Altansar

Altansar is an Asuryani craftworld that vanished into the Eye of Terror after the Fall of the Eldar and did not return for nearly ten thousand years. It re-emerged only during the 13th Black Crusade, and is remembered above all for its association with Maugan Ra, the Phoenix Lord of the Dark Reapers, who was long believed to be its sole survivor.

When the birth of Slaanesh tore the webway and scattered the Aeldari during the Fall, Altansar was caught by the resulting tide of warp activity and drawn into the Eye of Terror, the great immaterial rift bordering what would become the Cadian Gate. There it remained beyond contact for nearly ten thousand years, its fate unrecorded by the wider craftworlds. Maugan Ra, already an ancient figure among the Phoenix Lords, was for most of that span presumed to be Altansar’s only survivor, said to move alone through the webway and the wars beyond the Eye while his craftworld’s people went unaccounted for.

Altansar broke free only in 999.M41, during Abaddon the Despoiler’s 13th Black Crusade against Cadia and the Eye of Terror, when the great disturbance of the warp rift that accompanied the crusade’s opening allowed the craftworld to escape into realspace. Maugan Ra led it out, and its return revealed that a population had endured within the Eye alongside him, overturning the long belief that he alone remained of Altansar.

Other craftworlds near the Eye’s boundary, among them Ulthwé and Iyanden, regard Altansar’s returned population with lasting suspicion, treating ten millennia of proximity to the galaxy’s most corrupt warp region as a taint not easily set aside. Altansar’s Asuryani are recorded as having militarised in answer, ordering their society around unceasing vigilance against possession by the Neverborn. Its warhosts field a disproportionate strength of Dark Reapers in honour of Maugan Ra’s shrine, alongside dense wraith constructs, Wraithguard and Wraithlords, whose wraithbone housings shelter the spirits of a people who spent ten thousand years unable to lay their dead properly to rest.