Lachrimorta

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## Lachrimorta

Lachrimorta seen from orbit in Adeptus Mechanicus pict-capture, 914.M40

## Planet

### Class

Astartes Homeworld - δτ-Class Death World (former η-class Hive World)

### Military Forces

Redemptors Astartes, *Auxilia Sepulturis* (Serfs-Militant, PDF)

### System of Governance

Theocratic feudal autocracy (direct rule by Redemptors Astartes)

## Location

### System

Pelloran System

**Lachrimorta** is an Imperial Death World located in the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy in the Ultima Segmentum. It is also the Chapter homeworld of the Redemptors Chapter of Space Marines. Orbiting fourth from Pellora Primus, a large F-type star whose planetary system is unusually rich in strategically valuable resources. It possesses one natural satellite, the Forge-Moon of Ketra, where much of the Pelloran system's population lives and works in the deep-core mines and Manufactora that fuel the Redemptors Astartes' great war machine.

Lachrimorta is a bleak, deadly world. Kilometers of impenetrable toxic clouds darken the skies to a perpetual twilight and the atmosphere is saturated with radioactive fallout, volcanic ash and industrial pollutants. The surface of the world is a cratered hellscape of ash wastes and the shattered ruins of ancient Hive Cities. The dunes of rust and ash are populated by native tribes of techno-barbarians known as Ashlanders from whom the Redemptors recruit many of their Aspirants. Hive Tiberion, watched over by the virtually impenetrable defenses of the Astartes Fortress-Monastery built at its peak, is one of the few bastions of civilization on this haunted, inhospitable planet.

Millennia of work by the Redemptors and their serfs have reignited the fires of industry, and stubbornly, the shattered world has clawed its way back into the Emperor's Light.

## History

### Early History

During the Dark Age of Technology, human colony ships spread across the Galaxy and settled countless thousands of star systems. One such system in the galactic east became the home of a thriving interstellar civilization known as the **Dunbari Freehold**. The fourth planet, **Lachrimorta**, dense with rare metals and exotic volatiles, became the beating heart of the system, its population swelling over the millennia into billions packed into vast hives that grew to choke a poisoned, strip-mined landscape.

The Dunbari Freehold survived the horrors of The Cybernetic Revolt in the late 23rd millennium and the Age of Strife relatively intact. When forces of the Great Crusade arrived in the 31st millennium, the Freehold was brought quickly into compliance.

### Rebellion

Ruled for centuries by an incestuous cabal of aristocrats, the corruption of Lachrimorta's nobility finally came to a head in the form of Governor Merek Torvan, a man whose life of unfathomable luxury kindled in him a bottomless, greedy hunger for wealth and power. Taking advantage of the chaos of the early years of the 36th millennium, Torvan withdrew his planet's allegiance to the Imperium of Man and declared himself Supreme Ruler.

### Retribution and The Sundering

Five millennia after the Emperor's Crusade first arrived in the system, Lachrimorta's skies are darkened again by Imperial Voidships. The Crusade of Lachrimortan Reclamation arrived a century after Torvan seceded from the Imperium and were met by a rebellion that was well-supplied and thoroughly entrenched.

With horrendous loss of life, the Imperial forces established firm beach heads, and over months of brutal fighting, cornered rebel forces at Torvan's headquarters of Hive Tiberion. Perhaps in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of battle, perhaps the act of a madman trying to kill himself and his enemies both, Torvan ordered the sabotage of Lachrimorta's planetary power grid. Using a cache of fission weaponry, the traitors succeeded in detonating the massive plasma reactors that powered the planet's vast industries. Compressed and superheated, exotic fissionables deep in the bedrock flare with baleful energies and a catastrophic chain reaction races to the surface in a cataclysm of nuclear flame.

Half a million square kilometers of Lachrimorta's crust lift into the sky in a tsunami of incandescent earth and stone, two million gigatons of radioactive rock vaporized and sent hurtling into orbit at relativistic velocities behind a torrent of gamma rays that burns the Crusaders' voidships to free-floating subatomic particles.

The shockwaves of the detonation circled the world a full five times before dropping to subsonic speeds - billions are buried beneath toppled hab-blocks on the planet's far side, those closer to the epicenter reduced to shambling, melted corpses as ionizing radiation unravels their cells, pulverized by mountains tossed like giants' playthings or outright incinerated by an actinic fireball visible from Lachrimorta's moon.

The few survivors of the apocalypse would come to know this as **The Sundering**, and their crippled world would never be the same.

