Cadia

Cadia stood for ten thousand years as the great sentinel of the Imperium's northern marches, planted squarely astride the Cadian Gate, the sole reliable warp-passage leading out of the Eye of Terror. Every child born upon its soil was a soldier before they could walk, drilled in the lasgun and the fortress-wall, for Cadia knew only one purpose, and that was war without end.

Its surface bristled with kasrs, colossal fortress-cities ringed by minefields, gun-lines, and void-shields, while across the planet rose the mysterious blackstone pylons whose ancient influence smothered the warp and kept the daemon at bay. From this world came the Cadian Shock Troops, the most disciplined and battle-hardened regiments of the entire Astra Militarum, soldiers whose stubborn valour became legend across a thousand warzones. Cadian children were handed their first lasgun where other worlds' children were given toys, drilled in the arts of war from the moment they could hold one.

Thirteen times the hosts of Chaos surged from the Eye to break upon Cadia's defences, and thirteen times the world held, though the cost each time was measured in oceans of blood. The rallying cry of its defenders, that Cadia stands, echoed as both boast and prayer through the darkest hours of every siege.

But all things end. In the final Black Crusade the Despoiler brought not merely armies but the means to unmake the pylons themselves, and with them gone the world was doomed. The story of that catastrophe is told in the Fall of Cadia, when the shattered planet fell burning from the sky. Its scattered survivors carry the ashes of their homeworld and a single grim truth: Cadia may have broken, but the Cadians endure.