Setting:Tri-Sector

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The Tri-Sector

Tucked away in the northernmost stretches of the Galaxy, at the edge of the territories of Mankind, and in the shadowy perimeter of the Astronomican, lie three Sectors. These Sectors, the Drumnos to coreward, the Cloudburst to rimward, and the Naxos to spinward, are the frontier of the Galactic North in the Segmentum Ultima, and the home of many hundreds of billions of humans in the service of the Emperor. Each has its own unique history, challenges, defenders, and occupants. Each has its own terminology, its own infrastructure, and its own enemies. The most noteworthy of their features are mentioned here, and all information contained within is fully compatible with the Warhammer 40000 roleplaying games, including the array of Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Only War, Black Crusade, Inquisitor, and Wrath and Glory rulebooks. Although the Cloudburst Sector is the core and focus of this material, the other two sectors of the Tri-Sector area are covered in broad theme and some specific content. The neighboring Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone will be detailed elsewhere.

The Cloudburst Sector, the Enemies of Man, and the Blue Daggers

The Cloudburst Sector and Institutions

This young, expanding region of Imperial space takes its name from its capital moon now, but that is a recent development. Although individual Imperial colonies existed in the area once known as the Oldlight Proximate Circuit for thousands of years prior to its formal establishment as a Sector in M39, its overall barrenness stems from several factors that initially prevented it from reaching Sector status. Originally, the band of inhabited worlds that comprised the Hapster Subsector along the extreme eastern edge of the Circuit was the extent of the coordinated human holdings in the region. The Subsector was, at best, an outlier of the nearby Naxos Sector, and even then, only on paper. The remains of an ancient supernova had littered the region with thick gas, all of it radioactive. Though quiet Cognomen sat alone in the voids of the Circuit, there was little else to offer the Imperium out there in the hot gasses. All of that changed with the discovery of the Dawn-break, Triune, and Septiim systems, by the renowned Mechanicus Magos Explorator Justin MacDonald, in M39.012. The sudden awareness of five shirtsleeves-habitable worlds, that close to Naxos and unclaimed by aliens, shook the local Rogue Trader and Explorator fleets to their cores. How had they missed such wealth? How had five worlds for the Imperium gone wholly unnoticed? A veritable gold rush of exploration trips began at once from the Naxos Sector Forge World of Fabique, and a hundred ships sailed off into the gas storms and dark stars of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.

Discoveries and wealth poured into the Forge World’s hands. Archaeotech caches, contact with dangerous aliens, maps of worlds and stars, and more disturbingly, the wreckage of well over ten thousand Imperial and alien ships were found within mere years of the exploration craze beginning. The Inquisition’s name came up in frightened whispers more and more, between Rogue Traders and Free Chartists that spent their gold in the orbiting coaching house Star Gilt over Fabique’s shipyards. What had driven humanity from the Oldlight Proximate Circuit in the past? Captains and Traders saw the sheer number of dead worlds and dead ships in dark zones on the map with increasing unease. Clearly, humanity had lived in the Circuit once. Some of the dead ships that Rogue Traders found floating idly through the void were post-Unification Imperial, some even with Legionary markings. The Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus stepped in. Sending a Longstrike cruiser and fifteen smaller vessels off on the heels of Magos MacDonald’s fleet, the Inquisition established a temporary Seal of Verboten Passage on the Circuit, while it went to investigate the anomalous findings.

Months stretched into years. Finally, twelve of the sixteen ships abruptly returned unheralded with MacDonald, and set in at the Inquisitorial Palace of Naxos. Weeks of sharing and deliberation followed. When the silence was at last broken, the message that the Spire of Astral Choirs at the Palace Naxos sent out was not what the Captains of the Circuit had expected. MacDonald, the Inquisition declared, was a hero of Mankind. His fleets had pushed past the radioactive remnants of an ancient and unthinkably colossal supernova and supernebula, and found a rich bounty of lost treasures, lost worlds, and lost opportunities. Further, on his travels, he had found an additional ten shirtsleeves-habitable worlds to be earmarked for immediate scientific inspection by the Mechanicus, and for Rogue Traders and Administratum Colonization Department colony ships to prepare for Imperial habitation. The shipwrecks, the Inquisition publicly claimed, were from a potent Warp current that had carried the remains of vast battles from the Great Crusade to the edge of current Imperial space. The finding of these wrecks was not an ill omen, the Inquisition soothingly insisted to the superstitious Captains and Lords Trader. They were, instead, a sign that the mercy and love of the Emperor was upon them, and it was time, in His Divine estimation, for Mankind to expand to the realms that the galaxy had previously barred to human entry. Further, they declared, a new Sector would form in the Circuit, and loyal Humans of the Segmentae Ultima and Solar would settle it. Great ventures of manpower raising and construction would begin in the hives of the Segmentae, and ships would travel in the wake of the Administratum and Traders to begin the process of building the new sector. The Hapster Subsector would become a part of this new Sector, and a Sector Overlord chosen from the office of the Master of the Administratum Ultima.

Reassured by the Inquisition’s uncharacteristic full disclosure and prodding to do what they did best, Rogue Traders and Explorators took off by the hundreds, following the markers left by MacDonald’s trailblazers. New worlds were charted, and in the span of a mere five hundred years, the new Sector was declared established, In Nominae Imperator.

What the Inquisition, perhaps sensibly, did not disclose was what MacDonald had found beyond the Oldlight Proximate Circuit. Pushing past the radioactive clouds at the trailing edge of the Circuit and into the Oldlight Exo-zone proper, MacDonald had found an unspeakable charnel house of dead ships and planets. He had spent several years mapping this non-illuminatur region (so titled because it was outside the direct light of the Astronomican at its extreme northern edge). In that time, he had found psychic scars on planets, so intense that they left physical marks on their crusts. He had found totems and messages in alien languages, composed entirely of the power backpacks of Mark 2 Crusader armor, and at least three hundred planets subject to psychic or physical Exterminatus-level disasters. On one world, he had found over four hundred thousand skeletons of alien creatures, all fully made of metal. Weeks of study had yielded the horrifying truth behind them: they were the remains of cybernetic skeletons from vat-grown and cyber-augmented alien soldiers, locked in place and left to desiccate by an incomprehensibly powerful electronic warfare device. Such a device would have eclipsed even the Warp-tainted Electron Freezer of Moravec in power, especially since lingering radiation on their skeletal bodies suggested it had been triggered from eighty-two light years away.

Weeks of dangerous, slow, and violent travel by his Inquisitorial pursuers followed. When the Ordos of the Inquisition finally caught up with MacDonald at the edge of the Oldlight Exo-zone’s western border, at the very outskirts of the Astronomican’s light, he was researching a world-sized labyrinth of tunnels and metal tubes, apparently constructed by an Old Ones machine long ago and repurposed by the Eldar as a Webway technology test bed. The Inquisition was loathe to simply kill MacDonald for his knowledge, especially since the Inquisition actually knew less about what filled the Oldlight Exo-zone than he did, at that point. A deal was struck and sealed between the Mechanicus and Holy Ordos in the shadow of that ancient xenotech. MacDonald would return to the Proximate Circuit and lend his aid to the Rogue Traders that explored his findings, and the Inquisition would forget that MacDonald had ever come to that haunted place, in exchange for his findings and an oath not to return without the explicit permission of the Ordo Xenos.

On their return journey, however, a new discovery was made. The combined convoy of MacDonald’s Astra Explorators and the Inquisitorial ships halted over a world in the very center of the Oldlight Exo-Zone, where the light of the Astronomican was largely blocked by the many Warp Storms between their location and Terra. While taking a routine Navigation check, MacDonald’s ship sensors detected a colossal concentration of gaseous carbon and oxidized metal on the world below – a sure sign of a battlefield. After pestering the Inquisition to allow him to scan the world more closely, the Explorator began sweeping the planet with his mighty Grand Cruiser’s systems.

What he found horrified him. Below, on the surface of the planet that he immediately named Cladh in his ancestral language, he detected well over fifteen million human and alien bodies, decomposed to gas and powder. Millions of suits of alien and human Power Armor, thousands of wrecked tanks, a complex of psi-reactive crystals, an enormous dragon statue made from human teeth, and the remains of alien bio-horrors so complex that his systems couldn’t even tell what they were; they all lay in ruins on a vast plateau. The plateau, his cogitators helpfully informed him, had been created by the Lances on an Imperial Gloriana super battle barge, firing in Continual Discharge Mode, which would have reduced them to slag after only a few minutes. The Lances had boiled a canyon around the plateau, and judging from the heat damage on the Power Armor nearest the impact sites, at least some Crusade troops – including Astartes – had been alive and running towards the beams at the time of impact.

At this point, the Inquisition determined, a decision had to be made about MacDonald. A quick vote from the five Inquisitors present determined that disclosure would be more helpful than execution, and the Longstrike class cruiser hailed MacDonald’s ship.

The Emperor Himself after the culmination of the Rangdan Xenocides had quarantined the region, the Inquisitors explained. This particular world was unknown to even them, they hastened to assure him, but the evidence was clear enough. MacDonald looked at the surface below and immediately agreed to silence on the issue; he recognized the armor below as belonging to the Iron Warriors. Suits of armor belonging to at least five other Legions lay draped over a toppled building, originally shaped like a planarian worm or something akin to it. MacDonald agreed to keep the secret of what had happened here, and the convoy departed for the Circuit once more. The Inquisition, aware of the history of the Rangdan Xenocides and now the Exo-zone, were content to know that MacDonald, at least, would probably not realize that they had flown over the site of the opening of the Labyrinth of Night. MacDonald, his curiosity sated, compacted himself to the terms of the Inquisition’s bargain, and flew back to Naxos with the Inquisition. When the conclave was over, he ‘humbly’ accepted the Inquisition’s accolades, and set out once more, to catalogue the worlds of the eminently less classified Proximate Circuit. He achieved phenomenal success, ultimately categorizing twenty more systems in a mere decade. Eventually, his stellar rise to glory landed him a position as the Archmagos Explorator of the Sector, and a permanent posting on Cognomen proper.

Eight Subsectors, each named for an inhabited world around which their Control Fortress orbits, were created once the size of the Sector became clear. They are, in rough order from galactic east to galactic west (spinward to trailing): Hapster (by far the oldest), Cognomen, Celeste (which also contains the capital), Delving, Maskos, Thimble, Nauphry, and Rampart. The world now known as Brotherhood was once considered for a Subsector capital, but the decision ultimately favored Nauphry; this may have been a factor in the tragedy that befell Brotherhood. To compensate for the lengthy travel times between clusters of systems and the fact that several systems of the young Sector had multiple habitable bodies, System Overlords are generally installed instead of or in addition to individual Planetary Governors, and the Order Famulous is given the chance to render commentary on all high-profile Overlordship appointments. Overlordship is revocable only by unanimous consent of the Subsector and Sector Masters Administratum (the Overlord’s own peers), and is therefore a rare event, if the Ordo Hereticus doesn’t take matters into its own hands. Notably, the Sector Overlord’s entire family was deposed under a century ago.

