Iyanden

Iyanden was once among the most populous and radiant of all craftworlds, a shining beacon upon the Eastern Fringe. That golden age ended when Hive Fleet Kraken fell upon it, the endless tide of the Great Devourer consuming three-quarters of its people in an orgy of slaughter that left its graceful spires draped in silence and mourning. The craftworld survived, but only as a hollow shadow of its former splendour, its corridors haunted by absence.

With the living too few to hold the walls, the Aeldari of Iyanden turned to their dead. The spirits of fallen warriors, preserved within waystones, are summoned back into towering wraith-constructs of psychoplastic bone, and these silent giants march to war beside the dwindling living. Whole regiments of ghosts now defend a home their bodies died to protect, animated by grief and duty in equal measure.

This reliance on the departed is a desperate and sorrowful measure, for each spirit called to battle is a soul denied its rest, worn thinner by every waking. Under Prince Yriel and the ghost-legions of the dead, Iyanden fights on as a civilisation of mourners, unwilling to let its light gutter out. It is a place of aching beauty and profound loss, where the boundary between the living and the fallen has all but dissolved.