Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets (section)

== Cadia ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Gateway to the Eye of Terror '''''

Cadia was green, once. There were forests, green plains of flowing grass, lakes and rivers. The sky was blue, once. The air was clean. Once.
 
That was a long, long time ago, though. Before nobody knows how many millions of nukes went off in that clean sky, before how many millions of tons of gas and poison were released by both sides, before how many daemonic hordes trampled over its surface and were pushed back by how many billions of tanks.
 
The people of Cadia in those days were not so much Chaos worshippers as they were maltheists. Little more than tribal-hunter gatherers, with knapped stone tools and eyes specifically adapted to filter out the impossible colors and sights that should not be that filled the Cadian aurora at night. They believed the Chaos Gods existed, for only a fool would not on that world, but they only offered them curses or, at best, prayed that the dark gods would find them too insignificant to be worth noticing. For this was Cadia, doorstep to the Eye of Terror, and here Chaos did not have to be subtle or enticing to claim its victims. Like all tribal worlds the Cadians had stories of monsters in the dark eager to snatch the unwary, leaving only the sound of daemonic laughter echoing on the winds, only due to being right next to the Eye of Terror these stories were more literal than most. What the Imperium did is give the inhabitants guns, and taught them that the daemons of Chaos could be fought, and more importantly, killed.

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Despite its importance to the modern Imperium, Cadia did not become a part of the modern Imperium until after the War of the Beast. Cadia was first discovered by the Word Bearers 10th Expeditionary Fleet led by Bishop-Captain Kol "The Anointed" Badar, backtracing the routes used by the forces of the Beast and the Crone Eldar to try and figure out where they had come from. Kol was not an Astartes himself but commanded nearly a thousand of them plus appropriate Imperial Army elements. He was a curmudgeonly old priest from the Yndonisian Bloc and although it was buried under a lot of crust and grump he had had a good heart. Upon landing on Cadia, Kol took one look at the violet-eyed tribals living as good men under a broken sky to spite the dark gods and called for reinforcements. Upon seeing the scale of the request, the Administratum asked Kol what in the world he needed the reinforcements for. Badar’s response was curt and brazen. “We’re going to besiege Hell”.

Kol’s idea sent shockwaves through the Imperium. Some were appalled. Dorn was said to have claimed it was the best idea the “choir boys” had ever come up with. And yet, once the initial shock had passed, turning Cadia into a Fortress World sounded like an increasingly good idea. The region of space between the Eye of Terror and Sol was always likely to be a contested space as long as Chaos was interested in toppling the Imperium. However, examination of the region of space around Cadia showed that the planet was positioned in an anomalously calm region of space bordering the Eye of Terror, actually slightly within the Eye if you were to look at the stellar maps. Although barely wide enough to hold the Cadian system, the region around Cadia represented the easiest and most reliable way for Crone fleets leaving the Crone Worlds to attempt to march on Sol. By fortifying the only major entrance and exit from the Eye of Terror the Imperium would essentially deny Chaos any real long-term foothold in realspace.
 
Ulthwé also approved the idea, given that the Craftworld was typically been the first target of Chaos marauders due to its proximity to the Eye they loved the idea of a bulwark against Chaos that wasn’t them. The modern population of Cadia is derived from a mix of the original natives and the numerous immigrants resettled from across the Imperium to populate the planned Fortress World. Although the natives were enthralled by the idea that the daemons that had haunted them for millennia were actually able to be banished by mortal men, a tribal population in the millions who were just getting the hand of not using stone tools is not enough to man an entire fortress world, and the Imperium knew it. Most of the culture of modern Cadia is also heavily influenced by Ulthwé and the native Cadians (especially Ulthwé, whose population is an order of magnitude greater than Cadia), who had to teach the new wide-eyed immigrants how to survive on a world where the worshippers of the Ruinous Powers are your next door neighbor.
 
 
That was all a long, long time ago. Cadia isn’t green anymore.
 
The ground is churned mud, discolored by the iridescent sheens of ancient chemical weapons. The sky is bruised smog, the air corrosive and lethal in minutes. Geiger counters crackle and hiss. All landmarks, all features of terrain, have been chewed up by artillery barrages and orbital bombardment until all that is left of entire mountains is mud-filled craters. Unexploded munitions, some millennia old, litter the ground. Every rain exposes ancient corpses and ruined war machines, to be covered back up when the ground shifts again.
 