The specific policy of the Sector Administratum is to integrate worlds of the nearby Cloudburst Circuit directly into the Sector proper, and is by no means adverse to creating a new Subsctor if need be. The problem is that Cloudburst is on the very edge of the projection range of the Astronomican as of M41, and further colonization in the renamed Circuit will be dangerous at best. The radioactive gas left over in the region from the ancient supernova that blinded the Imperium to the Circuit’s potential in the first place is just thick enough to make non-psychic travel or communication difficult, and pirates roam by the hundreds of thousands. While plans exist to colonize some worlds Rogue Traders have secured for the Imperium in the Circuit, and a few worlds of cave dwellers and regressive primitives exist for potential acquisition, the majority of the Circuit will have to be far better mapped before the Administratum commits any more resources to the area than it already has. However, the Cloudburst Sector has lost two Agri-worlds in recent centuries, which has forced it to start importing food from neighboring sectors. With the loss of Chlorit to the Glasians and Scalding to Chaos, the sector’s food now either comes from the worlds where it is needed, or from Cassie’s World, Forender, Grendel, and Combine. Naturally, these worlds require constant defense from invasions. It is not helpful that the more powerful nearby Sectors sometimes drive retreating foes into Cloudburst to become their problem.

Today, Cloudburst is a triumphal example of the latter-day Imperial ability to keep expanding, despite having every reason to stop. Though its defenses were not particularly important prior to the arrival of the Glasians, it is now fortifying at a dizzying pace. Missionaries and Techpriests rush to worlds on the slightest hint of archaeotech or un-converted primitive humans. The stronger the Imperium’s arms and more thorough its faith, they preach, the better the odds that the Emperor will smile on them, and the Sector will survive another Glasian Migration. Rogue Traders and Explorators, rivals at the best of times elsewhere in the galaxy, work together to find more worlds and treasure for the sector. A full Space Marine Chapter digs in, deep in the sector’s heart, preparing for the worst, while ruthless armies of Astra Militarum and Skitarii ferret out enemies of the sector, within its borders and beyond them. The vast Forge World of Cognomen is now remorselessly disregarding stricture against Knight manufacture, while the Ecclesiarchy Cloudburst arms its Sisters on their beachfront palace. PDFs across the sector kiss their Aquila pendants and pray for mercy, while furious Nurglite Cultists strive mightily to break Tzeentch’s stranglehold on cult activity nearby. The Inquisition and Arbites burn all sign of corruption or heresy from the overtaxed populace of Cloudburst, even while fresh worlds are brought into compliance by the high-tech armies of Solstice and Septiim. All the while, vile alien beasts stare unblinkingly at the stars of Cloudburst from their time-stasis prisons; their very cells realigning to the dark curiosity of foul Tzeentch. Cloudburst is a place of dynamism, violence, and perfidious hope. None know its fate, none but Tzeentch know when Tzeentch’s evil experiment shall end, and even he does not know what he will do with the Sector after he is finally done.

Imperial Navy

The Imperial Navy are often the first force under arms to confront the Glasian menace when it recurs in the Cloudburst Sector.

Imperial Guard

The first few thousand years of existence of the Cloudburst Guard did not strain the military capacities of the Sector overmuch, but with the advent of the Glasians, the Sector's Astra Militarum have radically improved... barring a few noteworthy exceptions.

Setting:CloudburstGuard

Institutions

Within the greater Cloudburst Sector, the Imperial Adepta are hard at work. As a zone of expansion for the Imperium, the Cloudburst Administratum oversees colonization efforts and tithe efforts in a large and ever-changing area. As a result, the tithe and psyker collection ships they administrate need additions at all times. This, combined with the recent increase in needs among the military forces of the Sector, puts intense strain on the shipbuilding capabilities of the Sector.

The leadership of the Sector’s Administratum and Estate bases itself from the moon Cloudburst, while the local Officio Munitorum and Astra Telepathica are technically based there, but are more practically based from the orbitals of the nearby Subsector Capital of Celeste. The supreme command of all non-Astartes military assets in the Sector that do not answer to the Adeptus Mechanicus bases from a subterranean tunnel network on Cloudburst proper, but the local Officio Munitorum does own a Leviathan transport, which can carry field command to anywhere it can drive.

It is in the Cloudburst Circuit that the Imperial Adeptus Terra loses its grip, and the more militarized forces of the Imperium pick up the slack. Rogue Traders, Explorators, Navy patrols, the occasional Blue Daggers ship on its way to a surgical strike mission, and Merchant Privateers all cross the red-hot gasses of the Circuit on various missions. There are technically no ‘colonies’ in the Circuit, thanks to the fact that the Cloudburst Sector expands to include all colonies that are established in the Circuit. Since this means that the infrastructure of the Sector would have to expand to worlds far from the centers of industry and travel in Cloudburst, most of the Imperial-controlled worlds in the Circuit are instead referred to as ‘outposts,’ with all the lack of formal support that indicates. Some of the systems of the Circuit have been added to the Sector over the years. Many actual outposts, such as research stations and mining nodes, benefit from little protection, and crew of Navy ships stationed there consider it hazard posting at best.

There are many efforts in place among the civilian leaders of the Sector to prepare for the worst. Should worlds fall to the Glasians, evacuation protocols to resettle the refugees will be needed. So far, the plan is to move any surviving escapees from lost worlds to the many colony ventures in the Sector. Fathon Prime and Foraldshold are the most likely candidates to benefit from a surge in new refugees, although the Inquisition has grumbled about the possibility of Fathon Prime’s population interacting extensively with the rest of the Sector. If multiple worlds are lost but their populations saved, the capacity problem will be serious, however, and the Administratum is scrambling to find alternate destinations for displaced persons in the Cloudburst Circuit.

Inquisitorial efforts in the Sector are quite diverse, especially for a backwater Sector at the literal frontier of Imperial space. The Conclave here is represented by the Ordo Xenos in the majority with forty percent of the member Inquisitors, followed by the Ordo Hereticus, Ordo Malleus, the Ordo Militarum, the Ordo Machina, the Ordo Thanatos, the Ordo Chronos, and the Ordo Barbarus, with one member each of the Ordo Astra, Ordo Astartes, and Ordo Sicarius. The representative of the Ordo Astartes is present to monitor the Blue Daggers, since Lady Lerica is perfectly able to oversee the Deathwatch herself.

Some of the cultural trends that have taken root in other Imperial Sectors have been slow to arrive in Cloudburst. The use of subcutaneous Electoos, for instance, which are all but mandatory on Prison Worlds and Forge Worlds in the Segmentum Solar, is unheard of except among the spectacularly rich in Cloudburst, though it is making slow headway. Conversely, the Ecclesiarchy in most Imperial sectors is tightening its belt in these times of shortage and warfare, while the Cloudburst Ministorum has never been more profligate.

The Techpriesthood

Because of the somewhat contentious circumstances of the founding of the Cognomen Priesthood, there are odd cultural motifs that wormed their way into the common practice of the Cloudburst Tech-adepts and Priests. None of it strays far enough from Martian dogma to be considered Heretek, Cognomen makes sure of that, but there is an oddness to it that any Solar visitor can pick out.

Space Marines

Standing astride the gaps in the defenses of the Cloudburst Sector are the Space Marines. The Adeptus Astartes of the region have served on many occasions to repulse the Chaotic and alien incursors who have challenged the sanctity of Mankind’s rule. The Sector is blessed by two significant presences of Space Marines: the Blue Daggers Chapter and the Deathwatch. The presence of Space Marines in the Sector, however, began long before either of those two Chapters established permanent bases in Cloudburst.

His Divine Majesty's Space Marine Chapter 0983: The Blue Daggers

The silent, precise, diverse, and murderously effective Vigilant of the mighty Watch Fortress Dascomb.

Departmento Astrocartigraphicae Planetary Database: Cloudburst Sector

Sector and Subsector Capital System: Celeste

A twin world, and the regional capital of the Imperium's power.

Septiim

One of the rare Pasture Gate systems, and the home of the Blue Daggers Chapter of His Divine Majesty's Loyalist Space Marines.

Subsector Capital System: Cognomen

Loyal but burdened sons of Mars, the sole Forge World (currently) in service in Cloudburst, and home of the mighty Legio Congelatio, of the Collegia Titanica.

Elumanie

A worthless ball of gas, Elumanie 5 has in its orbit a moon of dark threat to Mankind.

Xerxes Mark IV Naval Platform: Thunderhead

A large Naval anchorage. This station has a population problem it simply can't seem to shake.

Drimmerzole

The Agri-worlds of the Cloudburst Sector are generally quiet and peaceful places, but Drimmerzole is also the exclusive source of one of the galaxy's most useful antibiotics.

Clegran

This is a world of winds, cities, plains, and the most lethal Imperial Guard formation in Sector history.

Fathon

Once a place of heresy and secrets, now just secrets and primitives.

Remananos

The Mining World of Underbar, and its toxic oceans of liquid metal.

Timeline

M22: The Cracks Show

The gradual rise of the human federation halts as a combination of complacency, alien incursions, Eldar decadence, and untrustworthy machine intelligences frays the structure and unity of human culture. The otherwise isolated regions of space that would eventually become Cloudburst enjoy initial stability, as close ties to each other’s economies and secure technological bases thanks to Martian ingenuity prevent some of the political damage from spreading that far from Terra.

M23: The Rise of Iron

The uprising of the Iron Men in the future Cloudburst Sector was as thorough and destructive as it was elsewhere in human space. During the Cybernetic Revolution, entire planets simply vanished as nanite weapons swallowed them up. Corers, employed to teleport or collapse the hearts of planets, destroyed several worlds, while unbreaking legions of robots marched through human cities, rendering them lifeless. Eight hundred years of non-stop war followed, with no hope in sight.

M24: The Foundations Crumbled First

Though the work of a coalition of alien and human factions prevailed over the Iron Men, new problems followed quickly. Hedonism and Godlessness among the Eldar saw to the beginning of their race’s decline, and the psychic distortions of their conduct ensured the increase in the expression of latent psyker genes in humankind and Orks. The birthrate of human Psykers and Ork Weirdboys rose sharply, and whole worlds that survived the tides of Iron Men fell into the Warp, while others were stripped of life by Enslaver and Psychneuein incursions. Some human worlds, including the most dogmatic Forge Worlds, survived the anarchy, but not enough.

