The purpose of the Titanicus Terranic Ordo Sinister is the battlefield employment of macro-level weaponry of terrible potency and of a nature which are expressly forbidden to all but those under the Emperor’s direct shadow and control on pain of death. These are weapons born of the Dark Age of Technology and perhaps ancient relics of civilisations which had risen and fallen before life had even begun on Old Earth, weapons classed as Sinistrum. This word has long stood as the Terran techno-arcana classification for prohibited technologies designed to artificially amplify or weaponise the psyker’s gift, usually at the cost of the psyker themselves, body or mind.
Ciricrux Anima
In place of the moderatii who would normally crew a battle titan, a warlord-sinister psi-titan is instead crewed by the damned: bound psykers who are surgically locked in place and slaved to the will of the preceptor-intendant, a pariah immune to their powers who masters the god-engine in place of a princeps. By direct cortical control, the powers of the slave psykers are siphoned off and focused by the arcane technologies of the Ciricrux Anima, a psychic amplification matrix conceived by the Emperor Himself.
Sinistramanus Tenebrae
This unique and nightmarishly powerful weapon, literally translated ‘the left hand of darkness’, is mounted on the left arm of every warlord-sinister. It is a hybrid of strange technologies, more akin to a mutilated warp engine in design than a conventional weapon, incorporating numerous systems of unattributable and most likely xenos origins, and it is believed the Emperor alone knew the truth of how they were acquired. The weapon requires the unified minds of cybernetically networked psykers carried onboard to concentrate and control its destructive energies successfully, and in this there have been those who have compared it to the fearful animus speculum of the Culexus in design. Whatever is struck by the baleful power of the sinistramanus tenebrae is torn apart molecule by molecule and its debris hurled into the beyond, while those in the wider area of impact are simply struck dead, their bodies left unmarked as if their souls have been sheared from their bodies.
Red Right Hand
Modified from the armorial imagery of the Ironsides of Old Albia, a crimson gauntlet painted the deep crimson of drying blood was adopted by the Dusk Raiders and later the Ordo Sinister to symbolise the red right hand of the Emperor’s justice where once it had proclaimed the murderous reach of the Unspeakable King.
- The Horus Heresy Book Seven: Inferno (with additional material from The Horus Heresy Book One: Betrayal and Adeptus Titanicus: Shadow and Iron)
