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The Pale Stars is a collection of blue-white stars located within the Maelstrom Zone to the galactic southwest of the Warp rift known as the Maelstrom within the Ultima Segmentum. Since its founding as an Imperial sector during the early years of the Great Crusade, the Pale Stars have seen their fair share of strife and warfare on a monumental scale, most recently during the Badab War which was fought between 901-913.M41.

History[]

Pale Stars Galaxy Map Carta Imperialis

Ancient Carta Imperialis map depicting the Pale Stars

Labelled on ancient void charts as the Sea of Pallid Stars and known to many simply as the Pale Stars, the sickly blue-white orbs of this region were all born of a common stellar nursery. They cast a wan, baleful light upon their satellites. These star systems were known by void-mariners to be rich in mineral resources, yet were regarded by some as ill-fortuned, as if birthed of some unfathomable cosmic woe. It was the 771st Expeditionary Fleet that first charted the region, encountering numerous devolved human cultures and several xenos strains, which the attached XIX Legion elements purged unto extinction. Later on in the Great Crusade, the World Eaters' "Bloody" 13th Expeditionary Fleet passed through the area, leaving a red wake behind it that would seed in much of the populace a deep and abiding fear of the Legiones Astartes. At the time of the outbreak of Mankind's galactic civil war in the early years of the 31st Millennium, the Pale Stars region had yet to ascend to the status of an Imperial sector, but its principal world -- Phargos Rex -- was host to a Terran Administration mission that was the de facto gubernatorial authority across several dozen developing and frontier sovereign domains.

Eye of the Storm[]

"In the eye of the storm there lies truth, it is better to perish in the cold depths of the void than to be cast down to the surface of some hateful orb, there to flounder worm-like and craven."

—Ishmael the Ancient

One of countless shadow wars fought during the Horus Heresy which would only be known to history by the piecing together of scattered archival fragments, the war for the region to the galactic southwest of the Warp rift known as the Maelstrom was one fought far from the front lines and outside of the chain of command of either side. When word of the Horus Heresy reached the individual planetary rulers, most recoiled in horror at the Warmaster Horus' base betrayal of the Emperor, yet none dared declare openly against him for they dreaded the gaze of Horus and knew that should they provoke his wrath, he could crush them out of hand. Several lonely voices denounced such vacillation as craven and dishonourable, imploring the Imperial Commanders of the region to stand together in common defiance of the Traitors, yet these voices were few and quickly silenced.

It was against this backdrop of dread and recrimination that the worlds of the region began to suffer a range of creeping horrors. It began with Astropaths reporting strange echoes upon the ætheric currents and quickly escalated as Navigators guiding merchant vessels along the region's outlying Warp routes perceived an oncoming Warp Storm front that would be the doom of any foolish enough to attempt to sail its currents. At that time, none could know of the great and terrible rite that the Traitor Primarch Lorgar had enacted at Calth, that in the sacrificial murder of the Veridia star he had brought the Ruinstorm into being, a tempest of such scale and ferocity that the Imperium would be sundered in twain. As the shock wave of the Ruinstorm struck the Pale Stars, terror and insanity erupted across the region's worlds. Entire choirs of Astropaths perished in hideous torment while dozens of vessels were lost to the Warp with thousands of souls cast to its hungry tides. The masses rose up in madness, either in blind anarchy or driven by ranting demagogues and wild-eyed preachers, who in retrospect must surely have bided their time for just such a moment. Religions, sects and cults cast down by the Imperial Truth solar decades before resurged in force and people whose grandsires had once prostrated themselves before heathen idols spontaneously resurrected the most terrible of practices.

Thus, as the light of Terra was smothered by the oncoming Ruinstorm, so entire swathes of the galaxy fell silent to the masters of the Imperium. The loyalties of the worlds of the Pale Stars remained unknown to Terra, lost to the galaxy-wide clamour of all-consuming civil war. But for the coming of a great, yet unsung hero of the Imperium, the fate of the Pale Stars might have gone unremarked in the story of the great Horus Heresy; that warrior was Nathaniel Garro, formerly of the Death Guard Legion -- the so-called Agentia Primus of the Knights-Errant.