M25: The Federation Dies

Though fixing an exact date on the event is impossible, at some point in this millennium, the human federation died, as millions of human worlds sloughed into the darkness. Ignorance, fear, anguish, superstition, tribalism, hate, and bitterness claimed a quadrillion souls, and Mankind as a whole and righteous force in the Galaxy ended. Shortly thereafter, Old Night descended in earnest, as the continuing decay of the Eldar accelerated the fall of their less psychically stable human allies. Abandoned by their former friends, humanity turned on itself. A thousand thousand pocket kingdoms and empires formed and burned as the human race cut its own throat.

The worlds of the future Cloudburst were crippled by the collapse of the Federation. Lacking stable Warp or Webway access, dependent on imports, and stripped of both their psychic and robotic support, the humans of the later Sector were teetering on the brink. The final blow came from the heavens, as the radioactive remains of a long-gone supernova began to wash over several older nebulae and black holes in the region, scattering lethal waves of radiation and atoms over several human Agri-systems, rendering them unsuitable for agriculture. Eighty percent of human worlds in the future Sector had driven themselves to extinction within six thousand years, and most of the surviving worlds fell prey to alien enslavement forces.

M26-M29: Old Night

The terror of this age is thankfully lacking in detail in much of Cloudburst records. Unfortunately, records of human worlds beyond Cloudburst are not so lacking. They tell of a vast, vile, and terrifying force of strange aliens, described by witnesses as ‘floating ropes’ and ‘tendrils of hate and hunger’ that drifted down from artificial moons and took the souls of those who couldn’t flee fast enough. Other threats are more quantifiable, such as records of ‘great green brutes,’ clearly Orks, and ‘lithe, psychic un-men with guns that fired agony and confusion,’ probably Eldar pirates, killing humans out of boredom. More obscure references exist to beings that Inquisitorial scholars have tentatively identified as either Slaugth or Rangdan, neither of which still exist in huge numbers in Imperial space. Most perplexing are the references to great floating eyes made of black and purple gas, which would extend teeth from holes that opened in their white surfaces, impale people, and pull out something blue and noisome, before disappearing and leaving paralyzed husks of men behind.

Oddly, the more bizarre alien forms seem to disappear from the records of the dead worlds and primitive cultures of the Cloudburst Circuit before the end of Old Night. The lack of any obviously Chaotic demons outside of a few specific cases is also puzzling to the Holy Ordos, since a world that close to the Eldar Empire and that far from Terra would have been hugely vulnerable to daemonic incursion.

Regardless of the individual causes, the human civilizations of the future Sector were all dead and gone, reverted to barbarism, or enslaved by M29, and would remain that way for varying lengths of time.

M30: New Light

When the birth of the Dark God Slaanesh broke the Warp Storms that had wracked the galaxy for so long, no organized human forces remained in Cloudburst to exploit it. Although over a hundred worlds still had either a few inbred remains of former colonies or cave-dwelling primitives left alive, most were dead or still enslaved when the Warp became navigable once more. On Terra, the rise of the Emperor to prominence over the forces of the Techno-barbarians is well documented, as he forged an Empire from the scraps of humanity’s cradle. When the Great Crusade surged past the Eye of Terror and into the region known now as the Oldlight Exo-zone, they found horrors that nearly consumed them all.

From the dark, whispers came. Rogue Traders Militant – hardly friends of the Emperor – reported that some of their number were gone, destroyed by odd alien pirates. The Expeditionary Fleets eventually moved into the region and began settling it, despite the navigation problems lent by the dimness of the Astronomican. In M30.859, however, whole worlds began to disappear in the wake of these Fleets. Recalls were sounded, and the Fleets returned, only to be slaughtered by Rangdan vessels. These terrifying cerbavores set upon the Imperium like wild animals, and ripped billions of brains from their human cattle.

The Emperor led elements of seven Legions of Space Marines, ten Titan Legions, massive forces of the Taghmata and Skitarii, the Ordo Reductor, two million elite Solar Auxilia and another three million Imperial Army conscripts, four hundred Custodes, and two thousand Sisters of Silence into battle against the monsters. Just before the turn of the century, the last of the Rangdan were killed, their Slaugth slaves (or owners) were killed off to the last known subject, and the Oldlight Exo-zone all but abandoned. The weapons employed in the conflict rendered hundreds of star systems barren of all life, and several unrelated alien worlds also died off as the Emperor unshackled the Labyrinth of Night.

M31: Rebellion

When the Horus Heresy began, it began quickly. Little of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit was colonized prior to the outbreak of the Heresy, and what little was colonized declared for the Warmaster. The intense fighting that characterized the fratricide of the era passed the Circuit by, perhaps for the long-term betterment of the sector. When the one world in the sector decisively to take a side, Fathon Prime, elected to hide from the Imperium after the fighting was over, the last significant signs of human activity in the region died down.

M31-M33: The Dark Quiet

The Oldlight Proximate Circuit maintained the quiet and the peace of the grave, for over two thousand years. What few human worlds remained in the Circuit had either thrown off their alien enslavers and promptly fallen apart, or died off completely, after being overlooked by the Crusade’s many thousands of fleets. Extensive evidence recovered far later from underground caverns reveals that Oglith, Gorkypark, and possibly Nauphry were visited by a Waaagh! at some point during this period, but that mass of greenskins is long gone.

Techpriests of Mars, exiling themselves for the desire to make flesh-indistinguishable augmetics instead of naked steel ones, settled on Cognomen in this time.

M34: We Happy Schismatic

Cognomen stands alone. Despite some limited colonization efforts in what would later become the Hapster Subsector, most human residents of the Circuit either have died off or live on Cognomen. Unbeknownst to Cognomen, however, some few dozen worlds in the enormous Circuit, including Fathon Prime, actually do still exist under human control, or at least human population and alien control. The only Imperial world outside Hapster Subsector and Cognomen itself, the Frontier World of Hangonne, on the border between Drumnos and the Circuit, is effectively a Drumnos world despite being inside what would later be Cloudburst. Slowly, the number of worlds in the Hapster Subsector grows to ten, but the physical barriers of Warp energy, radioactive clouds, and thick asteroid clusters that appeared on no map prevented Hapster from expanding to trailing.

M35: Nova Terra

The Nova Terra Interregnum and the spike in power of the Adeptus Ministorum does not scar the future Cloudburst Sector as it does much of the rest of space. The Hapster Subsector has some scrapes, mostly varying bands of Frateris Militia and Templars doing battle against each other over doctrinal disputes. The Mechanicus of Cognomen and the settlers of Hangonne find themselves siding with Terra and Mars; they are thus spared reprisal violence.

The rising tide of the Ecclesiarchy, and their return to prominence following the Ophelia relocation, brings faith to the fore in the Hapster Subsector. Wars erupt between the faithful, as they often do, but the sector itself is reintegrated into the Imperium after the battles between the faithful ended.

M36: An Era of Blood

The rise of the Era of Blood and the crippling effects of the cruel career of Goge Vandire are well documented, and need not be chronicled here. The aftermath of the Nova Terra Interregnum, the Reign of Blood, and the Plague of Unbelief in succession, with two Black Crusades in the same period, kept the Imperium from exploiting its true power, and from reaching the heights of prosperity that they should have attained. The reforms of Sebastian Thor at least ensured at the Imperium survived the madness of his predecessor. When the wave of reformation reaches Hapster, the fervor and degree of selfless devotion that Thor preached rings true in the hearts of the weary faithful. Eventually, the violence between the worlds of Hapster subsides.

M37: Whispers of Change

M37.039: Uprisings Thwarted – A circle of human psykers living on Oglith drive off the daemon cult that ruled it, then turn on each other ensuring that all human life on Oglith dies off within four years.

M37.040: The Pirates’ Life – The Voidlife pirate flotilla successfully robs Hapster’s orbitals of billions of Thrones of tithe goods. The Inquisition promptly executes the Planetary Governor for failing to prevent this, while the full force of the Battlefleet Subsector Hapster chases the pirates to the edge of the Naxos Sector, destroying four ships and losing the rest of the Voidlives in the Raoclos Nebular Cluster. Only a few million Thrones’ worth of cargo and salvage are recovered.

M37.077: The Taint of Nurgle – The Rot Soul Brigade, a Traitor Guardsman brigade of light armor, appears from the Pox Ring Warp Storm in the heart of the Corumbino Nebula in the Naxos Sector. Setting off on a hijacked Imperial Tithe barge, the Rot Souls make their way trailing, infecting over a dozen planets with the poison of sedition and the poison of Nurgle alike. In the end, over eighty Space Marines and two thousand Guardsmen are needed to kill the Rot Souls on the scarred battlefields of Barda’s Shield, only five light years from Fabique. This is not the final appearance of the Rot Souls in the history of Naxos and the Circuit, as they return twice over to plague the Imperium.

M37.243: The Dark Lights – A ripple of Warp Energy from the shrinking Warp Rifts in the heart of the Corumbino Nebula disrupts a long-dormant Webway Gate floating in the cold space of the Nebula. Dozens of silent Dark Eldar ships slip into the region, seeking flesh and souls for the Dark City. M37.247: Sudden Horror – A flight of Dark Eldar Kabal ships appear in the night over the Imperial military capital of Arnopax in the Lucern system of the Naxos Sector, abducting tens of thousands of Imperial military family members from their beds, never to be seen again.

M37.787: Expanding Sights – The world of Limmerdine is formally colonized by the Administratum in the Hapster Subsector, only for the colonists to all immediately be uprooted again as the first wave’s Techpriests locate massive metal structures mere feet below the surface of the spot selected for the world’s first power plant. After being castigated for having missed it completely, the priests hasten to assure the Administratum that there could be no more. Two years later, the colony erupts into a vicious civil war as a Mechanicus force investigating these metal structures goes completely mad, and turns their war-servitors on the farmers.

M37.971: The Scouring of Pholemnos – At the same time that the world of Pholemnos in the Gothic Sector is scoured of mutant life at the hands of an anti-Tzeentch Inquisition task force, four other Tzeentch cults in the undercities of Hapster are purged, hoping to distract the Change God with the simultaneous losses. Tzeentch watches in amusement at the petty Imperial efforts, and promptly dispatches a Thousand Sons cruiser to assault the Inquisitorial staging area, killing thousands.

