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Calliope

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Map Basic Data Planetary Image
px Name: Calliope Unknown.jpg
Segmentum: Unknown
Sector: Unknown
Subsector: Unknown
System: Unknown
Population: Unknown
Affiliation: Imperium
Class: Unknown
Tithe Grade: Unknown

Calliope was a world of the Imperium. The planet was laid barren by Ahriman and his forces in M41.[1]

Overview

Calliope was a world of lost knowledge: an entire planet given over to the archiving of records from the earliest days of the Imperium all the way to its uncertain present. Stacks of rotting parchment filled caverns extending far beneath its crust, dataspool stations ringed its orbits from pole to pole, and its cities sprawled around the Index Vaults. Every soul on Calliope existed for the archive, from the hunters who stalked vermin in the deep parchment stacks, to the scribes who fought for control of the hundreds of contradictory indexes; all were bound to the ecology of the archive. So it had been for a time since before any could remember, and so it seemed things would continue. Until something changed.[1]

A faction arose within the caste of indexers. This faction called for the unification of all the indexes into an endlessly extending formula. They called themselves the Summation. Where the idea had first come from none were certain, but once it took hold it bloomed like a flower in sunlight. The Summation’s power grew generation by generation until its rule of Calliope was uncontested. Centuries passed and billions laboured to further the Summation’s goal. At last, they succeeded. On the day of the Emperor’s Ascension, in the High Hall of Indexes, a scribe wrote the final line of symbols to complete the formula, and in that instant Calliope fell silent.[1]

When an Imperial ship arrived at Calliope a decade later, it found a few starved people living amongst the dry corpses of the dead. None of the survivors could remember anything for more than a few seconds. Stranger still, the great archives were blank, every datastore empty, and every page of parchment bare. The only mark remaining to tell of the algorithmic seed Ahriman planted, and then harvested millennia later, was a single image, hovering in the lost memories of the survivors’ blasted minds: the image of a figure in a horned helm wreathed in flame stepping from a wound in the air.[1]

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