The Talons of the Emperor

Two orders stood closest to the Emperor of Mankind, and neither was a Legion. Together they were named the Talons of the Emperor: the golden Legio Custodes, His personal praetorians, and the black-clad Sisters of Silence, the psyker-hunting Silent Sisterhood. One claw blazed like the sun; the other drank the light and the warp alike. Between them, they guarded the most precious life in the galaxy.

Where the Space Marine Legions were built to conquer, the Talons were built to protect. They did not seek glory across a hundred thousand worlds. Their war was fought within the walls of the Imperial Palace, in the very shadow of the Emperor Himself, and when the Heresy at last came for Him, it was fought for nothing less than His life.

The Golden Legion

The Custodes were the Emperor's own bodyguard, and He shaped each of them with His personal art. Where a Space Marine is made in batches from a primarch's gene-seed, a Custodian is crafted individually, an unhurried labour of alchemy and gene-craft that can take years to complete a single warrior. The result is a being of terrifying capability, stronger and swifter and sharper than an Astartes, bearing no flawed gene-line and no hidden instability, and by design all but impossible to corrupt.

Yet the Custodians were never merely weapons. Each was encouraged to become a distinct individual, soldier and scholar and statesman at once, and their gilded war-plate and paired guardian spears, part blade and part bolt weapon, were personalised works of art with no two exactly alike. Numbering only in their thousands, they were sometimes called the Ten Thousand, and each was reckoned worth a hundred lesser men. In the age of the Crusade they were commanded by the Captain-General Constantin Valdor, first and greatest of their kind and the Emperor's most trusted sword.

The Silent Sisterhood

Their sisters in duty were stranger still. The Sisters of Silence were drawn entirely from women born as untouchables, pariahs whose souls cast no shadow in the warp and whose mere presence sickened psykers and starved the daemon of its strength. To stand near a Sister of Silence was to feel a cold and nameless dread; to be a witch in her presence was to be smothered, one's powers guttering like a candle in a void.

The Sisterhood turned this curse into a weapon. Clad in black, sworn to an oath of silence and speaking only through sign and the written word, they hunted rogue psykers across the Crusade and stood sentinel against the horrors of the immaterium. In an age when the primarch-led Legions blazed with psychic might, the Sisters were the Emperor's answer to the danger such power invited: a living null, a firebreak thrown up against the ever-hungry warp.

The Sisterhood was no monolith. Its ranks were divided by function: Vigilators who hunted witches with blade and null-presence, Witchseekers who bore cleansing flame to burn out the taint of the warp, and Prosecutors who cut down rogue psykers at range. The most gifted of all, the Oblivion Knights, could turn their own pariah souls upon the enemy as a weapon in itself, snuffing out sorcery and unmaking daemons by their mere approach. Through the age of the Crusade the Sisterhood answered to the Knight-Commander Jenetia Krole, a swordswoman of fearsome repute who never spoke a word and yet commanded absolute obedience.

Guardians of the Throne

Both orders answered to a single purpose, the safety of the Emperor and of Terra. The Custodians knew the Imperial Palace more intimately than any living beings, and honed their vigilance through the Blood Games, ruthless secret trials in which a Custodian would attempt to breach the Palace's own defences by any means, so that every weakness might be found and sealed before an enemy could exploit it. The Sisters, for their part, warded the Emperor against the subtler assault of the warp, ensuring that no witch or daemon could ever strike at Him unseen.

Because their duty was the Throneworld, the Talons were largely absent from the great campaigns of the Crusade. While the Legions carved out the Imperium among the stars, the golden guardians and their silent sisters kept their watch at its heart. It was a devotion beyond question, and it would prove to be both their salvation and their curse.

The Talons in the Heresy

When the Horus Heresy reached its terrible climax at the Siege of Terra, the Talons were unleashed as never before. The Custodian Guard fought upon the walls of the Imperial Palace through the war's final, apocalyptic days, spending their peerless lives to hold the gates against the traitor host. The Sisters of Silence stood beside them, their null-souls a bulwark against the tide of daemons the Warmaster loosed upon the defenders, quenching sorceries that would otherwise have swept the walls clean.

Here the Talons paid the price of their long seclusion. They were few, and against the massed Legions of Horus even the Ten Thousand could only bleed and endure. Yet endure they did, holding the line amid horror and buying the hours the Emperor needed to strike down His rebellious son. For every hour won, they paid in gold and blood.

After the Fall

The Heresy ended with the Emperor mortally wounded and interred within the Golden Throne, and the Talons never recovered from their failure to prevent it. The Custodes turned inward, holding themselves partly to blame, and withdrew into the Palace to keep a silent vigil that would endure for ten thousand years. The Sisters of Silence dwindled and all but vanished from Imperial records, their strange order fading into half-forgotten legend. In the millennia that followed, the rare untouchables born to humanity would be gathered for other and grimmer purposes, and the art of the Silent Sisterhood was very nearly lost to the darkness with everything else that age had squandered.

But the two claws were never truly unclenched. In the darkest days of the long age that followed, both would return, the golden and the silent alike, to guard the Throne of a mankind that had almost forgotten they existed.