Event · M40–M41
Aurelia taken by warp storm
Aurelia, capital of the Aurelian subsector, was drawn into the warp when a storm froze its cities and removed it from realspace for centuries. Realspace is the material universe, as distinct from the warp through which the Imperium’s fleets travel; Aurelia’s removal from it meant the world was, for practical purposes, lost to the Imperium rather than merely isolated. Aurelia is an ice world, and this entry concerns the planet as a whole rather than any single hive or settlement upon it. The storm is recorded as having displaced the planet from its orbit before it vanished from realspace entirely, an event with no clean parallel among the subsector’s other worlds. Shortly before Aurelia disappeared, the Blood Ravens Epistolary Kyras is held to have bound the Great Unclean One Ulkair to the world, an act intended to contain the daemon rather than destroy it. Kyras later returned from the warp, but accounts describe him as tainted by the experience, a change that shaped his later standing within his Chapter. The binding and Kyras’s altered state are the clearest points of continuity between the world before its disappearance and the world that eventually re-entered realspace. When Aurelia returned, it did so as a frozen tomb rather than a living capital, its population and structures preserved in ice rather than restored to function. The Black Legion, under Eliphas, made use of the returned world as a beachhead, operating among Aurelia’s frozen dead as part of what is known as the Second Aurelian Crusade. This gave the planet a second identity in the region’s military chronology: not only the subsector capital lost to the warp, but a contested site fought over on its return. During Aurelia’s long absence, the neighbouring world of Meridian assumed the administrative functions of subsector capital, a transfer of status that outlasted Aurelia’s disappearance and shaped the politics of the region. Aurelia’s return opened a theatre in which several parties became involved. A Blood Ravens strike force including Davian Thule, Tarkus, Avitus and Thaddeus operated there, with Apollo Diomedes and Jonah Orion associated with the Chapter’s later engagement with the world. Eliphas and the Black Legion held their beachhead against these and other forces, while the Aeldari Ronahn and Kayleth are also named among those drawn into the conflict over Aurelia’s fate.
See where Aurelia taken by warp storm occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.