IC: Oh
cousin, there is a
lot to unpack there...
I will freely admit, I am not the most knowledgeable on the golden custodians. They rarely take the field, and humans shroud everything they do in
such mystery anyway - but even so this is a rather conspiratorial account at best.
So. Things in your account I know to be true. The Custodians are humanity enhanced and overblown, with complex internal feuding. This, as fair as I know, is true. The Custodians are likely byblows of the Emperor's Thunder Warriors. I've seen that theory bandied around, so, a tentative truth. They use any excuse to suppress 'threats' to their empire. Truth. They're likely the ones mostly in control of it. Somewhat true, though the humans' strange bureaucracies, aristocracies, and the Ecclesiarchy all also have some level of genuine control and say in how things are run; it's a tangled fucking mess, which is why they're so full of the apparatus of a dictatorship - factions vying for favour - with no dictator to hold the chair (at least until the blue fucker woke up). There's something cold and dead akin to their God in their eyes and beings - take this with a pinch of skepticism, but I
do have a cousin who faced them in battle and reported something similar.
Things I know to be lies: the origins of the sisters of silence and the Orks. The sisters are, plainly, simply - hmm. I will attempt to use layman's terms here so that most can understand (rather than my natural impulse to begin writing out the math-librettos of dimensional subexchange) - if most life reaches
down and through and thus touches the other side of reality where gods dwell and existence is fluid, the Sisters reach
up and back to some space equal and opposite - presumably a place of stillness and static in contrast to the change and emotion that power the Warp (which is why they seem so
odd to most other life forms; even those not blessed with the full gifts of psykerhood still touch on the vast entangling consciousness of the Warp itself, so to meet something that
doesn't makes that person seem offputting, distant, unaeldari). The Sisters likely undergo all the indoctrination and nonsense that make most Imperium-loyal humans so tedious to interact with, but having met so-called 'blanks' outside of such situations - actively rescuing one from being recruited, in fact - I can safely say that they are sophonts like any other, even if my instincts make me find them disquieting. That, however, is no fault of their own.
Honestly,
captured and brainwashed Tau - while I have no doubt this is something that the Imperium
would do given what they
did to the Jokaero, records indicate Sisters of Silence existed
long before Tau emerged onto the galactic scene. Additionally, Tau are
not reverse-delta inclined - they
do touch the Warp (it's how their ships travel) but only
very shallowly - if you and I have the waves up to our knees, cousin, the Tau in general tend to simply stand upon the wet sand of the shore.
On the Orks - no. I have seen records from the Peak of our civilisation of encountering them. They were no invention of human hands. And while the Imperium has fed the worst kind of cruelty that many Orks hold, resulting in some truly awful specimens of the species, I have met many others who have been kind, strong - perhaps overfond of 'a good scrap', but who am I to judge their culture. Painting them as a ravening horde 'unleashed' by the humans is behaviour that is beneath you, cousin.
Still, I do look forward to you covering more of these codices! Some of your speculation ran true - and of course, you are completely correct that the humans' so-called 'psychic beacon' is a continuous, awful war-crime for which there is no necessity. If they'd just fucking negotiate, we'd be happy to allow limited webway access, or help them develop engines that aren't constantly smeared in grease by people who don't know how they work, but that would involve trusting the 'hated xenos'