M38: A Tense Time

M38.090: Blood Sun – An army of Khornate daemons abruptly assaults the Imperial Shrine World of Larodar 4 on the border between the Naxos Sector and the Hapster Subsector, killing over a billion humans in an orgy of blood and terror. A Grey Knights task force arrives two months later, to find the daemon army gone, and the surviving population teetering on the brink of outright heresy in their despair at the Emperor not having sent his Angels to aid them fast enough.

M38.402: Strength of Arms – Lord Fabricator Richardson of Cognomen formally petitions to have the edict against raising a Titan Legion raised by Mars redacted. No response is forthcoming from the Red Planet, so Lord Fabricator Richardson quietly begins organizing the planetary militia in the form of his very own Taghmata. Declared Heretek Inculpa Belisarius by the Ordo Machina of the Inquisition, he barely escapes from Cognomen with his life, and spends the next two years fleeing from the Inquisition, before being caught and killed by a strike team of Stormtroopers on Fabique.

M38.560: Looking Outward – The Forge World of Fabique completes a four hundred year long manufacturing project and establishes the Grand Docks distretta. This massive, interconnected network of orbital platforms, dry-docks, berthing yards, temples, low-G tube-trans trains, satellites, and metallurgical factories allows for Fabique to construct any Imperial hull class smaller than 14 kilometers, and can dock vessels up to twice that size for refits or repairs. Higher in the world’s orbit, Fabique orders a large space station built into a convenient asteroid, named the Star Gilt. Home to a huge coaching house and auction hall, the station becomes the hub of nearly all major Rogue Trader activity in the Naxos Sector, just as the Fabique Explorators had hoped. Fabique is able to buy vast sums of archaeotech and other materiel from returning Rogue Traders at the auction houses, without any risk to themselves.

M38.612: An Unheralded Arrival – Future Archmagos Explorator Justin MacDonald finishes his training on Cognomen, and joins the crew of a senior Explorator on their search for a safer Warp route between Cognomen and the Drumnos Sector.

M38.799: Frothing Disease – Thousands of Nurglite cultists disembark from camouflaged barges and troopships onto the surface of Limmerdine, and the world turns from a pastoral wilderness paradise to a festering hell of plague and death. Cities run green with the melting flesh and pus-rivulets of millions of dying Imperials. Thinking quickly, the local Ecclesiarchy and Munitorum press the entire planetary population into a single vast militia, and march seventeen million citizen-soldiers into the force of Nurglites. By sheer weight of numbers, the Chaotic warriors are overrun and defeated, but the world’s recovery will take over five thousand years by the most conservative estimates.

M38.999: Claws of Hate – Cognomen, for the first time in its long history, is assaulted directly by its enemies. The vast Ark Mechanicus Archetype is attacked in its usual patrol by a force of mixed Renegade Space Marines. The Age of Strife-era auspexes and sensoria aboard the ancient ship are enough to see the enemy coming, and the Archetype signals for help from the planet proper as it attempts to return to the planet’s orbit. Before help can arrive, the Archetype is boarded by the force of Traitors, including Gorlabe the Unyielding, a Black Legion Terminator. The crew of the Archetype number over one hundred thousand people, however, and put up a vicious fight against the boarders, even as the vessel crawls towards Cognomen’s defense net. Two dozen smaller vessels, mostly Defense Monitors, rush to the aid of their flagship. Meanwhile, the actual objective of the raid, Cognomen itself, is left all but defenseless. Two dozen Black Legion and Word Bearer Terminators teleport to the surface of the planet, directly into the great data-library of the main Fabrication Temple Plant. Desperate counterattacks from the local militia are unable to stop the Terminators from looting over four thousand blueprints, then setting electrical fires in the rest of the building and teleporting free. Though the Archetype was quickly secured and Gorlabe’s forces driven off, the damage is done. Hundreds of thousands of blueprints, some older than the Imperium, are lost forever. Cognomen is forced to beg for fresh copies from Mars, and those copies are provided only begrudgingly, with a force of eighty thousand Skitarii along with them. These Skitarii will form the core of the world’s bolstered defenses.

M39: A New Beginning

M39.002: A Fate-Heavy Voyage – Explorator Justin MacDonald is promoted to Magos, and given command of his own ship, the Grand Cruiser Long Vision of Knowledge. He takes off into the nebulae that surround his homeworld in search of stable Warp Routes, despite being repeatedly assured that none exists save the one the fleet originally used to colonize Cognomen, thousands of years before.

M39.004: A Fatal Error in Judgment – A collection of corrupt members of the Adeptus Arbites succeed in murdering the second in command of the Hapster Administratum and covering it up, blaming it on a visiting Deathwatch Kill-Marine. The Marine barely escapes retribution by uncorrupted Arbites, unaware of their comrades’ corruption.

M39.009: Foreboding – The Space Hulk Mortifracture appears from out of the great clouds of radioactive gas that girdle the Cognomen system. Initial exploration of the Hulk by the Iron Hands Chapter reveals that the entire structure of the Hulk is completely overrun with Orks, but many seem starved or malnourished, and they do not put up a good enough fight to resist the Iron Hands’ Terminator boarding forces, which capture the Hulk for the Mechanicus. Cognomen, however, has no records of any Orkholds close enough to contain that many Orks.

M39.010: Recidivism – A vast army of human Renegades and Traitors descends on the planet Northrop in the neighboring Drumnos Sector. Over eighteen million of these assailants, out of twenty one million total, are eventually identified as being descendants of the Imperial prison planet St. Hobson’s Patience, which had vanished into the Warp a thousand years before. Disturbingly, many of the original criminals are also identified as having been present for the invasion, begging the question: what could have kept them alive for so long, while leaving them time to reproduce? The Renegade force assaults Northrop’s defenses with manic rage, and only a combined force of Salamander, Red Scorpion, Angels Vermillion, Emperor’s Nightmare, Death Lights, Celestial Knights, and Angels of Redemption Astartes, alongside over a million star-sailors of the Imperial Navy, manage to stop the incursion before the whole world is destroyed.

M39.012: The Great Discovery – To the shock of the Rogue Traders, Explorators, Astrocartographers, and Navigators of Drumnos, Naxos, and the rest of the Ultima Segmentum, Explorator Magos Justin MacDonald announces that he has discovered three shirtsleeves-habitable star systems, one with three Garden Worlds in it, within a few weeks’ flight from Cognomen. Named Triune, for the three completely unrelated primitive cultures living on it and apparently unaware of each other; Dawn-break, named for the artificial star MacDonald found crashed into the planet’s surface; and Septiim, for the ancient Terran poet and inventor of renown, the three systems had all tested as safe for immediate human habitation, and none were more than fifteen light-years from Cognomen.

M39.014: Gold Rush One – Propelled by discoveries of immense value by MacDonald’s fleet, over one hundred Rogue Trader and Explorator ships leave Fabique for the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.

M39.015: Unease – Several dozen Rogue Trader and Explorator ships return to the Star Gilt, with words of caution on their tongues. They spoke of dead worlds, dead ships, and whole systems of utter devastation, out in the void. Pict-captures and solid remains of wrecked Great Crusade ships, some with Legionary markings, surface in Fabique. After months of speculation, the Inquisition steps in.

M39.016: Gold Rush Two – The Inquisitorial expedition, minus four ships, and MacDonald return. A conclave is held at Palace Naxos. Official declaration of Discovery is made. Over one hundred more Rogue Trader and Explorator ships depart.

M39.093: Ambush – A routine co-operation exercise between the Basilikon Astra Cognomen and Basilikon Astra Fabique ends in total catastrophe when the fleet of Ork Freebooter Commodore Grotwhip assaults the asteroid base around which the joint exercise was conducted. The Archetype is lost with all hands when its Magos Dominus self-destructs the hybrid core after boarding by Orks. The fleet of Cognomen would never fully recover from the loss of their ancient flagship and home, and reserve a special hatred for Orks.

M39.098: Putting Down Roots – The initial colonization effort of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit begins, with population drawn from the many overpopulated hives of the leMarkos system in the Drumnos Sector.

M39.100 ~ 700: Expanding the Imperium – The Mechanicus and Administratum undertake a massive colony-building effort in the Circuit and its border regions. Fabique contracts to build several hundred colony ships and logistical barges, mostly for the colonization of Thimble and Nauphry, the only two worlds in the new Sector with populations of over twenty million within the first year.

M39.387: Empty Houses – The abandoned Rogue Navigator fortress of Coriolis is discovered by now Archmagos Explorator MacDonald. The world is promptly claimed by the Astra Militarum, and turned into the regional staging area.

M39.398: Wildfires – The Hapster system is raided by over three full flights of Infidel Raiders. Though the Defense Monitors of the SDF managed to sink one and slam it into one of Hapster’s two moons, the other nine successfully steal the Rogue Trader cruiser Lucre William, killing its crew, with Rogue Trader Roger Calavna only escaping by hiding in a messenger pod and launching himself to the world below. Calavna swears undying revenge on the unknown pirates and fails.

M39.519: The Birth of the Cloudburst Sector – With the discovery of the twin worlds of Cloudburst and Celeste, the Administratum declares that enough worlds have been found to justify the establishment of a new sector. The twin worlds are declared the new capital, though colonization is delayed by jurisdictional squabbling between the Ordo Hereticus, Ecclesiarchy, and Administratum. The new Sector Overlord, Lord Ramius Kruzedyvech Lubgrov, previously served as a Lord Administrator for the Hapster Subsector, though not a Subsector Overlord.

M39.628: Haunted soil – Explorator vessel Omnisssiah’s Great Bounty discovers the Oglith system. Detecting the taint of Chaos on the planet from orbit, the ship requests the Ordo Malleus investigate. Two years later, the world is found to have been the site of a horrific human sacrifice to or by an unknown daemon, but there is no multicellular life on Oglith’s surface at the present time. Cautious plans are drawn up for colonization. During preliminary efforts, however, a fully subterranean colony of Feral Orks is discovered, apparently unaware of either the current or previous human colony efforts, or the Chaotic interlude. The decision is reached to colonize the world, and then assault the Orks all at once after a colony is well established.

M39.631: Tearing Up an Oath – Mars formally rescinds the Titan Restriction order placed on Cognomen. Cognomen begins building new Titans and accepts six as a starter group from Mars. The new Legion is entitled Legio Congelatio, or Frostbite Army. Mars dispatches copies of the three basic Titan blueprints and leaves Cognomen to do the work themselves.

