Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maskos (section)

====Heresy====

One thousand years later, a preacher, wearing robes identical to those that Maskos himself had worn during his time as a Missionary, appeared in one of the many new cities of Maskos.  The preacher, who named himself only Ritorum the Humble, spoke glowingly of Maskos’s legacy, and disparagingly of the now long-dead warlord to whom Maskos had offered the throne of the world.  The warlord-cum-governor, Ritorum proclaimed, had deeply insulted the Ecclesiarchy with his materialism, his cowardice, and his pride.  The actual events were so long ago, most of the people of Maskos didn’t know better.  Ritorum went on to claim that the Ecclesiarchy was doing an insult of its own to the people of the world, by not building for them the same paradises that Maskos had built for their ancestors, a thousand years ago.

Initially, the preacher made little headway, but in time, his charisma, his persuasive speaking style, and the growing underclass of the planet had combined to build himself a sturdy congregation, one that exulted in hard work and enjoying the pleasures of life.  The Ecclesiarchy of the planet, unsure of Ritorum’s intentions, discreetly demanded an explanation for his unorthodox preaching, but Ritorum simply pointed out the facts: the Ecclesiarchy was losing its touch with the underclasses, and they were a potent breeding ground for sedition if ever they strayed from the Throne.  Though this did not calm the Ecclesiarchy much, they were forced to admit that it was not so terribly far from the general Cult Imperator in Cloudburst: that of happiness and holiness stemming from giving one’s all in the Emperor’s name, usually to the Ecclesiarchy itself.

Ritorum directed his flock to build a great monastery, one akin to the one that now served as the headquarters for the Ministorum and Administratum, only even grander.  This, he proclaimed, would be for the people, and like the pilgrims of old, any who pleased him could retire here after a lifetime of hard work.

Soon enough, Ritorum had his monastery.  Built into a mountainside known for its scenic views and isolation, Ritorum began using the same tactics that Maskos had; he took the downtrodden, promised them paradise, and then actually sent them there.  After disappearing for only a few months, the pilgrims who came to Ritorum’s monastery would return to civilization, eager to spread the good word.  Homes became galleries, workplaces became faith houses, and for a time, even the Ecclesiarchy had to admit that all seemed well.  Ritorum’s love of beauty and hard work were hardly inimical to Imperial virtues.

Some decades passed, and the first of Ritorum’s flock reached retirement age.  One by one, they collected their families and travelled to the monastery, whereupon they were never seen again.  Initially, the local law enforcement agencies of the world could write that off as a simple retirement home, far from the cities, but as thousands of people vanished from the population centers of Maskos, the Arbites grew suspicious.  They dispatched a plainclothes team to the monastery in the guise of pilgrims, seeking to infiltrate.  The team returned two months later, eagerly reporting that Ritorum was exactly what he seemed to be, and claiming that there was a real chance he had been blessed by the Emperor himself.  Sharp-eyed Arbitrators, however, immediately noticed two things.  First, that had not been what the plainclothes team had been sent to establish.  Second, one of the Arbites dispatched to the monastery had not returned with the others, but had come back later, with signs of a concussion, which no other team member remembered him getting.

Fed up with secrets and inconsistencies, the Arbites assembled a full Suppression Force and concealed them in the rocks around the monastery one night.  A volunteer from the Judges was sent in, in the guise of an inspector, looking for a missing person.  Under his armor, he wore a vox-wire and a heartbeat monitor.  After a few minutes of talking, the rest of the Suppression Force heard the Judge enter the building and begin looking around, at which time the vox-wire abruptly shut off.  The heartbeat monitor did not, perhaps because the Judge had concealed it elsewhere on his person.  The alarmed Arbitrators saw the Judge’s heart rate climb from 60 BPM to 140 BPM in under a minute.

The Marshal on site ordered an immediate Omega Crash, Arbites terminology for armed raid.  The entire Arbites force charged the monastery and attacked with suppressed guns and stunners, web guns and non-lethal needlers.  Hundreds of startled pilgrims fell in seconds to the massive assault, through windows and doors that faced out onto the plains of Maskos from their cliffside retreat.

