A Light in the Dark

The nascent Imperium burns as former brothers clash in the void, their cataclysmic violence ushered to new heights by impossibly ancient evils beyond reality. Across the galaxy worlds and lives end, countless tales of barbaric triumphs and heroic defiance left untold and unrecorded; lost in the tides of immeasurable strife.

The machinations of the World Bearers to isolate the Ultramarines behind the veil of unleashed insanity that is the Ruinstorm left many sectors in the Eastern Fringe cut off from the Astronomicon, their systems left to fend for themselves between the gulfs of uninhabited space. Too dangerous to enter the tumultuous warp and unable to decipher astropathic communications, many of these systems simply ceased to exist; destroyed by internecine fighting reminiscent of the Old Night or otherwise being swallowed up in the disfiguring currents of the warp storm surging around them. But it was these same undulating currents that also released their grasp, expelling whole sectors back into reality as the warp tide receded.

The Cushing system was one such place. Once the hub to several commercial trade routes, Cushing's automated beacons returned to imperial registrars throughout the sector just as suddenly as they'd disappeared when the Ruinstorm erupted. Any celebrations would be short lived, however, as any sentient contact with the system went unanswered. All sanctioned channels were silent. There were no choirs left to echo back into the void.

Nevertheless, the system once housed a sizable orbital to support the surge of sectoral traffic during the Great Crusade; the Benevolence shipyard was well known to local sector captains as a relic of the Dark Age and capable of the advanced repair as well as fabrication of stellar ships. Such an item would prove an absolute objective to the nubile Imperium Secundus, the prospect of a fallen Imperium outside the Ruinstorm leaving little hope of reinforcement in the ongoing Shadow Crusade.

Preliminary scans of the system have shown the Benevolence to still be orbiting Cushing's hive capital. While structurally intact, the drydock appears to be damaged by an unknown conflict and it will likely take some time and resources to bring the shipyard's sophisticated warp drives back online.

Regent Sanguinius has ordered elements of the 7th Company of his Blood Angels legion to secure the shipyard and investigate any remnants of imperial forces in the system.

Given wholly to the warlust inherent to their progenitor's blood, the once coherent fleets of the World Eaters now found themselves splintered into raiding groups, descending on the vulnerable worlds of the Imperium Secundus with a savage unchecked ferocity.

One such group, ostensibly registered as scrambled elements of the LXXII Chapter of the World Eaters legion, emerges from the warp at the edge of the system. Their ships begin a full burn towards the Benevolence; even blood maddened they too recognize the importance of denying the shipyard from loyalist control.

So begins the Cushing campaign.