Envoy of Terra[]

With the Ruinstorm surging across the galaxy, the War Council of Terra sought by any means to gauge the true scope of the unfolding calamity. Blinded as it was, the Council was desperate for other ways to measure the disposition of Horus' hosts and the allegiances of planetary rulers. Astratelepathic communication was by that point all but impossible, the Warp a howling cacophony that either drowned out their messages or corrupted their content in insidious ways. The only means of assaying the status and allegiance of the scattered worlds of the Imperium would be to despatch envoys and agents to do so in person, even though the War Council knew that such a hazardous mission would be the deaths of countless loyal and devoted servants of Terra. One amongst these was Lorn Orpheus, a minor scion of the celebrated Orpheus Dynasty of Rogue Traders Militant. Lorn was assigned the Pale Stars as his destination, having gained some knowledge of the region while serving in the pathfinder flotillas that ranged ahead of the 771st Expeditionary Fleet during the initial Imperial Compliance campaign. The assignment might have been regarded by many as a death sentence, but Lorn was possessed of an adventurer's spirit wedded to a fierce instinct for survival, and saw in it a sure means of rapidly ascending the ranks of the Orpheus Dynasty.

Convergence[]

Even as Lorn Orpheus was readying his flotilla at the Luna shipyards, other forces were converging upon the Pale Stars. One was an alliance of Astartes who had, each for their own very different reasons, renounced or severed their ties to their sire-Legion and obscured their heraldry; the other served an equally shadowed cause, albeit one that most others associated with the Traitors -- the Alpha Legion. Which faction came to the Pale Stars first is one detail amongst many now lost to history and none can tell if their appearances were linked or simply coincidental -- most likely the tides of the unquiet Warp simply stranded both there at the same moment in time.

The first group would come to be named the "Dark Brotherhood" by the peoples of the Pale Stars and later other regions, though none can tell if the group itself ever acknowledged or used this name. Very little is known for certain about the Dark Brotherhood, and even less of the circumstances of its formation, but it is clear that this band of what would become known as "Blackshields" had formed around a warrior known as the "Nemean Reaver," or simply "the Nemean," a title likely referring to the impenetrable Artificer-wrought Power Armour he was said to wear in battle or to suggestions that he was preternaturally strong and impossible to slay. Of the origins of this war leader very little is certain, though some accounts claim he was a Terran scion of the I Legion and a veteran of the Third Rangdan Xenocide, a notion at least partially borne out by elements of the sparse personal heraldry he wore and by the terrible scars that marred his features. The Nemean was a taciturn and brooding warrior and leader, but by 008.M31, he had bound the disparate warriors of the Dark Brotherhood into a coherent whole and moved quickly to establish a haven, a sovereign domain deep in the void beyond the spiral arms where he and his brethren might forge their own destiny in a galaxy fallen to insanity.

It was at the trinary star system known as the Eridayn Cataract that the Dark Brotherhood found refuge. A dense shroud of asteroids circled the system's three stellar bodies, concealing secrets and hazards that only the most accomplished of void masters could hope to navigate. The Dark Brotherhood were possessed of such individuals, their small fleet of light but fast and agile vessels crewed by a motley assortment of Voidborn and captained by an Astartes who had seen service in some of the most arduous campaigns of the Great Crusade. Having established a secure base of operations deep within the asteroids, the Dark Brotherhood laid claim to the entire stellar realm and the boundless natural resources that orbited its three stars. Within only solar months the Dark Brotherhood was aggressively defending its interests, ranging the surrounding Warp routes to clear them of any foe that might contest their mastery, from human and xenos void pirates to patrol vessels sent out by the small Imperialis Armada squadron stationed at Phargos Rex. In late 007.M31, the Brotherhood launched a sudden and overwhelming assault upon the nearby system of 771 / 51-6. There they brutally purged the human-xenos hybrid pirate clans that had preyed upon the region's outlying worlds since the time of Old Night, the Nemean executing their master by his own hand as an indisputable message to all of that abominable strain. The name of the Brotherhood's brooding reaver lord was soon known across a dozen and more systems, and whispers of his formative empire spread still further. Soon after this event came word of the arrival in the region of a Traitor Legiones Astartes strike force of the Alpha Legion, commanded by Strike Master Ijax, a bloody-handed veteran of the Drop Site Massacre at Istvaan V.

