Macragge is the throneworld of Ultramar, the great realm of five hundred worlds that stands as perhaps the best-governed and most prosperous corner of the entire Imperium. A rugged planet of soaring mountains, cold northern wastes, and disciplined, well-ordered city-states, Macragge is a rare thing in the 41st Millennium: a world where the common people live in relative safety, dignity, and order. Its many worlds trade with and defend one another as a single commonwealth, a rare fragment of the Imperium that still remembers what it was meant to be.
This is no accident, but the deliberate legacy of the primarch Roboute Guilliman, who raised Macragge from feuding rivalry into a model of enlightened rule. It is the seat and fortress-monastery of the Ultramarines, the exemplary Chapter whose sons are drawn from the finest of Macragge's warrior-aristocracy and whose Fortress of Hera dominates the capital city with its adamantium ramparts. Within its libraries was set down much of the Codex Astartes, the great tome of war whose doctrines shape countless Chapters to this day.
Yet even so favoured a world is not immune to the galaxy's horrors. Macragge earned its place in dark legend when a great Hive Fleet descended upon it from the void, and its defenders paid a terrible price to hold the line.
In that battle the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Behemoth first met the Imperium in force, and Macragge's northern polar fortress became the anvil upon which the alien tide was broken. The victory cost the Ultramarines the near-total loss of a company and much of Macragge's fleet, a wound that scarred the realm for generations. Still Ultramar endures, a beacon of order in a dying age, ruled with a care and competence that the rest of the Imperium can only envy from afar.
The atlas continues
