Editing Diamond Watch (section)

==Mists in the Snow (742-743M38)==
At the sight of possibly hostile xenos, the few space marines whom found themselves on the planet took immediate command, and leadership eventually passed to the veteran Captain Romero Whitefall. Several expeditions were launched to assess the threat levels, with more than one nerve-wracked guardsmen firing off into the sky, but the misty natives of the planet seemed to be little more than part of the scenery. By chance, a few among the expedition members possessed the psychic gift, and it was determined the mists gave of a weak warp presence, an echo of an echo, but it was enough to conclude that they were at least partly alive, and possibly aware of their surroundings too. Following the advice of the psykers, Captain Whitefall ordered the tech-priests to establish communications with the mist-like creatures, in order to ascertain their own current whereabouts. A few months later, an ancient linguistical cogitator had been found from the many forgotten hulls of one of the ships. The machine was able to detect and decipher the spoken language of the mist creatures (which was beyond the hearing range of humans) but it mostly translated to gibberish and meaninglessness. However, just before the tech-priests were ready to abandon the project, the machine spirit prevailed, and messages started flooding in.

The cries of the mist creatures was madness incarnate, describing concepts and events which could only be attributed to the unholy mouth of the [[Warp]]. Unspeakable acts of the flesh and purjery of the soul flooded from the vox units, low-pitched chants with the words uttered in reverse hailed the coming of the darkness, and the tendrils of chaos seemed but a hair's breadth away. (Un)fortunately, the exact details of what was said will never be known, as both the cogitator and the persons operating it were immediately executed for allowing such heresy to come forth, and the contents of the messages forbidden. Word of the taint spread however, and it became clear then, to most everyone, that whatever planet they were trapped on, it was not a good one, not by any measure. As such, further attempts at communicating with the mist shapes were promptly forbidden, in favor of exterminating them. Conventional weaponry caused the creatures no harm however, and while the psykers had moderate success, the warp backlash was deemed to great a risk for inflicting such measly damage. Bolter shells, laser beams, rays, radiation, plasma, even power weapons had little to no effect. Neither did the natives resist though, and what was initially planned to be a rather long military operation, ended within days. In the end, Cpt. Romero Whitefall ordered a ceasefire, to conserve resources, and instead chose to oversee the construction of defensive structures, with what little could be salvaged from this ships. It gave the people living in the mountain a familiar purpose, but an attack from the mist creatures never came, and as the years went by, the mandatory patrols became scarcer.