## Environment

Lachrimorta's environment has degraded in the six thousand years since the Sundering - in the 42nd millennium, walking unprotected on the surface is a death sentence. At the bottoms of its long-dry oceanic basins, millennia of industrial effluent and volcanic material have congealed into a contaminated sludge several kilometers deep. The heavy, toxic air is saturated with radioactive heavy metals and razor-edged silicate dust

### Atmosphere and Climate

Lachrimorta has a dense atmosphere primarily composed of carbon dioxide and oxygen, with significant levels of unstable radioactive compounds, vaporized heavy metals, and toxic volcanic gases. The mass of its atmosphere is three times that of the average terrestrial planet due to continuous off-gassing from the exposed mantle, and the dense air tends to move sluggishly at the surface, winds rarely rising above 20 km/h (12.4 mph).

In the southern hemisphere, colossal convection currents above The Maw spawn furious cyclones that spin off unpredictably across the wastes by the dozen. Across hundreds of kilometers of rock and ash heated to incandescence by decaying radioactives and cataclysmic volcanism, they build into furious Rad Storms. With little warning, the ashen skies begin to glow with the ghostly blue light of Cherenkov radiation, lightning rakes the land in explosive staccato and titanic winds hurl pulverized volcanic glass at speeds that strip flesh from bone.

### The Maw

For generations, Lachrimortans have known the yawning chasm in the south as **The Maw** - a smoking hole blasted through the planet's crust larger than Holy Terra's ancient Himalazian Mountains. Standing at its edge, the crater's rim stretches to the horizon, its far side obscured by boiling plumes of caustic smoke and ash twisted by hurricane-force updrafts into a cyclopean pillar so large it seems to support the sky itself. Jagged cliffs of smoldering basalt plunge half a hundred kilometers into the seething mantle, honeycombed by the cavernous burrows of Titan-sized Radiovores. The tortured, broken foothills surrounding The Maw are a treacherous waste thousands of kilometers across, where ionizing radiation pulses through the air and the ground cracks and heaves.

### The Meadows

With a grim irony, Lachrimortans call the broken, desolate wasteland of the south "the Meadows". Across the wastes, the tortured crust heaves and groans in perpetual motion, the ground prone to sudden and violent tremors. Huge crevasses split the earth with little warning, swallowing anything unlucky enough to be caught unaware.

## Wildlife

Heavy elements and radioactives spewed by the gigaton into the atmosphere by the Maw have mutated what remains of Lachrimorta's biosphere into forms universally hostile to human life. What little plant life that was able to eke a living in the polluted wastelands between hive cities during the world's golden era was thoroughly extinguished by the Sundering and the complete collapse of the ecosystem that followed. In its place, radio- and chemotrophic fungi, adapting to the brutal conditions and twisted by fallout, has flourished. Beneath armoured shells of transuranic crystal, swollen fungal blooms creep stubbornly in knee-high glades across plains of volcanic glass and industrial ash. Arthropodal megafauna feed upon these fungi and form the basis of a limited food chain.

### Sandshrikes

Across much of Lachrimorta's northern hemisphere, the perpetual twilight of the wastes is haunted by a screeching nightmare of barbed quills and razor-edged mantid limbs. Their eerie keening echoes strangely in the dense atmosphere, seeming at once far away and just beyond the next ridge. A decapodal crustacean-like animal, the Sandshrike is, apart from the Titan-sized Radiovores of the southern latitudes, Lachrimorta's deadliest predator.

The Sandshrike is comparable in size and mass to an ancient Terran draught horse, standing up to two meters at the shoulder and weighing in excess of one thousand kilograms in the largest specimens. Sandshrikes possess ten limbs, the first two pairs modified into mantis-like arms for capturing and grasping prey, their last three pairs developed into long, powerful legs with widely splayed feet specialized for gripping exposed rocks and distributing their weight across unstable substrates.

Sandshrikes hunt in groups of three to five adults called a *Chorus* by native Lachrimortans.

Sandshrikes will never stray more than a few meters from each other, each brood acting in concert as a single organism. Magos Biologis studies in the 40th millennium suggest that the piercing noises they emit contain vast amounts of information compressed into a cacaophony of overlapping high-frequency tones, allowing for near-instantaneous communication between members of a Chorus as long as they aren't separated. Effectively linked into a network, they are able to think and act as a gestalt, sharing information about their environment and prey, moving with perfect synchronicity and coordination. A mature Chorus can easily overpower an Astartes - the extreme danger they pose making them perfect targets for Redemptors Space Marine initiation rituals.

### Radiovores

One of the few creatures that have truly thrived in this hellish environment is the Lachrimortan Radiovore. Native to the hypertoxic underhives of Lachrimorta's arcologies, the Radiovore was a cat-sized centipede analogue that metabolized radioactive waste. In the thousands of years since the Sundering, these creatures have exploded in number and size. In the relatively habitable northern latitudes, Radiovores are merely a nuisance, fouling machinery by curling around reactor housings - easily dealt with by a group of adult humans. Further south, they grow in size and aggression, and near the Maw itself, the limitless flood of radiation builds Radiovores into monstrosities capable of dismantling the largest of Imperial war machines.