Strike Master Ijax had come to the Pale Stars as an emissary of the Traitor cause, his mission to ensure that the region's planetary rulers declared for the Warmaster. Instead of presenting himself directly at Phargos Rex, Ijax divided his command and despatched lieutenants as envoys across the region, each going before a planetary lord to deliver Horus' missive. Each recipient was informed that their peers were being made the very same offer at the very same moment. In so doing, each planetary ruler was compelled to reach their own decision without recourse to their fellows, the Alpha Legion envoy standing before them feeding their darkest fears about what the Warmaster's fleets might have in mind for their world while simultaneously appealing to their most venal desires with insinuations of the favour they might earn upon declaring for Horus and the Traitor cause. The presence of the Dark Brotherhood, however, forestalled immediate acquiescence. Upon learning of the Nemean and his pocket empire, Strike Master Ijax saw at once the necessity of neutralising this rival faction and an opportunity to seal the compact with the planetary rulers. If the Planetary Governors would commit their own forces to his command in the joint endeavour of ridding the Pale Stars of the Dark Brotherhood, then the Warmaster would surely bless each ruling house with his unconstrained largesse. The rulers saw no choice but to comply.

Shadow War[]

The compact sealed, Strike Master Ijax's subcommanders assumed direct command of the planetary musters of a dozen worlds and their system defence flotillas. While most of these forces were but crudely equipped and barely-trained, the Alpha Legion war leaders soon remade them into highly effective armies, utilising each muster's unique knowledge of its homeworld and the particular skills honed there. Having established a core of defensive armies on the key worlds, Ijax ordered his disparate hosts to press outwards into the Pale Stars, thousands of warriors transported in the holds of a motley armada of cargo vessels attended by Alpha Legion Escort ships. The Strike Master's intent was to challenge the freedom of movement the Dark Brotherhood had enjoyed since coming to the region, and in so doing to precipitate an escalation in the conflict, dictated by his own strategic ends.

The Dark Brotherhood were far from idle as the Alpha Legion raised the planetary musters and when the Traitor-aligned fleets pressed into the void, they were immediately opposed by the Nemean's vessels. Across the Warp routes of the Pale Stars, the black-hulled warships of the Dark Brotherhood fell upon their foes, exacting a fearsome toll upon those who would oppose their mastery of the Warp routes. The Traitor-aligned ships teemed with militia troops, their holds crowded way beyond capacity, and so the Blackshields' boarding actions were met with such a press of bodies that they were repulsed as often as they were successful. The Dark Brotherhood turned dozens of militia transports into charnel houses, driven by the twin goals of dissuading future attack while capturing what vessels might find employment in their own ragged fleet. The fighting was most intense where Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion warriors came face to face, on several occasions upon the burning bridge of some stricken vessel wracked by shuddering death throes. No quarter was given and none sought in such bitter confrontations, and countless Astartes from both factions went to their deaths rather than concede defeat.

Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion warships clashed across a dozen star systems, the conflict spilling onto the surfaces of numerous worlds as the Traitor-aligned militias were deployed wherever their masters willed. The mortal hosts were mostly treated as less than cattle by Strike Master Ijax and his officers, their presence often serving as provocation to incite attack from the Nemean. The Blackshield lord was no fool, matching the Alpha Legion's cunning with his own so that thousands-strong militia armies were often deployed to isolated regions at great effort to no effect, falling prey to hazardous local conditions or simply starving to death while the Dark Brotherhood committed their efforts elsewhere. At Larsa V for example, transport barques out of Phargos Rex deposited thirty cohorts of the planetary muster into the rhodium dune seas, which dispersed across the ergs and established a chain of fortified strongpoints. The Dark Brotherhood declined to take the bait, however, and within a solar month the entire army of occupation had perished from exposure to the highly irradiated environment.

At Mirdath, three Dark Brotherhood vessels succeeded in bypassing the quasi-sentient out-system defence monitors protecting the Dark Mechanicum forge-fane that had long orbited in the system's outer reaches. Striking directly for the fane's macro-provender chambers, a Dark Brotherhood boarding force captured and escaped with hundreds of tonnes of high value supplies. During their escape, though, they encountered some manner of mechanical horror of whipping mechadendrites that slaughtered half their number before they could break clear. It would later be determined that this creature was the product of the Mirdath forge-fane's inner foundry, the holy-of-holies where unspeakable machine blasphemies had long lain dormant.

