 To combat the witch, to drive a spear through the heart of the warp predator, to safeguard the very minds of humanity, these are the watchwords by which one of the most esoteric military orders of the Imperium operated and still continue to operate to this day. Such a task requires training that is utterly unique, war gear and equipment that is superlative, and arcana that is not seen outside of the most eldritch of spheres. Know then that by special permission of the adaptus astrotelopathica and the imperial household and through meticulous examination of extant sources, that this is a record of the tactical disposition and organizational structure of the sisters of silence. The organization of the Divisio Investigatis of the astrotelopathica, colloquially known as the Sisters of Silence, resembles no other body in the Imperium. The adaptus and Divisio astrotelopathica themselves are at once a component of the Imperium's infrastructure, a law enforcement agency, a capture and contain force, and a highly specialized paramilitary operation, with the sisters representing a fusion of each of these aspects, although primarily the latter. As with all organizations that operated in close proximity to the emperor and his greatest works, ironclad secrecy of procedure was paramount. As such, no exact record of the number of active sisters has ever or can ever be ascertained, be it at the time of the great crusade, or as heresy, or now in the era endometous. Through extrapolation of ideal disposition and sheer size of the League of Black Ships during historical times, it can be assured that at its height, at the closing days of the great crusade, the sisters of silence had tens of thousands of active members. That the pyriogene, the source of the psychic nullification effect that gives the sisters their reason for existence, is so rare, and organizational necessity removes the use of 49% of the species by simple function of gender. This all stands as a testament to the effectiveness of the astral telepathica in their relentless pursuit of the great tithe of human psychers. Upon their selection for the ranks of the sisterhood, aspirants are slowly inducted into the arcana by which the Divisio must operate with the dread knowledge of. They learn the direst secrets possessed by our species, mysteries and enigmas so horrible that they would see cities torched to prevent the spread of them. By their ascension to full sister, they are sworn to a code of purest silence that they will carry for the remainder of their lives. Secrecy is the nature of their existence now. They will bear these secrets to their deaths, letting nothing of their lives, their tasks, their role, be known to any outside the sisterhood. They will not utter a single sound even under the most painful of duress or injury. To further symbolize this vow, their armor incorporates a high gorget that completely covers their mouths. The facet of their panoply incorporated into the order's heraldry lest none broke any doubts as to their absolute dedication. This vow is however not merely figurative, but plays a real and tangible role in the sister's mental conditioning and training. What historians past have only ever referred to as a hollowness forms within the sister as she dedicates herself to the vow, the facet of both conditioning and the pariah genome. This hollow is honeable and over time the sister learns to sculpt and wield it, to better harness and indeed strengthen her natural pariah powers. Naturally, the somewhat oblique terms by which I refer to this should give you some clue as to the mystery surrounding it. The practice is utterly unfathomable to those of us outside the order, and perhaps it is best that it remains so. In these ways, the silence of the sisters is eminently practical and has the additionally and likely highly desirable effect of rendering them an organization of mystique and indeed terror. Owing to the vow of tranquility, the sisters possess a range of sign language forms for whatever communication is necessary. Battlemark, its name being as blunt as its battlefield role, is the most basic of these, a lingua bellum woven of hard precise motions to prevent any ambiguity in intent or any confusion at extreme range. Thoughtmark is quintessentially the opposite, being incredibly advanced owing to the need of the sisterhood to communicate complex and often highly abstract information and concepts on arcane subject matter. For transmissions, a machine-readable version of Thoughtmark is employed, known as Orse Code, akin to a series of rattles and clicks comprehensible to the sisters via their inbuilt armor comms systems. Orse Code additionally forms the one means by which the sisters converse with those outside their ranks, as despite its complexity, it is an ancient and perfectly translatable lingua tecnis. Beyond this, those acolytes of the sisterhood yet to fully undertake the vow of tranquility are also employed, acting as transliterators for the fluid and rapid Thoughtmark gestures of their older sisters. These prolacores often accompany sisterhood hunter-seeker cadres, if significant involvement with outside forces is required, as the click-clack of Orse Code does little to facilitate smooth diplomacy with baseline humans, repulsed and pained as they are by the very presence of these nulls amongst them. The sisterhood was during the Great Crusade completely fluent in a vast array of legionnaires as a Starty's battle