M39.648: Under the Rocks – A former Terran Federation system is discovered in Cloudburst, including its world Drolorium. After an extensive, decades-long conversion effort by the young Missionary Maskos and his Ecclesiarchal allies, the world is made a part of the Imperium, and the Mechanicus examines its treasure trove of STC mining equipment.

M39.839: The Stars Come to Kill – A panicked call for help from the nearby Naxos Sector reaches Cognomen. A war to drive off Dark Eldar from the Corumbino Nebula has taken a turn for the worst, as a Webway Gate explodes and sends a squadron of Daemonships into the nebula through the resultant Rift. Though Imperial War-Savants believe the Rift may eventually close on its own, the Daemonships deposit over eight thousand Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Mutants on Dynarix 3, the Imperial Navy staging world for the brutal war. Cognomen agrees to dispatch its fledgling Titan Legion and a small fleet of its limited Basilikon Astra to aid the Imperials.

M39.916: Betrayal of Confidence – The Rogue Trader house Jiax is annihilated in the span of five days by the Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus and the Officio Assassinorum. No explanation is ever given to the other Traders of the region.

M39.955: The First Rebellion – The Subsector Capital of Delving rocks from an internal rebellion. Hundreds of thousands of disaffected Imperial citizens turn on the Administratum in the span of two weeks. Pacification eventually requires chemical weapon usage, or so claims the Imperial Guard general staff sent to implement reconquest by the Sector Commanders. The Inquisition’s Ordo Militarum establishes a permanent presence in the Cloudburst Sector at this time, to watch for other potentially unneeded uses of non-conventional weapons.

M40: Building Strength

M40.003: Bureaucracy Sets In – The Adeptus Terra has, by this point, taken over the administration of the new Sector directly. Over a hundred new star systems have been added to the Imperium, with several more mapped, several beyond that earmarked for exploration, and two identified as having been so heavily infested by aliens that colonization is not feasible.

M40.102: Codification – The total number of star systems in the growing Cloudburst Sector demands fresh Subsectors. Oglith and Maskos, two grand success stories of Imperial expansion, are made Subsector Capitals, as is Cognomen, to nobody’s surprise greater than their own. Septiim is considered for the honor, but is passed over for Delving since the problem of determining which Septiim world to honor is too fractious to be worth the trouble.

M40.145: The Phlebotomist Rises – A cult of sadistic killers on the planet Hapster rises to the attention of Khorne, who needs do very little to shift their conduct to something more pleasing to him. The cult goes on a rampage against the local Arbites, killing over a dozen Arbitrators and Judges and sixty local police before being halted by a sniper team with Enforcer support. Their leader, a former surgeon named The Phlebotomist, escapes the massacre, and continues a solo killing spree for eighteen years before dying of infection.

M40.189: A Theft – A horde of Orks descends on the Imperial Fortress World of Coriolis in the hope of looting it of its vast stockpiles of cruise missiles. Valiant Imperial Guard and local PDF armies drive the aliens off, losing an insignificant eight hundred missiles.

M40.201: A Metal Marble – The bizarre and unique world of Underbar is discovered. Competitions between Mechanicus and merchant assets to best extract the valuable resources of the liquid metal seas are fierce, and nearly escalates to violence before Cognomen steps in and forces a compromise.

M40.247: Winds of Darkness – The formerly isolationist band of pirates known as the Black Wind violently annex two small neighboring pirate groups, and capture several Imperial ships. Three Chartered freight-carriers of the Drumnos Sector disappear within days afterward, so quickly that no messages are sent.

M40.289: An Unexpected Honor – Fifteen regiments of Septiim Guard are demanded of Septiim by the Officio Munitorum for a crusade in the adjacent Drumnos Sector, against the expanding Green Empire of Morkstar Redfangs. All fifteen regiments are told in advance that they will not be coming back, but will instead gain colonization rights and titles of conquest upon successful resolution of the campaign. All forty six thousand volunteers are given formal funerals by their families before departing, never to return. Four months later, the Septiim Regiments return, the Green Empire homeworld having been destroyed by a gamma ray burst. Some regiments are eventually reassigned to Rogue Trader fleets in the Cloudburst Circuit.

M40.400: The Map Shrinks – Unstable projections in the Astronomican, hard enough to see this far from Terra and blocked by so many Warp Storms, make life challenging for Rogue Traders in the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone. Fifteen Rogue Trader ships vanish in under a year. Four later turn up as part of the Space Hulk Speeding Death in the Gothic Sector.

M40.470: The Winds Grow – The fleet of the renamed Dark Winds capture a Cobra Destroyer from the Lawrencium patrol squad. The pirates then vanish into the border darkness between Drumnos and Cloudburst.

M40.569: Entropy – The Tovash system, on the border between Drumnos and the Hapster Subsector, drops out of all contact with the greater Imperium. A Navy patrol squadron arrives to investigate, and detects the planet’s continents flying out into space, the result of an unprecedentedly large Hrud migration loosening the tectonic bonds. The Ordo Xenos is baffled by this behavior; Hrud often do not care about the state of a planet when they’re done with it, but to destroy it pre-emptively at the cost of their own lives is outside their usual mode of conduct.

M40.610: The Gyronax Crusade Begins – One hundred regiments of Imperial Guard are raised across Drumnos and Cloudburst to participate in the Gyronax Crusade to liberate the Aelthus Cluster, far to the galactic north of Port Maw. The lack of able defenders in the sectors makes repelling pirates and slavers temporarily more difficult.

M40.666: A Dark Parallel – A Slaaneshi daemon infiltrates Maskos, nigh-perfectly recreating Maskos’s techniques, this time to turn the world that bears his name into a Daemon World. A mission to stop it costs the Arbites a precinct’s worth of men, and ends with the deaths of over two thousand cultists.

M40.798: The Paradox Stars – A flicker in the web of Warp energy in the Hell’s Vortex Warp Storm reveals that the binary stars at its heart are not the same size they were when observation began.

M40.745: Lightning Strikes – Piracy is an annoying but frequent concern in the border regions of the Imperium. Ships and forces belonging to criminal groups sometimes successfully assault Imperial holdings, and the most common response from nearby civilians is to batten down the hatches and wait for the Navy to drive them off. On the planet Lemankonstruert in Drumnos, a massive force of armored pirates, driving Mars quality tanks, roll into an Imperial warehousing district. The pirates make off with over one million Gold Gelt Thrones’ worth of trade goods and food, over four hundred prisoners, and eight cargo ships, then vanish without a trace. Enraged Ordo Hereticus, Ordo Militarum, and Mechanicus investigators demand to know which local Imperial military force could have been so careless as to allow Mars-quality tanks to fall into the hands of pirates. No Imperial military force is found to be at fault. Horrified Mechanicus officials realize the truth: the Dark Winds have an STC.

M40.834: Crime and Punishment – Two Task Group-strength forces of Adeptus Arbites storm the pirate asteroid base of Rum-slog, killing the motley band of raiders that commanded the Ork and human fleet of pirates. Although hundreds of pirates are killed and a thousand more captured, six thousand escape on their vessels to plague the Imperium again.

M40.844: Crippling Loss – Thousands of Dark Eldar, Imperial, and Chaotic ships assault each other and the ground in the savage war for the vast wealth of the Corumbino Nebula in Naxos and its super-fast Warp routes. The Dark Eldar find themselves unable to consistently outmaneuver both enemies at once, while the Chaotic forces are conscious of the need to open a foothold on the worlds of the Nebula before the Warp Rift that allows their Daemonships to maintain a realspace connection closes. The Imperials need merely outlast the Chaotic fleet before the closure of the Rift drives them away, and then they can focus all their brute firepower on the Dark Eldar. Cognomen again dispatches their original Martian Titans to aid the local forces. The Mechanicus and Naval force from Cognomen is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of their opposition. The prospects of Imperial victory grow dimmer as the entirety of the newly gifted Legio Congelatio are destroyed in a savage three-way battle between the Mechanicus, Traitor Guard, and a Dark Eldar Archon’s forces. Though the loss of the Legion enables the Imperial defenders to destroy the Chaotic staging area and blow up their entire ammunition cache, ultimately tipping the ground war in the Imperium’s favor, it is no consolation to Cognomen. Cognomen relates this defeat to Mars, who reply that Cognomen is on its own if they want more Titans. With nothing but wreckage with which to rebuild, Cognomen starts the work with heavy hearts – they had insulted Sacred Mars with their losses.

M40.899: Ludovic’s Toxins – The Tzeentchian mage Ludovic the Sorcerer assaults Oglith with his warband of over eighty thousand Chaos-aligned raiders and cultists. Though the Oglith PDF is eventually able to contain and kill the cultists, Ludovic achieves his goal: destroying the Chaos artifact buried in the planet’s crust, over which an Imperial bank had been built. Ludovic dies laughing, as do over a third of the planet’s Astropaths. Over the next fifteen years, a virulent mutagen disease sweeps the world’s water supply, killing hundreds and mutating tens of thousands. The Ecclesiarchy and Arbites are pressed to the limit killing the mutants, though this also has a constraining effect on the subterranean Ork problem. Orks are not immune to mutation, not when it permeates their entire food and water supply.

M40.914: The Second Rebellion – Another, larger uprising on Delving nearly costs the Imperium the planet. Thorough covert action by the Ordo Hereticus succeeds in stopping the rebellion from spreading off world, but the Imperial Guard General sent from Thimble to stop the uprising deploys plutonium bombs to put a stop to it. This makes the second time the Officio Munitorum has resorted to using contaminating weapons to stop a domestic war, and the Officio Munitorum forces said General’s retirement. Mutant birthrates on Delving rise dramatically.

M40.967: A Conclave of Killers – Fifteen Inquisitors and six Assassins converge on the Maskos Inquisitorial Palace, all from Terra, with an assignment they did not want to entrust to the Astropathic Choir. Lord Inquisitor Cloudburst Aronbel hears them in private, and re-routes them to the venerable Deathwatch Watch Fortress named Fort Pykman, deep in the Oldlight Exo-zone, where the team passes beyond the Cloudburst Inquisition’s sight.

M40.989: A Glorious Occasion – The Ecclesiarchal Mission ship Sacred Voices stumbles across the planet Oromet in the Cloudburst Circuit and hastens to begin proselytizing to the few thousand humans left alive on the storm- and plague-wracked world. Mechanicus atmosphere control machines begin converting the world to a more tolerable place.

