There’s a box of Custodian Guard under my painting desk that I bought the week the 8th edition Custodes codex came out, back in early 2018. Five models, one built. I’d flicked through the book in my local store, landed on a page about the Shadowkeepers, a Shield Host in black armour who guard a prison under the Imperial Palace, and decided on the spot that this was my way out of painting gold. I primed the one I’d built with Chaos Black in the garage, then did his trim in Retributor Armour. He looked like a bin bag wearing a necklace. He’s still in the box. My kid has learned to read, ride a bike and negotiate bedtime in less time than it’s taken me to paint the other four, and Pete, who’s finished roughly three Salamanders projects since, saw him once, picked him up, turned him over and put him back in the box without a word.
So I got a small, daft jolt this morning when Warhammer Community’s detachment reveal for the new Codex: Adeptus Custodes listed Shadowkeepers as one of thirteen detachments. It’s one of six tagged Unique: Shield Host, and GW’s entire summary of it is “Brawl in close combat and overwhelm your enemy.” The other Shield Host blurbs are about as short.
For anyone who skipped the 2018 book: the Shadowkeepers hold the Dark Cells, a sealed complex deep beneath the Palace where the Custodes keep things from Old Night that were judged too dangerous to set loose. Rune-locked doors, wards, sanctic circles. Over a hundred of them are on patrol at any time, many of them Custodian Wardens, some standing a single watch for decades. Their commander carries the title Lockwarden. The codex says their leaders carry ancient weapons of unknown origin, to be used only if something gets out. Lexicanum, drawing on the Cypher novel, adds a Mechanicus maintenance entrance called the Door of Cogs, which I love, and which apparently connects to the Mechanicum’s ambassadorial enclave inside the Palace.
They’re older than the name, too. Forge World’s Horus Heresy Book Seven: Inferno has sodalities of the “Warders of the Vaults of Rython” going to Prospero as reserves in Valdor’s Censure Host, where they held against the Thousand Sons’ psychic counterattacks after the mortal troops around the landing zones broke.
The Dark Cells get sold as the most secure place in the Imperium, and nearly every story GW has told about them since that codex is about something getting out.
What the Shadowkeepers Keep in the Dark Cells
GW has never shown us the inside of a cell, and I think that’s the right call. Instead they drop names. The 9th edition codex has a short piece on a Shadowkeeper called Arrian Porphyrius, and the list of things he had to face just to be accepted reads like someone found a metal band’s lyric notebook. The Souldelver. The Eight of the Skull. The Sevenfold Trimiasma. The Granter of All Six Wishes. Other sources add the Sorrow of Karakalla, the Chalice of Darkalabaster, something called It That Craves, and the Vexen Cage, a psychic amplifier that can apparently enslave thousands of minds at once.
Porphyrius petitioned the Lockwarden for a thousand days before anyone let him try out. The trials, as the codex describes them: stare into the nine eyes of the Souldelver for a day and a night without blinking. Beat the Eight of the Skull with no spear and no armour. Breathe the fumes of the Sevenfold Trimiasma for three hours without asking for help. Sit for a whole day listening to the Granter of All Six Wishes, then get up and walk away. He passed, served 183 years, and left the cells exactly once, to bring the Sorrow of Karakalla back.
The wish one is the trial I keep thinking about. The Granter is basically a job interview question about whether you’d take a bribe, except the bribe is anything you want and the interviewer is a daemon. I honestly don’t know what a Custodian would wish for. More gold leaf? The Emperor getting up?
So, the cells are full. Full of stuff with names like album titles. And the Shadowkeepers are, what, a hundred-odd blokes in black armour, forever, on decade-long shifts. I get twitchy on hold with the bank for twenty minutes. Decades. In the dark. With something called It That Craves behind the wall, and I’m not even sure that’s the worst name on the list.
The Escape Record
The big one is the Great Rift. When it opened, cells were found empty, and the Shadowkeepers who’d been on patrol were dead. The Auric Gods novella gives it a sharper and slightly damning shape. During the Battle of Lion’s Gate, Lockwarden Borsa Thursk ordered most of his Host up into the fighting and left a handful behind. Then the Rift tore open. By the time Thursk abandoned the battle and got back down there, some cells had nothing in them and no trace of where the occupants had gone.
I go back and forth on Thursk. The Palace was under attack, and he had a hundred of the best fighters on Terra standing in a basement, so sending them up makes sense to me. I’d probably have done the same. Then I reread the next sentence, the one with the empty cells, and I’m less sure.
