Vore-Weapon

A Vore–Weapon is a made beast, a living assassin’s tool crafted by heretek genetor and xenobiologis tech–adepts from raw xenos breeding material. This crafting is a dangerous practice for a Calixian Mechanicus priest. While the Omnissiah blesses the toil that created grox, beremoth, and a dozen other worthy agri–breeds, the creation of new xenos beasts from breeds declared corrupt or vile is tech–heresy. The line between the holy and the heretek xenobiologist is smudged and often redefined, but creation and use of vore–weapons are emphatically tech–heresy in the Calixis Sector. No faithful servant of the God-Emperor would create or employ such obviously corrupt xenos life, and those who do must be hunted down and burned.

The most common breed of Calixian vore–weapon is a thin worm–like creature less than a hand-breadth in length, bristling with hard spines. It is possessed of startlingly strong hooked fore–limbs and a maw of razor–teeth. It can coil to leap clear across a room if needed and employs its hooks and spines to scuttle with alarming speed. A vore–weapon is docile until enraged by chemical cues. Typically, an assassin activates and throws the vore–weapon upon its target by means of an armoured gauntlet of particular design. A frenzied vore–weapon is fast, fearless, and extremely aggressive. It tears through even light armour to get at the flesh beneath, and then rapidly levers, thrashes, and burrows its way within to destroy internal organs. Once the xenos has maw and fore–spines within flesh, the target is as good as dead.

Just as for an assassin's envenomed dagger, however, a vore–weapon is ineffective against the armoured, the alert, and the forewarned. Its primary use is often as a coded missive intended for someone other than the victim -- the assassin's master displays power and ruthlessness in using a heretek's vore–weapon, and threatens the same terrible death to those who continue to go against his wishes. The noted Inquisitor Embuleos raged against vore–weapons in his lifetime, calling them a great heresy forced upon the Imperium by negligent and degenerate Magi. Despite periodic purges by the Calixian Ordos and Mechanicus, vore–weapon breeders continue to practice their ugly craft throughout the Calixis Sector. Renegade Tech–priests and biologis hereteks outside the Machine Cult ensure that the wealthy and unscrupulous have access to this terrifying means of assassination. They cultivate squirming colonies of the beasts, hidden away behind facades of wealth, and hold court for the factors of assassin guilds and death cults.

In recent years, more and more of these bizarre living weapons have been used to commit murders across the Josian Reach, leading some to speculate that a large storehouse of these xenos creatures is located somewhere in the region.