Setting:Cloudburst/Ecclesiarchy

Description

As with all other aspects of Imperial life, with the colony ships came the preachers. The Administratum founded the Cloudburst Sector long after the reforms of Sebastian Thor, and so when the colonies of the Sector began their establishment, the modern Ecclesiarchy of the Sector began alongside it. The worlds of Cloudburst have a history of odd interpretations of the Imperial Creed, however, including some that alarm the Ordo Hereticus.

The majority of the Adeptus Ministorum presence in the Cloudburst Sector is innocuous enough. The Ministorum asserts control over things like arranging marriages between nobles and the general spiritual guidance of its charges on most Imperial worlds. The many Feral and Feudal Worlds of the Cloudburst Sector call for Missionaries regularly. The sheer size of the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone mean that a Missionary may begin a process of converting a primitive world generations before it concludes at the hands of an apprentice. None of this is especially odd or unusual for a Frontier sector.

The Inquisition finds certain trends of the Ministorum Cloudburst troubling. The similarities between the modern Ecclesiarchy of Cloudburst and the pre-Reformation Ecclesiarchy are stark, enough so that eyes have been drawn from as far away as Calixis. The ideology of Drake’s Ecclesiarchy is that of the Imperial Cult, sure enough, but his means of expressing and encouraging faith are heirlooms that date back to the very dawn of Cloudburst. The trouble is that they are also akin to what the Ecclesiarchy now calls the Temple Tendency, or as they were once known, the Temple of the Savior Emperor. Banished and crippled by Sebastian Thor, many thousands of years ago after the Reign of Blood and rebirth of the Daughters of the Emperor, the Temple of the Savior Emperor once claimed supremacy over all theological and many military matters of Imperial state.

Although the leaders of the Cloudburst Ministorum find the very idea repugnant when asked, the fact is that the doctrine of their faith does resemble that of the pre-Thor era. The Synod Cloudburst is a joke, given its size. With only a few tens of billions of humans in the whole sector, the Synod consists at present of two old men. However, as the Inquisition knows all too well, any time two people with limitless power meet, conspiracies are born as if by the will of the universe. The Ordo Hereticus has seen sufficient evidence of Savior Emperor Tendencies among the lay clergy of the sector to suspect that any infiltration of the Ministorum comes from the top. This is glaringly obvious in contrast to the spartan Ecclesiarchy of Drumnos, and the pragmatic militarism of the Naxos priesthood. However, preliminary investigations of the Ecclesiarchy’s conduct in Cloudburst have revealed the opposite trend. Some of the most embarrassing events in Ministorum history in the sector have come about because the Ecclesiarchy took their tendencies towards opulence and self-armament too far, and were chastised for it.

For example, the problem of conscription by Ecclesiarchal ships from Hapster led directly to the arrest of an Archbishop after a humiliating mutiny on Thunderhead Station. Three worlds in the Sector have either endured outright Exterminatus or at least civil war because Bishops or Archbishops were undiscovered psychics or remorseless charlatans. The Temple Tendency has become the nuisance it is elsewhere in the galaxy because of their discretion, caution, and restraint. The Cloudburst Ministorum displays none of these traits.

Where exactly the truth may lie, the Inquisition does not know. However, given the building resentment between the Canoness Superior Lanbrie and the Sector Cardinals with Drake’s and Lamarr’s constant overspending, lavishness, militarism, and lack of oversight of their subordinates, any Inquisitor so inclined could find a ready ally in the firebrand Battle Sister.

The Imperium has had some major issues with Ecclesiarchal staff and clergy mistaking their proximity to the divine for permission to do as they please in the past. The Ecclesiarchal Palace on Celeste is one obvious example of this, with its abundant decorations and lavish design.

Jodhclan’s Paradise, the only true Shrine World in the Sector thus far, houses an even more obvious deviance from the typical Ecclesiarchal restraint. Jodhclan’s military, which trains under the Battle Sisters of the Sacred Rose Order, is expanding faster than that of any other Cloudburst worlds save Cognomen and Oglith, one of which is a Forge World and the other of which is under Ork invasion. Cardinal Lamarr insists that he is simply being cautious, and that any military force he builds is to defend the faithful from the Glasian menace. The truth is that he is a student of history.

Lamarr is aware of the historical trend of verdant, beautiful, unspoiled paradise worlds being abruptly claimed by the Eldar as long-lost Maiden Worlds. As he watched Jodhclan’s Paradise grow from a mere Rogue Trader discovery to a major Shrine, he saw the familiar patterns emerge. All it took was a few nearby Dark Eldar slaver raids, and his natural paranoia filled in the gaps. Lamarr is terrified that the Eldar, be they Craftworlders, Kabalites, or Corsairs (he is not worldly enough to know the difference by sight) will soon come to evict him from his beautiful home. The fact that the Eldar do not even seem directly aware of the planet’s existence simply drives him to imagine that they are pooling their strength. He is also unaware that his paranoia, which fuels his military expansionism, has placed him firmly in the sights of the Ordo Hereticus and Ordo Militarum, both of which see his actions as deliberate violations of the Decree Passive, which the Cloudburst Ecclesiarchy has had trouble following in the past anyway.

As a result, Jodhclan’s Paradise sits in the incredibly uncomfortable position of being both host to an Inquisitorial Chamber Militant and a world against which it is likely to deploy. The capital and many other cities are places of peace and piety, but Lamarr’s paranoia is bringing subtle pressures to bear against its people. Though he has not yet slipped to the extent of turning on his own citizens as Eldar spies, he is gradually falling prey to his own fears. The religious orders on Jodhclan’s Paradise are anathematic to the Eldar, of course, so he has little reason to suspect that they may turn on him, but the civilian population on the planet is large and diverse; realistically, he can’t control all of it.

It is both a common and an uncomfortably obvious observation by other members of the Adeptus Terra that the tiny Synod Cloudburst can’t be relied on to do anything of import in the rulership of the Sector. To fill in the gap left in the spiritual oversight of the Sector’s needs, smaller local cults and hierarchies of Ministorum personnel have arisen on the worlds other than Jodhclan and Celeste. Most of these go unnamed, or simply morph into regional churches, but some become secret societies in all but name, working their way into the stagnant leadership of the Ecclesiarchy.