Event · M41

City of Dust incursion

The City of Dust incursion was a forced entry into the City of Dust by Beta Bequin, Gregor Eisenhorn and Gideon Ravenor through Queen Mab’s gates. The gates had long been read as a figure of speech within the City’s own lore rather than a literal threshold, and their forcing was itself an act of interpretation as much as trespass. Beyond them lay a domain associated with the Yellow King, a presence the City’s inhabitants spoke of only obliquely. The three who crossed did so as a working party rather than an army, relying on discretion and prior knowledge of the City’s habits to carry them past a boundary few had thought passable. On the living side of the gates, Comus and Renner Lightburn held the point of return while the incursion party advanced, maintaining the one fixed reference the others could retreat to if the City’s geography failed them. It was a reasonable precaution: the domain within did not keep to stable streets. Pocket streets folded and re-presented themselves, and each attempted to rename everyone who entered them, testing identity as a lock might test a key. The Yellow King’s domain met the intrusion not with soldiers but with ash, mirrors and borrowed identities, an opposition suited to a place that dealt in likeness and substitution rather than open combat. Bequin, Eisenhorn and Ravenor pressed the incursion as far as its logic allowed, each bringing a different resistance to the domain’s attempts at renaming: Eisenhorn’s discipline, Ravenor’s inward stillness, Bequin’s trained refusal to be read. Their contest was less a battle for ground than a sustained argument over who each of them was, waged in a place built to answer that argument wrongly. The incursion did not map the City of Dust, and no attempt was made to claim or hold territory within the Yellow King’s domain. Its result was narrower and, in its way, more unsettling: it established that the City’s twin condition, long treated as legend or metaphor, was real enough to bleed when tested. What the domain was, and what became of it after the party withdrew, is not recorded, and later accounts differ on how much of what was seen inside can be trusted as description rather than the domain’s own deception.

See where City of Dust incursion occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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