Order of the Argent Shroud
| Order of the Argent Shroud | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
||
| Founding | M.36 | |
| Daughters of | The Daughters of the Emperor | |
| Canoness Superior | Unknown | |
| Strength | Unknown | |
| Specialty | Shock assault | |
| Allegiance | Imperium | |
| Colours | Silver armour, with white cloth. | |
"Heretics crave the cleansing fire of absolution. They need not fear for we shall deliver."
- – Canoness Helflax of the Order of the Argent Shroud.
"A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided."
- – Tony Robbins
The Order of the Argent Shroud is a major Orders Militant of the Sisters of Battle. They're the "nicest" of the Sororitas; believing themselves to be conduits of the Emperor's will, guided by him alone, and are noted for being altruistic and selfless. They jump headfirst into nearly every conflict they're in to save the imperium through bolter fire, prayer, and blindingly fast attacks deep into the heart of enemy territory where survival should logically be impossible, and then coming out alive anyway like the space-paladins they are. They wear silver armor with black robes.
Of course, that couldn't last forever, and they got buttfucked by the Great Rift opening up.
About the Order of the Argent Shroud
The Order came to be through the work of Saint Silvana, one of Alicia Dominica's sisterhood in the Brides of the Emperor, and had a part in ending the Reign of Blood. She was the nice, quiet one of the sisterhood of the travelling pants; being super giving and self-sacrificing to pretty much everybody, but also not apparently saying much of anything during her lifetime since no quotes of hers apparently survive the Age of Apostasy. And that kindness, so hard to find in a galaxy that sucks shit, made a massive impression on her fellow battle-sisters; She was one of the only battle sisters of Alicia Dominica to actively found an Order within her lifetime, and was declared a Living Saint while she was still alive. Like all of Alicia's buddies however, she was martyred; she met her end at the hand of a Death Cult Assassin who was either butthurt that Goge Vandire got taken out, or by the Alpha Legion. And as if that wasn't enough, her remains mysteriously vanished while she was lying in state, proving that not being a raging douchebag in the Imperium of Man has it's consequences among the Ecclesiarchy. The name of the order comes from Silvana's death shroud having the slight imprint of her bones on it, and it became one of the chapter's most holy and revered relics, as it was the last thing left behind by the Saint before her disappearance.
The Order believes in emulating the life of Silvana however they can, and it starts with them speaking, or rather the fact that they don't do much of it at all. This silence follows their burial beliefs, as unlike their fellow Orders that do the whole song and dance about sending their fallen to the emperor and guiding their souls and all that, they just quietly drag the bodies off the battlefield in stone silence, fix up their wounds and armor, then leave them out in the convents from which they came from. They also take Silvana's altruism and faithfulness to new, crazy extremes in that they actually don't coordinate or even listen all that carefully to other Imperial forces during missions at all, preferring to dive-bomb straight down the throat of the enemy to go smash up fortifications, artillery and enemy commanders, then come back and do it all over again. Their plans are almost always being improvised on the fly, and they tend to have to cut their way out of the enemy through sheer willpower and faith. This naturally drives other imperial forces nuts as it means there's tons of ecclesiarchal relics and weapons in the midst of a bunch of Chaos or Xenos that is not concerning itself with what the actual objective of the battlefield is nor what the other battle groups are doing, but their near-supernatural talent of escaping certain doom and the fact that they surgically strike the most valuable targets on the battlefield with shocking precision means usually it turns out alright, or at least ignorable in the short term. To the Argent Shroud, they believe that their steadfast trust in the emperor makes more sense than the words of his more fallible subjects. Which does kind of make sense, as the order was founded just after the Reign of Blood and Goge Vandire's nonsense happened, and the number of Sororitas lost thanks to the fallible minds of ecclesiarchal bullshit is probably in the high-trillions, so they figure they'd just go cause some trouble for the biggest, scariest targets on the table then go fuck off and pray on their own. After all, Actions speak louder than words is sort of their thing. As a result, they're some of the most effective and dangerous shock troops the Imperium has on-hand, and they usually use them to great effect.