M40.998: Rolling Thunder – The Dark Winds launch brutal raids on multiple Drumnos Sector border forts and listening posts, especially on the galactic north spinward of the Sector. Alarming reports of entire merchant flotillas disappearing into Dark Winds territory chill local travel; Chartist Captains spend fortunes finding alternate routes for freighters. As local Ecclesiarchal officials note depressed tithe income thanks to the diverted ships, their complaints reach the ears of the Ordo Hereticus. However, it is only when two Drumnos Sector vessels independently report sighting newly-built Raiders on the border that a decision is made to put an end to the Dark Winds forever, because now they have a means of building their own warships. A force of Drumnos Mechanicus and Navy assets begin a grinding war of assault on their own border, slowly pushing back the pirates, who have now existed long enough to have developed their own communities and home worlds with self-sustaining populations. Two worlds in the Drumnos Sector are found to have whole cities of Dark Winds populations, and are promptly flattened by the vengeful Navy. The Dark Winds respond by airlifting whole factories into space and resuming production of weapons, while slowly retreating towards the less heavily defended Cloudburst Sector.

M41: End of Two Eras

M41.029: Gas Storms – A vast force of Orks, more than twice the largest ever before recorded in Cloudburst, appears at the edge of the Sector, as foretold by the Tarot. A covert Ordo Xenos task force assembles to intercept them, when the Orks suddenly veer off course. The Ordo follows them, and discovers that a binary rocky-gas planet has drawn their attention. Vast coils of gas spin off the giant and descend as a liquid to the surface of the rocky world, where a tribe of Orks has set up nothing less than a refueling station for other Orks. The Ordo identifies the phenomenon as being caused by a Beast-era Graviton Compressor Array, and covertly erects a listening post at the edge of the system, hoping for a chance to steal it. The Ork fleet gradually scatters over the three nearby Sectors, causing headaches for the Navy.

M41.100: For Terra and Mars – The partially rebuilt Legio Congelatio, alongside one hundred thousand Skitarii, four hundred Ordo Reductor Specialists, and two hundred thousand Imperial Navy and Basilikon Astra sailors, engage the massive Dark Winds gang of pirate Renegades at the border of the Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors. The group captures over one hundred thousand prisoners and secures two warships for the Drumnos Sector Fleet. They also seek to regain the favor of Mars. In the wreckage of the pirate deep space repair foundry, an intact Standard Template Constructor for the baseline variant of Leman Russ Tank is found. Though it is a copy of one Mars already has in abundance, it is sent to Mars in a great Mechanicus Forge Ship, after the plans are meticulously copied. Though the Fabricator General recognizes that as a transparent attempt to buy favor, he grudgingly gives his thanks.

M41.103: Dark Needles – The Kabal of the Fiend Ascendant conducts a massive raid on Hapster, Oglith, Cognomen, Septiim Tertius, Grendel, Coriolis, Locke’s World, and Gorkypark. The Inquisition is able to determine that this is not a raid of conquest, but mass abduction; Commorragh needs slaves. Millions vanish screaming into the Webway. Two Deathwatch Kill-teams and two brigades of Celestial Guard fly out to engage the raiders. The Dark Eldar retreat after minimal direct combat and the Webway Gate the slavers use is hunted down by meticulous Mechanicus and Inquisitorial ships. The first two ships to approach are skewered by Dark Eldar guns, but the next nine successfully destroy the gate, closing off the preferred route of Dark Eldar in the region.

M41.189: Requisitions – Twenty thousand troops from Cassie’s World and four hundred thousand more from Thimble fly off to support the Rogue Trader fleet of Tomás Reledar the Second, on his ongoing campaign to capture the worlds of the southern Cloudburst Circuit.

M41.299: Disappearance – Hundreds of thousands of Chaotic pirates, Renegades, Traitors, Daemons, and other foes of the Imperium simply vanish from across the Cloudburst Sector. Oglith, which had been fighting against Chaos pirates for some years; Thimble, beset by mutants; even Grand Anchor, long assailed by Warp-tainted pirates and alien ships, suddenly had no enemies to fight. Stranger yet, a band of Tzeentch cult ships appear on the border between Naxos and Cloudburst, hulled and burned by what had clearly been the Terminus Est. The Ordo Malleus launches extensive investigations, and locates hints to the disappearance in an underhive of Thimble’s desolated northern continent. Extensive forensic work on an abandoned building with Chaotic graffiti reveals that the building had, until weeks before, contained a potent navigation and 3D rendering cogitator, apparently being used to plan a complex stellar route to the Drumnos Sector without crossing through any Imperial-controlled Navy Checkpoints.

M41.304: Deathly Quiet – All contact is lost with Naval strongpoint Iron Beach, on the edge of the Cloudburst Circuit. A Navy investigator team unearths massive plasma burns on the interior bulkheads of the drifting void platform, indicating a boarding action, or perhaps a malfunction. The station is repaired and put back to service the following year.

M41.340: Abhor the Thinking Machine – A specialist team of two hundred Skitarii and Arbites quarantine a bunker on one of the few islands of Obelisk II, suspecting it to be a concealed cache of Iron Men from before the Age of Strife. The bunker opens to the air hours later thanks to an internal security mechanism, and two thirds of the team dies before the breach is sealed by a stasis trap and a sustained shelling of the strange metal beings that emerge. The Techpriests leading the force claim that whatever the creatures were, they were not Iron Men. True Iron Men in that number would have overrun them in seconds. The identity of the metal beings remains a point of scholarly concern on Cognomen and security concern to the Deathwatch.

M41.351: A Scream of Absolution – The fullest might of all three extant Convents of Sororitas in the Sector falls upon the heretical uprising on the planet Cassie’s World. Seven hours later, the planet is as pious as a preacher in the pews, and the smoke from the burning city at the heart of the heresy is visible from space.

M41.378: The Emperor’s Finest – Fifty Space Marines from three different Dark Angel Successors pass through the sector on their way to the Oldlight Exo-zone, collecting ammunition and other supplies from Cognomen on the way. They refuse to speak of their mission, and Cognomen chooses not to press the matter.

M41.382: Expansion Plans – The world of Foraldshold is formally added to the Imperium by a Mechanicus survey team. A single colossal city is planned, and the first surveys begin. The intent is to make the world a satrap of Cognomen, in the hopes that a subsidiary world would able to handle much of the mundane manufacturing of the larger Forge World, so that it can focus on its planned military expansions.

M41.399: Confusion and Intruders – Ripples of odd Aetheric energies from the Cloudburst Circuit presage troubled dreams among the Cloudburst Sector’s scarce psychics. Readings of the Tarot bespeak disasters, destruction, and war. The Inquisition begins hardening its defenses, and engages in discussion about the possible forms the problems the Tarot foretells may take.

M41.399: Greatness – Lord Commander Solar Macharius conquers over one thousand worlds for the Imperium in a mere seven years. The Cloudburst Sector played no direct role in the Crusade, though the depleting effect it had on the Imperium’s short-term resources would later prove telling in the Inquisition’s decisions.

M41.400: A Bolt from the Blue – With no broadcasted warning, no precedent, and no hesitation, a vast force of aliens, numbering well over two million heads, assaults the Septiim, Maskos, and Drimmerzole orbitals. Enormous spacecraft, looking somewhat like the archetypal Imperial Grand Cruiser, materialize at the edges of star systems and burn their way inward. The ships carve through the defenses of these three systems and ravage the people below, then deposit strange hovering tanks on the crusts of the planets. Only after the intervention of five Astartes Chapters, eight Deathwatch Kill-Teams, five Inquisitorial retinues, four hundred thousand Imperial Guardsmen, and multiple Sector and Subsector Battlefleets are the aliens finally killed. Sifting through the rubble, the Ordo Xenos tentatively identifies their attackers by a word that sees frequent use in their primitive cogitators: Glasian. Representatives of the Celestial Knights, the Novamarines, the Angels of Fury, and the Red Templars assemble to discuss their findings after the battles end, while the Carcharadons vanish without a word. The Ordo Malleus makes a concurrent discovery: the Glasians were corrupted to a being by Tzeentch.

M41.400: Drowning – The entire city of Nelabaster on Obelisk II sinks into the waves after catastrophic damage caused by an asteroid impact.

M41.402: Assembly – Inquisitors, Magos, Psykers, Marines, Admirals, and Generals of every sort convene for an emergency meeting in the Cloudburst Administratum Palace. Fierce debates begin on the topic of the Glasian migration and the effects it had on the Sector.

M41.405: Garrisoning the Front – A force of 120 Space Marines assemble in Septiim to watch for future Glasian incursions. The Inquisition formally establishes Exigent Task Unit Cloudburst.

M41.406: The Long Wait – The Exigent Task Unit Cloudburst settles in on former Mechanicus mining base Gleamlock and awaits further Glasian incursions. Brisk harvesting of gene-seeds ensures that the separation of so many Marines from their home Chapters is not permanently crippling.

M41.437: A Dire Heresy – The planet Oromet in the Thimble Subsector is wracked by a premeditated act of heresy and conspiracy by its reigning Archbishop, who plunges the whole system into a crippling war for power. Caught completely off-guard by the speed of the uprising, the Inquisition mobilizes an emergency task force, but it is too late: by the time a joint Arbites, Astra Militarum Scion, and Inquisitorial Ordo Hereticus retributive unit cuts their way to Archbishop Haggar and beats him unconscious for his secret trial, over a billion souls are lost. Haggar’s crime, it transpired, was claiming that he and he alone could accurately interpret the Emperor’s Tarot; to the commoners this may have appeared true, since Haggar was a hedge psyker. How this had been allowed to happen is unknown, and is also a source of lingering embarrassment to the Adeptus Astra Telepathica Scholastica Psykana.

M41.467: Forlorn – An Imperial mapping ship taking on supplies on a Mechanicus station at the edge of the Oromet system detects a Space Hulk in the darkness outside the system thanks to light from the star reflecting off its hull. The Inquisition later dubs it the Forlorn Sight. It drops back into the Warp four months later.

M41.480: Vast Frontiers – Lord Captain Lavarr Redneick finally finishes mapping the Spiraling Fastness Nebula in the Cloudburst Circuit. Five new worlds are discovered in the remains of the supernova that birthed the region. One is already inhabited by humankind, and the other four are either formerly inhabited or never have been.

M41.499: Lesquire’s Dismay – Inquisitor Ronald Lesquire’s investigation into a possible heresy of the flesh comes to a crashing halt as a mutant cult on the planet Cassie’s World rises up against him, killing four Throne Agents and two Interrogators. A full Arbites mobilization is needed to put the cult down, costing millions in property damage.

