Summary
An ancient and rarer pattern of Imperial Knight whose speed and agility far exceed the Questoris chassis, built solely for war and most often borne by Mechanicum-oathed houses.
Lore
The Cerastus Pattern is among the oldest patterns of Imperial Knight, predating the more common Questoris chassis and surviving in far smaller numbers. Cerastus engines were forged not as guardians of farmland and feudal estate but as tools of destruction — bloody-handed conquerors whose legacy reaches back to the close of the Age of Technology and the cataclysms of the Age of Strife. They are encountered most often in the field of Knight Household alliances sworn to the Collegia Titanica (Adeptus Titanicus) and the wider Mechanicum, where the deep wells of archeotech needed to maintain them still endure.
The Cerastus chassis is markedly faster and more agile than the Questoris pattern, its long, digitigrade legs and ion-shielded form built for the rapid assault rather than the line of battle. The Machine Spirit of a Cerastus engine is famously restive — a temperamental and hungry anima caged within the colossal frame — and only the most impetuous or implacable Scions of a House are deemed fit to mount its Cogitator-laced Throne Mechanicum.
Variants
Four principal variants of the Cerastus chassis are recognised in the inscriptions of the Mechanicum:
- Knight-Lancer — the most widely known of the Cerastus, a first-strike duellist armed with the Shock Lance and Ion Gauntlet Shield, attuned to lethal flanking charges and the slaying of titanic foes face to face.
- Knight-Castigator — bearer of the Castigator-Pattern Bolt Cannon and the electrified Tempest Warblade, favoured by Houses that must break great hordes of lesser foes through volume of fire and sweeping melee.
- Knight-Acheron — a reaper of lives armed with the long-flaming Acheron Flame Cannon and a vehicle-shredding Reaper Chainfist, designed to kill and to inspire terror.
- Knight-Atrapos — the rarest and most forbidden, raised solely to destroy heretek engines and xenos war-machines whose existence offends the Omnissiah, armed with the Atrapos Lascutter and the dread Graviton Singularity Cannon. Its anima carries an all-consuming hunger; for the Scion who bonds with it, madness is a constant risk.
Allegiance and Doctrinal Standing
Cerastus engines are overwhelmingly the province of Mechanicum-oathed Knight Houses — those Knight Worlds whose pacts of fealty bind them to a Forge World rather than to the Imperium of Man directly (the Questor Mechanicus, as the present age names them). The technological support of the Adeptus Mechanicus — its Sacristans, its archeotech reserves, its Standard Template Construct (STC) fragments — is what allows the Cerastus pattern to walk at all in the late Imperium, and so the chassis appears far more readily among Houses sworn to Mars and her sister forges than among those sworn to the Throne.
In the wars of the Schism of Mars and the wider Horus Heresy, Cerastus Knights walked under both loyalist and traitor banners; the Dark Mechanicum retains its own corrupt examples to this day.