At the outlying system of Dissolution, the Alpha Legion envoy ordered the recall of an army of occupation that had been engaged in a solar-decades-long campaign to eradicate a primitive, yet highly pernicious native xenos strain. As the garrison forces mustered in orbit, the long-suppressed xenos rose up against the remaining Imperial colonial holdings, achieving in a single solar day what the garrison had fought for long solar decades to hold at bay, and tens of thousands of Imperial settlers were sacrificed to the primitive aliens' chthonic fire-gods. Even as the militia watched its world burn from orbit, the Dark Brotherhood struck and a fierce battle erupted across Dissolution near-space. Thousands of Traitor-aligned militia died as their transports were cast burning to the surface below, but the Nemean's forces suffered concomitant losses, for the Alpha Legion had used the garrison force as bait to draw the Blackshields into an ambush by their own vessels.

Though the war that erupted across the Pale Stars divided the belligerents between those aligned to Horus and their enemies, the Dark Brotherhood fought not for Terra but for their own cause. That cause, so it would later be claimed, was simple survival, the Blackshields having determined that in a galaxy fallen to darkness, survival lay in the seizing of their own destiny. The Nemean was bitterly opposed to the Traitors' campaign to force the local Imperial Commanders to declare for the Warmaster, for them doing so was detrimental to his own ambitions of a safe haven for his kin. The populations of the worlds of the Pale Stars knew horror at the war the Traitors had brought to their worlds, but any who looked to the Nemean for deliverance would find only disappointment, the Dark Brotherhood unheeding of their suffering.

The Storm Rises[]

With the coming of war to the Pale Stars, there soon followed yet another woe. The turbulence that had afflicted the Warp for so many solar months now flared into a raging tempest, fuelled, so it seems to us now given what we have learned of the Empyrean, by the shedding of so much blood among the Pale Stars. The planetary musters raised at the command of Strike Master Ijax had borne the brunt of the suffering, and the losses sustained by the Alpha Legion and Blackshields were insubstantial in comparison. As the deaths mounted in increments of many thousands, so the Warp grew ever more restive, immaterial tendrils groping in the darkness towards spilled blood like unseen predators about a drowning man. Later studies would conclude that this phenomenon had been brought about with deliberate intent, but others doubt that Strike Master Ijax was fully party to the fell wisdom possessed by Erebus of the Word Bearers and his peers.

As ever more blood was shed, Dissolution, Phargos Rex, Mirdath and Larsa were subsumed in a seething mass of what Navigators once referred to as a Warp/realspace interface, but which now is known by far less mundane terminology as a Warp rift. With the Warp Storms came further waves of insurrection and insanity more intense than any before, and if but a fraction of extant accounts from this period are to be afforded any credulity, things born of the Abyss now walked amongst Mankind. Nightmares made flesh tore themselves from the shadows and fell upon the peoples of a dozen worlds, and it is said that the streets ran with torrents of blood. Worse still, great swathes of the population of Phargos Rex reportedly joined the unnamed creatures and turned upon their fellows, rendered by Warp-touched madness into atavistic cannibals and savage murderers.

Witness[]

It was to this region of blood-stained space that Rogue Trader Militant Lorn Orpheus finally came. His flotilla had traversed the tumultuous Warp routes from Terra, through the outer marches of the Segmentum Solar and across the depths of the Orion-Crux void. Fewer than half of the flotilla survived the passage through the Khymaran Drift, for here they encountered the leading edge of the Ruinstorm as it surged across the galaxy. The flotilla that at last translated into realspace at Phargos Rex bore scant resemblance to that which had departed Terra solar months earlier. Those vessels that survived were visibly wounded, their hulls scorched black by immaterial fires and their armoured flanks rent and buckled as if they had been caught in the grasping talons of some god-daemon of ancient myth. Limping in-system, it was immediately apparent from the flood of signals, both electromagnetic and astrotelepathic, that the Pale Stars were in the grip of some terrible woe. Among the numerous names and images repeated throughout this torrent of Vox and psychic traffic was that of the Nemean, as if the peoples of the Pale Stars sought his protection and protection from him in equal measure.

The envoy of the Council of Terra knew that not only had the ancient tales of the horrors of Old Night been true, but those very horrors had returned. Funeral pyres the size of cities burned across the darkness of Phargos Rex's night side, while a pall of dense smoke obscured the terrors being inflicted upon the surface of the day side. Orpheus, however, had come too far and risked too much to turn tail and retreat back to Terra, if indeed a return voyage was even possible given the ever-rising intensity of the Warp Storms and the woeful state of his flotilla. The envoy resolved to travel to the surface and to determine if anything remained of the planetary government or the Terran Administration mission that had been based there. But Orpheus was well aware of the risk he was taking, and so he prepared a message packet for Terra, to be carried through the Warp Storms upon the fastest vessel remaining to his flotilla.

