Gilead Primus

Classification: Hive World
Population: Approximately sixteen billion
Geography: Arid wasteland plains, lifeless alkali flats
Planetary Governance: Lord-Militant Taleria Fylamon
Tithe Grade: Aptus Nihil (no longer capable of paying
Terra’s due)

Gilead Primus, capital world of the Gilead System, home to uncounted billions of Imperial citizens, and the seat of power of Lord-Militant Taleria Fylamon. Massive hives dominate the red rock wastelands, and the scars of centuries of aggressive strip mining cut deeply through the crimson deserts. Abandoned mining towns and way-stations dot the land, but all life on Gilead Primus is contained within the multi-kilometre tall hives. The massive skeletons of carnosaurs that would dwarf the megafauna of Nethreus litter the red sands surrounding the hives, long fallen to the silence of extinction. The hives themselves rise kilometres from the harsh desert wastes, with the uppermost spires providing the palatial housing for the lesser branches of Imperial noble families and racketeers who rule each hive.

Politics here run on a knife edge, as gaining rank
means greater privilege, power, and breathable air
above the poisonous effusions of Imperium industry.
Manufactorums ache with the suffering of billions of
workers, each enduring backbreaking labour to pay for
a taste of clean air and the nutrients to survive.
The low-orbit plate Brassyl is the only orbital
body visible from the surface. This magnificent
floating remnant of the Dark Age of Technology drifts
through the toxic clouds with the glimmer of void
shields, the static haze of atmosphere scrubbing fields,
and the shimmer of rad-barriers. Here are the fortress palaces of the elite of Gilead Primus: the nobility who
have ascended beyond the hive spires themselves.
Gilded cathedrals overseen by cardinal-confessors of
the Adeptus Ministorum rise in glory upon the plate
of Brassyl, and high-ranking Adeptus Administratum
officials make their homes among small estates filled
with luxuries. The technologies here are tended by
select representatives of the Adeptus Mechanicus,
producing an artificial paradise upon which lesser
nobles in the hive spires gaze upon with envy.
Five moons orbit the planet, all shrouded
from the surface dwellers due to the perpetual cloud
of pollutants and radioactive dust that fills the
stratosphere.

The five moons of Gilead Primus are:

Anval, an ore processor, super-massive
manufactorum and chem-plant.

Skaelas, an ore mine twice the size of Anval. This
moon’s gravity is unusually high, and houses
a penal complex where an inmate’s life span is
measured in months working the mines. The
Ogryn guards are occasionally called on to serve in
Tyleria Fylamon’s assaults.

Saintshold, the fortified barracks-moon of the
Gilead Gravediggers, the system’s Imperial Guard
regiment drilled to exemplary standards under the
watchful eye of the Lord Militant.

Daedalon, a graveyard of untold billions with more
arriving in funerary barges every day, presided
over by the Adeptus Ministorum and a Preceptory
of the Order of the Sanctified Shield.

Imperia, a gilded rock from which the wealthiest
masters of Gilead Primus — patriarchs, matriarchs
and the favoured heirs of ancient Imperial noble
bloodlines, look down upon the world they own
but have never walked. The grandeur here is
an echo of distant Terra, both in opulence and
might. Palace-fortifications are the homes of
noble families, Imperial lord-generals, and the
scions of the Navis Nobilite houses Omincara and
Taliandru. Lord Militant Fylamon herself resides
upon Imperia, in the holy site of Julyanna Gilead’s
own palace, founded in the days of the Gilead
Crusade. The most secure and populous bastion
of the Inquisition towers menacingly from Imperia,
an Ordo Hereticus fortress casting its vigilant gaze
across the system.