Damascus

**This article, Damascus, was written by RavensOfLondinium. It may be linked to any page without asking for the author's permission.**

## Forge World

### Affiliation

Imperium of Man
Adeptus Mechanicus

### Class

Forge World
Artificial World

## Location

### System

Damascus

"*If you wish to hide something from view, build a wall. If you wish to keep people from touching your wall, build a fence around it. If you wish to keep people from noticing your fence, build a circus in front of it.*"
—Magos Magnificat Biologis Ria Colorado
**Damascus** is a relatively minor Forge World of the Adeptus Mechanicus, located within the Albion Sector, on the border between Segmentum Ultima and Segmentum Obscuris. Oral history holds that the world was founded by Mechanicus Tech-Priests hand-picked by Dominatus Dominus Belisarius Cawl sometime between the thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth millennium. Cawl himself asserts that he has no recollection of the selection or founding, and the records of Damascus are vague with regard to timing; clues can only be gathered by when mentions of the forgeworld began appearing in records of other worlds.

Though labeled a world for purposes of Imperial administration, it is not a planet. Instead, Damascus is a collection of servitors and ships carrying out asteroid mining; wheel and ball stations hosting research labs and living spaces; and a primary rod-shaped station known as the **Great Forge of Damascus** which hosts the majority of manufactoria. This menagerie is collectively designated an Artificial World. Given its population of barely two billion, however, it hardly deserves the designation, let alone inclusion in the *Cartographica Imperialis*.

Various economic and political factors keep the world on the books. The largest such reason is that Damascus provides wargear for the White Ravens Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes; the Albion Vigil of the Sisters of Silence, including the Silver Crows cadre; Adepta Sororitas forces throughout the Galactic North; initial load-outs for regiments of the Imperial Guard raised from planets of the sector, including the Hive World Londinium; and substantial stores of munitions for Armory Worlds of the Departmento Munitorium. These arms, armor, and munitions are compliant with Imperial military specifications, but are of a higher quality, a subtly more finished appearance and tighter tolerances than those built by the common run of Hive World or even Forge World manufactoria.

If asked about this anomalous level of quality, Tech-Priests of Damascus will point to their primary manufactoria hub, a cyclopean cylinder a hundred miles in diameter, a thousand miles long, and with outer walls from five to twenty miles thick. The ends of the cylinder are open, and raw materials are introduced at one end, with finished products extruded from the other. Within this colossal structure, the Tech-Priests say, all aspects of the manufacturing environment are controlled, including gravity, atmospheric composition, and even ambient light levels. This obsessive and necessary control leads, they say, to finer end products than those produced by their brothers who settle for what is ambient upon the surface of their worlds.

## History

### The Founding

Though the records of Damascus' founding are vague and redacted, one thing is agreed upon by all oral history and tradition: It was all Cawl's fault.

According to Damascene tradition, a Rogue Trader returned from Wilderness Space in the Galactic Northeast with news of an unusual system. Unusual, first, because its primary was an orangeish Red Giant star off the Main sequence; unusual secondly because it held no rocky planets, only a hot Jovian and an ice giant, with the rest of the system's mass agglomerated into three distinct asteroid belts; unusual thirdly because the Rogue Trader's prospecting crews had discovered large deposits of Blackstone in those asteroid belts. Cawl did not yet know the full properties of Blackstone, nor why ancient and unknown Xenos craftsman had built fortresses and enigmatic pylons of it, but he knew that a supply of the material almost guaranteed to be free of Necron corruption might be valuable in the future. Verifying that the Trader had not sold the location of the system to anyone else, Cawl paid for all data the ship had obtained in the system, and arranged for the Rogue Trader's Gellar Field to fail the next time the vessel entered the Warp.

Perhaps a century passed; perhaps a millennium, while Cawl readied his experiment. Cawl believed that knowledge hoarded in darkness was knowledge wasted, and further, that the true Quest for Knowledge was to pursue technological innovation rather than ritualistically and mindlessly maintain the Imperium's existing technology base. These ideas being heresy among the Cult Mechanicus, he proceed slowly, identifying young Tech-Acolytes of similar mind and training them. He needed a place far from the eyes of his fellow Magi to put these young Tech-Heretics and the experiment they represented, and his thoughts fell on the system, designated only by a catalogue number, for which he'd purchased the data. Gathering his most promising students, he created a colonization fleet and sent them off into the darkness without him.

