Sanctum Aeterna

The first Dax were Orokin slaves, made to serve and nothing more. Their children were born into the same chains, and so were their children's children, one generation after another in a cycle of servitude that never seemed to end.

When the Tenno arrived, the Golden Kith who ruled the system had less and less use for the Dax. But the Dax never really disappeared. They lived on beside the Tenno, close enough to fight alongside them, and many of them carried a quiet, buried hatred for the warriors who had replaced them. Even so, they stayed loyal to the Orokin to the very end, and in those final days they fought against the Void-touched children who wore the frames of war.

After the fall, the Tenno began to gather into the first guilds and clans. It did not go peacefully. Too many of them wanted power over the rest. Like the Grand Order, clan after clan rose up and declared war on its rivals, and the Sol system burned with Tenno fighting Tenno. Peace only came when the Lotus declared every Tenno equal and shut down the Solar Rails.

When the Grand Order fell, the Chapter of Aeterna, known today as Sanctum Aeterna, began to grow. It built itself from the ground up. Members joined, then seedlings and squires, and a few remarkable people who made names for themselves that no one has forgotten since.

Sanctum Aeterna lives on as a symbol of free will: the right of every Tenno to choose their own path.

There is no worse feeling than being abandoned. Left behind, with no one anywhere near you.

That is why the Sanctum asks its Knights and Angels to be guides and guardians, and above all, warriors. They exist to show every Tenno that there is a choice between staying lost and forgotten, or being found and remembered. Tenno have always been caught in that strange cycle of losing their way and finding it again. Sanctum Aeterna has made it its mission to break it.

We are building a community founded on respect, inclusivity, and support. Whether you are brand new or have played for years, you deserve a place where you feel welcome to learn, to grow, and to share your journey.

The Sanctum's goal is a community of free will and free thought, united by choice. Here, asking questions is encouraged, mistakes are part of learning, and every voice matters. It is run by its members, for its members. We want people to feel comfortable talking openly about the world they live in, sharing what they know, and helping each other without fear of being judged.

We serve the innocent and we protect them, as the Lotus and the Tenno kith once did.

The Sanctum plays its part in the wider operations of the Tenno, and its specialty is extermination. When the Sanctum deploys, it takes the missions that softer hands are not ready for. When an enemy of the Tenno is marked, many clans join the hunt, but the most important targets go to the top orders. Sanctum Aeterna is one of them.

Training is mostly a test of the mind. A Tenno's body is naturally frail, and their metabolism means physical drills do little for them. So squires are put through hard mental trials, and some physical ones too, outside of their Warframes. Those trials, together with real lessons from their mentors, are what turn a recruit into a full member of the Sanctum. Knight or Angel, every Tenno of the Sanctum walks the same path.

Cinder Acolyte. Every journey starts here, learning transference: how to summon a Warframe and commune with it through continuity and the internal link. An acolyte who masters it becomes a squire.

Ember Squire. Squires are sent on low-rank missions and the occasional small errand. They have not yet sworn the oath, because they are still in their trial. Those above them are expected to help them and keep them on a good path. A squire who has passed every lesson and cleared every obstacle their mentors set is ready for what comes next.

Flamebound. The squire kneels and takes the oath. As a reward for their effort they are given one of the Sanctum's Nikanas, and they are sworn in. The Flamebound are the backbone of the Sanctum, still in training and at the start of a long road to making a name among its legends. They are sent on the bigger and riskier missions.

Ashen Templar. Templars are often mistaken for ordinary Flamebound, but they are the best of the best. Each one has something special, whether a strategy, a weapon, or a rare skill. They may not be the highest-ranked or the most favored, but they are the sharpest swords in the Sanctum. Templars are the elite, sent on the riskiest missions and the ones that stay secret.

Infernal Warden. The jails where Cephalons are made are not guarded by a server or a cryo room. They are guarded by Tenno. The Wardens are the strongest in the Sanctum and also its outcasts, the rejects and the uncontrollable, sent to die if the Sanctum decides it must. A Warden has two duties: to die, or to guard the inner sanctums where the Sanctum holds prisoners and targets the Tenno need kept for interrogation.

Things find their place in the ashes of pain, despair, and suffering. Nature fills the vacuum of space, and in time everything comes back together.

The Scattering was the time when everything came apart. Brothers and sisters were cut off from their families. Friends and allies were mistaken for enemies. Many fought just to survive, never knowing the war had already ended. Others still fought for control, sure they were strong enough to bring every clan and chapter back into a new Grand Order. None of them succeeded.

It was the Grand Master's own knights, the ones he had banished himself, who chose to hold on to the truth they had learned during the uprising against the Grand Order. They came together and became a light in the dark that any Tenno lost in Duviri could find.

The Thrax reformed. They rebuilt and took back their power in the region. The Tenno were not so lucky. They could not rebuild the strength that had once stood against the Thrax's tyranny. But in those ashes, something new was born. It was not a grand order, or one of chivalry and mastery. It was Sanctum Aeterna, sworn to uphold free will and to protect and bring peace to the new Sol system and whatever lies beyond it.

Every Tenno of Sanctum Aeterna, Knight and Angel alike, speaks these words.

