Editing Ghalhal (section)

==The Age of Strife==
Ghalhal's roots date back to the end of the Age of Technology, when the world was still only an industrial colony of the old human confederation. It was a red world colonized by descendants of a holy man, whose teachings sundered the old Terra's faiths over twenty millennia before. Like the rest of the galaxy, Galhal too fell into the depths of unrest at the onset of the Age of Strife. Witches and dissidents plagued the planet, engulfing it in strife. The citizens of Ghalhal took drastic measures, hunting psykers relentlessly to prevent their world from being devoured by the forces of the Immaterium.

After centuries of infighting and witch hunts, Ghalhal exhausted its resources. Before they could starve Ghalhal would have to expand into an empire, and much to their luck, there was a "warp bubble" nearby, free of witches and ripe with supplies. Ghalhal's fleet of twenty set off for these worlds, beginning on the rocky planet of Lemartia. However, if the fierce resistance and harsh terrain were not enough, Ghalhal discovered too late that Lemartia stood alongside four other worlds in this sector, in an alliance that divided and conquered, destroying the Ghalhallan fleet one ship at a time. The invaders retreated to their home world, only for the Markians to chase them and bomb Ghalhal back to the stone age.

Later in M28, new lords came to Ghalhal. A relative quieting of the warp allowed a Martian colony fleet to reach Ghalhal.  These settlers made peaceful contact with the few surviving Ghalhallans and absorbed them into a hybrid culture. Martian technology transformed Ghalhal into an industrial powerhouse, a forge world, a center of economy in the subsector.  The same bubble in the warp that had led to the doom of old Ghalhal led the new Ghalhallans to make contact with the nascent Markian Pact.  But the new terms were not war but trade, with Ghalhal's mighty forge fans transforming the raw materials of the Pact into industrial and consumer goods.  This relationship led to the Markian worlds being among the most civilised human planets in the Galaxy prior to the foundation of the Imperium of Mankind.