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At a glance
Enslavers are among the most dangerous entities that can cross from the warp into realspace. They are not daemons, but psychic predators native to the Immaterium, drawn to the bright minds of psykers the way sharks are drawn to blood. An Enslaver's body is a pulsing, barrel-shaped sac about two metres tall, with a crown of eight to twelve tentacles, and it floats in the air as if suspended on invisible strings. Its true weapon is its mind. A single Enslaver can dominate the minds of up to ten people at once and turn them into its slaves.
Once they reach realspace, Enslavers spread like a plague. They use their slaves to find more psykers, and through those psykers they open portals that let more Enslavers through. Left unchecked, an infestation can engulf an entire world in a matter of weeks. Many Imperial records end with the same grim conclusion: the planet was quarantined, then destroyed from orbit.
Nature & powers
Drawn to psykers
Enslavers detect unprotected psychic minds from great distances, reportedly as far as ten light years. They are particularly attracted to psykers who have not been trained or sanctioned, and whose minds glow in the warp without protection. This is one of the reasons the Imperium culls and binds psykers. An untrained psyker is not only a danger in himself; he is a beacon for the things that live in the warp.
Domination
When an Enslaver reaches realspace, it takes control of the minds around it. Its victims become mindslaves. They keep their skills and memories, but their will is gone. They fight, work and kill for the Enslaver, and they defend it to the death. A single Enslaver can control up to ten slaves within about fifty metres, and Enslavers usually appear in groups of three, which allows a trio to dominate a whole squad or a small town. Victims under domination are unable to resist, and many are aware of what they are doing even as they do it.
The gate of flesh
The most horrifying part of an Enslaver infestation is the creation of portals. An Enslaver takes control of a psyker and uses his mind as an anchor. Over fifty to seventy-five hours, the psyker's body swells and distorts into a grotesque arch of ruptured flesh and bone. When the transformation is complete, the arch becomes a gateway to the warp. More Enslavers pour through it, and the infestation grows. The psyker is still alive for much of this process.
History
Enslavers are ancient. Some accounts claim they appeared during the War in Heaven, the cataclysmic struggle between the Old Ones and the Necrons. In this telling, the Old Ones' use of the warp, and the psychic races they created, drew the attention of the Enslavers. The Enslaver Plague that followed overran worlds and contributed to the fall of the Old Ones. Whether the story is true or not, Enslavers are counted among the horrors that broke that ancient civilisation.
The Necrons themselves have their own memories of the plague. Trazyn the Infinite is said to keep an ossified Enslaver husk in his galleries, and the Necrons have no love for any creature of the warp.
Imperial records
- Hive Skorpios: Inquisitor Mallen recorded how a hive governor shielded his psyker daughter from the Black Ships. She drew an Enslaver brood to the hive. Within three days, much of the population had become mindslaves. Within three weeks, the continent was at war with itself.
- The Nemesis Incident: in the late 36th Millennium, the Storm Wardens Space Marines fought an Enslaver outbreak.
- The Blackened Tower: in the early 42nd Millennium, Enslavers attacked a fortress of the Black Legion, proving that even the servants of Chaos are prey to them.
Major infestations are usually dealt with by the Inquisition. The Ordo Xenos and the Ordo Malleus both claim an interest, and both have authorised Exterminatus to end outbreaks.
Signs of an infestation
Enslaver outbreaks are hard to detect early, because mindslaves look like ordinary people. They go to work, answer questions and carry their weapons as normal. The first signs are usually subtle: workers who stop speaking to their friends, guards who leave their posts without explanation, a sudden surge of missing persons reports in one district. Psykers, astropaths and sanctioned seers may suffer nightmares of floating shapes and invisible strings. In some recorded outbreaks, the first clear warning came when an entire shift of workers walked off the manufactorum floor at the same moment, in perfect silence, and never returned.
As the infestation grows, the signs become impossible to miss. Whole sectors fall out of contact. Mindslaves begin hunting for psykers, dragging them back to the Enslavers to become new gates. Local defence forces split into factions, with dominated units firing on their former comrades. By the time the Inquisition arrives, the question is often not whether the world can be saved, but how much of it can be quarantined.
What remains of the victims
Survivors freed from domination, when the controlling Enslaver is killed, rarely recover fully. Many remember everything they did as slaves and cannot live with it. Others are left with gaps in their memory and a terror of their own minds. The Inquisition tends to treat them as tainted by contact with the warp, and most freed mindslaves are executed or mind-scrubbed as a precaution.
The Imperial response
Fighting Enslavers is extremely difficult. Ordinary soldiers can be turned against their comrades in a moment, and the creature's power makes conventional battle lines meaningless. The Imperium relies on a few hard rules:
- Kill the psyker: if an Enslaver has a psyker anchor, he must die before the gate forms.
- Use the soulless: Sisters of Silence and other blanks are immune to domination, and their presence weakens the creatures.
- Use the strong-willed: Grey Knights and other psychically hardened warriors can resist domination.
- Quarantine: infested regions are sealed. Nothing leaves.
- Purge: if containment fails, the world burns.
The Imperium's harshness toward psykers is partly a product of Enslaver outbreaks. Every untrained psyker is a possible gateway, and every governor who hides one from the Black Ships risks his world.
Enslavers and Chaos
Enslavers are often confused with daemons, but they are not servants of the Chaos Gods. They are simply predators of the warp, and they prey upon Chaos worshippers just as they prey upon the Imperium. Their attack on the Black Legion shows that no faction is safe. Some scholars of the Inquisition believe they are among the oldest things in the warp, older than the Chaos Gods themselves, and that they are a natural part of the Immaterium's ecosystem rather than an expression of its emotions.
Trivia
- Enslavers usually appear in groups of three.
- A psyker anchor takes fifty to seventy-five hours to become a full warp gate.
- They are attracted to psykers up to ten light years away.
- Enslavers are often grouped with the worst threats in the Imperium's catalogues of Xenos Horribilis.
- Their earlier names include Psyrens and Krell.