United, Found, and Free.
These three we speak.
From the sands of Yore to the stairs of Thrax,
we engage the enemy, bulwarks against tyranny.
And so we are led, from Duviri to Sol,
spreading our word:
"Choose your path. Make your worth."
For we are not lost, yet we were found.
Our swords are sworn, for then and now.
Together we make a future, safe and sound.
Our swords in our hands,
forevermore,
forever bound.

Written by MrRice.

In the shadowed sublevels of Sedna, where humans once worked as miners for the Orokin Empire, a boy named Taylor was born. By then Sedna had become a haven for smugglers and illicit trade from across the System, but down in those depths, children did not belong to their families. By decree, they were taken and delivered to the Orokin academies to be trained, or broken, under the watchful eyes of the Archimedians.

Taylor was hard to break. As a teenager he was already stealing encrypted data, picking fights with adults, and beating the guards sent to discipline him. His defiance caught the attention of the Seven themselves, and as punishment he was sentenced to serve aboard the Zariman Ten Zero. The other children travelled as passengers. Taylor was sent below decks to keep the ship's systems and machinery running, and his attitude nearly got him thrown into the Void before the ship ever made its fateful jump.

When the Zariman came back from that impossible voyage, its survivors had been remade by the Void into the Tenno, and Taylor was one of them. In the years that followed, the Orokin trained him as a weapon for their endless wars, and he learned to be patient. He studied Warframe modifications obsessively, working out unusual powers and effects no one saw coming in battle. Of all Ballas's prized frames he favored Khora, whose bond with beast and chain matched his own spirit. He tamed not one feral kavat but two, and with Khora at his side his results outshone even the elite A-Squads.

When the Tenno turned on their masters, Taylor's squad became infamous. They called it the Beast Squad, and it was as destructive as it was insubordinate. Objectives failed and orders were ignored, but wherever they struck, devastation followed.

Centuries later, when the Tenno woke again, Taylor found a System as cruel as he had left it. Orokin, Grineer, Corpus, Infested, Sentient: to him they were all predators wearing different skins. His disillusionment hardened into resolve, and he joined Sanctum Aeterna, an order forged in defiance of corruption, and earned his place among its Knights.

Then came the Incident.

The records are sealed, but the fragments say enough. Taylor turned on his fellow Knights and cut down renowned veterans with a skill and fury that left no one standing, until Continuity's cruel machinery dragged them back. Whatever his reasons were, they are lost, locked away with the blood he spilled. Since that day his name has been spoken with equal parts fear and reverence.

Val Madurai, the Insubordinate Slayer.

Earth was once the cradle of humanity. Before the Orokin ruled, its towers reached the heavens and its cities lit the night brighter than the stars. Those ages were long gone by the time the Orokin returned to reclaim the Sol System after the Old War, but what they found was not an empty shell. The last of humankind was still there, holding on in the ruins of its ancestral world.

Among them was a shy, tired boy named Colt. He wandered the broken monuments around his grandparents' home and found small moments of joy among the relics of a civilization that had once touched the sky. The Orokin's arrival turned discovery into reclamation, and their colony spread across Earth's wounded soil. The Ostrons, born of mingled human and Grineer stock, became Earth's new settlers. Colt stayed different. He was a pure-blooded human, an anomaly in a System that had long forgotten what that meant.

His fate was sealed when he was chosen for Orokin training. He was taken from Earth to the Sol Academy of Phobos, where the halls of Zenurik schooled him in diplomacy, statecraft, and the quieter arts of war. Later, aboard the Zariman Ten Zero, his mother worked as a healer while Colt buried himself in forbidden studies: Eternalism, the philosophies of Lua, and the mechanist theories of Albrecht Entrati. He was just as fascinated by Orokin tortures like the Jade Light as by their great instruments of salvation, the Warframes.

Then came the Void jump, and like the other children, Colt was changed. The boy who had studied Warframes from a distance was now bound to them, and he wielded their power as if he had been born to it.

His path turned during the second Orokin expedition to Earth, sent to find out why a Warframe had vanished. In the groves of Sylvanus, Colt found her: Titania. She was more than a machine or a tool. She was a spirit of the forest, a dream given form. Titania called to him, and Colt gave himself to her Continuity without a second thought. From then on, child and Warframe were one soul.

Centuries passed. When the Tenno rose against their masters, Colt stood out as a tactician without equal rather than just another soldier. In the Solar Rail wars his strategies and his command of necramechs reshaped battlefields and won territories and rails for the Grand Order. His brilliance lifted his allies and his fellow knights to prominence, and it also exposed how corrupt the Grand Master he served had become.

Disgusted by the greed and betrayal, Colt became the spark of rebellion. He led the first and only uprising against the one who shall not be named, shattered the Grand Order, and scattered what was left of it across the stars. As the System broke apart into clans and guilds, Colt gathered his most loyal allies, and out of that bond and their shared cause he built something new.

Sanctum Aeterna.

It was never meant to be an empire of vanity or an order built on control. Sanctum Aeterna was made to keep the balance between Sol and Lua, light and shadow, purpose and freedom, and so Colt gave it two orders. The Knights of Aeterna carry the sword and stand against tyranny. The Angels of Aeterna, named for the healers who tended the children of the Zariman, carry the lost home and lift up the fallen. Neither stands above the other, and every Tenno of the Sanctum belongs to both its causes.

For his vision and his strategies, Colt was given a name that is still spoken today.

Val Narmonai, the Leader of Tacticians.