Jericho Reach - Age of Shadow: During the time that became known as the Age of Shadow in the Reach, darkness and anarchy reclaimed the Jericho Sector. This period saw the glory of the Jericho Sector wiped away, reverting the entire region to an area known only as the Jericho Reach on the astrographic charts of the Imperium's Navigators, an area of the galaxy untouched by the Emperor's light and awash in evil.The decline began during the time of misrule, unbelief, and tyranny known as the Age of Apostasy in the early 36th Millennium. During this time of civil war when the Imperium came closer to its own destruction than any other time since the Horus Heresy, for reasons unknown, communication between the Jericho Sector and the core of the Imperium became more and more difficult. Astropaths had an increasingly hard time sending and receiving intact telepathic messages, and starships travelling in and out of the region were lost to Warp Storms that gathered as if to increase the sector’s isolation. To make matters even worse, a massive Ork WAAAGH! on a scale unseen in millennia utterly severed the great trade routes between the sector and the powerful worlds of the Imperial Realm of Ultramar to the galactic south. With the Imperium as whole awash in strife and war, the Jericho Sector became marginalised and forgotten, ultimately slipping beyond the reach of the Imperium without a single Administratum bureaucrat on Terra noting its passing.The few records of this time that remain indicate a corrosive dread came to pervade the sector after it was cut-off from the rest of the Imperium. Slowly, one by one, the planets previously under direct Imperial rule from the sector capital world of Verronus slipped away. Unable to gain aid from the broader Imperium, some fell to warring on their neighbours as a result of paranoia or unbridled ambition; their leaders laid low by the flaws in their own hearts, or because they clutched at the promises of the Dark Gods. Others, such as Verronus itself, succumbed to rebellion from within. Almost within a single generation, much of the Jericho Sector had slipped into anarchy and feral barbarism due to its isolation. When the last Imperial naval patrol was recalled to Kar Duniash to take on pressing duties, they would report that the last tatters of Imperial order in the Jericho Sector were but small and ragged circles of light beset by encroaching darkness. Soon these too fell, unsung and disregarded, and the sector's Age of Shadow would claim its worlds and its people for over five millennia. Of the notable events of this period, almost nothing has been recorded. Only the Astartes of the Deathwatch know some of what happened during the Age of Shadow and even they recorded little, for their attention was cast elsewhere and their concerns encompassed far greater events than the fates of a few forlorn worlds on the edge of human space.The formal end of Imperial civilisation within the Jericho Sector came when the great census and reassessment of the Domains of Man known as the Third Mesericordia Imperialis Mundi was declared in the 37th Millennium by the High Lords of Terra. In the course of that extensive survey of the Emperor's realm, the Jericho Sector, along with a dozen other sectors along the Eastern Fringe, were decreed to no longer exist until an Imperial Crusade could once again return them to the Imperium’s fold. The region was re-designated by Imperial astrocartographers as the Jericho Reach, and so returned in name and nature to the darkness from which it had been raised almost six thousand Terran years earlier. The Warp Storms and temporal distortion that so isolated the Jericho Reach at the start of the Age of Shadow have never truly abated, while the Imperium’s claimed borders have only shrunken further away from it. As a result, voyaging into the region remained a dangerous task only undertaken by the Deathwatch and a few Inquisitors over the last four millennia. This state of isolation changed, however, with the discovery and opening of the Jericho Maw Warp Gate which linked the Jericho Reach to the Calixis Sector on the other side of the galaxy, making this region accessible to the Imperium once again and unleashing the inevitable Imperial Crusade.