Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Hell's Vortex

An apt name if ever there was one, Hell’s Vortex is speculated by Imperial Ordo Malleus experts to be the reason that the Dark God Tzeentch – ever obsessed with prophecy and foretelling – had originally focused their attention on [[Setting:Tri-Sector|Cloudburst]], before the pleasant diversion of the Glasians came along.  This relatively small but non-navigable Warp Storm centers around a binary star system that orbits in the opposite direction of the galaxy’s spin.  The binary stars, however, are nearly invisible behind a dense cloud of radioactive gas and Warp-stuff that constantly spews from inside the roiling Warp Rift between the two stars.  There, like batteries feeding a dynamo, stellar material streams from the surfaces of the two stars in perfect symmetry, and disappear into the Rift.  What lies on the other side, none know for sure.  What matters to the Imperium and Chaos, however, is the effect of the gasses.<br>
When the first Imperial Rogue Traders and Explorators flew into the region, many thousands of years ago, Hell’s Vortex was much larger, in both physical dimensions and total energetic discharge.  Mechanicus Astral Savants suspect this to be the result of the stars shrinking.  Easily mistaken for a black hole at a distance, it is only at the very edge of the Storm that the true, barely-comprehensible horror of the Vortex becomes clear.<br>

Anomalous behavior of time-space near Warp Storms is quite common.  Near Hadex, for instance, ships may suddenly corrode as if oxidizing in an atmosphere like that where their raw materials are mined.  Near van Goethe’s Rapidity, ships suddenly move faster.  Near the Damocles Veil, time slows, and people may even stop aging temporarily while in Warp-flight.  Hell’s Vortex, however, is so far the only Warp Storm known to the Imperium where time actually flows ''backwards'', and in quantifiable amounts.  Experiments carried out by the Ordo Chronos and Ordo Thanatos established this after tests carried out in M41.007.<br>
To confirm their suspicions of the nature of the Vortex, subjects were chosen from a convenient Penal Legion.  Subjects were strapped to life-support machines and given a simple series of numbers and colors to memorize.  Their memories were then erased completely, and they were shown a new set of colors and numbers.  The subjects were then flung into the Storm in surplus Lightning Fighters.  When the Lightnings returned from the other side of the storm, some years later, their ships were stripped clean of all paint, as if the metal of their hulls had aged backwards.  More shockingly, the surviving test subjects were all much younger than they had been, and remembered no sequences of colors and numbers.  Some did not even remember committing crimes against the Emperor worthy of sentencing to a Penal Legion.  Three fighters simply disappeared.

When the results of these tests were relayed to the Sector Conclave in orbit about Maskos, however, the true horror of the Vortex manifested.  As the Inquisitors Chronos in charge of the experiment regaled the outcomes of the test to the listening audience of Inquisitors, the Inquisitors Thanatos that had accompanied them activated pict-screens on the walls of the audience chamber.  Displayed on the walls, the Inquisitors present saw the contents of three vaults that had stayed unopened in the guts of the station for as long as any living Inquisitor had been aware.  The vaults contained the three missing Lightning Fighters, perfectly intact.  Inside their cockpits, the Inquisitors saw the remains of the three missing Legionnaires, their faces twisted into expressions of animal terror.

The Thanatos Inquisitors present then explained that the three fighters had been found, drifting through space some half light-year from the edge of the Vortex, by Inquisitor Berlenstein of the Ordo Malleus, over four thousand years ago, while pursuing a group of Khornate pirates.  Berlenstein saw, after taking the fighters aboard, that they had come from the far future, and had given them over to the Ordo Thanatos to establish how this could be possible.  The fighters had stayed in the Ordo Thanatos’s care, until a hunch had led to their secret transfer to the Maskos station after its construction.

There was nothing left to discuss.  The Conclave immediately set about the business of declaring the entire Warp Storm as ''Perdita Aeternus'', and the Ordos Chronos and Thanatos destroyed what remained of the experimental equipment and Penal Legion.  What the Ordo Thanatos elected not to share with the greater Conclave Cloudburst is that only one thousand years later, a full Ecclesiarchal flotilla emerged from the same Warp Storm.  All of the people aboard, including five Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, wore the garments of the Ecclesiarchal Palace of Celeste, numbering over four hundred thousand souls total.  Though the Ordo Thanatos concerns itself with life and death, they interpreted this to mean that the Ecclesiarchy would someday send a fleet – itself a violation of the Decree Passive – into the Warp Storm, apparently with the cooperation of the Ordo Hereticus, in an attempt to turn back time.  Quite how the Ordos Chronos and Astra would have allowed this is unknown, as is why the ships have extensive battle-scars on their broadsides, but not their engine blocks or armored prows.  All eighteen ships and their contents were disposed of in a nearby black hole, to prevent time paradoxes, after the Ordo Thanatos had surreptitiously downloaded the contents of the ships’ cogitators, which they have kept guarded and unread ever since.

As to what Hell’s Vortex actually ''is'', nobody knows.  Eldar Corsairs in the region suspect it to be a damaged Webway Self-repair Ward Nexus.  If this is true, then the Inquisition has significantly underestimated the regional damage Hell’s Vortex could cause.  After all, the portions of the Webway made by the Old Ones had extensive magical self-repair wards, of greater complexity than the Eldar ever managed to duplicate.  The Eldar and Old Ones both knew how to displace stars into the Webway, however, and if what the Hell’s Vortex storm represents is what the Eldar suspect, then what is visible from the outside of the Storm is the opposite of what is actually happening.  Sometime soon, the Eldar predict, the buildup of stellar matter in the system, as a result of stellar material being ejected from a self-repairing section of the Webway, will result in a nova that will destroy both stars, and leave a permanent Webway portal in its place, at the heart of a radioactive Warp storm.  Whether these Eldar Corsairs are aware of the lost Ecclesiarchy fleet or not is unclear, and only adds to the Ordos Chronos’s and Thanatos’s concern.  The other issue is that it is not clear if the light being emitted from within the cloud is the product of reversed time flow, or if it is depicting things as they happen, which does not simplify things.

There is another possibility, which has occurred to neither Eldar nor Imperial military.  It is possible that the Warp Rift that birthed this chrono-displacement is not a product of the Webway, but the remains of a Warp Gate, like the Maw-Jericho Gate in the Segmentum Obscurus, and it is siphoning stellar material to repair itself.  If this is the case, however, it is of little benefit to the Warp-faring races of the galaxy, because the heat and radiation from the stars is more than enough to boil any ship that gets close.