Covenant of the Ebon Creed

The Covenant of the Ebon Creed is a post-biological theocracy holding a network of sterilized Sanctum Worlds. Its adherents are machines: tall synthetic frames carrying the skull of the body each was born with, kept as an identity marker and a devotional object. The Covenant professes devotion to Deimos, custodian of the boundary between life and death.

It began on Mor'thelis, where entombment and remembrance sat at the center of pre-industrial culture. A fanatical sect within the priesthood declared that biological life, even life spent in reverence of death, defied Deimos, and took the planet through purges and theological coups. The first mass brain extractions and mechanical implantations were carried out there and named transcendence. Mor'thelis was then sterilized and rebuilt as the first Sanctum World.

Authority is absolute and entirely theological. The Prophet Seraphiel interprets divine will, and beneath it each Seraphim governs one or more Sanctum Worlds without oversight. There is no birth, no inheritance and no succession. The population grows only by converting conquered peoples before their world is sterilized. The Ascetiscar system was emptied this way, and the Ossuary Reach to the north now serves as a distributed necropolis and staging region.

The Covenant keeps no treaties and sends no envoys, and its contact with other civilizations amounts to annihilation or forced conversion. The scale of its scouring has raised Khaos activity high enough to produce a separate entity, The White Death, which the Covenant neither recognizes nor understands. Its current line of expansion runs along the hyperlane known as the Passage of the Long Night, toward neutral space in the southeast.