In minutes, it became obvious that something was badly wrong.  Though the entry rooms were perfectly normal Ecclesiarchal material, with the usual devotions and icons of the Throne and Primarchs, the rooms deeper in, past the first group of residential halls, had far more disturbing iconography, of things that were not quite human doing things that were not quite legal, or anatomically possible, to various human heroes of ages past.  Their hearts gripped by sudden knowledge of what was happening, the Arbites switched to lethal weapons and charged deeper.

Inside the central gallery of the monastery, the Arbites team encountered a scene from a fever dream.  A monstrous, pulsating ball of flesh and Warp-stuff hung in the air above the floor, surrounded by thousands of chanting Slaaneshi cultists.  The Arbites, seeing no sign of either their missing Judge or Ritorum, opened fire at once, cutting down the oblivious cultists by the hundreds.  In the carnage, cultists rose from their chants and threw themselves at the Arbites as if possessed, and at least some were.  Arbitrators began to fall, outnumbered as they were by over a hundred to one.  An emergency reinforcement request went out to the nearby Inquisitorial Palace, but the team had to press on in the meantime.

At the heart of the chamber, something reacted to the presence of the Arbites team.  The murders of its cultists called a mighty daemon forth, inhabiting the body of the daemonhost Ritorum, who swatted the first wave of Judges with Shock Mauls and Power Cudgels aside.  As cultists died, the bond between the Immaterium and the daemon faded, and it began to shrink and falter as the Warp-conduit it had made of the pilgrim’s families’ flesh started to disappear.  Sensing possible defeat, the daemon called for something in Ritorum’s voice.

If the daemon had spoken in a language other than Gothic, if the Tech-Arbitrator covering the door hadn’t heard it, if the cultist manning the hidden vox-controller wired to the concealed radio dish on the roof of the monastery had been a microsecond faster, or if the Arbites tech crew outside hadn’t had a radio jammer on hand, the entire world of Maskos would have fallen into the Warp.  As it was, the Tech-Arbitrator recognized the coded order and signaled for a local radio blackout, the cultist had been too busy staring hungrily at his soul’s owner to respond at once, and the team outside was quick on their feet.  The jammer engaged, and whatever signal the cultists had arranged did not broadcast.

The daemon was forced, screaming, back into the Warp, as the number of cultists in the room fell below critical mass for the summoning.  The surviving Arbites fought their way back out of the room.  The Arbitrator Senioris gave the order, and the team flooded the room with their guns, cutting down every single member of the pilgrimage.

Outside, the team regrouped.  The body of the missing Judge was never found, though the heartrate monitor kept going at over 140 BPM for the following six years before cutting off.  It transpired, according to the team outside, that the cultist signal had been an activation order, for over two thousand cultists in the cities of Maskos to begin indiscriminate murder of everybody near them, to offset the deaths of the cultists in the monastery itself.  The planet had been literally seconds from becoming a daemon world, right under the Ecclesiarchy’s nose.  Stopping the incursion had cost the Arbites 40% of their manpower in the first half an hour.  An Inquisitorial taskforce of Ordos Malleus and Hereticus specialists arrived minutes later, to find a charnel house of a temple and an army of enraged Arbitrators, looking for somebody to blame.

As might be expected, the following two years were the bloodiest in Maskos’s history, with savage purges of the cities and local Ecclesiarchy every week.  The Ordo Hereticus eventually declared the world clean of heresy, but the damage was done.  No longer, the Arbites declared, would the Ecclesiarchy be able to wield such power over Maskos.  Instead, the Subsector Administratum Master would control the world directly, and all domestic Ecclesiarchal Missionary activities would have to be cleared with the planetary Archbishop first.

One thousand four hundred years later, the careful vigilance of the Archbishop and Arbites have successfully prevented any resurgence of cult activity on the planet, though it has faced sporadic pirate and Dark Eldar raids in the interim.  Now, Maskos is a local Imperial strongpoint, with a potent military, loyal citizens, and a bustling trade economy, and over it all, the Arbites must keep sharp watch, in case other foes of Mankind attempt to emulate their founder’s methods.  Fortunately for them, the system now houses a small convent of Sisters of the Sanguine Soul Order, which hosts a permanent force of one thousand Battle Sisters.  The majority of the Order is of the Famulous and [[Hospitallers|Hospitaller]] disposition, but the Battle Sisters here (established in the wake of the Ritorum incident) often fly to other systems to aid in Missionary work or to fight off the Glasians.  The Sisters keep a careful eye on the populace for any sign of further corruption.