Iyanden

Iyanden is an Asuryani craftworld, a mobile Aeldari world-ship of the eastern galactic rim, once the most populous of its kind and now gravely diminished. Its allegiance lies with the xenos powers of the Aeldari diaspora, and its world-rune, meaning “Light in the Darkness”, honours Asuryan, eldest of the Aeldari gods. Since catastrophic losses in the late forty-first millennium, Iyanden has come to rely on wraithbone constructs animated by the spirits of its dead, earning its people the name Ghost Warriors.

In the aftermath of the Fall of the Aeldari, the seers of Iyanden moved swiftly to shield their people from Slaanesh, recovering waystones from the Crone Worlds and raising an infinity circuit credited to the bonesinger Invaril Brightshard, activated at the cost of Mehlendri Silversoul’s life. Emboldened, Iyanden’s council set itself the ambition of one day rebuilding Aeldari dominion, sending emissaries through the webway to other craftworlds. Only Biel-Tan answered in force, and for centuries the two craftworlds fought as allies against Chaos, Iyanden clearing the eastern rim while Biel-Tan purged the west and Exodite worlds of the Ybaric Cluster lent aid. The alliance cooled after 777.M34, when Biel-Tan turned to war over the maiden world of Rasilena against Iyanden’s counsel, and contact between the two eventually lapsed.

Iyanden’s campaigns since have been fought largely alone. Its Ghost Warriors cleansed the Chaos-corrupted world spirit of Menimshemash in 867.M35, and its warhosts spent decades hunting the Fallen Angel Zhemon, a renegade Space Marine building a realm of anarchy, before cornering him on Ishasta in 478.M37 alongside the Dark Angels’ Ravenwing — one of the rare occasions Iyanden fought openly beside Imperial forces. In 876.M39 Iyanden struck the T’au sept colony of Ka’mais in reprisal for the destruction of the maiden world Lilarsus, a conflict later revealed to have been engineered by the Drukhari archon Andross Klax; Iyanden also later fought alongside the sept of Vior’la against the Novokh dynasty of the necrons before turning against its erstwhile ally. A demand by Iyanden’s farseers that the world of Thule be evacuated was answered instead by a Crimson Fists intervention force in 978.M39, and in 585.M40 Admiral Draech led reprisals against the Imperial Fists over the seizure of the vessel Blood of Khaine at Hypnoth. Between 810 and 812.M41, Iyanden joined the craftworlds Malan’tai and Idharae to break one arm of the Tyranid Hive Fleet Naga threatening the Ybaric Cluster.

Iyanden’s gravest trial came with the invasion of Hive Fleet Kraken in 992.M41, an assault remembered as the Doom of Iyanden, in which roughly nine-tenths of its population was destroyed before the exiled fleet commander Prince Yriel returned with his corsairs to break the Tyranid blockade. The craftworld survives this day only by resurrecting its honoured dead as spiritseer-guided wraith constructs, a necessity its seers accept with sorrow rather than pride. Diminished but unbroken, Iyanden remains counted among the Asuryani craftworlds, its people holding to the hope that its light will one day burn bright again.