"*The sound of science happening is not "Eureka!" It is "Huh. That's strange...."*"
—Pre-Mechanicum Tech-Sage Klark Azimof
### Hiding in Plain Sight

A research station would still be subject to oversight from other Magi. Only a forge world would be self-contained enough, able to shroud itself enough, to hide the depths of tech-heresy contemplated. Upon arrival at the newly named Damascus system in the Albion sector, therefore, Cawl's proteges set about constructing the epitome of manufactoria: a structure of such proportion that adjectives fail in the task of description. Using materials refined from the asteroids in which the system was so wealthy, they built a cylinder with open ends, hollow on the inside for the construction of projects such as starships -- indeed, the hundred mile diameter of the interior, combined with its thousand mile length, mean that an entire Imperial Navy flotilla could be constructed at one time. The cylinder's outer walls, which tapered from five miles thick near the cylinder ends to twenty miles thick at the center, contained subordinate manufactoria for smaller projects. To keep the new Forge World relevant and useful to the Imperium, the founding magi focused this colossal engine of creation on the tools of destruction.

"*The beginning of Science is the question "Why?" The beginning of Engineering is the question "How?"*"
—Pre-Mechanicum Tech-Sage Hynline
While the **Great Forge of Damascus**, as the primary manufactoria cylinder came to be known, held the attention of outsiders, the Magi who based themselves in this forgeworld created their own stations for research and habitation, in myriad designs as varied as the Magi themselves. In these stations, completely controlled by the Magos who built or occasionally inherited them, the majority of research took place far from prying eyes.

The Magi of Damascus and their acolytes followed the Cawline heresy: rather than being content to follow the copied standard templates they had brought with them, rather than simply building by rote and ritual, they sought to *understand* why the templates were laid out the way they were; how the machines they built created the effects they observed. As they gained understanding, they went a step farther: they *improved* what they made. They created STCs of these improved designs for use in the Great Forge, counterfeiting signs of antiquity and passing the constructs off as simply variants uncovered in far places. Distance, and ultimately the ***Cicatrix Maledictum*** kept their sin from view of the wider Cult Mechanicus, while utility to the Imperium's various military forces and the power of the Mechanicus keep even the dread Inquisition from looking too closely.

### The Final Secret

Unknown even to the Damascus Fabricator-General, there is another, more portentous secret concealed in Damascus: The Angel. Though the Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus believe that they have the Emperor's Angel of Destruction safely contained, what they have is a decoy created by Genetor Extremis Ria Colorado and substituted for the actual Angel in a feat of slight-of-hand perpetrated by the Archmagos Cawl. Following this astoundingly audacious and brazenly heretical theft, Cawl sent the Magos Magnificat Biologis to Damascus with her angelic prize.

The station the Magos constructed is a layered ball. At its center lies the stasis coffin in which the Angel is contained, and around this, an additional, Cawl-patterned stasis chamber was built, to which only the Magos Magnificat Biologis Ria Colorado herself has access. This sphere is concealed as one of four vessels of the fusion reactor which powers the station, a deception maintained down to false read-outs on the reactor control panels.

## Notable Individuals

* **Ria Colorado**:

"*Her name is Ria and she dances on the sands, just like the murdered river sweeping through a ruined land.*"
—Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl

the Genetor Extremis and Magos Magnificat Biologis known as Hekatonkheira, the hundred-handed. She is known to be at least four millennia old, with knowledge and an understanding of biology second only to that of her mentor, the Archmagos Cawl... and even that secondary status is subject to argument and caveat. Hekatonkheira lurks like a spider at the center of her web, rarely seen in her own body. Instead, she makes use of Homunculi: vat-grown Human bodies -- most often of shapely young women -- she turns into servitors by decraniation, replacing much of the shell's brain with machinery that allows the Magos to remotely control the body. Nor does she generally send a single shell. It is customary for her to send forth a dozen at a time, grown from the same gene-stock so as to be perfectly matched, and one of her habits is the "thinking pattern," in which she sets the meat shells to dancing while she considers. One favorite pattern is the ancient beelee dance known as Mhakrana, in which the shells sort themselves into two circles, four in the inner, eight in the outer, their footfalls synchronized within a microsecond of each other as they sway and gesture obscenely.
"*Bouncing mammaries are worth a thousand, thousand words. It is a weakness of flesh, even among those who would swear it not so.*"
—Magos Magnificat Biologis Ria Colorado

Though not Damascus' Fabricator-General, nor even one of the founding Magi, the Hekatonkheira's political power may be the primary reason the relatively small Forge World has not been absorbed into some other administrative umbrella. The Magos maintains that she wishes only to be left alone to conduct her research, that she does not wish to become a bureaucratic apparatchik filling out forms reporting having filled out forms on the filling out of forms, and complaining about the need to restock said forms. In practice, however, she maintains a wary eye on as many power structures as she can, keeping apprised and occasionally interfering to keep them from disturbing her projects.

Magos Colorado has pledged a substantial bounty to anyone who can bring her a Tyranid Narvhal, living or dead. Outside observers speculate that the Genetor Extremis is searching for alternative methods of Faster-Than-Light travel which can be depended upon even if the warp storms currently disrupting the galaxy do not resolve.