Ulthwé

Craftworld Ulthwe is an Aeldari craftworld that orbits near the Eye of Terror, standing as a bulwark against the warp rift it borders.

Its population includes an unusually high proportion of Seers, drawn to the Path of the Seer by the craftworld’s proximity to the warp’s turbulence, and its rune-readers hold correspondingly greater authority in Ulthwe’s governance than on most other craftworlds. Farseer Eldrad Ulthran, one of the oldest and most far-sighted of the Aeldari seers, has for millennia directed Ulthwe’s strategy from its Council of Seers, weighing paths of fate that stretch across the wider galaxy rather than the craftworld alone. Ulthwe’s warrior caste musters as the Black Guardians, regiments kept under near-constant mobilisation, reflecting a craftworld that treats war as a standing condition rather than an occasional necessity.

Eldrad’s foresight has drawn Ulthwe into conflicts far from its own hulls, including the manipulation of the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka’s invasions of Armageddon, undertaken to divert threats the Farseer judged more dangerous to the Aeldari path of fate. Daemons have breached Ulthwe’s own avenues and habitation domes on more than one occasion, carrying the war it wages against the Eye into its interior as well as its approaches. Ulthwe maintains a Gate of Infinity, a webway portal linking the craftworld to the wider galaxy, which its rangers and Black Guardians have used to intervene in campaigns well beyond the Ghost Stars.

Ulthwe is placed in the Ghost Stars, near Cadia, and its fate has become entangled with that fortress world’s: Ulthwe forces fought alongside the Imperium during Abaddon the Despoiler’s Thirteenth Black Crusade, and Eldrad is recorded as having foreseen Cadia’s destruction and the opening of the Great Rift before the Imperium itself grasped the scale of the threat. In the era after Cadia’s fall, Ulthwe continues to stand watch on the Eye of Terror, its Council of Seers still weighing the craftworld’s course amid a galaxy in which the boundary it has always guarded has grown wider and less stable.