Malachos Tertius
Anvil of War
Classification (multiple allowed)
Daemon World
Sector / Segmentum
Ultima Segmentum
Description
Malachos Tertius lies in the Ultima Segmentum, about thirty light-years east of the death world Vorax Prime, which across the segmentum border already counts as Segmentum Solar. The world lies on a desolate trade line that once moved freight between the forge worlds as far as Forge World Kethrak-Prime. The nearest fleet base, the watch station Hesperon, lies eleven warp jumps away. Two centuries ago ore freighters and grain transports still passed here. Today the navigation registers record only warning buoys whose signals break off at irregular intervals.
As an agricultural colony, Malachos Tertius supplied grain, algae paste and livestock to the mining outposts around it. The harvest reports of the last years before 847.M41 survive and are unremarkable: good yields, a fungal rot in the southern belt, three executions for tithe fraud. Then a warp fold swallowed the planet. For three years it was missing from every star chart. When it returned, it was changed.
In the meantime the ships of a fallen Dark Mechanicus lord, whom later fragments name Archmagos Velkhar Sorn, had crashed there. His retinue of daemons has declared the surface its home. The forbidden machines from his hulls have grown into the wreckage of the colonial city like flesh. Piston arms jut from storage walls, cable strands run like sinews through collapsed grain silos, and some generators beat in a rhythm that recalls a heartbeat. The ruins still smoke from fires that never went out. No recording shows a fire spreading or dying. It simply goes on burning.
Beneath the city the caves drip with blue-black blood. They have joined into a continuous system in which the classical architecture of the Imperium is distorted into glandular, hormonally pulsing structures. Pillars swell and contract. Vaulted arches secrete fluid. An aquila relief over a former chapel entrance is said to have grown teeth.
A sealed prohibition of the Adeptus Mechanicus keeps all survey fleets away. It gives no reasons, only a code sequence that refers every enquiry to higher-level archives. Even the Black Ships avoid the coordinates. Their psykers fall into catatonia on approach alone, and of those carried out of the cells afterwards, none has ever spoken again.
As an agricultural colony, Malachos Tertius supplied grain, algae paste and livestock to the mining outposts around it. The harvest reports of the last years before 847.M41 survive and are unremarkable: good yields, a fungal rot in the southern belt, three executions for tithe fraud. Then a warp fold swallowed the planet. For three years it was missing from every star chart. When it returned, it was changed.
In the meantime the ships of a fallen Dark Mechanicus lord, whom later fragments name Archmagos Velkhar Sorn, had crashed there. His retinue of daemons has declared the surface its home. The forbidden machines from his hulls have grown into the wreckage of the colonial city like flesh. Piston arms jut from storage walls, cable strands run like sinews through collapsed grain silos, and some generators beat in a rhythm that recalls a heartbeat. The ruins still smoke from fires that never went out. No recording shows a fire spreading or dying. It simply goes on burning.
Beneath the city the caves drip with blue-black blood. They have joined into a continuous system in which the classical architecture of the Imperium is distorted into glandular, hormonally pulsing structures. Pillars swell and contract. Vaulted arches secrete fluid. An aquila relief over a former chapel entrance is said to have grown teeth.
A sealed prohibition of the Adeptus Mechanicus keeps all survey fleets away. It gives no reasons, only a code sequence that refers every enquiry to higher-level archives. Even the Black Ships avoid the coordinates. Their psykers fall into catatonia on approach alone, and of those carried out of the cells afterwards, none has ever spoken again.
Fauna & Flora
No flora as the Imperium knows it: fungus beds that twitch in time with the generators, and a mesh of cable and sinew that covers the silos. Rats that live in the caves have no eyes any more and find their way all the same.
Population & Society
Before 847.M41 some forty thousand people lived on the agricultural colony; what returned of them stands in no register. The retinue of the fallen Dark Mechanicus lord has declared the surface its home, and the navigation registers carry only warning buoys now.