First Battle of Paramar - Paramar: The Paramar System lies at the outer northern edge of the Segmentum Solar, and Paramar was a vital staging post and supply terminus for Imperial expeditionary fleets, vital to the outward expansion of the Great Crusade. Paramar lies in almost direct conjunction between the Istvaan System and Terra.Before the blood spilled in such great effusion in the Drop Site Massacre of Istvaan V had even cooled, Horus' generals viewed Paramar V and the vast stockpiles of military supplies cached there with covetous eyes, and drew their plans against it.Comprising an unusual trinary star system, Paramar had the particular advantages of possessing vast (if difficult to access) mineral wealth and thirty-seven recorded main planets. Additionally, the system was located in an unusually stable Warp-synchronous location in space. Identified and entered into the Carta Imperialis by the Rogue Trader Hel DeAniasie in 803.M30, it quickly became a waypoint for the Imperium's early expansion.What was originally little more than a navigational marker would grow over time into first a largely automated Mechanicum outpost and finally, as the Great Crusade moved into the Segmentum Obscurus, was further developed into a major supply base and fuelling station for the Imperial expeditionary fleets.With no native population extant, and colonisation by normal means of the system's handful of habitable and semi-habitable worlds rendered undesirable by the prevalence of intermittently hazardous conditions from the fury of Paramar's three stars, it remained a strictly military possession, rather than becoming a governed star system of the Imperium in it own right.Military penal colonies were established on Paramar VIII and Paramar XIX, with subsurface prison-hives constructed for the workers, while a minor moon of the gas giant Paramar XXI was converted to a fully independent void station and fleet anchorage of the Armada Imperialis.Known as the Pharaeon of Paramar, this station importantly housed the largest Astrotelepathic Choir of the northern Segmentum Solar and formed a vital hub for communications between Terra and the Segmentum Obscurus. It was further protected by a cordon of dependant gun-bastions orbiting in the near-void around the Pharaeon which carried the combined firepower of an entire naval battle group, making it all but unassailable to assault.Of equal, if not greater, strategic value to the Great Crusade was Paramar V. An anomalous planet, whose structure has suggested to some scholars artificial engineering in its composition sometime in the unknown and distant past, Paramar V had clearly once been a fully life-sustaining world. Its topology bore clear signs of having been covered in oceans, and its vast untapped geological reserves of hydrocarbons indicated that it once was home to a plethora of life.Reduced for many Terran millennia to an arid, radiation-swept wasteland scoured by solar winds, with a thin oxygen atmosphere breathable only with artificial aid and wildly differing temperature extremes during its slow day/night cycle, Paramar V nevertheless was a perfect choice to use as a military cache and supply base for the Great Crusade. This was principally as promethium could be refined there in vast quantities and the Dead World's extensive cave systems could be readily transformed into armoured sub-surface bunkers for secure storage of arms and munitions running into a multi-gigaton capacity.Given into the satrapy of the Mechanicum to administer, Paramar V's investment was done with great dispatch, with overall control of the planet being centralised from a primary starport terminus near its southern polar region, designated as the Paramar Nexus. Paramar V and its facilities were later granted, in particular, as a vassal domain of the distant Forge World of Gryphonne IV by the word of the Emperor as part of the rewards made to the Forge Lords of Gryphonne for their great service and sacrifices during the Crisis of the Hungering Gyre in 891.M30.As well as serving to add greatly to the prestige and power of Gryphonne IV and its magi -- a factor known to have caused some acrimony with Mars -- Paramar V's defences gained further from this union, becoming a sub-bastion and outer forge of the Legio Gryphonicus, further adding to its importance and breadth of facilities. By the outbreak of the Heresy, Paramar was a strategic locale the Warmaster Horus could not readily choose to ignore, but one that circumstance and the tide of the Great Crusade had put outside of his sphere of influence.