In brief: The Second Octavian Purge was a massacre orchestrated by Graend Councilman and Graend Architectus StahlRichterian of "traitors" deemed to be grossly incompetent or straight-up inactive in Octavium. The motion was approved by the Graend Council and the sitting was personally observed by Great Leader Aleczaender in person. Twenty officers, the most inactive in the Imperium's books, were tried one by one in the old council hall of Mount Invictus, and every one of them was condemned. The event had mixed reactions: the majority of Octavians approved it as a step in the right direction for a pure Zaenderist state, while others, especially within the Vatican, disapproved of it as barbaric and unforgiving.
Background
Six days after the First Octavian Purge, the Council found that the books still held officers who had not answered the warning. StahlRichterian moved that a second sitting be held, larger than the first and without its crosses, and that the accused be drawn not from any list of enemies but from the activity record itself: the twenty officers who had served the fewest minutes and hosted the fewest events across the movement. The Graend Council approved the motion. Aleczaender announced that he would attend and watch the sentences with his own eyes.
The procession
The Second Purge opened not in the hall but on the road. The twenty accused were penned in the lobby in handcuffs under a ceremonial guard of twenty Legionary Guardsmen, with the Inquisition on its marks. A band of twelve musicians, a bandmaster and a standard bearer marched in first and took post outside the hall door. Then trucks drew up: from them the guard crews unloaded the pikes and three candelabra and carried them into the hallway, where the pikes were planted in a line along the wall. The Inquisition entered last, made a circuit of the hall, opened the lodge and lit the lamps to east, south and west, and the sitting was declared open under the anthem.
The trials
The floor of the hall had been opened around a pit, ten studs by twenty, before the presidium. Each of the twenty was called by name, walked in alone with his guard, and charged from the record. Unlike the First Purge, the accused were made to answer: each man begged in his own voice, and the Master of the sitting put the question to the hall, and the chorus answered it. The sentence in every case was death. Each man was shot where he stood, dragged to the rim of the pit and thrown in.
The harvest
When the twentieth man had fallen the bodies were lifted from the pit and laid out on twenty chalk outlines on the floor of the hall. The heads were taken and carried out to the hallway, where each was set on a pike bearing the man's name, so that the line of pikes stood along the passage as the crosses had stood six days before. The band played the assembly out.
The film
The Enlightenment Ministry of Octavium recorded the sitting and published it as The Second Octavian Purge 9/19/26. The Ministry's account describes the event in the words given above, and it is the Ministry's description that the wider community has taken as the official record of the day.
Reactions
The greater part of the Imperium approved. The purge was read as the Council keeping its word: the ranks would be held by men who held their posts, and the Zaenderist state would be pure. Officers who had been present at the First Purge noted that the Second was the harsher, since no man was spared the pit.
The disapproval came, as before, from the Vatican. The Papacy's men within the community called the sitting barbaric and unforgiving, a slaughter of men whose only crime was absence. Having made its answer once, the Council did not make it again.
The sentences carried out
On the morning after the sitting the sentences were executed in the books. All twenty men were reduced to the base enlisted rank in every Octavian group in which they had held an elevated rank, fifty-two rank changes without a failure, and each was told by the Imperium's own machinery that he had been reduced to the ranks, kept his place, and would have to earn it back. Later that day the twenty were removed from every Discord server of the Imperium. No man was banned and no man was liquidated. Two seats of the Octavian Command in the main group were held back for the word of the Council itself.
Legacy
The Second Purge fixed the form of the Imperium's discipline for the season: the record as the only indictment, the public sitting as the only court, and the reduction to the ranks as the sentence behind the theatre. It was followed by a third, reduced sitting held in the hall alone, without trucks or procession.