Koronus Expanse

"Lo, I see that which is beyond. I see the faces of pale moons and the fire of lost stars. I see the void un-walked and the waiting dark. I see the void that is my home and to which I return with hope and fear."

- reputed words of unknown Rogue Trader departing Port Wander

The Koronus Expanse is the name given by the authorities of the Imperium of Man to a dangerous unexplored region of the Halo Stars located beyond the Calixis Sector in the Segmentum Obscurus. The Expanse is accessed through the Koronus Passage, a treacherous but navigable route through the great Warp Storms that bar passage to the Halo Stars beyond the way station of Port Wander on the edge of the Expanse. As is true of the Calixis Sector itself, the Expanse was untouched by the God-Emperor’s Great Crusade many millennia ago -- and so it is a realm of fearsome xenos, treasures beyond imagining, heathen worlds of men, and the echoes of ancient doom.

The Koronus Expanse in the late 41st Millennium is a scattered, partly explored region on the frontier of the galaxy containing a few young Imperial colonies and vast natural wealth still barely exploited. Rogue Traders vie with one another for known resources, heedless of lives lost in the pursuit of riches, while a tentative attempt at Imperial colonisation follows in their wake. Drawn by the flow of wealth, pirates and servants of the Dark Gods have also slipped into the Expanse, eager to cast destruction upon the works of the God-Emperor’s faithful, living by what they wrest from dead hands, while the Expanse itself holds many secrets and native inhabitants no less dangerous.

For centuries, Rogue Traders have braved great evils and the treacherous warp to venture into the Koronus Expanse, but their efforts have barely begun to uncover its secrets. Footholds have been built close to the few semi-stable Warp routes into the area. Here, resource-rich worlds are exploited, xenos ruins excavated, trade envoys meet with heathen lords, and Imperial colonies are attempted upon sheltered worlds. This effort has been enough to shower wealth and fame upon the fortunate -- and make corpses of the rest. The gateway to the Expanse is littered with broken vessels and tales of the vanished.

Beyond these human conflicts lie truly dark and dangerous voids, rife with rumoured terrors, undiscovered stars, and worlds of men who have never known the light of the God-Emperor. There are no defined Warp-routes, no safe ways through the swirling Empyrean. These regions hold the fearsome Ork, the treacherous Eldar, and strange ruins that lie beneath the light of dying stars.

The Warpspace of the Koronus Expanse is treacherous and unknown in the main, and the partially explored regions of the Expanse are islands of Imperial activity amidst a vastness of danger and mystery. Navigating is a far cry from traversing the well-established Warp routes of the Calixis Sector. Most of the Koronus Expanse is known to the Imperium only though legend, revelation, and hearsay. The Rogue Trader who ventures into this unknown risks his very soul upon the talent of his Navigator, and on the quality of what little information he has gleaned from those gone before.

Beyond the partly explored regions of the Koronus Expanse, past deeps beset by pirates and dread xenos, lie many worlds and strange phenomena which exist as the stuff of dark legend. Some of these uncharted stars were visited by a single Rogue Trader whose tales are doubted or dismissed by rivals as outright lies, while others are known only from dubious and apocryphal sources such as Thulean datavaults recovered from Dolorium’s voids in 741.M41, or the infamous prophetic visions of the Seven Witches of Footfall. Other fragments of contradictory lore relating to these dark zones are culled from even more untrustworthy sources, such as the muted astropathic whispers overheard on the Warp’s twisted eddies, the falsehoods of the deceitful Eldar, or the ancient myths of heathen worlds given over to darkness for millennia uncounted. Such areas are labelled only as “Here be monsters” on ancient charts, where only the foolhardy or insane would venture to seek their destiny.

Great Warp Storms of the Halo Stars
"Calixian history is littered with footnotes describing the lost and the dead who braved the Great Warp Storms beyond the worlds of Saint Drusus."

