Alaitoc

Alaitoc is a craftworld of the Aeldari, known among its kin for a strict isolationist creed and for the great number of Rangers it sends out beyond its hull.

Like the other craftworlds, Alaitoc is one of the vast world-ships that carried survivors of the Aeldari race clear of the catastrophe known as the Fall, when the birth of the Chaos god Slaanesh consumed the greater part of their civilisation. Alaitoc drew from that history a particularly severe conclusion: that contact with the wider galaxy, and with the excesses that had doomed the old empire, was to be limited wherever possible. Its population is accordingly divided between those who remain aboard, committing themselves to a single Path of disciplined practice, often for long enough to rise as Exarchs bound permanently to their war shrines, and those who leave as Rangers and Pathfinders, ranging across the stars as Starstriders to scout, trade information, and watch for danger from a wary distance. The craftworld’s rune, showing the Sword of Khaine cleaving the Red Moon of the Doom of Eldanesh, is read by its people as a warning against the folly of unchecked passion.

Alaitoc’s outlook sets it apart from contemporaries such as Ulthwé, whose seers accept deep entanglement with human and Chaos affairs for the sake of foreseen necessity, and Biel-Tan, whose warhosts pursue the militant restoration of the old Aeldari empire; Alaitoc instead favours withdrawal and quiet observation, trusting its scattered Rangers to bring warning home. Its seers hold the Necrons, waking in growing numbers across the galaxy, to be a graver long-term threat to the Aeldari than either Chaos or the younger races. Despite this caution, Alaitoc has been drawn into open war with the Imperium of Man on more than one occasion, most often after Imperial forces followed the trail of Alaitoc-born Corsairs back to the craftworld itself, a paradox the Aeldari of Alaitoc attribute to the restless individuals who abandon the Path altogether rather than to any failure of their creed.

In the era after the opening of the Great Rift in 999.M41, Alaitoc’s Rangers and Corsair fleets remain among the most widely reported of any craftworld’s wanderers, encountered from the fringes of the Imperium Nihilus to contested Ultima Segmentum systems, consistent with its long-standing preference for information gathered from afar over direct engagement. The craftworld itself continues to hold to its puritan discipline, its standing in Aeldari society resting on the endurance of its Exarchs, the reach of its Starstriders, and its unbroken refusal to repeat the errors that ended the old empire.