Editing The Lathes (section)

==Overview and History==

The Lathes' home system was conquered by the forces of Lord Militant Golgenna Angevin during the Angevin Crusade in the 39th Millennium with the aid of a Mechanicus explorator fleet led by Magos Aleph Xenon. Xenon requested stewardship of the system as a reward for his fleet's efforts, which was duly granted. He landed his ''Lathe''-class fabricator ships (also named ''Het'', ''Hesh'', and ''Hadd'') on the planets' surfaces, intending them to remain there permanently. All three worlds were strip-mined to hell and back to produce more resources for the crusade, until the soldiers and supply convoys that came to pick up the resulting weapons and munitions said that it looked like all three worlds had been turned on a lathe. Magos Xenon initially adopted the name of "The System Where the Lathes Dwell" in order to honor the machine-spirits of the three ships that now made up the heart of the nascent Forge Worlds. Everyone who wasn't him got sick of calling them that pretty quickly, and the name was shortened a few times until it became just "The Lathes".

In the two millennia since, the Mechanicus have turned the entire system into their own little corner of Omnissiah Heaven. Everything in the Lathe system is now controlled by the Mechanicus, and outsiders require a mountain of paperwork just to enter the system, let alone visit the Lathes themselves. Their irregular orbits produce unusual gravitic events that allow for the forging of rare alloys that can be turned into super-dense armor-piercing ammunition and unbreakable blades. These gravity anomalies also mean that the Lathes' native population have developed into sort of proto-[[Squats]]. While still recognizably human, they are shorter, denser, and tougher than the average person, though a rare few go in the other direction and grow to be bigger than [[Ogryn]]s. The tech-priests from the world share these characteristics, making them easily identifiable. While from the outside the system looks like an orderly, harmonious machine, in reality it is a snake-pit of competing factions, cults, and hereteks.