The Dark Mechanicum

The Dark Mechanicum was the Mechanicum's damnation given form, the great mass of the priesthood that followed Kelbor-Hal into treachery when the Fabricator-General broke the Treaty of Olympus. Freed from the Emperor's restrictions and the strictures of their own dogma, these magi threw open the forbidden vaults and reached for the technologies their order had long declared anathema — abominable intelligences, warp-bound cortex-engines, and machines that ran on suffering and stolen souls. What they forged in their hell-forges was blasphemy by the standards of Mars itself.

Corruption spread through their ranks like rust, twisting adept and automaton alike into things that should not be. Their battle-hosts marched to war wreathed in the stink of the warp, their engines howling with bound daemons and their magi remade into monstrosities of flesh and iron and malice. In the Schism of Mars they turned upon their loyalist kin without mercy, drowning the Red Planet in fire, and thereafter they served the Warmaster's cause with a zeal born of newfound, terrible freedom. The Dark Mechanicum was proof that the priesthood's cold logic, unshackled from restraint, could birth horrors to rival any daemon.