Phaedra
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This article is about the Dark Coil planet; for the Blood Angels campaign, see Phaedra Campaign. |
You’ve come to a water world and found a grey-green hell like no other. The oceans of Phaedra are choked with islands and in turn the islands are overrun with a wildfire cancer of vegetation – a morass of stinking kelp, strangling vines and towering fungal cathedrals. Worse still, the islands themselves are alive. Just look beneath the waterline and you’ll see them breathing and pulsing.
| Map | Basic Data | Planetary Image | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Name: | Phaedra | 
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| Segmentum: | Eastern Fringe[1c] | ||
| Sector: | Damocles Gulf[5] | ||
| System: | Yuxa System[5] | ||
| Population: | |||
| Affiliation: | Imperium of Man[1j] | ||
| Class: | Ocean World[1b] | ||
Phaedra (Fi’draah to the T’au[2]) is an inhospitable ocean world noted for its exceptionally difficult biosphere, with only its lack of macropredators or cataclysmic geological events preventing it from being classified as a true death world.[1b] It is home to the Saathlaa, a sanctioned strain of mutants descended from humanity, and may itself be sentient.[1e][1b]
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This page contains spoilers for: | A Sanctuary of Wyrms (Short Story), Altar of Maws (Short Story), Fire Caste (Novel), Adeptus Mechanicus: Vanguard (Short Story) |
Contents
Overview
One of two inhabited worlds of the eleven planets in the Yuxa System,[5] itself part of the Damocles Gulf[5] region of the Eastern Fringe,[1c] Phaedra is described as a “grey-green hell” and “too lazy to be a death world, too bitter to be anything else”.[1b] Its surface is over eighty-percent water,[2] which takes on a yellow, blotchy, curdled appearance and smells of sewage thanks to glutinous algae blooms,[1d] divided into oceans and typhoon-wracked seas such as the Sargaatha.[1b][1f] Ancient coral growths form landmasses, some considered continents, the largest of which is Dolorosa.[1b][2] This archipelago comprises many islands, notably those designated by the Imperium as Topaz, Vermillion, Magenta, and Azure.[1b][1c][1e][1h] At least one is large enough to contain an inland sea, named Lake Amrythaa, meaning “Wellspring of Life” in the local tongue.[1j]
Dense jungles of fleshy trees with bladder-like fronds, caustic spidervines, enormous, omnipresent, bioluminescent fungi, and stinging, anemone-like wyrmtrees known collectively as the Mire grow in the grey mud produced by the slow breakdown of dead mega-corals and the constant sticky rain.[1b][1d][2] Spores are shed in such numbers from these jungles that both off-worlders and engines often require sophisticated filters to function, particularly in the high-altitude band dubbed the “Strangle Zone”.[1e][1j][2] Narcotics can be rendered from certain spore strains, including the stimm Glory.[1b] Despite the cloying atmospheric canopy, global temperatures never drop low enough for “winter” conditions.[1b]
Rivers cut across the coral, turgid and milky and swarming with vermin save when something worse than them slips into the water.[4] Snaking its way across Dolorosa is the great Qalaqexi River, fed by a tangle of inland tributaries at the heart of the continent.[1g] This, the darkest, dense-ist, and most dangerous land on the planet, is called Sector 0-31 by the T’au and the Dolorosa Coil by the Imperium.[2] Entering the tainted Coil may trap or corrupt the trespasser or even shunt them to another realm, a process known colloquially as “slipping.”[4]
Phaedra is home to a variety of fauna, like the aquatic mirewyrm and the poisonous skrab.[1b][1f] The planet is also a breeding ground for invasive diseases and fungal pathogens, including foot rot, gutrot, mire fever, swamp burn, greyscale rash, and splinterskin.[1j] Humans, T’au, Kroot of various breeds, and Tyranids have all been infected by various local diseases.[1b][1j][1k][2] One of the rarest- and most extreme- of these found on Phaedra is fungal leprosy. Only one in a thousand humans have the correct blood type to foster its growth, but once such a person is infested there is no cure.[1d] Natural disasters like spore tsunamis, silt quakes, and hurricanes are not unheard of.[3]
During the final years of the planet’s failed second pacification a Warp anomaly nicknamed the Ghostblight appeared above Phaedra’s troposphere.[3] At first invisible except to psy-sensitives and advanced instrumentation, projections estimated it was feeding off of the planet’s corruption (or vice versa) and would rapidly growing into a Category Gamma Warp Storm.[3]
Planetary Sentience
Some deployed to Phaedra, humans and t’au alike, insist that the planet itself is sentient. Enough merit was found in the claim for the Ecclesiarchy to investigate, quickly focusing on the mega-coral islands. Though they confirmed that the corals do pulse and breathe the official finding was that they are only minor xenos, akin to mindless animals, and no sapience was present. Despite this, many firmly reject those findings and it remains common to refer to “Lady Phaedra”, “She”, and “Her”.[1b][1j][2]