- from The Voids, scribed by Tarsimus of Archaos

On the rimward margins of the Calixis Sector boil vast Warp Storms that have since ancient times barred passage into the Halo Stars. This barrier of raging tempests has claimed the lives of many who would dare to find new passage to the unexplored expanses. They ebb and flow with a ferocity and maliciousness that can lure even the most seasoned navigator to destruction in a sudden rending surge. Though these Warp Storms are referred to as a group, they are in fact an amalgamation of individual Warp Storms that clash, overlap, and occasionally consume one another. Passage through this mass of tempests is almost impossible outside a few stable routes that run through the storms like narrow threads of calm. Some storms have persisted for long enough that they have acquired names of infamy amongst those who travel and navigate the Sea of Souls. Of these, the most famous are the Void Dancer’s Roil and the Screaming Vortex, which bracket the stable passages known as the Maw like daemon sentinels at the gates to a waiting hell.

The Void Dancers’ Roil is a mass of subtly sliding drifts and beguiling currents in the warp that can lead the most seasoned Navigator astray and carve apart the hulls of starships that dare their tides. It is said that ghost-ships have been sighted drifting amongst the Void Dancer’s Roil, their hulls as pale as carved stone.

The Screaming Vortex is a boiling mass of Warp turbulence and vortices that clash and grind against one another with unceasing fury and power, giving rise to a constant psychic wail that can be perceived by those sensitive to the flow of the Warp. It is this dread wail that gives the Warp Storm its name. The character of the Screaming Vortex is that of a raging beast whose teeth clash and gnaw in a neverending search of food, and it is said by the void born that it has claimed entire fleets to satiate its endless hunger.

Nesting within or beside the Screaming Vortex and the Void Dancer’s Roil are other lesser Warp Storms whose nature is permanent and distinct enough that they have acquired their own infamy and doom-laden titles. Some Navigators who have strayed within or to the edge of the great storms whisper of the Deathveil as a strange cascade of unnatural beauty that will draw the mind of the unwary to within its soft and silent embrace never to return. Old voyagers into the Halo Margins of the Calixis Sector exchange strange stories of the pocket of stillness within the fury that they name the Whispering Storm, where the fingers of the dead caress the hull and forgotten voices whisper inside the minds of the living in voices of crackling static. These strange storms within the Warp, and many others beside, all whirl and dance together and so create a wall within the Sea of Souls that cannot be crossed except by a rare few stable Warp routes. The greatest and most easily navigated of these is the Koronus Passage, or “the Maw” as it is more often called, which passes through the Great Warp Storms and into the dark unknown of the Koronus Expanse.

Port Wander
"A stinking, painted harlot who would see your blood flowing for a few coins, that she may be, but who cannot say that they love the light that is known waiting for the traveller returned from the void."

- Roguie Trader Cortin Blaine, captain of the Astra Veritas

Port Wander is a void station on the uttermost edge of the Drusus Marches Sub-sector of the Calixis Sector, rightly regarded as the last bastion of the rule of the Emperor this side of the Koronus Expanse. A place of desperate hopes and vain dreams; Port Wander teems with a transitory population of traders, spies, merchant factors, pilgrims, and missionaries amongst which move Administratum functionaries and minions of the Mechanicus, all feeding on the riches that flow from the realms beyond the warp storms in the Koronus Expanse. All who travel into the Koronus Expanse share one common experience in that they pass Port Wander. Be they the pious bringing the Emperor’s Light into the darkness beyond the Imperium or black-hearted monsters searching for the keys to forbidden dreams, many will stop in the last place where the rule of the Golden Throne keeps the horror and possibility of the unknown at bay.

Port Wander was founded by the Imperial Navy in 917. M40 as a staging ground to investigate the loss of many vessels on the fringes of the Drusus Marches. With the discovery of the Koronus Passage in the late 40th millennium, the station grew in importance owing to its close proximity to the Passage. Its original role as a base for military operations was slowly forgotten, and Port Wander became a way station for those daring passage into the Koronus Expanse. Merchants and mercenaries began to choke the once- deserted corridors of the station, and strangers shook the dust of distant stars from their boots while trading wondrous things from beyond the Great Warp Storms.