Imagine if the battle of Verdun had continued for ten thousand years.
 
Civilization on Cadia, such as it is, has moved underground. Vast underground vaults, hardened against shock and bombardment, house factories, armories, farms, apartments, schools, mines. All sheltered from the attention of enemy warships by at least a hundred meters of rock, if not more.
 
Each of these cities is, of course, also a fortress. Every corridor a chokepoint, every intersection a killzone, every building a bunker. Every entrance rigged to collapse. In many cases, the entire city is rigged for total destruction if it falls, to deny resources to the enemy and spite them one last time. Atomic demolition charges, magma floods from geothermal taps, simply bringing the ceiling down with melta bombs.
 
The entire planet is a fortress, spiderwebbed with defensive lines and connected by underground passages. There is not a point on the planet that cannot be hit with at least one gun. Individual bunkers fight on for as long as possible before the crew abandons the position and falls back to the next line through the tunnel system, just a hundred meters away. Areas the enemy thinks secure are struck by commandos through secret passages and hidden sally-ports. Fortresses surrounded on the surface can hold out for years with supplies flowing into them through the tunnels. When the enemy gets into the tunnels, they will find nothing but booby-traps, collapsed passages, and ambushes.
 
Some of the bunker systems extend down halfway to the mantle. Even if the surface, the cities, the top fortification layers, all fall, resistance will continue. Tunneling machines loaded with atomics crawling up from the depths, like very slow ICBMs.
 
Imagine a combination of the Maginot Line, VC tunnel systems, and the Japanese defense of Peleliu and Iwo Jima.
 
Normally, the reaction of the Archenemy to defenses of such magnitude would be warp-work, drown it in daemons and drive the defenders mad. Not on Cadia, not with the Pylons, not under a Null-Field powerful enough to stitch the Eye of Terror shut. Daemon engines stutter and malfunction, Nurgle's plagues are banished by conventional treatment, daemons are banished by the humble lasgun. Victory will have to be by fire and blood.
 
Sadly, Chaos has plenty of that as well.
 
In places, the bodies of the dead are mounded high enough to be terrain features.
 
 
The stone of Cadia is unnaturally resilient. The Archenemy has attempted to destroy the world with nearly every method ever conceived at one time or another. Cyclonic torpedoes, mass orbital bombardment, ram attacks by Space Hulks and entire fleets, vortex bombs to the planetary core. A dozen things that should have left Cadia a drifting asteroid belt, and yet the fortresses and deep bunkers still stand. Something is holding Cadia together, and for years nobody knew for certain exactly what.
 
The most commonly proposed theory was that the planet’s resilience was related to the Cadian Pillars, the strange, alien pylons constructed of an unknown material by an alien race long before the Eldar had even explored the region after the War in Heaven. The Cadian Pillars are extremely tough, shrugging off anything less than a direct, focused attack. Above their surface they appear to be simple obelisks, whereas below they are linked together by a network of metallic roots that in some cases were all that held the planet’s crust together after Chaos bombardment. Bizarre natural phenomena have also been suggested as a possible explanation, and a few bold iconoclasts whisper that it might be the work of Chaos, a manifestation of its self-defeating nature. In the end, nobody knows; but Cadia would have long fallen without it.
 
 
However, in recent times, a darker side to Cadia's story has emerged. Cadia's position as the lone bastion of realspace within the immaterial turmoil of the Eye of Terror was not due to chance. The Cadian Pillars have been discovered to be of Necron origin (possibly as the brainchild of the C’tan only known as Mag’ladroth, also known as the Void Dragon), having been built by the Necrontyr Star Empire in ancient times across and beneath the Cadian surface. The fact they built this device so close to the Eldar homeworld speaks of hubris, or spite, or both. This explained the unnatural resilience of Cadia and the pylons, if the pylons were of Necron origin, then it made sense that they would want to make them as hard to destroy as possible. The Cadian Pillars have the passive effect of "anchoring" the planet and its surroundings more reliably in realspace, allowing Cadia to exist even after the fabric of space-time was warped during the Fall of the Eldar. However, when fully activated the Cadian pillars would act like a wedge, separating the Warp from reality and ripping out the souls of almost every living thing in the Milky Way. Their original purpose was most likely to kill off the Old Ones as well as their psychic servant races such as the Krork and the proto-Eldar, but fortunately the Necrontyr (or more likely, the Necrons) were driven off before this task could be complete.
 