History
Likely found and settled by humans during the Dark Age of Technology, when the Imperium of Man rediscovered and pacified Phaedra roughly one thousand years prior to the T’au’s arrival, its inhabitants had significantly degenerated from baseline mankind over the previous tens of thousands of years.[1c] Without access to any stone deposits the population learned to shape coral, creating cities of globular, organic buildings both above and tunneled deep beneath the surface.[1b] Temples dedicated to now-forgotten gods dominated their districts and outposts, the structures later being noted to both completely prevent plant growth nearby, and serve to imprison some of the horrors with which their builders once consorted.[4] Eventually these cities were abandoned and their now-tribal inhabitants, calling themselves the Saathlaa, reduced to squatting in villages of igloos built from sticks, stretched animal hides, and fungus, built around their chieftain’s halls.[1f][1g][1k][2]
One account holds that limited industrial infrastructure began to be installed by the Adeptus Mechanicus shortly after the first pacification, including the sizable offshore Promethium rig-city later known as the Iron Diadem.[1j] Another story, however, says the platform is much newer, dating back only two centuries before the T’au conflict, and was primarily built to protect an Explorator starship.[3] It is certain that at some point an Inquisition research base was built in the Dolorosa Coil and garrisoned by the Deathwatch of the Ordo Xenos. Applications for the planet’s infectious fungi were studied there, primarily as weapons and poisons, but the program was abandoned and the station sealed decades before the conflict with the T’au, following disastrous fungus-Genestealer hybridization and containment breach.[2]
Second Pacification
See also — Wintertide Concordance
T’au forces lead by the Ethereal Aun’o Hamaan engaged the Imperium at Phaedra.[1m][1o] Through extensive diplomatic work by the Water Caste diplomats under Por’o Dal’yth Seishin much of the indigenous population embraced the Greater Good, forming a pro-T’au Empire rebellion called the Wintertide Concordance. This movement, taking its name from legendary Fire Warrior Commander Wintertide,[1b][1e][1i][1j] was backed by a few thousand Fire Warriors, battlesuits, armor, drones, and Cuttlefish transports.[1j][1l] Additionally, contingents of vespids, kroot, mercenary loxatl, and great numbers of gue’vesa auxiliaries provided support, including suicide bombers.[1b][1f][1g] For a time the local Adeptus Mechanicus under Magos Caul (also spelled “Kaul”[1j]) aligned with the Concordance, creating blasphemous combinations of Imperial and xenos technology.[1j]
Imperial authorities tasked Imperial Commander Zebasteyn Kircher, self-styled as the “Sky Marshall”, with Phaedra’s second pacification, which he oversaw from the crippled Imperial Navy ship Requiem of Virtue in orbit until its loss to the Warp.[1c] Over the course of the conflict many Astra Militarum elements were deployed, including the 19th Arkan Confederates,[1a] 6th Verzante Tempest,[1b] Iwuijii Jungle Sharks,[1d] 12th Galantai Ghurkas,[1e] and 77th Oberai Redeemers,[1g] totaling at times one hundred thousand men, most operating out of Seabase Antigone or the small camp Dolorosa Breach.[1e][1f][1l]
Lethean Penitents under Admiral Vyodor Karjalan and his adviser Confessor Yosiv Gurdjief[1d] deployed aquatic vessels to assist the fight, supplying transports, amphibious Triton-pattern gunboats, Argonaut-class battle cruisers, and even the Poseidon-class battleship Puissance.[1d][1g][1h]
Following the early deaths of Aun’o Hamaan and leader of the Fire Warriors Shas’o Gheza, and widespread defections from the Imperial Guard to the rebels, the Invisible Accord, a secret treaty to prolong the war, was signed between the two sides.[1f][1l] By holding back from decisive action the Imperium gained a politically-expedient warzone to send disfavored regiments, and the Water Caste acquired a low-cost way to grind down Imperial manpower in the Eastern Fringe using only their own unwanted personnel.[1d][1l][4] This arrangement prospered for fifty years, long enough for some Guardsmen on Phaedra to have children who, in turn, were inducted.[1c][1h]
After the assassinations of most leadership on both sides the agreements fell apart. No further reinforcements or supplies came from either the Tau Empire or the Imperium, leaving soldiers to grind each other down for the next 27 years. Only with the death of Magos Caul and the near-annihilation of the Concordance on the eve of the Warp Storm breaking did fighting cease.[3]
Sources
- 1: Fire Caste (Novel)
- 2: A Sanctuary of Wyrms (Short Story)
- 3: Adeptus Mechanicus: Vanguard (Short Story)
- 4: Altar of Maws (Short Story)
- 5: The Greater Evil (Short Story)
Uncited
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Trivia
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If it’s confirmed that the Undying Martyr is the same person as Lethean Penitents confessor Yosiv Gurdjief then Phaedra is the birthplace of the Lethean Revelation religion.