M41.500: Return of the Darkness – A second wave of Glasians, ten percent larger than the first, returns to assault the Cloudburst Sector. The entire population of Agri-world Chlorit IV dies in days as a wave of hovertanks and fighters kills every person on the planet. Ordo Xenos Inquisitors watch in astonishment as the Glasian ship then retrieves its warriors and splits the planet down the middle with its FTL engines. The ship is later intercepted off Coriolis and destroyed. The Exigent Task Unit suffers forty percent casualties and the total loss of its headquarters when a bizarre Glasian ship assaults Septiim.

M41.502: Reconclave – The remaining Exigent Task Unit Marines and the Inquisitors of the Ordos Cloudburst assemble in the Inquisitorial Palace of Maskos. The group deliberates for almost a year on the outcome of the second invasion, and eventually resolves to create a permanent garrison.

M41.519: Brotherhood – The planet Azure, once a logistical and governmental hub of the Nauphry Subsector, changes its name in Imperial records. No other changes are noted by outside observers, and life appears to proceed as normal. However, when an Inquisitorial vessel makes dock above the world to take on supplies some weeks later, it is captured by an unidentified force of raving cultists, who throw themselves on the Inquisitor with savage ferocity. The Inquisitor barely has time to call for aid by Astropath before the ship is taken, and he is drawn and quartered by the lunatic mob. Ordo Hereticus reinforcements arrive four months later to find that the world’s government has fallen to a collective of fanatical cultists named the True Brotherhood, who have listened to the whispers of a recidivist Astropath. The Astropath, the Inquisition learns, has gone utterly mad, and has declared that he can bestow psychic powers on his most devout worshippers. He has turned the whole planet against the Imperium, and even changed the name of the world to better reflect its new station. The Inquisition summons every Battle Sister in the Sector and Circuit to a Mechanicus refueling station at the edge of the system, and upon their assembly, descends on the world with four thousand Templar Militia and twelve thousand Guardsmen in tow. Brotherhood burns as Inquisitorial and cultist forces fight in the streets, propelled by their clashing faiths to a battle of no quarter. Finally, after suffering extensive losses, the Inquisition declares the world Perdita, and reluctantly calls in Exterminatus on the planet. Psychic scars on the population by the mad Astropath and his rogue psyker legions were great enough that the world could not be salvaged. The Sisters of Cloudburst bear the incident as a mark of shame to this day.

M41.525: The Blue Daggers are Born – After decades of work and preparation, the Blue Daggers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes is formally Founded in the Septiim system. Taking the hollow asteroid dubbed Gargantuan as its Fortress Monastery, the Daggers collect gene-seeds and equipment from the Novamarines and Angels of Fury to establish their starter population of one hundred twenty Marines. The Mechanicus of Cognomen are given the honor of building the additional equipment of the Daggers until they can get their own forges up and running. The Daggers select Brother Lieutenant Augustus Alderoster as their new Chapter Master. The Chapter begins busily expanding their assets and numbers.

M41.538: A Gang of Thugs – The absurdly overzealous collective of pirates named The Endless Party attack Watch Station Discus in the Nauphry system, hoping to steal the Inquisitorial armor and weapons within. The Deathwatch slaughter them all in minutes by teleporting into their ships and sabotaging their life support systems. The Nauphry SDF arrives to help, just in time to be handed the captured ships by the disinterested Deathwatch, who view the entire exercise as a distraction.

M41.589: The Peaceful Faith – The Abbey of the Martyred Emperor opens in the Septiim system, housing over a thousand priests and nuns of the Ecclesiarchy. The tiny Battle Sister contingent of the abbey flies in from the Segmentum Solar to serve as its defenders, and quickly establish the tone of their relationship with the Daggers by refusing to allow a Dagger representative to attend the abbey’s consecration.

M41.600: The Third Glasian Migration – As predicted by the Ordos Xenos and Malleus, a third wave of Glasians, this one even larger, assaults the Cloudburst Sector. This time, the Daggers stand ready. Although the Glasians attack four disparate systems, the six hundred Battle Brothers of the Daggers work alongside over two million Guard and forty million PDF and sailors to drive the aliens back into space, where teleporting Dagger Terminators destroy them with sabotage.

M41.624: Mysterious Murder – The Lord Sector Cloudburst Roger Holdlt Coliard dies to an assassin’s bullet on the porch of his sprawling underground mansion in the caves of Cloudburst. The assassin is captured alive by an Arbites bodyguard squad, and find him to be under the control of an unknown alien machine, embedded in his thyroid.

M41.669: Pox – Without warning, a massive fleet of Nurglite pirates, tainted aliens, and even a few Death Guard Marines surges from the tainted heart of the Naxos Sector. The Daggers begin their first extra-Cloudburst mission, as they work alongside the Celestial Knights and their own parent Chapters: the Novamarines and Angels of Fury. The combined force of Marines and Imperial Navy beat the Nurglites back into the perimeter of the Corumbino Nebula, where vengeful Chaotic reinforcements fall on the Imperium’s fleets. The Blue Daggers vessels take a savage pounding, and although they lose no ships larger than an Escort, their fleet is left at two thirds strength. Eventually, the pirates are driven into the Warp Storms at the heart of the Nebula by Battlefleet Naxos and the Celestial Knights.

M41.688: Whiplash – On the Frontier world of Hangonne, scraps of an archaeotech cache are found by enterprising gold prospectors. The Mechanicus snatches it up, and finds it to be left over from an abortive colonization attempt by Terra, over eighteen thousand years before. All usable technology has decayed beyond any use, save one: a shipping pallet of electric whips, apparently used for fighting off predators. Cognomen Electro-Priests eagerly add the whips to their arsenals.

M41.700: The Fourth Glasian Migration – Again foretold by the Tarot, the Glasians strike Cloudburst Sector. The expanding military forces of the Cloudburst Sector meet the aliens head-on, and although the Glasians come harrowingly close to destroying Nauphry VII, the Imperium again defeats them.

M41.704: The Rot Souls Rise Again – After thousands of years dying and reawakening in the pits of the Warp for the amusement and defense of Nurgle, the Rot Soul Brigade abruptly appears in the roiling Warp Storms at the extreme galactic north. The Nurglites rampage unchecked until they arrive in the Cloudburst Circuit’s fringe, where they are detected by horrified Astropaths of the Rogue Trader House Rowsdower. The Rogue Trader fleets of the region quickly marshal their forces and blunt the Nurglite assault, but four Rot Soul troopships escape the death of their escorts and escape into the Circuit proper. The Basilikon Astra move a fleet of their own to intercept, but the ships instead abruptly shift course and discharge their diseased cargo onto the world of Combine, specifically to attack a Blue Daggers company there for a mission. The Daggers rout and slaughter the Nurglites before they can contaminate the soil of the indispensable Agri-world.

M41.742: Macragge Stands – The Tyranids assault Macragge, the homeworld of the Blue Daggers’ ultimate progenitor Chapter, the Ultramarines. Although casualties run into the millions of humans and hundreds of Marines, the Ultramarines eventually drive off and destroy most of Hive Fleet Behemoth.

M41.749: Overambition – Warships of the Battlefleet Drumnos report that one of the hundreds of lesser pirate fleets that operate in the Oldlight Exo-zone has vanished. Local worlds on the Drumnos-Cloudburst border brace for the worst, and indeed the Frontier World of Hangonne is promptly invaded by the pirates, seeking plunder and recruits. A force of Blue Daggers and Cloudburst Defenders intercept and destroy the pirate ships as they retreat, and manage to return some small amount of stolen goods to the grateful people of Hangonne.

M41.750: Hunger, Evil and Infinite – The news of the arrival of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, albeit in a sanitized form, reaches the ears of the Cloudburst Sector. Civil unrest and upset damage productivity on some Cloudburst worlds before the Arbites restore order.

M41.760: Greater Need – A dozen Battle Brothers and two Techmarines of the Blue Daggers depart Septiim to join the Deathwatch, at the specific request of Watch Fortress Excalibris. Only the Techmarines and two Battle Brothers return alive, fifty years later.

M41.788: The Scadial Campaigns – Fifteen Imperial Guard regiments, each raised from a different world in Cloudburst, dispatch to the Cloudburst Circuit, alongside fifteen Navy and Space Marine ships and twenty Daggers. Their ultimate objective is far beyond, in the Exo-zone, where the Segmentum Ultima battlefleet is staging to attack the Ork empire of Bluddrunk Bonesquat. Though most of the Daggers and starships of the fleet return, the Imperial Guard survivors are too few in number to become a reconstituted regiment, and they are left behind as a permanent garrison on Bluddrunk’s former homeworld to defend it against uprisings of Feral Orks.

M41.799: Heresy Stirs – Oromet’s Ecclesiarchal servants lose control of a dangerous heretic in their own number, the Deacon Woldenbar. He has turned his soul completely to Chaos, and managed to convince a million humans of the Oromet system and beyond of the true divinity of the Dark Gods. The Inquisition captures him alive, and cryo-freezes him for torture and interrogation on Celeste.

M41.800: The Fifth Glasian Migration – Once more, the alien monsters in the thrall of Tzeentch enter into the realms of men and assault the Cloudburst Sector. Although the Blue Daggers are able, with the aid of the sector’s millions of defenders, to kill the Glasians and sink their command ship before it has the chance to destroy any Imperial worlds, the civilian casualties in Septiim and Mendic rise into the millions.

M41.826: Fire and Death – The Imperial colony Letrione in the Mendic system falls to Chaos Undivided in mere weeks. How and why Tzeentch allowed this is unknown, but whatever the cause, an entire system is lost to mankind.

M41.839: Green Waves – Though not numerous or directed enough to be considered a true Waaagh!, the Orks of an unknown world in the Oldlight Exo-zone stage an invasion of the Cloudburst Circuit. Hundreds of ships from human, Ork, and at least one unknown alien species’ fleets race to strategic points in the hot gasses of the Circuit, and fight over the uninhabited worlds. The Imperium manages to force an uneven peace by destroying enough Ork ships that the survivors can no longer mount sufficient force to both attack the other factions and defend their holdings, while the mysterious aliens disappear.

M41.848: An Unremarked Beginning – The future leader of the Free Corsair Coalition, Langdon Reith, graduates with honors from the Nauphry War College, and witnesses some of the ships he will someday command in the FCC attack the ship on which he first serves. He barely escaped with his life in the fighting, and watches as the leaders of the pirate attackers are ripped to shreds by Navy retaliation forces.

M41.862: Rampancy – A Mechanicus research base on the border between the Hapster Subsector and the Naxos Sector, AGF322, drops out of contact. Basilikon Astra ships sent to investigate are fired upon by cogitator-controlled lasers on the asteroid into which the lab is built. The Basilikon destroys the asteroid. No freshly-slain bodies are found in the remains, indicating that the Mechanicus personnel in the base were already long-dead.

