Iyanden was once a jewel among craftworlds, teeming with life and celebrated for its splendour. That golden age ended in horror when a devastating catastrophe swept through the vessel and slaughtered the great mass of its population, leaving vast halls silent and whole districts emptied of the living. The survivors emerged from that ordeal a fraction of their former number, too few to defend so great a vessel by conventional means.
In their desperation, the people of Iyanden turned to their dead. The craftworld had always honoured its fallen, storing their souls within spirit stones set into towering wraith constructs, and now it awoke those ancestors in unprecedented numbers, filling its diminished ranks with Wraithguard, Wraithlords, and the mighty Wraithknights. To walk the corridors of Iyanden is to move among ghosts made manifest, silent giants of wraithbone housing the souls of the honoured dead, marched to war so that the last of the living might endure. It is a bleak and mournful bargain, and it has made Iyanden the most haunting of all the craftworlds.
Aeldari
Order of battle
The Iyanden field the units of the Aeldari — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Aeldari formations
Biel-TanThe Swordwind, most militant and idealistic of the great craftworlds, whose people refuse to accept the Aeldari as a spent and dying force. Biel-Tan dreams of rebuilding the shattered empire of old, and its armies are composed of Aspect Warriors in numbers no other craftworld can match, striking with the disciplined ferocity of those who believe their race can still reclaim its lost supremacy.
Craftworld AlaitocAlaitoc is the most remote and inward-looking of the great craftworlds, drifting at the ragged edge of the galaxy far beyond the frontiers of the Imperium. Its people hold to a discipline stricter than that of any other Asuryani, forever watchful against the seductive whispers of She Who Thirsts. From this severity is born a restless tide of wanderers who take up the Path of the Outcast, and Alaitoc sends more Rangers and Pathfinders into the dark between the stars than all its sister worlds combined.
Saim-HannThe Wild Host, a craftworld of proud kindred clans who prize speed, daring, and personal honour above the patient strategies of their kin. Saim-Hann wages war from the saddle of skimming jetbikes and grav-tanks, its warriors striking in headlong charges that reflect a fierce, almost barbaric spirit tempered only by an intricate code of martial etiquette.
The YnnariThe Ynnari are the Reborn, a movement that cuts across every division of the Aeldari race in devotion to Ynnead, the long-dormant god of the dead. Craftworlder and Drukhari, Corsair and Harlequin, Exodite and outcast gather beneath the banner of the whispering god, united by the conviction that only his full awakening can deliver their species from oblivion and shatter the tyranny of Slaanesh. Led by the prophet Yvraine and her Triumvirate, they wield the very energy of death as a weapon.
UlthwéThe Damned Craftworld, drifting in the shadow of the Eye of Terror and shielded by the greatest concentration of seers among the Aeldari. Its people live under constant threat from the daemonic horrors that spill from that hellish wound, and this proximity to ruin has forged a somber, disciplined culture that treats prophecy as a weapon and survival as a duty owed to the whole species.