Spinward Front - Avitohol: Th Feral World of Avitohol lies within the borders of the Periphery Sub-sector, and has been part of the region’s infrastructure since the founding of the Calixis Sector almost two thousand standard years ago. When the Angevin Crusade first made planetfall there under the command of Duke Severus I, they found a fertile, windswept land ruled by primitive and warlike human nomads. This barbaric culture lived and died by the possession of the great herds of gargantuan bovine creatures thought to have been genetically engineered from the yaks of Old Earth and brought to Avitohol at some point during the Age of Technology. These beasts have such prodigious appetites that they must continually migrate across the endless plains and they are so massive and stubborn that all the nomad tribes could do was follow along in their wake or on their backs.This mode of existence led to the Imperium drawing upon the herds of Avitohol as a food source, but it also meant that the human tribes would never be able to settle and enjoy the fruits of their world’s integration into the greater empire of Man. Instead, the tribes maintained their aeons-old ways and the Chartist Captainsof the Calixis Sector came once each season to purchase a share of Avitohol’s mighty herds to feed the teeming masses on the distant Hive Worlds. This way of life continued almost without interruption until, one day, the skies turned black with the contrails of countless thousands of drop vessels and soon the grasslands were set alight in a raging inferno that swept from one horizon to the next. WAAAGH! Grimtoof had come to Avitohol and nothing would ever be the same again.On Avitohol, Ghenghiz Grimtoof Git-Slaver found a world teeming with humans and ripe for exploitation. Despite being fearsome warriors, the natives were tragically outgunned and, though the tribes came together for the first time in recorded history, they could not defeat the overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty rampaging Orks. Within three standard months the steppes were reduced to a smoking, corpse-strewn wasteland. Those nomad warriors that could not flee to the deepest wilderness regions were enslaved. Grimtoof informed the captured natives that they would be allowed to live, so long as they worked to build what he believed would be his greatest work -- a world of foundries, ruled over by a palace as great, in his mind, as any the Imperium had ever built.The invasion of Avitohol caused great consternation within the ranks of the Spinward Front High Command, for no stable Warp route exists between it and the nearest Ork-held star system. This is not to say that a route could not be forged,n but traversing the uncharted currents of the Warp in such a manner is generally beyond all but the most experienced or desperate Navigators. Not anticipating an assault from that vector, the Imperium had failed to reinforce Avitohol, and so when the Orks came they were unopposed. To make matters worse, Avitohol represents the apex of a new Greenskin salient, the tip of WAAAGH! Grimtoof plunged deep into the Periphery. When Avitohol fell, heads rolled amongst the general staff, several veteran commanders losing their stars or their lives as punishment for the unforgivable dereliction in duty.Its upper echelons drastically re-ordered, Spinward Front High Command ordered a hasty counter-attack on Avitohol before the Git-Slaver could fully consolidate his gains. The Imperium launched the largest planetstrike operation of the conflict with the Orks -- twenty entire Imperial Guard regiments landing in three successive waves and striking out for Grimtoof ’s half-built “kapital.” The battles that followed have entered into the consciousness of the Spinward Front High Command staff corps, or at least those not executed for incompetence by the Commissariat following the massive Imperial defeat that ensued. Despite initial gains, the Imperial Guard soon found their advances surrounded on all sides by far larger numbers of Orks than any had prepared for. In days, the assault ground down into a bloody slog to win every metre, before stalling entirely and becoming a bitter war of attrition. Lord Marshal Ghanzorik was faced with the choice of committing still more resources to a battle it was clear to all he could not hope to win. Vowing to return to Avitohol at the head of an army ten times the size of that committed to the operation, Ghanzorik ordered those Imperial troops who could leave to do so. It is estimated that less than thirty per cent of the units on Avitohol when the withdrawal order was given made it off-world. The remainder either died glorious but unheralded deaths, refusing to surrender to impossible odds, or they were captured and set to work in Grimtoof ’s foundries.In the aftermath of the failed assault on Avitohol, Lord Marshal Ghanzorik unleashed a ferocious purge of his intelligence units, who he blamed for multiple failures. Not a single intelligence officer between the rank of General and Major is said to have survived Ghanzorik’s purge, further reinforcing his reputation and his nickname of “Old Steel and Blood.” In so doing, Ghanzorik became something of a folk hero amongst the Imperial Guard's rank-and-file, whose ire was shifted from the command corps to the intelligence advisors.With the decapitation of the Spinward Front’s intelligence infrastructure came another purge, one that could only be instigated with the express aid of the Inquisition's Ordos Calixis. Avitohol was declared a Forbidden World and all reference to what had occurred there was struck from the records. Lethal dataslayers were released into Cogitator networks across the entire sector and, while many physical or isolated records no doubt survive, almost all mention of the fate of Avitohol and its would-be liberators is now destroyed. So far as those that ply the Warp routes of the Calixis Sector are concerned, Avitohol is simply out of bounds, none having any notion that it is, in fact, the capital world of a nascent Ork empire on the very edges of the Calixis Sector, nor that millions of natives and captured Imperial Guardsmen labour there under the yoke of Ghenghiz Grimtoof the Git-Slaver’s despotic regime, forced to manufacture arms and ammunition for the Orks.Though the Imperium has withdrawn its forces from Avitohol, the world is far from free of war. Firstly, numerous Imperial Guardsmen escaped the initial encirclements that slaughtered so many of their fellows and even years later many of these still fight on, organised into ad hoc units and striking the Orks wherever they can. The object of these attacks is two-fold -- if sufficient damage can be done to the Orks’ war effort, then perhaps the Imperium will consider a return to Avitohol, butthey also hope to free as many as possible of the hundreds of thousands of their fellows captured during the withdrawal. Ork hunter-killer-eater mobs roam the blasted steppes in search of insurgents and, to many, it is as if war has never gone away. Some of the most organised of these guerrillas have made contact with those surviving nomad tribes of humans that still exist in the deepest wildernesses and have launched a number of highly effective joint attacks on the Greenskins' infrastructure.