Armageddon is a hive world of choking ash-storms, toxic equatorial jungles, and vast volcanic wastes, its skies forever stained by the smoke of a billion furnaces. Its immense manufactorum-hives, clustered as Armageddon Primus and Armageddon Secundus, pour out tanks, guns, and munitions to feed the Imperial war machine, making the world a prize worth oceans of blood to hold. Beyond the hive-walls stretch the great Ash Wastes, a lethal expanse of dust-storms and roving wreckers where only the desperate and the outcast endure.
That blood has been spilled again and again, for Armageddon is a byword for slaughter. Its first great war saw a daemonic incursion nearly consume the planet, turned back only by the intervention of the Emperor's most secret warriors. Yet it is the invasions that followed that have written Armageddon most deeply into Imperial memory.
Twice the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka descended upon the world at the head of a green tide beyond reckoning, and the most terrible of these onslaughts is chronicled in the Third War for Armageddon. The Orks came in their untold millions, crashing against the hive-walls in a storm of scrap and fury that lasted years and consumed whole continents.
Against them stood the Armageddon Steel Legion and the massed regiments of the Astra Militarum, reinforced by Space Marines and Titans, grinding out victory hab-block by hab-block in the ruins of their own cities. For the people of Armageddon, war is not an event but a condition of life, an inheritance passed from parent to child amid the ash. Ash-choked and battle-scarred, the survivors rebuild each ruined hive only to garrison it once more against the next onslaught. They know that whatever peace they win will be brief, and that the enemy always returns.
The atlas continues
