Editing Grey Knights (section)

==Grey Knights and the [[Adeptus Custodes]]==
Shield Captain Valerian provides a telling perspective about how the most elite warriors in the Imperium views their silver-armored cousins. Shield-Captain Valerian thinks it possible that M41 Custodians are individually '''more skilled''' than their Great Crusade era counterparts, owing to ten thousand years of extra experience and information gathering on mankind's enemies. However, in the book ''The Emperor's Legion'', while working with and fighting alongside a Grey Knights company, Valerian does acknowledge to himself that while each individual Custodian is more than a match for their Grey Knight counterparts, the Custodes are not a self-contained army the same way as Space Marine Chapters are, since that was never their intended function. Nor are they possessed of any prescient gifts or supernatural abilities that would assist them against the Great Enemy. In this way, he further compares the Custodians to the Grey Knights, both being descended from the Emperor (in different fashions), were incorruptible and immune to the temptations of Chaos; the key difference is that the Grey Knights are a weapon of singular purpose against the Warp while the Custodians had been intended to be the guardians of mankind in a future without the Warp. Valerian privately speculates that it might be the Grey Knights who more faithfully embody the Emperor's final legacy considering how the Imperium eventually turned out, and isn't so sure about which agency is the finest or most faithful; and while he never says that he himself actually agrees with this sentiment, he acknowledges that a reasonable argument could perhaps be made. This is a shared sentiment that skulks around the other Custodians like a foul odour.

The missing element in the Custodes deployment has always been the [[Sisters of Silence]], a force that most commanders very easily forget about, especially when faced with the awesome fighting prowess of the Custodes themselves. But it is worth noting that they were always intended to fight together. Sister Tanau Aleya believes that there is no physical opponent that the Custodians could not destroy [the [[Swarmlord]] recently being killed by a single, no-name Custodian without even a whole lot of fuss seems to support this assessment, [[RAGE|irksome as Tyranid players may consider it]]] and that it was the role of the untouchable Sisters of Silence to anchor supernatural or warp tainted enemies into the physical realm where they can be wounded and destroyed by the golden warriors or by the Sisters themselves, whose null effect causes any daemons they strike down to be killed ''permanently''. Thus, they act on the opposite end of the scale to the Grey Knights, who fight against the warp on its own terms, whereas the Talons of the Emperor deny the warp any purchase in reality to begin with.

Which method is more effective, it is actually difficult to say. From the Grey Knights' end, while superlative warriors even amongst the astartes, they are not the peerless physical combatants that the Custodes are; but then, nobody is. However, they were also never meant to be, and the Grey Knights ''are'' peerless psykers, which offsets the discrepancy somewhat. While certainly fighting creatures of the warp using harnessed warp energy is not so foolishly sounding as first appears, as it has real precedence; The God-Emperor himself does so, and the [[Eldar]] do it almost routinely. This is where it's also important to point out that there's a difference between Chaos and The Warp; Chaos needs The Warp to exist, but not vice-versa. If that's still not clear, then as an analogy, in Star Wars, there's a distinction between The Sith and the Dark Side of the Force, even if the two are sometimes thought of as interchangeable; The Sith are reliant on the Dark Side, but the Dark Side exists irrespective of the existence of The Sith. Not a perfect analogy certainly, but hopefully conveys the gist. But returning to the point, for perspective's sake, it is better to understand that it is '''Timing''' that is the main factor. When the Grey Knights arrive on the scene, it is already too late for everybody else: the great enemy already has all the cards, the dark gods have now found purchase into the material realm, [[exterminatus|the battle is effectively lost, and no number of battle tanks or titan god-machines will reverse the inevitable]]... and that is where the Grey Knights are forced to begin their fight.

So, [[skub|regardless of what anybody else says]], be proud of your silver dudes. For while they may be sometimes deployed as a preemptive force, Grey Knights are more often typically wrestling victory from the jaws of not only certain-defeat but a point where defeat has already happened. ''To win even when everything is already lost.'' They're the last prayer, they're final hail mary, the last roll of the dice. Don't be surprised if they lose, because everything is so stacked up against them. But when they actually win, [[Nobledark Imperium|that's something]].