<<bkil05.pcx>>
Symbiots

The Pancreator is a beneficent god, yet we must be worthy of the tasks set before us, and to this end He tests us, that we may grow strong and capable. I have already averred that the Vau represent a test of our faith and will; now the Pancreator tests our bodies and courage with the hell-hordes known as the Symbiots of Chernobog. Embodying the worst aspects of predator and parasite, disease and madness, malignant evil and ravenous hunger, these monsters howl at our jumpgates, as if the Shadow Outside had incarnated itself tangibly.

The origin of the Symbiots is perhaps better left unknown. My own research amid the Church's most ancient archives has revealed the merest referential hints among the texts of the Second Republic, implying that even our reckless Promethean forebears found the Symbiots too unnerving to catalog more fully. Nay, according to the hints I have gleaned, the fearful scientists of the Republic clandestinely quarantined any world infected with the Symbiot taint, lest their population fall into paroxysms of terror and despair.

Such measures proved as futile as they did transient. For now, in this ruined age, the devils of Chernobog have returned from the void, descending in their animate spacecraft upon the worlds of men to ravage and slay and, worst of all, reproduce.

Verily, these blasphemies are tenfold worse than the Vau; for while a soldier sent to his reward under the Vau's pikes may at least hope for rest in the Empyrean's embrace, the fate of those taken by the Symbiots is horrid indeed. Ye who would war with the Symbiots, pray that ye merely die shredded beneath their cartilaginous blades or corroded into paste by their acidic war-slimes. For the fate of those captured by the monsters is to become as they: to suffer a vile usurpation of body, and to have one's very soul-light extinguished, replaced by inky strands of Shadow binding one inextricably to the Symbiots' demonic masters.

Horrid the experience of the soldier who sees his companion, thought slain in a Symbiot ambush, miraculously return to camp, and then realizes, as osseous spikes erupt from the former friend's innards, and seductive blandishments issue from lips suddenly transformed to clacking jaws akin to those of the extinct white shark of Urth, that the companion is no more, and that the thing that slavers and reaches for him with outstretched palms turned to razored talons has become but another Symbiot: another enemy to destroy or be destroyed by. Little wonder that those haunted wretches returning from the garrison on Stigmata are mere shells of themselves, their souls dimmed nearly as gray as the Symbiot-spawn themselves.

And, as if this were not horror enough, the newly born Symbiots have the temerity to claim that this excommunicative conversion is a willing one, and that we, not they, are the blasphemies. They would have us come willingly to their embrace, as a lover returning to the connubial bed. Indeed, their very name, "Symbiot," is a deliberate deceit, implying a willing union of predator and prey rather than the violation it assuredly is. Little more will they say about their theology and philosophy; certes, the two captured specimens whom the Avestites put to the iron in 4919 were characteristically reticent and unhelpful on this point. It matters little; all true followers of the Pancreator know the stink of a devil when they smell it.

It is perhaps understandable that Symbiots have so little regard for the bodies and souls of their victims, for their own corporeal structures are as malleable and amorphous as iuk-candy in the sticky paws of a Decados child. A Symbiot may assume any shape its demonic master orders. And so their spies walk among the cities of Urthkind now, in the shapes of the bodies they raped, to spread deviltry and terror in their wake.

Symbiots at war are not so deceitful, but just as terrifying. Any vestige of trickery or proselytizing is discarded, as are the deceptive shapes they wear. I have seen sketches of warrior-Symbiots: spiky, ropy, chitinous things, lurching forward upon many-jointed limbs to rip and devour. And once battle is joined, they are terribly efficient murderers, for Symbiots are the sin of Invention incarnate, sprouting a thousand virulent weapons from the stuff of their own bodies. Nerve-scarred survivors of the battles on Stigmata and Daishan mutter of soldiers impaled on barbed spikes that once were limbs, strangled and lashed to death by living viscera vomited from needle-toothed maws, scissored into pieces by mandibles sprouted from the creatures' midsections, liquefied by gobbets of catalytic enzymes, and slain in a thousand other grisly fashions besides.

And some of these were once men! Yea, Most Reverend Palamedes spoke truly when he averred the malignant presence of demons between and behind the ebbing stars. Into the maw of horror we children of the Diaspora have been thrust, and only by throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Church shall we be saved.

But I digress. There are evidently several different species or broods of Symbiots, but such fine distinctions matter little, save that they may prove of use in finding more effective ways to eradicate the lot of them.

And, despite the woeful moans of those faithless soldiers who have battled them and despaired, this feat can indeed be accomplished! Remember, if you will, who won the Symbiot War. It was not the Imperial soldiers, boast though they will; nor, contrary to warlock propaganda, was the victory the work of foul psychics. It was the doing of the Church's own Eskatonic Order, who by their victory proved their holiness in the sight of the Pancreator. (Let history, then, serve as a lesson in truth; for not with their beams and bombs will the nobles prove themselves supreme in their righteousness, but only by the Pancreator's grace divinely directed through earthly works.)

Despite this victory, however, the Pancreator would test us more; and so the Symbiots vex us still. From the streets of Byzantium Secundus to the wastelands of Stigmata they lurk, and raven, and lust to ravage our bodies and infect them with their own tainted seed. Only when we of Urth have given ourselves to the Pancreator in full will this plague be lifted from us, and yet only by striving against these devils with every fiber of our being will the Pancreator take pity on His children.

I can find no fault with the words of Archbishop Lycrecia, who has ordained the Great Interdiction against all Symbiots, and decreed their slaying a holy duty. Look not kindly upon these abominations, even should they stare at you from the visage of father or brother or daughter; for their form, like their function, serves as the merest Shadow-tainted lie.
