Cadia

Cadia is a fortress world on the Cadian Gate, the sole fleet-scale corridor out of the Eye of Terror, held by the Imperium for ten millennia. Its garrisons, fortifications and orbital defences existed for a single purpose: to deny that passage to the forces massing within the Eye. The world is now a shattered ruin, wracked by warp storms, held by traitor garrisons and haunted by a daemonic presence that lingers where Cadia’s cities once stood.

Necron pylons, raised across the Cadian System long before human settlement, are recorded as having held the Eye’s turbulence in check throughout the Imperium’s tenure there. The Word Bearers are recorded as having walked Cadian soil seeking converts before the Horus Heresy, so the Gate’s strategic weight was understood in the earliest age of the Imperium, long before it became synonymous with siege warfare. Ten millennia of Black Crusades and lesser incursions followed, each broken in turn against Cadia’s void shields and its massed Guard regiments.

The world’s end came during the Despoiler Abaddon’s Thirteenth Black Crusade, when he drove the wreck of the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity into Cadia’s crust; the necron pylons failed in the devastation that followed, and the planet broke apart. Ursarkar Creed commanded the Gate’s defence in that same campaign; the Cadian 8th’s personnel list records him as missing in action, while another account holds that the Necron overlord Trazyn the Infinite removed him from the surface and placed him in a gallery on Solemnace labelled the Last Stand of Ursarkar Creed. Celestine the Living Saint, Trazyn the Infinite, Logan Grimnar and Haarken Worldclaimer were all present in the Cadian System during the fighting, drawn there by stakes reaching far beyond one world. Cadia’s destruction tore open the Great Rift, splitting the galaxy into Imperium Sanctus and Imperium Nihilus and ending the Gate’s ten-thousand-year watch.

Cadian Shock Troops regiments, raised from a world that no longer exists, continue to serve across the Imperium as disciplined infantry prized on every front, and Ursula Creed carries the name of Cadia’s last defender into the wars that followed the Gate’s fall.