Astartes Chapter
Exorcists
The Possessed and Cleansed · Wardens Against the Warp · Children of the Dark Founding
LOYALIST · SUSPECTED IMPERIAL FISTS
The Dark Founding
The Exorcists were raised during the 13th Founding, the so-called Dark Founding that fell sometime between the 35th and 36th Millennia, an event the Administratum's records pass over in conspicuous silence. They were created, it is whispered, as a classified Imperial experiment: to forge Space Marines who could withstand daemonic possession and the seductions of Chaos where other warriors are corrupted or destroyed. Their very existence was sealed at their inception by a Bull Absolute issued by the Inquisitorial Representative to the Senatorum Imperialis, a writ that hides the truth of their making to this day. Whatever was attempted in that founding, the Exorcists emerged from it changed, and they have never explained themselves to the wider Imperium.
Banished, the Mountain Fastness
The Exorcists hold the grim mountain world of Banished, a fortress-monastery of stone and shadow from which they recruit and to which they return only to be remade. Their selection of aspirants follows the brutal patterns common to the Adeptus Astartes, but what follows induction is unique among loyal Chapters and would see any other warband condemned as heretics. Recruits are not merely trained; they are subjected to the central, terrible rite that defines the Chapter. Banished's isolation suits a brotherhood that trades in secrets no sane Imperial citizen could be permitted to know, and the world's monasteries echo, it is said, with the remembered screams of those who have endured the Chapter's making and survived.
The Rite of Possession
Here lies the Exorcists' darkest secret. As part of his initiation, each aspirant is deliberately given over to a daemon, made to serve as a living daemonhost while the entity wears his flesh. Only then is the foul thing cast back into the warp, exorcised by the intervention of an Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus. The Marine who survives this violation emerges scarred in body and soul but profoundly resistant to possession, inoculated against the very horror he has hosted. Through the painful Orison rites his battle-brothers afterward cut away any mutation the ordeal has left upon him, while he wrestles with the searing memories of the daemon that once looked out through his eyes.
Hunters of the Daemon
Forged against the warp, the Exorcists fight as specialists in the destruction of daemons, possessed renegades and the servants of the Ruinous Powers. They commit readily to warzones other Chapters shun, the daemon-incursions and Chaos eruptions where their hard-won resilience turns the tide, and they keep close, secretive counsel with the Ordo Malleus and the Grey Knights whose mission so nearly mirrors their own. Where a daemonhost would turn a lesser Astartes, an Exorcist can stand against the possessing entity and cast it down. This grim utility makes them invaluable to the Inquisition and deeply unsettling to everyone else, for a warrior who has held a daemon within him is not easily trusted by the credulous and the fearful.
The Truth Withheld
The Exorcists are a famously secretive brotherhood, and the deepest of their secrets they keep even from their own. Their gene-seed is suspected to derive from particularly resilient Imperial Fists stock, yet that origin is an anomaly, for no other son of Rogal Dorn shows their resistance to the daemonic, and the matter remains officially classified. So jealously is the truth guarded that an Exorcist learns of his descent from Dorn only upon elevation to the First Company; the rank and file fight and die without ever knowing whose blood runs in their veins. Whether the resilience is a gift of that lineage or of the possession-rite itself, none beyond the Chapter's innermost circle can say.
Standing Against the Rift
Through the 41st Millennium the Exorcists kept to their secretive vigil, surfacing without warning in the Imperium's worst daemonic crises and then withdrawing again to Banished with their truths intact. When the Great Rift tore open and daemon-legions spilled into realspace in numbers unseen since the Horus Heresy, a Chapter expressly bred to endure the warp's touch found itself needed as never before. Still bound to the Ordo Malleus, still guarding the sealed truth of the Dark Founding, the Exorcists answered the new age of daemons as the only Chapter that has made a doctrine of surviving possession, casting the warp-born back into the abyss from which their own brothers were once dragged screaming.
See also
Sources
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