Alaitoc

Alaitoc is an Aeldari craftworld — a mobile world-ship home to a scattered remnant of that species — noted for its rangers and its puritanism. Positioned on the frontier, far from the crowded core of surviving craftworlds, its people hold to an unusually strict reading of the Path, the Aeldari discipline of pursuing a single vocation to mastery before setting it aside to preserve the mind against obsession. Alaitoc enforces this discipline more rigorously than most craftworlds, out of a determination to avoid the excesses that led the wider Aeldari species to its ancient catastrophe, the Fall, and the birth of the Chaos god Slaanesh.

This severity has a distinctive consequence: many of Alaitoc’s citizens, unable or unwilling to sustain such discipline, choose the Path of the Outcast and leave the craftworld altogether, becoming corsairs or, most famously, rangers. Known among themselves as the Starstriders, Alaitoc’s rangers do not live aboard the craftworld but travel the wider galaxy, gathering intelligence and periodically returning to renew their loyalty. Alaitoc fields more rangers than any other craftworld and alone maintains pathfinders, rangers whose long solitary practice has honed their marksmanship and stealth to an exceptional degree. This dispersal of its own people, together with intelligence gained from tortured Outcasts, has drawn the attention of the Imperial Inquisition, and Alaitoc and the Imperium have remained in a state of intermittent conflict as a result, including a siege of the craftworld itself after Imperial forces traced corsair raids back to its Outcasts.

Alaitoc’s forces have been committed to campaigns across the galaxy, among them the Fall of Medusa V, the Siege of Somonor, the Betalis campaign, the Carnac campaign and, alongside the Adeptus Astartes, the defence of Rynn’s World. The craftworld has also pursued a sustained campaign against the necrons, a war its seer council trace to visions of the necron overlord Imotekh the Stormlord and to a fragmentary crystalline map of the galaxy’s tomb worlds gathered through its network of rangers and Exodites. Its farseer Ylocu Shaie has held the necrons to be the graver threat even after the opening of the great rift and the rise of Chaos across the galaxy, and Alaitoc’s forces have taken losses operating within the Pariah Nexus, a region where necron devices disrupt Aeldari psychic technology; there the craftworld has drawn closer to the anti-necron Masque of the Frozen Stars while its own rangers, still led in part by Illic Nightspear, continue smaller precision operations.

Alaitoc’s world-rune depicts the Sword of Khaine bisecting the Red Moon, the sigil of the House of Eldanesh, recalling the slaying of that Aeldari hero by the war god and serving as a standing reminder of the price of offending the gods. The craftworld is associated with the colours blue and yellow. Unlike some other craftworlds, Alaitoc has largely stood apart from the internal strife stirred among the Aeldari by the rise of the Ynnari, a restraint attributed to the close-knit loyalty binding the Starstriders to their home.