Praxes

Located in the Ultimata Segmentum towards the galactic core, Praxes was in close proximity to a number of Mechanicus worlds. In ages past long before the Imperium, the planet had once been a major mining colony supplying nearby forge worlds. However, as the mineral wealth of Praxes became exhausted, the planet fell into obscurity until it was almost completely forgotten in the chaos of the Age of Strife. By the time Praxes was rediscovered, Imperial explorators found a barren, arid world with a formerly civilized human population reduced to warring techno-barbarian gun-tribes that fought over what scraps remained of their once-prosperous society. Yet even rediscovery did not change the planet’s fortunes, for once Martian tech priests and Administratum bureaucrats had inspected the planet and stripped it of any salvageable pieces of technology, Praxes remained unclaimed, its apparent lack of value foreclosing any serious attempt at recolonization. It was this abandoned planet that the Sixteenth Legion chose to remake into the first and greatest of its mustering worlds.

As the Great Crusade progressed, the Sixteenth Legion was constantly redeployed from crusade front to crusade front across the galaxy. Rarely lingering in any particular region long enough to avail itself of the logistics supply lines that usually followed in the wake of the great expeditionary fleets, the legion soon found itself stretched thin and depleted. A logistics world was needed for the legion, and Praxes suited that need well. The planet’s central location near the galactic core eased the strain of cross-galaxy redeployments, and its proximity to a number of Mechanicus worlds in the core region expedited requisition and resupply efforts. Though the planet was undeveloped, the lack of competing claims for it made Praxes an ideal independent Astartes world.

Under the control of the Sixteenth Legion, Praxes once again became an important world. Interstellar shipments brought vast quantities of munitions, war machines, and supplies to be stockpiled in legion armory vaults. Meanwhile, legion warships returning from active warzones ferried countless enslaved prisoners - adolescent orphaned survivors of the legion’s brutal campaigns - to Praxes for processing, indoctrination, and forced conscription into new generations of legion initiates. Imperial and Mechanicus emissaries frequented the halls of the legion fortress, coordinating with Astartes officers on the needs of the legion and on matters of the Great Crusade at large. In a few short years, Praxes transformed into the ideal Astartes world, becoming a sort of foster homeworld for the legion. Still, the world would offer the Sixteenth Legion yet one more boon.

The scavenging gun-tribes, descendants of the original mining colonists of millenia past, did not take to the sudden invasion of their planet kindly. With the newly-built Imperial fortifications encroaching onto the scavenging grounds won by the blood of their ancestors, the gun-tribes launched raids on Imperial facilities. The Astartes of the Sixteenth Legion responded with their characteristic thoroughness and mercilessness, razing tribal camps and scattering survivors. The techno-barbarians, though hardened by a semi-nomadic lifestyle fraught with constant peril and endemic warfare, ultimately proved unable to resist the might of the Emperor’s transhuman warriors and were subjugated. Yet even in the midst of the pacification campaign, the officers of the Sixteenth Legion saw use for Praxes’s gun-tribes. Rather than be hunted down, the adolescent survivors were captured for conscription while those too old to undergo the uplifting process were allowed to flee into the inhospital wildernesses of Praxes and nurse their wounds - and their hatred for the Imperium.

For generations to come, new Astartes initiates would be baptized by fire as they were sent to clash with the Praxes tribesman, routinely culling the techno-barbarians for suitable future initiates. In little more than a decade, Praxes would become an appreciable source of manpower for the Sixteenth Legion, with a sizable minority of all legion initiates coming from the Praxes gun-tribes, greatly supplementing the number taken following the Sixteenth’s other campaigns. To many outside observers, the cruelty of sending newly uplifted initiates, especially those from Praxes, to wage war on the gun-tribes, bordered on inhumanity. But to the officers of the Sixteenth Legion, the cycle of violence and hatred was a necessary cruelty that hardened the hearts of legion initiates; the Great Crusade required remorseless killers. After all, they reasoned, had the Emperor not professed the same when he took their families from them on Terra and remade them into his angels of death those many decades ago?

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