sign, including legion-specific variants, as well as a wide array of common Exurta's auxilia, combat camps, and the graph binauric of the Mechanicum of Mars. In organization, the sisterhood is a specialized paramilitary force, seconded to the Astro-Telepathica by original order of the Emperor, but ultimately is answerable only to him and those who bear his writ. In Crusade terms, this latter part would frequently see them operating under the discretion of the Ligio Custodis and the Office of the Sigillite and its teams of elucidators. The operational head of the Divisio's armed forces is the Knight Commander, held at the time of the Great Heresy by Genesha Kroll. Of equal standing to her is the mistress of the Black Ships, in effect the ruling admiral of all the ships beholden to the Astro-Telepathica. Lastly, the Nemesis Praxia acts as the Divisio's archivist and chief training and recruitment officer. During Horace's foul perfidy, these officers were held by Veronica Sulath and Ebon Naroda, respectively. Field forces were structured by, in ascending order, seekers, prosecutors, and vigilators. Specialized formations peeled off from these, such as the pursuers who handled heavily cyberized animalia, the Aquila Astra, who formed the sisterhood's pilot cadre, and the Questora, who headed up a dedicated investigatory division. Multiple different cadres operated within the silent sisterhood at any one time, each containing sisters of the various ranks and roles. These cadres were quite identifiable from each other by varying color schema and ident markers, as well as their titles, such as the Frost-Links or White Falcon-Cadres. Above the level, the Divisio Investigates was bisected into two distinct chambers. The first, the Chamber of Oblivion, comprised the Order's most elite and militarily able members, known as the Oblivion Knights, who took the role of battlefield commanders during times of open warfare. The second, the Chamber of Judgment, was a dark inverse of this. It was led by the sisters, who decided the ultimate fate of all psycher-related crimes, from those suspected of harboring psychers from the Great Tithe, to passing judgment on those who are suspected of psychic deviancy, to the ultimate sanction of those who had treated and bargained with the powers of the warp. Both in the present and in the Great Crusade, the Sisterhood does not commonly operate in full battlefield engagement, and indeed actively avoids such encounters unless absolutely necessary. Owing to their genetic rarity and sheer value, the Order rarely adopts a war footing, but, when necessary, are lethally adept combatants. Given the duties the Sisterhood was commonly tasked with, namely, the hunting and seeking of dangerous psychic individuals, their training and overall tactical attention was primarily pivoted around close-quarters engagements, be they brutal melees or intense localized firefights. Deployed commonly in dedicated hunter-codras, it would invariably be operating in likely unknown terrain, with minimal concrete intelligence and from a point of almost guaranteed numerical inferiority. No attention was therefore paid to aspects of warfare, such as siege operations, battlefield fortifications, artillery capabilities, and the like. The Sisterhood existed to fulfill a specific purpose, and if any of the above or more was needed, other arms of the Imperial military would be employed to meet the tactical needs of the operation. High-intensity warfare, spinning out of operations that were generally covert level in nature, to where the Sisterhood lived, and where they excelled. Nothing of the need for glory and honor was extant, or is extant, in the prosecution of their duties. The goal is enough, and its attainment sufficient to say to the needs of all squad members. This ironclad discipline speaks to one of the Order's hallmarks. Their training and conditioning had exposed them to such unspeakable horrors as to shatter lesser mines a hundredfold, and upon the battlefield it allowed them to turn into the most lethal and precise of blades to be plunged exactly where needed. They would hit hard, hit fast, and achieve their objectives by any means necessary, up to and including collateral damage that, while it was never recorded as coming close to the excesses of, say, the Astartes legions, like the Eighth Legion Nightlords or Fourteenth Legion Deathguard, it was nevertheless never questioned, nor gainsate. Whatever destruction the Sisterhood had wrought was a small price to pay for the capture or annihilation of its quarry. It has been posited by one's colleagues that the savagery seen in Sisterhood engagements, as well as their noted predilection for archaic close combat swordsmanship and cyber-animalia usage, hearkens to an origin that is fundamentally barbarian in nature. As one discussed in a previous record upon the Order, a long-standing theory for the origin centers around a techno-barbarian and all-female auxilia regiment known as the Daughters of the Crow. This extends to a tendency to use animal-inspired or totemic imagery and battlefield cadre designations, as well as their archaic, even by imperial standards, aesthetics. From the brazen power armor they are outfitted with to their top-knotted hair, never to be shorn unless a sister has utterly failed in attaining her prey. The theory holds a lot of merit, in one's opinion, but it cannot be discounted that such things are common in imperial