Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Cognomen (section)

===A History of Schism===

In high orbit over the rotting globe, there is a large but unpainted space station.  Inside this station, the Cloudburst Inquisitorial Ordos maintain a vigil.  The Ordos make use of their own Astropathic choir aboard the orbiting platform, as well as a hangar.  This is not the principal Inquisitorial Palace for the sector, however, and never holds the convention of the entire Conclave Cloudburst.  Instead, the Inquisition uses this platform for the disposal of relics, whether Chaotic or xeno, which are not safe to dispose of otherwise.  They make use of unmanned, servitor-controlled kinetic rockets, which can’t unseal once shut, and launch the items into the system's star.  These rockets are made to order, of the sizes the Inquisition requires, on Cognomen itself.  They are delivered by a member of the Cognomen Electro-Priesthood only after undergoing extensive background clearance.  The consequences of launching a variety of bizarre and possibly Warp-infused artifacts into a star that lights a system with thirty-nine billion residents have not been fully explored.

Cognomen maintains a token force of Arbites and PDF, solely to uphold its commitment to the Cloudburst Administratum, but does not tithe up Imperial Guard regiments as a matter of course.  Instead, it meets its tithe requirements by supplying its own knockoff Vanquisher and Eradicator cannons to systems that can't make their own, as well as a variety of other military weapons such as Hellhammer cannons.  Their knockoff weapons tend to be larger and less effective than the weapons they clone, although they are still lethal.  As Cognomen’s wealth and power grow, it may come to pass that it will pay a tithe no longer.  A higher percentage of its output goes to other worlds in the sector every year; the formality of a tithe may eventually become unneeded.  As the Cloudburst Sector expands as well, the needs of its industries and consumers rises, and Cognomen is struggling to meet the demand despite its own growth.

Though Cognomen is perfectly capable of supplying Rogue Traders and other non-military assets that explore the Circuit, it prefers not to, instead leaving that responsibility to other Forge World vassals and Great House merchants in Cloudburst.  The heavily expansion-weighted preferences of the Cloudburst government ensure that the Explorators of the Cognomen fleet take high priority in their own ports.  Of course, on the rare occurrence that the Rogue Traders of the region do find anything of value, this means that Cognomen is the third world to benefit from it, after the Rogue Trader's port of call and Mars.

In ancient times, Cognomen was a lonely beacon in the depths of uncharted space.  The location of the planet was known to pre-Imperial Mars, as established by the stellar coordinates found scribed on the headstone of the Explorator who located it deep in the Martian Mausoleum Tunnels.  For thousands of years, Cognomen sat in the deepest depths of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit, untroubled by neighbors or politics.  Loyal to but untrusting of Mars, Cognomen drifted through space, its leaders content to labor in obscurity.  That changed with the sudden successes of famed Explorator Justin MacDonald, who found several habitable worlds close to Cognomen itself.  Faced with the knowledge that the rest of the Imperium would surely come to occupy their region of space, Cognomen reluctantly opened its doors to further trade and work with the greater Imperium.  This even resulted in the Forge World becoming a Subsector Capital, to their surprise.  A mighty Navy Anchorage station, fully eighteen kilometers in width and twenty in length, hangs over the equator of Cognomen.  Connected to the ground with the planet’s only working Orbital Spire, the anchorage serves as the regional command station for the Navy, and can build vessels of up to Oberon displacement.  This is in addition to the other shipyards the system already has.  The Anchorage is currently building an Exorcist for the Navy.  The station also houses the Master of the Administratum Cognomen, the highest-ranking member of the Adeptus Terra in the Subsector.  The Castle of the Forges commands Cognomen itself and the sector-wide Techpriesthood.  It is a massive factory-temple near the equator, at one end of Dolomblen Canyon.  Seven more Orbital Spires of far smaller size are either under construction or repair equidistant around the equator.

Cognomen is the result of a schismatic philosophical discussion in the upper ranks of the Mechanicum, after their reforging as the Adeptus Mechanicus following the Great Scouring.  Given the number of cultural and military shifts in the Mechanicus that followed the Heresy, the old ways of the Mechanicum had to change, that much was clear.  The feudal Taghmata system was dead, so too was about a third of the Martian Priesthood and over half of the Basilikon Astra.  When the call came, once the Great Reforging Era began, to reclaim lost Forge Worlds and build new ones besides, the losing side of the schism saw their chance to preserve their freedom without having to resort to Tech-Heresy.  Taking to ship, the schismatics, specifically those who thought that tech-augmentation should be used as an actual augmentation and not a surrogacy for human tissue, settled on Cognomen.  This world of vast wealth and great isolation was perfect for the schismatics to build their society, preserving what they thought to be the best parts of Martian theology and culture, without the fetishizing of self-mutilation.

They were unsuccessful in stamping out the germ of the idea, of course, because worship of the machine is easier if machines are a visible part of the body.  Tech-augmentation is as much a part of Cognomen culture as it is Martian, by now, but some aspects of the schismatics' beliefs still linger.  Core to this belief, as reflected in the world’s own description, is the power of names.