Warhammer 40K, Dark Horizon: Prologue

Warhammer 40K, Dark Horizon: Prologue

The planet span slowly through the dark void, as though hung by a string from a child’s toy, orbiting a small blue sun. Gaseous clouds moved within its atmosphere, casting long reaching shadows across the surface of the world. The planet surface was a dull grey, baked hard and dry by the heat of the blue star it orbited. Much of the world’s landmass was clay desert, where nomadic tribes migrated, following the herds of Cantha they hunted for food. Two hives were located on this world: one at each pole, where the climate was marginally more accommodating. This world was Andarras II, the second planet of the Andarras system, and one of only three that were inhabited. The Andarras system was located on the very edge of the western arm of the galaxy, in the Segmentum Tempestus.

The system had been discovered in the nineteenth millennium, during the Age of Technology. Mankind had created the first warp-drives, allowing them to explore parts of the galaxy. Colonisation of the Andarras system did not begin until the twenty-second millennium, after the end of the first Alien Wars. Trade and commerce within the system boomed, and the Andarras system thrived during mankind’s Golden Age. Then came the warp storms. Early in the twenty-fifth millennium, massive eruptions of warp energy spread across the galaxy, devouring and destroying entire fleets of craft. Travel between systems ground to a halt, and many worlds were cut off, left to their fate. The Age of Strife had begun, ripping apart the foundations of human civilisation and decimating the galaxy.

When the Emperor of mankind rose to power in the thirtieth millennium, the warp storms abated. Interstellar travel became possible once more, and the Emperor sent forth his mighty Space Marine legions, the Adaptes Astartes, to reunite the human colony worlds. Andarras was rediscovered and reclaimed by the Space Marines, and brought into the light of the Emperor’s wisdom. However, the terrible events of the Horus Heresy nearly destroyed the system. Fully half of the planets of the system rejected the Emperor’s reign, siding with the Traitor Legions and waging a guerrilla campaign against their loyalist brothers on Andarras II and IV. When the traitor Horus fell, slain by his own father, the traitorous worlds were declared heretics and virus bombed by the Astartes legions, leaving the system a shell of what it once was. The Age of the Imperium of Man began, the struggle for mankind’s survival, and to hold what was left of the galaxy together against the alien, the mutant, and the heretic.

Andarras was now a low-priority system. With no valuable assets to speak of, the High Lords of Terra gave little notice to the loyal servants of the Emperor on those worlds. Andarras became another statistic in the unending libraries of the Administratum, one of a million worlds barely tracked by the Imperium, a recorded number amongst recorded numbers. Little of consequence was thought to exist on Andarras II.

The truth was well hidden.