organizations where an aura of fear is deliberately cultivated as part of its remit. Perhaps the answer, as with a lot of such histories, lies somewhere in the middle. When it came to their battlefield equipment, the Sisters of Silence benefited from both the extreme import of their role and clear and present danger it embodied, as well as their proximity to the Emperor himself in the most secret of imperial inner circles. Within these circles, only the Ligio Custodes had a finer and more specialized arsenal of war gear. In the field, the Sister Hood will bear commonly modified versions of bolters designed for use by unaugmented humans, allowing a single squad to possess similar destructive capabilities to an Astartes squad. Similarly, two-handed execution power blades, designed to carve through the toughest armor-like paper, were handmade for Vigilator squads. In keeping with their specialized nature, the Sister Hood is outfitted with numerous resource-intensive and rare weaponry, impossible to field in a force the size and scope of, say, an inch of Astartes Legion or even a current Astartes chapter. These included ammunition and weaponry, firing psychic negation ammunition, said to have been fashioned in the Emperor's own laboratoria, as well as firearms intended to allow the Sisters to fulfill the role of capture, like alchem needlers to render a target comatose in seconds, or snare guns that shoot fast-hardening nets. Their routine power armor was based upon a combination of elements of Astartes power armor and selenite lunar void plate, but was not fully environmentally sealed in the manner of its progenitors. It traded this for the retaining of ballistic projection while prioritizing speed and freedom of movement, allowing the unaugmented Sisters to react to threats almost as fast as transhuman Astartes, and to better fit their preferred battlefield role. While the Sisterhood could commandeer any vehicle they required, and had the sum total of the Imperium standard template construct catalog at their disposal, they had by the latter part of the Great Crusade developed a range of gravitic vehicles for their own purposes, prioritizing range of movement, speed, and stealth over the often bullish directness of other Imperial technology. The Keron pattern acquisitor is a common example, a sinister and rare sight upon the battlefields of the Imperium, as it was not a true war machine, rather a weapon intended to ferry Sisters in utter secrecy to the sight of a required psychic call. Built to integrate numerous systems more communally known as the Spectra Distort Field, it was capable of approaching targets in the Otmos Stealth. Upon its reveal, however, the Distort Field could be inverted, bombarding the foe with imagery and sensation so as to be made quite deliberately a weapon of mystery and terror, to better instill disorder and even cow resistance without the need for weaponry. The role of the Black Ships must not go unmentioned in any discussion of the Silent Sisterhood's military disposition, as they represent one of the most well-equipped naval forces in the entire Imperium. The fleet are of the Astra Telepathica, and owing to the hierarchy of the Silent Sisterhood under the latter's direct command, at least during the Great Crusade. Black Ships, or heavily armed and armoured starships, outfitted for long range extended operations in utter secrecy. Their stealth apparatuses allow them to slip through almost any aspect's webs undetected, and the only reason a planetary authority will ever be aware of their presence is because the commander of the ship wishes it so. The ships are as automated as battlecruiser classes can be, in order to leave the barest minimum of human crew exposed to whatever psychers are interred aboard, who are themselves subject to the sound deadening and psych-disrupting technologies that line the bulkheads of the ship's interiors. There is no possible way of ascertaining the sheer amount of them in existence, nor the number of their ports or forges, but given the scope of the Astra Telepathica and the number of worlds within the Imperium's volume, it would surely range into the tens of thousands. The Black Ships, during the Great Crusade, nominally under the sister's writ, were also in possession of exterminatis-level weaponry, in the event that the psychic threat they were sent to combat requires nothing less than planetary-level annihilation. In the current era in Dometis, there is some strife between the Astra Telepathica and the League of Black Ships as to the sisterhood's current role amongst them. While the Astra Telepathica is eager once more to wield the nullification effects of the now recently remilitarized Silent Sisterhood, the sisters themselves still feel the pain of the Ministorum's betrayal millennia ago. Currently, they do not wish to be reshackled. Black Ships remain staffed by baseline humans, albeit highly trained ones. It is unclear whether this situation will change. The wounds of the past have not proven easily healed, but these are dark times, and extraordinary circumstances may be acquired. Such are the realms within which the Silent Sisters operate, and by such actions are the unsuspecting populations of the Imperium safeguarded. May their renewed vigil never tire, for in this most benighted of eras we have such terrible need of their unique skills. Ave, Imperator. Gloria, in Excelsis Terra. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.