## Culture

### The Ashlanders

For centuries stretching into the dark ages of unrecorded history, the barren leagues of ash and dust between Lachrimorta's bustling hives were home to humans who clung stubbornly to a life of nomadic freedom.

Collectively known as Ashlanders, whether exiled to the wastes or born there, these people have thrived in a harsh and unforgiving environment where only the hardiest and the fiercest could endure. They travelled the shifting ash dunes in great caravans of landships - massive vehicles large enough to carry entire clans, propelled across the seas of soot and industrial waste by tattered sails painted with barbaric glyphs.

When the Sundering brought Imperial civilization on Lachrimorta to its knees, the Ashlanders adapted. Prior, the tribes often adopted exiles from the hives, and so they maintained a level of contact with the rest of humanity. After the collapse of civilization and the cataclysmic devastation of the environment, the Ashlanders turned inward and their culture became more insular and idiosyncratic. They are known for their fanatical death cults, whose adherents wear bones and skins and consume the flesh of their dead. Their caravans are fiercely defended, and they have been known to attack outsiders with the ferocity of wild animals.

The prevailing belief system among the Ashlanders revolves around the Balance of Life and Death. They see death as natural and necessary, the default state of all things and the state to which all things must inevitably return. These beliefs have permeated the culture of the Redemptors Space Marines as more and more Ashlanders were chosen for recruitment over the centuries.

## The Iron Tower

The Fortress-Monastery of the Redemptors Space Marines, **The Iron Tower** has been built atop a ruin dating back to the cataclysm that killed Lachrimortan civilization. The colossal armored prow of an Imperial battleship rears above the storm-swept dunes; speared through Tiberion Hive's sides, the ship's monstrous hull stretches kilometres into Lachrimorta's wounded sky.

The Iron Tower rises from the ancient ship's superstructure and the spires of the old hive city, a massive, sprawling complex of fortifications and gun batteries. The ship's weapons systems have been repaired, its hull reinforced and its titanic void shields reactivated.

Stretching for endless kilometres through the ruins of urban sprawl at the base of the hive is a labyrinth of trenches, pillboxes, redoubts, sandbags, watch towers, artillery and heavy weapons emplacements. Here the art of combat engineering is practiced and perfected by the Redemptors, each new generation of Marines building the walls higher, the trenches deeper.

## Industry

Like the rest of the biosphere, Lachrimortans subsist mainly on fungi. In vast halls hollowed out of Hive Tiberion's abandoned hab-blocks, endless acres of bloated radiotrophic fungi practically grow themselves. The true hives of the wider Imperium with their countless teeming billions necessitate Corpse Guilds to recycle their dead into Corpse-starch - on Lachrimorta, these duties are performed by serfs who feed the dead to endless fields of softly fluorescing mushrooms, and later retrieve the bones that remain for interment in Tiberion's catacombs.

Under the dour supervision of the Redemptors, the hive's inhabitants are driven in shifts night and day, repairing and reactivating the thousands of Manufactora that riddle Tiberion's haunted bowels. In the Era Indomitus, Lachrimorta now produces nearly all the material needs of its ruling Astartes in concert with a nearby forgeworld.

### Exports

The bewildering array of exotic radionuclides and transuranic metals that permeate Lachrimorta's lithosphere are prized for their numerous industrial and military applications. Extracted in greater and greater volumes with each generation of new serfs born into Hive Tiberion's cavernously empty hab-blocks, this plethora of valuable material is funneled back into Manufactora that ring day and night with the thunder of industry.

Redemptors Astartes make regular sorties from the Iron Tower into the wastes, cleansing the toppled ruins of hive cities of their degenerate inhabitants, and unearthing the Imperial remains buried under centuries of rubble. Occasionally, the deepest layers of these hives yield recovered archaeotech, often degraded or destroyed by the relentless march of time. Even broken and incomplete, these artifacts are priceless to the Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and by centuries-old treaties with the Cairn Lords of the Redemptors, holy weapons of war are bought with their trade.

One of Lachrimorta's most valuable exports is its people, especially the nomadic Ashlanders; hardened by a lifetime lived in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable, they are natural-born survivalists and expert killers, hardy and resilient and with a technical resourcefulness bred from life and death necessity. They make ideal bodyguards and mercenaries as long as puritan Imperials can tolerate their referring to the Emperor as the "Vulture King" or "Lord of Bones" and other such quaint cultural idioms.