 As a child on Gehenna, I remember the stories of the White Maidens, terrifying ghosts that would come in the night and steal away the witch-born and their children who had done terrible wrongs. It was said they could find the wicked no matter how deep in the hive they sank or to what forgotten spire they climbed. As I grew, I came to believe that such things were no mere superstition. But now that I am an officer in the Great Crusade, bloodied upon the battlefields of a score of worlds, I have come to find my childhood fears were true and quite valid. The memoirs of Lieutenant Colonel Godrun Keax retired, 227th Gehenna The Emperor of Mankind has many servants. Many are known well to us, some to only a few. In his eternal wisdom he kept and yet keeps those most precious of his subjects shrouded and hidden from the sight of the heaving masses of humanity. For their work is of such dread import that to know of their purpose would be enough to damn the possessors of such terrible knowledge. Better to leave these beings in the shadows, for by their very existence they challenge all the Imperial citizen knows and believes about the foundation of their reality. Know then that this is a record of the militant wing of the Divisio Astra Telepathica, the maidens of the Null, the Sisters of Silence. So much of what the Sisters are and were, and from whom or what they were formed, is either lost to us or sealed by highest Imperial writ. Special exemption from the Imperial household by way of the Lord Regent has allowed this humble chronicler access to what remains, but I shall warn the examiners of this record that concrete information, scant as it is in this dark age, is a challenging prospect to find with regards to the Sisters. Nonetheless, herein is contained what remains. The Silent Sisterhood is a paramilitary force, nominally under the sphere of the Astra Telepathica, but functionally operating very much under its own remit. What is notable about the organization is that, unlike other clandestine or atypical Imperial military formations that operated a diverse spectrum of operatives and warriors, the Sisterhood is comprised entirely of women and women who are all, without exception, untouchables. These individuals possess an incredibly rare genetic trait that renders them psychic blanks that exude no immaterial presence. All humans possess some degree of presence within the warp, that realm of pure energy that exists alongside or underneath or behind our own reality. To use an ill-fitting analogy, most of the species would appear to the entities of warp space as tiny, insignificant lights. A human psycher capable of mentally accessing the tides of the material, to wield it in this material plane as eldritch power, is a flame burning brighter and more intensely the more powerful they are. An untouchable simply does not exist in this fashion. They cast no shadow in the warp. The more melodramatic chroniclers who have recorded this effect call them humans without a soul. However one chooses to see it. This has the curious and ill-understood effect of making them walking anathemas to psychic beings, whether they be human or xenos, and ever more so to the predatory warp beings from the material. This condition, simply by the very presence of one such as the sisters, severs the psychers connection to their warp-borne powers, but it goes beyond it. Beings in the company or the vicinity of untouchables have been recorded to feel deep sensations of unease or revulsion. The effect appears to be unconscious, with some who recounted the experience, describing the untouchable as being somehow unnatural. In psychers, this goes beyond disquiet and has been known to extend from causing full existential terror to extreme physical pain. The presence of the psychic null gene in humanity is itself a bizarre mystery, as despite the term, no single genome of it has ever been isolated. During the earliest years of unity and the Great Crusade, numerous teams of Mechanic and Biologist adepts and members of the Imperial Archaeotechnologist Corps attempted to extract and exploit the effect, but were met with abject failure at best and disaster at worst, all of which to such an extent that the Emperor himself mandated a ban on all further investigation into human untouchables, save of course for his own work. Speculation was discouraged. Hypotheses range from ancient Xenos tampering to arcane experiments conducted in the Dark Age of Technology, but nothing concrete has ever emerged. Human psychic untouchables simply are. A crucial value to the Imperium lies in their utter immunity to psychic powers. Their minds cannot be undermined, corrupted, or changed. They cannot be puppeted, nor be shown horrific or tempting visions. Nor can their bodies be possessed. As maidens chosen specifically for the strength of this gift curse, taught to hone it, and equipped with an array of the finest anti-psych weaponry the Imperium can devise, the Sisters of Silence are the most perfect hunters of the arcane humanity has ever developed. Their very presence utterly anathema to the witch, and a lethal toxin to the demon. Their every skill razor focused to the destruction of both. The origins of the Sisters cannot be rendered as a date with any degree of accuracy. Debate indeed exists as to their presence during the Unification Wars. Certainly, untouchables were employed by the Emperor during this period, as it would appear, lone assassins and operatives. The enemies arrayed against the would-be Master of Mankind were diverse, and many abused sorceress warp powers in their desperate attempts to quash the Lord of Lightning. These were themselves put down by the Emperor and his thunder warriors through sheer brute force, but often at a shockingly high cost of life and material resources. Prior to the launch of the Great Crusade, the Emperor ordered the formation of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, an organization that would