidden lore. Through the tutelage of the Word Bearers, the human wretches of the holds had learned to commune with their gods, to name them, to know what they loved and what they hate. And the Legionaries had delighted in seeing a great manifold potentates of the godly court spoke even to the slaves of the warband. It meant that the Forsaken, they named themselves thus for they had been driven off course by the Sea of Souls and did not rejoin the rest of their brethren, had the favor of the Ruinous Powers. This realization caused the death of quite a few cult leaders when the Astartes cut them on their own crude altars to divine oracles from their blessed entrails but there were many more.
Of course even the love of anarchy the proud heretics held had limits. So they ordered the cults to sort their differences. Five, one for each head of the Pantheon and one for Chaos entire, would be authorized to treat with their transhuman masters. It did not matter to them if this hierarchy established itself through bloodshed, intrigue or even dumb luck. The souls of the defeated were offered to the Pantheon and this was beautiful. After all what better death was it than to feed the Chaos Gods? They did not tell they were but the first transhuman to walk the holds for soon came scions of the Eighth and the Twentieth, to train the cultists in the arts of assassinations, terror and sabotage. In some cases direct cults worshipping at the altars of brutish nightmares were extinguished by more intelligent sectators, in other they triumphed to hold their bloody ground, first among the lost and the Damned.
Who were these worthies who stood at the feet of the Chaos Space Marines? Choose 1 in each category
Khorne
[] The Nailed took spikes to their head and close combat weapons to their hands. They fought among themselves in great contests of skill and violence. They said they saw the Lord of Red Sands, the Red Angel transfigured on the fields of Nuceria. They heard his screams and held sacred the murder of those who pretended themselves righteous. All of them emerged from lives of horrors and the blood of those who wronged them.
[] The Faceless came from fallen armsmen and they worshipped the ruthless equation of slaughter. Blood had to be shed to appease the great god of war who howled in their dreams, an horror of bloody mud with hair like barbed wires and the face of a thousand thousand skulls pound to dust. They gathered in ordered squads, held to discipline but only in the service of the reaping of skulls.
[] The Scarlet Flame had taken to the worship of a figure they named the Lady of Ashes. She was as molten iron with many hands each bearing a weapon dolorous. They had all been followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus before their conversion, before understanding the goal of faith was to shed the blood of unbelievers. They loved the Astartes as they had loved them in service to the Emperor. And so their Lady made the greatest of them giants with bestial features and overwhelming strength, with writings shielding them from sorcery.
Tzeentch
[] The Hem-Prospero were few but each of them had tried in vain to prevent doom on their families and friends. When they failed they had seen the form of the Crimson King falling through the cosmos among a ring of betrayed souls. They had accepted the bargain he offered in their dreams and understood none of their woes were their fault. Each had taken out an eye, offered to their patron, and in exchange received the knowledge of divination so they could change the future.
[] The Hidden Blades had trained under the sons of Alpharius and emerged with a doctrine. Haunting their night was a shadow who introduced itself as the Unsung and said it was born of every act who made a riot into a revolution. They were assassins and murderers, trying to understand the weaknesses of their foes and strike them at where they were most vulnerable. They said that to destroy an empire, the wise should only have to kill a mouse.
[] The Broken Helix were fascinated by mutation being made from the most intelligent of the crew who assisted in the operations of the Apothecarion and the Forge. They had taken the secrets of flesh and steel alike and existed only to shift and change them until all was broken metal and twisted flesh. Few of them acceded to the greatest alterations their patron granted them and those emerged a protean nightmares loosely bound in black hooded robes.
Slaanesh
[] The Phoenix Throng had visions of the White Naga as he was enthroned in pleasure beyond imagination. And they had understood the meaning of the exile of the son of the False Emperor. Fulgrim existed as the lord of unattainable but striven for desires. The Court taught that only by exploring the deepest reaches of sensation, one could be found worthy to sip at his throat and be worthy of heavens. They were preachers of rule-breaking and misrule rewarded with angelic appearance.
[] The Crimson Court saw their dreams haunted by a bloody noblewoman who once had stalked the forests of Terra. They had learned from her whispers that beauty, strength and power were found in the flesh of others. So they had modified themselves to drink at the throat of their victims and devour their quivering organs. In exchange they had emerged as figure of strength and speed second to none among their sect.
[] The Order of the Ogresire affected the customs of knighthood in order of their master, the Prince of Ogres. They had learned from him that the privilege of power and strength in battle are nothing than boundless indulgence. Full of loathsome and unameable desires they had been and the honeyed voice in their nightmares promising them they could indulge if they proved strong enough was too much to resist. In the field they were proud and professional but they intended to spread their gospel of delight to all ears they reached. Height of their pride was that their lord could not generally be served by Astartes, pushing him to prefer the company of mortals for his servants.
Nurgle
[] The Reapers worship the Pale King, the reaper of men and souls. They find solace in his lonely crusade on Barbarus, on the endurance he showed in the Crusade and the Heresy alike. They take scythes without understanding their meaning and strive to prove as unchanging, as determined as their patron. They advance and nothing but the destruction of their body can stop them. They especially loathe the oppression of the unrighteous and they desire its end through rust and slaughter.
[] The Grim grumble and pester to the indulgent laughter of Nurglings. They are simple. They desire the comforts of the past, the unchanging glories of childhood or youth they lost. The world moves and they loathe it and they would grasp at their memories until they are of the living dead. Their patron in the voices of flies and carrion brings them rest, ensure them the universe is spiraling to destruction but they can be preserved. They may be underestimated on the fields of battle but their gospel is convincing enough for those who pine for a past who never existed.
[] The Grinners have understood the nature of the universe, the great joke only Nurgle understands. What is created will be destroyed. What lives will one day die. They grin because only in the touch of their benefactors are these fears banished. Yet they exist to bring this enlightenment to others. They specialize in taking everything from their prey, to make everything around them succumb to the kiss of entropy. Only then, when the target has nothing that it is judged. If devoid of anything they despair, then they are slain and become mulch for the Garden. If they laugh in defiance and persist, then Nurgle smiles upon them and they join the congregation.
Undivided
[] The Jade Fangs were made monsters. Others, mundanes or Astartes, have brought them to terror and terror drove them to break all rules, to laugh at every taboos. Fear reduced them to beasts worthy only of contempt. Yet they endure, not by the grace of the Grandfather but by the urge to prove the problem was not with them. They took the lessons of the Night Lords to hearts and set up to make monsters of their own. After all martyred Kurze was right. Fear is the rule of the universe.
[] The Children of Darkness know they are weak compared to their lords and they hate it. Power is the only thing mattering in the world after all. So they seek to become strong, they adorn themselves in steel, they study the arts of sorcery, they strengthen minds and bodies and seek perfection. Yet the urge is to be mighty, to gather thralls around it, to move along the chain as efficient avatars of strength. Everything below them is to be trodden underfoot and trampled. And for that technology is surely the surest path.
[] The Yellow Courtiers have seen their minds break under a terrible vision. For they have seen an empire of darkness, a collection of horror existing only to consume worlds upon worlds and fill the universe with the mewling masses of humanity. They have seen the face of the gods and know they are cruel even to their servants. They do not know in their madness if they found glory or horror in the sight. They are clad in yellow and preach of the empire yet to come and the coming of the Yellow King whose reign will be suffering without end.