However, now that the Necron Star Empire has returned to the galactic scene, they seek to use the Cadian Pillars once more. The Silent King has stated as much. The Silent King seeks to use the Cadian Pillars to starve out the forces of Chaos and return the Warp to the Realm of Souls, finally fixing the last of the damage done to the galaxy by the War in Heaven. The fact that this would killing off every living thing with a soul is seen as a regrettable though necessary evil. It is uncertain whether the Cadian Pillars are the only part of this device or coordinate a series of devices throughout the galaxy, but it is clear that Cadia is a lynchpin in the Silent King’s plans.
 
Now that the Imperium knows the truth about the Cadian Pillars, engineers from a hundred worlds and a dozen species have travelled to Cadia to try and figure out how to shut the pillars down, but none have figured out a way to dismantle the pillars, let alone do so in a way that would allow Cadia to remain existing and restrict the flow of Chaos Forces in and out of the Eye of Terror.
 
Now Cadia faces the threat of a siege on two sides. An invasion by Chaos from the front and the Necrons from behind. Cadia may be on the opposite side of the galaxy from the seat of the Silent King’s power, but even it depends on reinforcements from the Gate Worlds to survive any protracted siege. Letting either the Necrons or Chaos get a hold of the world could prove disastrous.

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=== Resettlement of Cadia ===

It is common (although far from universal) practice for long- serving regiments of the Imperial Army to be given worlds, or parts of worlds, to settle (or re- settle, in many cases) for their retirement. This is simultaneously a sentimental gesture, a lavish reward for years of service to the Imperium, and a practical one; worlds colonized by ex- Guardsmen usually develop highly martial cultures, which will contribute many more fine Guard regiments in the centuries and millennia to come. Also, worlds colonized by Guardsmen are more likely to survive their early years with a bunch of fully equipped veteran soldiers as a PDF. 

Although regiments of any world may be selected for colonization, there are a few which pursue these initiatives with unique fervor. One such is the Fenrisian Line, as the Space Wolves try to expand their recruitment population. But by far the most visible and prolific are the Cadians, who pursue settlement with special fervor. 

Part of this is simply how many Cadian regiments there are throughout the galaxy. But mainly it is a function of the nature of Cadia itself. The immense fortifications, coating the entire surface of the world and crawling deep into the crust, require tens of billions of soldiers to man properly at minimum. Preferably hundreds of billions; in theory the barrack vaults of the deep tunnels while in top condition could accommodate as many as a trillion men, although this has never been actually achieved. And with every Black Crusade that garrison is brutally decimated, with losses sometimes climbing as high as ninety percent. (At least every drop of Cadian blood is brought with a river of the enemies'.)

In the wake of every Black Crusade, it is imperative that the defenses be rebuilt and remanned as quickly as possible. Even with the main conflict over, as long as the Gate's defenses are compromised raiding bands by the hundred will continue to flow through to plague the Imperium. And not just anyone will do; it needs to be people with a tradition of resistance to Chaos both physically and spiritually, of stubborn, heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, down to the last ditch; who have been doing so for so long it has gone past the cultural and down to the genetic. In short, the Cadian Gate needs to be manned by Cadians. 

On each of the thousands of worlds colonized by Cadians, the traditions of Cadia are maintained. Universal conscription with military training starting from the early teens, bunker as the basic mode of architecture, sending out hundreds of regiments to fight in the wider galaxy. Worlds colonized by the Cadians almost invariably become fortress worlds and major Army recruiting worlds, bulwarks of the local defense. They would be deeply valuable to the Imperium for that alone. 

And when Cadia lies wounded in the wake of yet another war, they respond. Dispatching soldiers, workers, and colonists by the billion to restore and man damaged defenses and refill empty cities. Thanks to its colonies, it takes mere decades for Cadia to recover after each Black Crusade instead of centuries. 

It is estimated, by the Dark Clerks and Grim Statisticians, that the effect of Cadia's colonies on the Imperial defense are about equal to Cadia and the Gate itself. For this, they are referred collectively as the Cadian Shield, a defense stretching across the entire galaxy.