House Devine

House Devine was the ruling Knight house of Molech, a world of vital and secret importance to the Emperor, and its fall to the Warmaster was among the most consequential betrayals of the Knightly houses in all the Heresy. For generations the Devine scions had guarded Molech and the terrible secret buried beneath it, their Knights a proud and martial aristocracy grown fat on the world's wealth and privilege. Yet privilege had bred decadence, and when Horus came to Molech with his Legions, the Warmaster found the house ripe for corruption. The lord of the house and the greater part of his scions cast aside their oaths to Terra and threw open the way for Horus, some seduced by promises of power, others already tainted by the dark bargains their line had made in secret. In the battle for Molech, Devine Knights turned upon the loyalist defenders and upon those of their own kin who kept faith, and the house's treachery helped deliver to Horus the prize he had crossed the galaxy to seize. Thereafter the name of Devine was a byword for the corruption that could rot a noble house from within, a warning of how easily chivalry curdled into ambition when a scion set his own glory above the oaths that bound him. The fallen house marched on in the Warmaster's service, its honour spent.