The message that Lorn Orpheus composed for the Council of Terra was as full an accounting of the horrors that had consumed the Pale Stars as he was able to compose. He described the Warp phenomena that had assailed his vessels as they braved the storms, of crewmen driven to rabid insanity and the bloodbath that had ensued. He spoke of the apparitions that had tormented them as they plied the turbulent Empyrean and which lingered still at the edges of vision even solar days after translation. He recounted something of the unfettered, impenetrable insanity that had drowned the Vox channels and the flood of pain and horror which the few surviving Astropaths were broadcasting far and wide. He concluded his message informing them that he intended to descend to the burning surface of Phargos Rex and to seek out any vestige of authority in an effort to fulfil his mission, and to learn the identity of the individual whose name and face appeared in so many communications -- the Nemean.

Dark Compliance[]

It would be many solar weeks before Orpheus' message runner reached Terra, the fact that it survived the return voyage at all nothing short of a miracle. In the meantime the horrors that afflicted the Pale Stars intensified many times over. The void boiled as other-worldly energies burst across space, the skies above each planet ripped asunder in a livid display of seething insanity. The anarchy that Orpheus had encountered at Phargos Rex cascaded outwards and subsumed each and every world in the region, millions rising up and tearing down planetary governments before turning upon their own.

Ruling bodies were compelled to flee the rioting hordes and abandon any pretence of control, and many Imperial Commanders found their authority entirely reliant upon the support of the Alpha Legion. Across the worlds of the Pale Stars, Ijax's subcommanders deployed Legion assets to defend the rulers from their own rebelling populations and, in short order, the Strike Master became the de facto power in the region, able to precipitate the downfall of entire planetary governments simply by withdrawing his forces and allowing the mobs to exact their bloodthirsty vengeance. Even those rulers not under siege by their own peoples were acutely aware that with their Planetary Defence Forces directly controlled by the Alpha Legion, they were entirely reliant on Ijax for protection from the Dark Brotherhood.

At a stroke, the Pale Stars had fallen to the Traitor cause -- Dark Compliance to the Warmaster Horus' shadow empire had been achieved.

One of Twenty[]

It might have been expected that the worlds of the Pale Stars would have been lost to the Imperium, as were so many other regions. The Ruinstorm now split the galaxy asunder and hundreds, even thousands of star systems were drowned in blood or brutally crushed beneath the heel of the Warmaster Horus, the Great Betrayer. Countless worlds were lost for all time, consumed in the raw stuff of the Warp, their names to be struck from the stellar cartographs and their approaches seeded with navigational warning buoys. Warp travel became all but suicidal and astrotelepathic communication nigh impossible.

No doubt such a fate would indeed have befallen the Pale Stars were it not for the fact that not only did Orpheus' message runner somehow make it back to Terra, but one important detail in his message had caused it to be routed directly to the attention of Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and the second highest authority in the entire Imperium. That detail was the naming of the leader of the Dark Brotherhood.

The warrior dubbed the Nemean was already known to Malcador, for he was one of a score of Astartes identified by the former Luna Wolf and member of the Crusader Host, Severian. The Sigillite's intent was to gather each of those named by Severian and muster them into a cadre of warriors directly under his control, a band he would dub the Knights-Errant. It fell to the most senior of these, his Agentia Primus Nathaniel Garro, to go forth into the galaxy and recruit all twenty to his master's cause. And thus Garro was despatched to the Pale Stars, his mission to return with the leader of the Dark Brotherhood at his side that the Nemean might swear himself to the cause of Malcador the Sigillite.

The Coming of the Herald[]

At 017.008.M31, a grey-hulled, dagger-prowed Warp-sprinter named the Eusebeian Herald plunged from the churning Warp Storms closing in upon the outlying system of Optera, a trail of rapidly dissolving Warpstuff forming a kilometres-long contrail in her wake. The Herald had been laid down at Saturn by the hands of the most skilled ship-wrights of that domain and utilised hybrid technologies jealously guarded by the Terrawatt Clans of Ancient Terra and denounced as heresy by the Martian Priesthood. Not only had she survived the tempest but she had made the journey in mere solar weeks and carried her passengers safely through the otherwise impenetrable Immaterium to the frontier of the Pale Stars. It was a voyage few would have dared and even fewer could have survived.

