Vraks Prime

Vraks Prime was the armoury world of the Scarus sector, its only inhabited planet, and the site of an eighteen-year siege. Brought into the Imperium during the Macharian Crusade of the early forty-first millennium, it was afterwards dedicated entirely to storage, its surface riddled with bunkers holding the Departmento Munitorum’s stockpiles of ordnance for the sector’s garrisons.

The siege began when Cardinal Xaphan, commander of the world’s Ecclesiarchy garrison, seized the magazines and declared for the Ruinous Powers, turning Vraks into a fortified stronghold. The Alpha Legion moved to support the rebellion, and in its later years warbands sworn to Khorne and Nurgle joined the defence. Against them the Departmento Munitorum committed the Death Korps of Krieg’s 88th Siege Army, sustained across the campaign by Adeptus Mechanicus Titan maniples, Elysian drop troops, and the Adepta Sororitas, with the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus directing the reclamation.

Fought across the ash wastes and bunker lines ringing the magazine complexes, the reclamation cost some fourteen million Imperial lives before the last defenders were destroyed, and it stands among the longest single-world sieges recorded in the sector’s history.

With the fighting ended, the Inquisition quarantined the emptied magazines rather than resupply them, judging the taint that had entered the world during the war impossible to excise fully. Vraks Prime remains sealed and largely uninhabited, its name recorded chiefly for the eighteen years and the scale of loss its recovery demanded.