act as the communication lines of the Imperium. With no technological means of communication available to humanity, all such secrets having perished with the downfall of the species at the end of the dark age of technology, mankind now relied upon astropaths, psychic individuals whose minds are deliberately sculpted to be able to send and receive messages across the vast interstellar gulfs that would soon separate the planets of the growing Imperium. But while communication was indeed the paramount concern of the organization, there was simply one segment in a larger group responsible for the management of all human psychic resources, the Divisio Astra Telepathica. In order to provide the manpower required to outfit each and every crusade expeditionary fleet, Mechanicum Basilicon Astra Armada, Rogue Trader Militant Convoy, or even simple bulk hauler flotillas, the system of administration to rival the Adeptus Administratum itself was required, with hundreds of thousands of functionaries and techno magi developing specialized facilities, codes of conduct, logistic accords, and even academic faculties. All of this was meant towards the correlation, development, and utilization of the greatest concentration of psychanalore humanity had ever amassed, and all of it under the most rigorous of secrecy. That the human psychic existed was not unknown to the species, and while the Imperial Truth, that secular philosophy by which the Emperor had founded his regime, denied all existence of the supernatural, psychers blurred the lines between what was comprehensible science and ill-understood arcaneity, to such a degree that extreme measures were required to sequester them from the general population. Key to this Divisio's initial work was the means that would become known colloquially for such a dread process as the Great Tithe. Every human psycher upon Terra itself, outwards into the great dark of the Sol system and outwards beyond that, were now under the direct purview of the Divisio Astra Telepathica. They commanded the full scope of all mutants of this variety in the species, and quite literally none, save the Emperor himself, could assay their harvest. No matter the consequences of one's birth, no matter the circumstances of one's birth, be it nobility or peasantry, vast wealth or direst poverty, and one's psychic abilities manifested, you were beholden to the Divisio. To this end, the Astra Telepathica formed the League of Black Ships, so named for their unmarked ebon hulls, to carry out the footwork of the Tithe, harvesting psychers from all worlds within the Imperium's borders, and transporting them to Divisio facilities for processing, training, or internment, depending on their abilities. As a task, it represented one of extreme danger, given the quarry in question and their uncanny natures. Because of this, the League formed Hunter Seeker Cottress to serve aboard its fleets. These teams were formed of trained Divisio soldiery with attached psychers fresh from the Scholastica Saicanna, where newly minted battle psychers were developing. They proved, at least initially, successful. However, as with all military formations in humanity's great endeavor, the challenges they faced only became more numerous and more dangerous as the sphere of Imperial expansion pushed ever outwards. Psychological breakdowns were becoming too common and too regular to be ignored by the Telepathica's new Divisio Investigatis, not to mention the attrition rates in combat losses. The role was too specialized to be entrusted to the soldiery of the Imperial Auxilia, the enemy often too powerful or insidious besides. It is unknown whether Astartes were considered, marked with legions like the 15th and 5th displaying marked talents in Saicanna and the 14th and 7th in its suppression, but was quite likely sidelined when the Divisio was forced to consider the idea of an Astartes whose mind could be usurped by an alpha level psychic threat. A new solution was needed, and as the War Council debated the matter at the highest of levels, a tragedy was set to unfold on the world of Pentecanes. Pentecanes was a poor but relatively stable hive world, only several weeks coreward from Terra, offering the Imperium a stable fleet anchor and mustering point for outward expansion. The world's population, barely at an industrial level of development, was nonetheless billion strong and proved an ideal recruiting ground for Exertus Imperialis regiments. The petty kingdoms of its past had been put down under Imperial rule, and a stable world government of the new regime was looking forward to building the planet up to a prosperous frontier outpost. However, the tides imposed by the Imperium began to take a toll on the population, whose best and brightest were scooped up by the Exertus Imperialis in their tens of thousands. Society began to fester, with corruption and vice creeping into the slums of the world. Despite the best efforts of the local iterators in promulgating the Imperial truth, a cult calling itself the final banquet, led by a holy family purporting to work miracles, began violently spreading to the worst of the planet's hive sinks. Word reached the governor, who informed the black ships immediately. The Imperial truth, brooking no tolerance for religiosity in any form, and the rumors of troublesome phenomena were doubtlessly signs of rogue and lightly dangerous psychers at work. A similar pattern had played out across too many worlds encountered by the great crusade for this to be misguided itinerant preachers. The signs pointed towards a rampant and degraded form of sorcery, redolent of the Age of Strife, which simply was no longer tolerated by the Imperium. The Divisio Investigatis of the Astra Telepathica dispatched a troop cadre to put down the banquet, but within hours of landing in the slums, all contact was lost, and the hive was erupting in unspeakable bloodshed. It appeared for all the worlds to be a plague, but one