M41.874: Clog – The Imperial Navy station Bulwark suffers a crippling hit from the pirate ship Wealthy Lads, destroying its function as a proper logistics hub of the Navy. It is sold and renamed.

M41.879: Full Strength – The Blue Daggers reach the nominal full strength of their Chapter. This totals to just under 1400 Marines, not counting Dreadnoughts and Marines in the Deathwatch. Although the Daggers have sufficient gene-seed to continue expanding, they elect to at least try to adhere to the Codex, despite their Honor Guard far exceeding the number they are traditionally allowed.

M41.897: Necrons – Although contact between the human race and the Necrons had first occurred many hundreds of years before, the destruction of Sanctuary 101 by the Necrons is the first contact of which any video records survive of individual aliens. News of their existence filters through the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Adeptus Astartes, leading some Deathwatch Marines to question whether border facilities like Dascomb would be better deployed in places where they could protect the Imperium from the Necrons.

M41.900: The Sixth Glasian Migration – The fleets of the Glasians arrive in the Cloudburst Sector once again, and promptly lay siege to four star systems. Overall, the full-strength Blue Daggers are able to repulse the Glasians, but the Mining World of Lordarine is nearly lost to the Imperium when the aliens overrun the capital. Only a last-minute destruction of their Cylinder by a Terminator Squad from the Daggers prevents a repeat of the Chlorit disaster.

M41.904: Rebellion – Future Admiral Reith steals a Light Cruiser from the Imperial Navy and defects, forming a pirate group. His first successful capture is against an Imperial freight convoy, which mistook his ship for a legitimate defender. He ambushes and loots the convoy before they even have a chance to confirm his identity.

M41.912: Foreseeing – The potent Pscryer of Oglith, a recognized Tarot-Reader and Sanctionite, detonates on the job. Two minutes later, a ship carrying Ork Weirdboys crashes on the planet, guided by a psychic signal the Imperium can barely detect. Oglith Jaegers hunt and kill the Weirdboys, but the Orks manage to locate the entrance to the underground Feral Ork communities before they die, and were minutes from contacting them when the Jaegers kill them.

M41.917: Downfall – The Colliard family, which has ruled Cloudburst for nine hundred years, is officially deposed by the Senate of the High Lords for remorseless and repeated misuse of Adepta resources and attempted conspiracy. After a brief discussion between the Administratum and Ecclesiarchal leaders of the Sector, the Quintus family is elevated from the high court of the Celeste Subsector to the throne of Cloudburst. Although none alive in the Sector now know, this was instigated by a retired member of the Adeptus Custodes, in their function as a member of the Eyes of the Emperor.

M41.931: Ingrates – A rebellion sweeps Hive Walden on Thimble, and the Overlord mobilizes the Argent Shield and Sword to suppress it. Four hundred thousand citizens and half a million rebel PDF and militia perish before order is restored, at the cost of forty percent productivity in the Hive’s factories.

M41.939: Unbreathing – Over four thousand daemon-worshippers of the allegiance of Slaanesh and Tzeentch either buy passage or hijack passage to the Dead World of Brotherhood, and begin fighting over the ruins of the Exterminatus-flattened world. Inquisitorial observers, watching from stealthed ships in orbit, are baffled by their ferocious fighting in vac suits and enclosed armor. Their objective remains unclear. All die within four months.

M41.942: Conscription – A brigade of Thimblan Argent Swords and four regiments of Septiim Guard deploy to the Pox Ring Containment, a special detachment of the Officio Munitorum raised to drive off the Nurglite armies rampaging through central Naxos. They are joined by two squads of Blue Daggers, three Techmarines, and an Apothecary, to serve as advisors and emergency backup if needed.

M41.948: Shields – An archaeotechnological machine is discovered by Explorators on the Feral World ABS00273. The machine appears to be a hybrid power plant, collecting geothermal, wind, tidal, solar, and thermoplasmic energy to fuel an enormous Void Shield of Dark Age origin. The Void Shield appears to cover a previously undiscovered and subterranean storage chamber on the world of cavemen and tribals. The Mechanicus begins restoring the advanced technology and probing the edges of the chamber, which seems inaccessible from the surface. Initial surface-penetrating radar scans suggest it to have been cold storage for a shipwreck of some kind. The Void Shield is over one hundred fifty percent the strength of a contemporary Mechanicus Void Shield of equivalent generator size, and unfathomably ancient, dating to even before the Rise of the Iron Men.

M41.949: Hidden Knowledge – The Space Hulk Dreadful Sight skids through the outer edges of the Triune system. To prevent any contamination of the helpless primitives on the planet Triune itself, a combined force of Solstice, Cognomen, and Fabique Skitarii intercept and board the Hulk with help from ten Blue Daggers Terminators. Aboard the Hulk, they find over two dozen Khorne daemons, fighting just as many Tzeentch daemons for control of the vessel. Now that the Hulk has left the Warp, they are vulnerable to direct attack, and the Skitarii and Marines manage to purge them, with casualties. The Hulk is still on a collision course with Triune, however, and so the Mechanicus reluctantly destroys it, though not before pilfering the datacores and ammunition of the ships in the Hulk.

M41.961: Beggars and Thieves – The nomadic fleets of vagrants and scavengers that eke out a living in the spinward edges of the Drumnos Sector come under sudden attack from unknown Eldar and Ork pirates. The nomads flee towards the Cloudburst Sector, but only one third make it before the pirates capture the rest.

M41.977: The Rot Souls Drive On – A collection of Nurgle cultists on the border of the Naxos and Cloudburst Sectors abruptly go public and begin assaulting an Arbites Courthouse on their homeworld. The arrival of Inquisitorial reinforcements from Cloudburst drives the cultists off world. They capture a freighter and fly off into the nebulae between Naxos and Cloudburst, where they successfully summon the Rot Souls. The Rot Souls and their cultist backup fly towards the previously secured worlds of the Corumbino Nebula, and assault Imperial mining colonies there. The overstretched defenders of Naxos barely hold on against the pustulent tide.

M41.984: Murmurs of Crime – The great Merchant House Herrera endures a scandal as four of its mercantile offices on Septiim Primus are found to be smuggling illegal gene-mod technology. Arbites and Ordo Hereticus investigations yield four executions and over five hundred arrests, and the impounding of two Herrera freighters.

M41.985: Darkness Rises – Fluctuations in the Astronomican and surges in Genestealer activity in the northern Segmentum Ultima lead to unrest and civil disturbances on hundreds of worlds in the region. Two outposts in the Circuit go dark.

M41.989: Betrayal – The Imperial Luna Cruiser Swift and its two escort Cobras abandon the Imperium for the growing power of the Free Corsair Coalition. The Imperial Naval Commissariat of the Ordo Praefector issues an ‘Assassinate on Sight’ command for the traitorous Admiral Reith.

M41.990: Annexation – The FCC invades and instantly conquers Zlodziei. The Imperium does not immediately respond.

M41.992: The Battle of ANKH 909 – The FCC captures the Imperial Endeavour Light Cruiser Flame so quickly that its Astropath does not have time to call for help.

M41.993: Iconoclasm – A cabal of Heretical progressives on the world Forender-b corrupt the Bishop of the little agri-colony. He preaches the inherent equality of all mankind for two years before the Ordo Hereticus notices and burns him at the stake.

M41.994: Surge – A blast of aetheric energy two light-years outside the Foraldshold system presages a thinning of the Materium boundaries, but to the surprise of observing Magi, nothing else happens.

M41.995: Preparation – Citing the increased demands on the sector’s resources from securing the borders against the FCC while also fighting the Glasians, the Cloudburst Sector Administratum increases tithe requirements from all worlds able to pay them. Civil disobedience follows on some worlds.

M41.996: Recall – The Blue Daggers summon all of their brothers on deployments outside the Sector back to prepare for the arrival of the Glasians.

M41.997: Imperial Warnings – The Tarot foretells Glasian assaults in more systems than ever before. Imperial Navy and Blue Dagger ships fly to the future invasion sites to begin preparing for the fighting.

M41.998: Oglith Burns – A force of well over two hundred sixty thousand Orks invade Oglith when a mistake in their fleet’s navigation directs them away from Gorkypark. The Sector Administratum makes the tough call of diverting most of their Glasian defenses to Oglith to attempt to secure and protect the Subsector Capital.

M41.998: Reinforcements – A task force led by over a full Battle Company of Celestial Knights arrive in Septiim to negotiate backup to reinforce the Cloudburst Sector. After stocking up on ammunition on the Gargantuan, the task force under Seventh Battle Company Captain Irlain Ironhand departs to the Forender system, led by the Strike Cruiser Citadel of Stone.

M41.998: Infiltration – After a year of debate, the Inquisition determines that the Zlodziei invasion represents too clear a threat to the security of the Imperium to be allowed to fester into something worse. However, most Sector assets are either bracing for the Glasian Migration, relieving Oglith, or aiding Rogue Traders in securing and looting the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone. Thus, four specialist teams of Throne Agents, Interrogators, and Inquisitorial special operations Scions and Stormtroopers fly to Zlodziei undercover to infiltrate and kill the Admiral that has bound the Coalition together. If needed, an emergency relief force of Clegran Hunters can dispatch to reinforce them.

M41.999: Anarchy – The Lord Primarch Roboute Guilliman, Lord of the Thirteenth and Master of Ultramar, awakens on the Throne of Corrections in the Fortress Hera on Macragge. Cadia explodes when Abaddon the Despoiler crashes a Blackstone Fortress into it. Machinations of the Custodes, Inquisition, and Drukhari result in some temporary repairs of the Golden Throne. Khaine’s Gate in the Undercore of Commorragh shatters; the ancient Aeldari weapons that Asdrubael Vect stationed there to stop a daemon incursion are instantly overcome. The 13th Black Crusade to split the Imperium begins and captures several worlds around Cadia. Mordax falls to Orks. The Hadex Anomaly and the Eye of Terror begin expanding. Belisarius Cawl begins deploying Primaris Marines. The Space Hulk Predator crashes on an Imperial mining colony on Lossos.

M42.000: The Seventh Glasian Migration – The Glasians attack the Cloudburst Sector, hitting six systems this time, including several worlds that lack the means to stop their invasions outright. One hundred thousand Orks descend on the Forald’s Legacy system and attack the Mechanicus colony there. The Blue Daggers, the Imperial Guard, the Scions, the Mechanicus, the Imperial Navy, the Deathwatch, the Inquisition, and unnumbered millions of PDF and SDF prepare for the worst as the darkness closes in.