Of course, they aren't safe from GeeDubs' personal bolter bitch snuff fetish, and whoo boy, they got it as badly as you possibly can without the order being wiped out completely. After the Great Rift opened up in the 42nd Millenium, the Argent Shroud found that a vast number of their sub-convents and Shrine Worlds just so happened to be either right up against the rift, or got ate completely. When the damage finally got calculated, it's estimated that 80% of the entire order's might got a one-way ticket into the warp. But they press on, spurred by the loss of their sisters, and fighting just as valiantly as they did at full strength. And every so often, in battlefields on Worlds within spitting distance of the Rift where the fighting's thickest, Seraphim or Dominion Squads suddenly appear from long thought swallowed worlds to throw an unexpected kidney shot at the Emprah's enemies.
So yeah, We Orders Militant of the Damned now.
Notable Campaigns
- Gyre Crusade (Unknown Date.M36) - The Order's very first campaign, and it set a precedent of the kind of shit they were able to walk away from. Their most notable moment of triumph was fighting the Iron Warriors on a planet with Magma flats for a straight year and coming out of it with minimal casualties and three skulls from the warpsmiths hanging around. Perturabo must've blown a gasket and caused a warp storm when he heard about that.
- Charak Persecution (Unknown Date.M41) - Your usual Mutant purging operation under the guise of keeping the human form pure. Standard stuff. they show up, flamer the entire place to the foundations, that sort of thing.
- Exorcism of the Infected (Unknown Date.M41) - Now we're back to their favorite thing: Pulling wild rescues from straight out of their ass. The Death Guard's 3rd Company set about a massive Poxwalker infection that was steadily taking over system after system, until it finally got to the the Yanthilmar system, where it began turning planet after planet into a massive Dawn of the Dead sequel. The survivors fled to a non-affected moon and beg the Emperor for salvation, and in return he sends them roughly less than a thousand Argent Shroud Battle Sisters straight from the warp, which doesn't give anybody any real hope. Undeterred, they go find a secret temple hidden underground, and pray for three days in it's inner sanctum. After that, the temple shoots a pulse of light, pointing to each planet in the system. They go to the planets in order, and eventually the survivors follow them: Where they learn that the Argent Shroud proceeded to kill The Poxwalkers so hard they somehow exorcised the plague right out of them.
- Third War for Armageddon (998.M41) - They (along with everyone else) went to go have a good scrap with Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka during his bi-annual Humies vs. Orkz cookout on Armageddon, and were primarily stationed to the Fire Wastes, and then everywhere else on Armageddon, typically fighting alongside the Flesh Tearers, something they did not appreciate whatsoever given their propensity for wanton violence and the fact they didn't bother collaborating on what the fuck they were supposed to do (or more likely, the orders they were gonna end up ignoring anyway), but ended up liberating a mining village together at Gaius Point. It actually started out pretty well; they managed to put together an ad-hoc militia from the people battened down underground at Gaius Point and prepared to take on the oncoming greenskin horde and hold the village for good with a plan that seemed to be doing wonders: The Tearers would go meet the Orks on the battlefield first, and then drive them into the line of the Sister's gunfire. Everything was going pretty smoothly until the Sisters noticed that the Orks, not ones for turning around during a fight...turned around during a fight, not bothering with the Sisters at all and quite done trying to fight the rampaging space vampires, but instead went after the militia's threadbare wall of lasguns instead, only to get the reacharound from the Flesh Tearers who by that point had long given into the Black Rage, and once they were out of Orks, they began attacking the militia and then the people of Gaius Point, slaughtering them all. They promptly decided to go fuck off since there was no way they were going to be able to save those people from the Flesh Tearers, and called up the Inquisition to maybe go have a look and see if they could go handle that at some point in the future. Also they lost some relics of the first colonists of Armageddon in a hive city. Whoops.
On the Tabletop
They're the hit and run specialists of the Sisters of Battle. They move faster and more than any other order, and their vehicles thank them for it. Their special Conviction is Actions Not Words, which gives any model with it the ability to fire while advancing as if it were standing still, which is great for Retributor Squads, and gets your infantry straight up your opponent's nose, drowning them in rapid and heavy fire. Repressor fans (which, if you're playing Sororitas, you should be already) also absolutely love this since it does get the <ORDER> tag necessary to make the short-rangedness of it's weapons a trivial matter. Go forth, and run a bulldozer with a Heavy flamer on it straight up their ass.