of the mind, not the body. Citizenry were killing each other with want and abandon. The emergency deployment of Imperial Auxilia regiments to cordon off affected areas did nothing to stem the tide, merely adding to the conflagration as these soldiers too succumbed to the madness and turned their weapons upon their comrades and civilians alike. The governor himself was shot by his bodyguards as he attempted to murder his own children. Imperial Authority Planetside broke down within a matter of hours, leaving the captain of the orbiting Black Ship, Gaigan Dantes, nominally in command. Land strikes and orbital bombardments, however targeted, would ultimately be ineffective. The Ligioni as Astartes were petitioned, but the closest force belonging to the aggressive Sixth Legion was days away, and even then, Dantes had no assurance that they would have the ability to weather the madness spreading across the planet. It was then that the Black Ships realized that there was one force retaining total combat effectiveness, despite the storm of insanity around them. The 5th 913 indentured irregular infantry, designated so for being from the Thirteenth World brought into compliance by the Ninth Expeditionary Fleet, were a primarily female force from a feral world that possessed some technological aptitude. Records from its time prior to Pentecanes show a number of nebulously defined disciplinary complaint issues raised against it from other regiments barracked alongside. However, as the plague spread, the 913ers were not simply weathering it, they were actively fighting back, seemingly immune to the psychic storm itself. Dantes drew the only conclusion available, based on his astro telepathica training. The regiment, known to themselves as the Daughters of the Crow, were comprised, in large part, of psychic blanks. Making contact, the Divisio Investigates provided orbital and aerial support for the regiment as it began to push into the slum identified earlier in the battle as the lightly placed that the family was residing in. There, the 913ers battled the Cabal itself, a Gestalt hive mind of alpha level psychers, putting the creatures to sword and flame. With the source of the corruption cut off, the plague evaporated, freeing the population and affected auxilia regiments from its grip, but leaving millions dead. Anarchy continued to reign, with the arriving Sixth Legion task force bringing the planet ultimately back into compliance, albeit with an even higher death toll. By this time, however, the black ships had long departed, and the Daughters of the Crow had gone with them. This account is generally accepted as the origin of the Sisters of Silence as we know them. It is certain that within years of the stated date of Pentecanes' fall, roughly four decades since the Crusade left Terra, the first of the Silent Sisters were seen fighting alongside Imperial forces, or scouring worlds for their psychic crop at the behest of the Divisio Astra Telepathica. There were some chroniclers who doubt the veracity of the story of Pentecanes. The tale, to many, seems too perfect an explanation. The presence of a huge amount of bearers of what was an incredibly rare human genome on a world beset by an extreme psychic threat does indeed stretch credulity when the odds are considered. These self-same theorists are wont to whisper that Pentecanes was in fact a contrived affair, a dark experiment to test the efficacy of a new, specialized formation of untouchables. It is worth noting that verifiable fragments do, however, match the account. Pentecanes is indeed a hive world in close proximity to Terra, but remains to the present day a haunted place, ravaged by some ancient capitalism, with the population well below what is expected of a world its size. Additionally, the Silent Sisters do bear distinct hallmarks of descent from a techno-barbarian culture, much like the one from whence the daughters of the Crow were drawn. And on that note, there exists in the cartographic imperialis, nor anywhere else, no record of Planet 913. The 9th expedition brought a 12th and 14th world into compliance, but of 13th, no record is excellent. It is, it must be said, not uncommon for the most covert or esoteric imperial organizations of this time, especially those to whom the emperor vested special attention in order to combat Psycana, to have deliberately occluded origins, lest any knowledge of the role the arcane played within the early Imperium make its way to the general population. The order Illucidatum and the Ordo Sinister, both of whose roles complemented the Silent Sisterhood, albeit on vastly different ends of the destructive spectrum, are similarly excised from histories of the time. One suspects the hand of the master of mankind, or at the very least members of the imperial household, in this affair, pruning the threads of the past in order to ensure that there were none for inquisitive minds to pull too strongly on. Yet others insist that the Silent Sisters have always been with the emperor since the very first days of the Imperium, even as he yet strove to unify Terra. As one discussed earlier, it is confirmable that nulls did indeed exist under the raptor and lightning banners of unity, but what little is known of their role paints them, as I said, as assassins or covert agents deployed by the emperor or his vizier, Malkador. Certainly, clade colexus of the officio assassinorum made and yet makes exclusive use of untouchable agents, so that it is possible that such blanks as fault during this time were simply the proto-agents of that now long-established foundation, and their necessary occlusion has led to wild speculation that the emperor has always had the silent sisterhood at his side, waiting perhaps for a critical mass of female untouchables to be properly formed and deployed. Should this indeed be the case, the great crusade was fundamentally necessary for their origin, as Terra itself, despite its heaving