Aboard the Eusebeian Herald was a contingent of the Knights-Errant -- Garro, formerly of the Death Guard, Callion Zaven, once of the Emperor's Children, and Tylos Rubio, a scion of the Ultramarines. Each Astartes had been named by Severian and the Sigillite had foreseen they would each prove vital in averting the fall of the Imperium and combating what he had prophesised would come in its aftermath. In the Dark Brotherhood and their mysterious leader, Malcador hoped to secure another weapon for his long, silent war against the darkness.

The Conclave of Optera[]

At Optera, Garro ordered the Astropath assigned to his mission to send forth a signal, its allegorical cipher imprint unique and composed for this specific circumstance. The message could only be understood by an Astropath bound to the service of the Legiones Astartes, and its precise content only deciphered by one whose loyalties lay truly with Terra. The message called for the recipients to gather at Optera and Garro chose as the meeting place a ruined, megalithic structure high atop a rocky plateau overlooking the cratered wastes of Optera IV. There were numerous risks inherent in the sending of such a message, but still greater advantage to be won, and so the Astropath's mind-song went out across the storm-wracked reaches of the Pale Stars. Twenty solar days later, Garro convened his parley.

At the fulcrum of the parley, both the Loyalists' and Blackshields' vessels were attacked in orbit by the Traitor forces under Strike Master Ijax. The Traitors must somehow have broken the cipher of Garro's Astropath, a feat that only the Alpha Legion could achieve. In an instant, chaos claimed the formerly solemn gathering. Blackshields bellowed in rage or denial, some at the skies, some at their brothers but the greater number at Garro and the other two Knights-Errant. The Dark Brotherhood quickly fractured into rival groups and a vicious, close-range fire-fight erupted. What followed remains unknown, only that the meeting descended rapidly into armed conflict. The Nemean ultimately turned his back on the Dark Brotherhood and departed with Garro, to become one of the Sigillite's Knights-Errant.

The Blood-Stained Stars[]

In the aftermath of the Alpha Legion's ambush at Optera, a bloody and bitter shadow war erupted across the systems of the Pale Stars. The Dark Brotherhood carved their way across the region, slaughtering any force that stood in their way until they vanished into the Eridayn Cataract, not to be encountered again for an age. As with so many accounts of those final days of the Horus Heresy's Age of Darkness, the truth is hidden beneath a pall of ashes and the crushed bones of the greatest heroes of the shattered Imperium.

Notable Worlds[]

  • Crow's World (Civilised World)
  • Optera IV (Feral World)
  • Larsa II (Mining World) - This Mining World is known to have a mutant population -- and their aberrations are many.
  • Phargos Hex (Information Classified. Access Forbidden. Security Level Omega) - This world, once named Phargos Rex, served as the de facto authority within the region, but since the time of the Horus Heresy, it has been declared Classified for unknown reasons. During the Horus Heresy, with the coming of the Ruinstorm, Phargos Rex and a number of other worlds were subsumed into the seething mass of a Warp/realspace interface -- a Warp rift. Waves of insurrection and insanity gripped the planet, and soon daemons walked amongst man. Great swathes of the doomed planet's population reportedly joined their daemonic allies and turned upon their fellows, rendered by Warp-touched madness into atavistic cannibals and savage murderers. It is assumed the world was lost to the Ruinous Powers and became a Daemon World. Most likely, following the events of the Heresy, and the subsequent Great Scouring, the planet was subjected to an Exterminatus and declared Perditas ("Forbidden") by order of the Inquisition. This would explain the planet's modern-era name, "Phargos Hex," and why it is deemed Classified by long-standing Imperial decree.

Notable Systems[]

Notable Celestial Bodies[]

  • Eridayn Cataract - This trinary star system is a primary source for resource extraction in the Pale Stars region. A dense shroud of asteroids circles the star system's three stellar bodies, concealing secrets and hazards that only the most accomplished of void masters could hope to navigate. Boundless natural resources orbit its three stars, which makes it a target for prospectors, smugglers and pirates alike.

Sources[]

  • Imperial Armour Volume Nine - The Badab War, Part One, pp. 6-7, 16, 18, 29, 43, 48
  • Imperial Armour Volume Nine - The Badab War, Part Two, pp. 11, 42, 78, 109
  • The Horus Heresy - Book Six: Retribution (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 29, 84-91, 95-98, 101, 162, 206
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