Questoris Knights

Across the feudal worlds of the Imperium there strode a breed of war-machine older than the Legions and, in its way, no less proud: the towering battle-suits of the Questoris Knights. Piloted by the noble scions of ancient houses, these Knights were the martial aristocracy of a hundred worlds, walking a middle path between the lone warrior and the god-engines of the Titan Legions. Smaller than a Titan yet mightier than any tank, a Knight was a fusion of feudal chivalry and archeotech majesty, a mounted champion for an age of stars.

The Knight Houses were relics of the Age of Strife, colonists who had survived Old Night upon harsh and isolated worlds by clinging to their sacred war-machines and the rigid codes that governed their use. When the Great Crusade rediscovered these lost domains, most were bound into the Imperium through the Mechanicum of Mars or through direct oaths to Terra, their Knights marching to war beside the Legions and the Titan Legios as honoured allies. Bred to the saddle from birth and steeped in codes of honour, obligation, and vengeance, the scions who piloted them were warriors for whom war was both duty and sacred inheritance.

The Knightly Houses

Each House was a feudal realm in miniature, ruled by a High King or Baron and served by the sworn scions of its noble bloodlines, with lesser nobles, sworn men, and vast populations of common folk labouring beneath them. A House's Knights were its treasures, ancient suits passed down through generations, each with its own name, honours, and history of battle. To pilot one was the highest privilege a scion could earn, and the deeds done in a Knight were recorded so that those who inherited it might be worthy of the ghosts within. Some scions, cast out or bereft of their House, wandered the stars as Freeblades, masterless champions bound by no oath but their own.

The Throne Mechanicum

At the heart of every Knight lay the Throne Mechanicum, the sacred seat through which a scion bonded his mind to his war-suit. To take the Throne was to commune with the accumulated echoes of every noble who had piloted the Knight before, an ancestral weight of memory and expectation that could steel a pilot or crush him. This bond made a Knight an extension of its rider's will, swift and deadly as no mere vehicle could be, but it bound the scion to the honour-codes of his forebears as surely as it linked him to the machine.

Oaths Broken

When the Heresy divided the Imperium, the Knight Houses were divided with it, and oaths sworn in good faith across generations were shattered in a season. Houses that had guarded compliance worlds for the Emperor turned their Knights against loyalist neighbours, some seduced by the Warmaster's promises, others bound by feudal loyalty to Legions or Mechanicum overlords who had themselves turned traitor. At Molech and across a hundred lesser fields, Knight fought Knight, ancient houses tearing at one another with the accumulated grudges of centuries, and the chivalric ideal of the Questoris was drowned in the blood of kin.