population, simply could not provide the quantity of untouchables necessary. Whatever their deliberately murky origin, it is verifiable from numerous accounts that the Sisters of Silence were present abroad in the Imperium at least four decades after the crusade's departure from Terra, somewhere in the late 830s of M-30. They were immediately to become synonymous with the Divisio investigates of the astro-telepathica, to the extent that they completely aggregated all of the functioning paramilitary roles from the original hunter-seeker cadres. The Divisio's armed men were retained as crew members and auxiliaries aboard the Black ships, but the presence of so many nulls aboard put an end to the department's utilisation of battle-sikers, who now found themselves destined for usage in select Exertus imperialis regiments. The function of this new militant arm of the telepathica retained their military bearing, but additionally were expanded, further into actual investigation, making them warrior-trackers as well as jailers, for when not in the field to seek, capture or destroy psychics, they were tasked with staffing the telepathica's many psychercontainment facilities. Their status as an all-null formation was an incalculable boon to the Divisio's work, as now it was possible for psychers to be more readily, efficiently and safely apprehended, and delivered into their hands. Existing within the overlapping fields of military efficacy and genetic suitability, the sisterhood rendered what had been an increasingly impossible task almost seamless. The colloquial name springs primarily from their trademark vow of silence, to be explored in a later record, but also the sheer remorseless efficiency with which they prosecuted their rule. Ghosts persistently moving at the edge of the Imperium's vision, arriving and departing from theatres of war or compliant systems, under the unassailable codes of the imperial household itself, all to execute in perfect silence the most crucial of operations. They rapidly became, to the wider Imperium, figures of both admiration and no small amount of dread. The still maidens in imperial gold were only ever whispered about, as those who asked openly about their nature soon found themselves rapidly silenced. Such, as was the case with all psychana in the Great Crusade, was the cost of secrets. The return of the silent sisterhood to prominence amongst the Imperium in this most darkest of millennia is a welcome one, for with the opening of the Great Eye and the creation of the Great Rift, mankind finds itself plagued ever more with the powers of the immaterial, and not since the blackest gauge of the siege has the sister's roles been more vital. The later history of their order is a sorry one indeed, for in the aftermath of the emperor's ascension and the reorganization of the Imperium, rise to prominence of the imperial creed led to a renewed hatred for psychic nulls. Barely trusted at the best of crusade times, the new imperial regime, with the adeptus ministerum leading the cries, relegated the sisterhood to ever more remote operations, until, finally, ministerum troops purged the somnus citadel upon luna, smashing the order's headquarters and scattering them to the furthest corners of the galaxy. These remote vigils retained the order's equipment, traditions, and training as best they could, harvesting female nulls from the local volume to keep the old division operational, even seconding themselves to imperial forces, or carrying out pregation operations outside of any chain of command, simply at their own behest. It was not until the return of the primarch that their role changed. Gulliman, who had fought with their ilk during the great crusade, was well aware of the tactical advantage they represented to the Imperium, immediately ordering their reunification. The somnus citadel was rebuilt in its totality, its residence having preserved an albeit degraded form of the original order since its fall. The dispensatus anethema, as the primarch's decree became known, reinstated the order's primacy amongst the astral telepathica, although it must be said tensions yet remain between the sisterhood and the wider organization, with many within the sisterhood alleging that the telepathica simply wished to turn them into over-trained black ship jailers, wasting their talents and lethality, and, they claim, shackling them once more. The wounds of the ministerum's betrayal do not easily heal, and were rent open yet once more during the recent coup attempt by the Hexarchy. Yet, despite this, vigils of the sisterhood are being founded now across every segmentum, with somnus forming the nexus, yes, but no longer the sole base of power. These new vigils retain the panoplies and heraldry of the originals, heresy, era codras that purport to be their founders, restoring the ancient traditions of the oldest and most venerated hunter seekers so that they may bear arms in the era endometous. They are, now, as an order, primarily fleet-based, detachments seconded to endometous crusade fleets to allow them to better combat the resurgent arch-enemy. They have also begun to liaise with imperial navigators in order to better plot courses through the ever more turbulent warp. This particular aspect of their role is a relatively new one and ill-understood, but has seen with enough success that the sisterhood is actively exploring its development. After millennia in isolation and still bearing the scars of their outcast, the silent sisterhood is once more at the fore of the imperium's drive into the outer dark, torchbearers of immaculate stillness, striding quietly but with iron-clad resolve into that great night. Appended to this record shortly will arrive a deeper exploration into the organizational structure and panoplies of war that the sisters of silence possessed. Until then, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at OculusImperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.