House Mortan

House Mortan holds its vigil upon Kimdaria, a world smothered beneath the lightless nebula the Imperium came to name the Black Pall. When the founders of the household first made planetfall, that veil had already thickened until day was scarcely to be told from night, and the ink-dark forests teemed with predators long since adapted to the gloom. Only the skill of the colonists' Knights held these horrors at bay, and it was beneath the guns and blades of those war-suits that the first settlements were carved out of the murk.

For as long as twenty thousand years the household stood utterly alone, severed from the wider Imperium and unaware that Humanity had ever reached beyond their benighted sky. Generation upon generation of Nobles waged an unending war against the beasts of Kimdaria's forests, and the endless dark seeped into the very character of the line. Its Knights learned to hunt by senses other than sight, and to trust the killing stroke of a blade over the uncertain aim of a distant gun; to this day Mortan places a singular premium upon close-quarters slaughter. It is said that the shadow of their home clings to the war engines of the household even when they stand beneath an open sun.

Only in the thirty-fifth millennium was Mortan at last rediscovered and reconciled with the Imperium of Man, to which it now stands firmly bound as a household of the Questor Imperialis. The most accomplished beast-slayers of the line are inducted into an honoured order known as the Dolorous, warriors whose grim ferocity is a byword even among their own kin. So wholly are these Nobles wedded to the hunt that many regard any existence beyond the cockpit of their Knight as a pale and hollow half-life, and they return to the sanctuary of their war-suits as other men return to the light.