The Chalice of Darkalabaster was taken during Lion’s Gate. Porphyrius, the one with the thousand days of petitions, went after it. He tracked it to the Maelstrom, found it in the hands of the Astral Claws warband, and attacked them. They ran into the Great Rift to get away from him, and he followed them in. The Shadowkeepers haven’t heard from him since and now count him as dead, with the Chalice still missing.
Thursk has been Lockwarden for a century and a half. Before the Rift he’d left Terra twice, and since then he’s barely been home. That’s what the Host is now: reclamation teams sent out across the galaxy to recover what got loose. A Warden named Jaeharl Feldorus Ghau, seventeen years in the cells, has been out three times, and on one of those trips he killed something called the Slithering Dreamer on Tarnus IV after it escaped its cell. There’s also a small force sent to the ruins of Cadia on Trajann Valoris’s direct orders with Shadowkeepers attached, and as far as I can find, GW has never said what it was for.
Cypher Walked Out of the Dark Cells
And then there’s Cypher, who’s my favourite and also the one that bothers me most. In John French’s Cypher: Lord of the Fallen, Cypher and a handful of Fallen surrender on Terra and end up in the Dark Cells. A small Dark Angels force led by Mordachi murders its way into the Palace to get at them first and destroys the cells’ generators. The complex normally has redundancies stacked on redundancies, but with the war on Terra, warp incursions and general damage, the failure cascades and the prisoners get out. Cypher and his Fallen recover their wargear, knock out the Palace’s central communications hub and disappear into the catacombs. (The Dark Angels have form with this sort of thing. I wrote about the loyalist Legions’ own traitors a few days ago.)
Then he doesn’t run for a ship. He heads for the Throne Room, along a forgotten route into the Sanctum Imperialis called the Path of Martyrs, fighting off Dark Angels and Imperial Assassins on the way. He gets as far as the Bridge of Ascension, where a badly wounded Custodian Warden called Hekkarron stops him. Hekkarron, guided by a vision of the Emperor, tells him “not yet.” Cypher accepts that and leaves the Palace.
I’ve argued with myself about this whole pattern. Part of me thinks the breakouts are a writing problem. Nobody escapes from a prison that works, so every author who goes near the Dark Cells has to open a door, because otherwise why go there? That’s fair. Hekkarron is the exception I keep coming back to. He stopped Cypher with two words and a vision, the only time in any of these stories that an escape ends where the Custodes wanted it to, and even then Cypher got to walk out of the building afterwards.
A Tangent About the Phalanx
One more, because I play Imperial Fists and I’m not letting it go. The 8th edition Imperial Fists supplement mentions, in about a sentence, that early in the Indomitus Crusade the Shadowkeepers opened one of the Dark Cells and handed the Fists the technology they needed to restore the Phalanx. Their fortress-monastery. The thing they’ve been nursing along since the War of the Beast.
I read that line three or four times the first time I saw it. The Custodes keep a cell full of something under the Palace, lent some of it to my Chapter, and the supplement moves on to the next paragraph like it’s normal. What was in there? Was it technology, or something that knew about technology? Is there a Dark Age gadget bolted into the Phalanx now that a Custodian had to sign out? I don’t know, and I’ve looked. The Limited Edition’s cloth map of the Palace probably won’t help either. I haven’t seen one in person, and the preview photos are too small to read.
The New Shadowkeepers Detachment
Back to the new book, briefly. WarCom gave the Shadowkeepers detachment one line, and the codex is still a few weeks off, so I can’t tell you what it does beyond brawling. It sits alongside Aquilan Shield, Dread Host, Emissaries Imperatus and Solar Watch as a Unique: Shield Host detachment, and each of those gets a favoured ka’tah that adds a bonus when you activate it. Emperor’s Chosen is the sixth. Dread Host’s favoured Dacatarai, for comparison, adds re-rolls of 1 to hit against non-Monster, non-Vehicle units and knocks 2” off enemy pile-in and consolidation moves.
My first reaction to “brawl” was disappointment, because I wanted something about holding a corridor against impossible things… then I thought about what the Host actually does now. Since the Rift, the Shadowkeepers are a hunting party. They go out, find the thing, fight whoever’s standing next to it, and carry it home in some sort of container I would dearly like to see as a kit.
WarCom’s closing line today promised a look tomorrow at some of the things even the Ten Thousand need to be wary of. The codex itself is still a few weeks out.
