Ordo Reductor
The Ordo Reductor,[1] also known as the Bringers of Blessed Ruin, is a military division of the Adeptus Mechanicus known for shock assaults, siege warfare, and blitzkrieg-style attacks[3]. They worship the Omnissiah as Destruction Itself, as the Unmaker God.[4]
Overview
Known to their fellow adherents in the Machine Cult as the 'Bringers of Blessed Ruin', the Ordo Reductor is a distinct and highly specialized military division of the Mechanicum. Theirs is the sacred role of un-maker, slaughterer and breaker; they embody the animus of the Omnissiah, its duality not as creator or embodiment of knowledge, but as destroyer and bringer of oblivion. Their given title, whose prefix was unusual for the servants of the Mechanicum, was invoked first by the great treaty between the Lords of Mars and the Emperor of Humanity, although their true and forgotten origins delve back into the dust and blood of the Age of Strife on the red world of their birth. By this order, a sub-clause of the very compact by which the alliance between the Mechanicum and Terra was sealed, was the Ordo Reductor created for the express purpose of sundering and destroying those who would stand against the Great Crusade. Where a new and terrible alien form of life was encountered that would not succumb to the Imperium's panoply of war, it would be the Biologis of the Ordo Reductor who would find a way to kill it, where a recalcitrant human techno-empire stood strong against the Great Crusade fleets, it would be the preceptors of the Ordo Reductor who observed and analysed their weapons and defences to find their weakness and, most famously, where a fortress stood seemingly impregnable, it would be the Ordo Reductor who would find a way to bring it low.[3]
The Ordo Reductor's numbers however were always relatively few, accounting only for a handful of the most bellicose of the magos of Mars in the beginning, split from their forges and domains henceforth to serve the Great Crusade first and their feudal masters of the Mechanicum second in all things. Even as other Forge Worlds were contacted and brought into the fold, their numbers did not increase greatly and it is often said, and not without evidence, that those Tech-Priests and magos given up to the Ordo Reductor by their birth worlds or who were drawn to it of their own volition were often already seen as outcasts; either dangerously heretical in their leanings or overly-independent and perhaps psychologically unstable by their peers. However, within the fold of the Ordo Reductor were such individuals redeemed in the doctrine of the Cult of the Omnissiah and given righteous purpose in the service of the Mechanicum -as well as removed largely from the feudal politics of the Forge Worlds- and so while they became 'other' to those who remained directly under the shadow of Mars, they were not considered with the same levels of suspicion and often distrust as followed that parallel Mechanicum faction which also shared the battlefields of the Great Crusade with them, the Legio Cybernetica.[3]
Forces
Notable Members
Sources
- 1: Deathwatch Core Rulebook, pg. 339
- 2: The Horus Heresy Book One - Betrayal
- 3: The Horus Heresy Book Five pg.220
- 4: Master of Mankind (Novel), Chapter Seven
- 5: White Dwarf 452, pg. 5
