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| Copyright Quentin Mabille |
" It's a cold, icy, unforgiving harsh world ! There is a great darkness that exists, slumbering beneath this cursed world. You don't need an Astropath to figure that out. You can feel it even from here where we stand in space. It killed those damned miners who defiled this place with their presence, and it will destroy us too. "
Commander Ghurtesh, commenting from the observation dome on a ship internal transmission.
Deep within the area of the Dakota Expanse called the Katorga Realm is a frozen world which, were it not for the resources found below its surface, no one would have pay any heed to its dim past history. Sheltering methite crystallized gaz and nephium, two resources sought out by the tech-priests of the Adaptus Mechanicus, Kanis is a planet covered of elevated peak mountain ranges and deep snow valleys.
Discovered by the Rogue Trader Baroness Kristina Kankas in c.M31, Kanis was named after the many wolfing creature that subsisted on its surface and the hardship they went to survive. Home to a hefty gone astray group of miners the bare ground of the planet is now landmarked by the many dig area completed prior to the Emperor Great Crusade. Boring warrens and tunnels that now stand empty, as the dark and cold void itself, the technology left behind stand at their entry and deep end area. Crumbled and totally useless, do to the countless metals brittle not being specifically resistant to the planet low down temperature, its structures frozen in time.
Scattered across the surface of this ice-covered world are the numerous clusters of man-made beating structures as what can only be called the underground lost Imperial Hives formed from the very gas-impregnated ice and snow that covers the world and anchored deeply into its bedrock. Each hive is clustered around a sinkhole where pools of nephium are found deep beneath the surface joined throw stand warrens of icy tunnels cut by long lost mechanized drills into the unyielding rock. The wind-smoothed drift edges of the hives' shattered walls are the only hint of what a civilization might have once thrived to...
For the better part of a century, stories have filtered back to the seedy underworld of the sector that Kanis is a cursed world. Whispered to be now haunted by the dead who toiled and left their sweat within the now lifeless great structures. The planet has been left alone to the strange and bulky wolfing shapes creatures that oversee the world frozen decay from within the pearlescent numb Hives shadows walls.
