Halo Zone

"There exist out there in the unbroached void of night and in the deeper darkness beyond, things so terrible and vile that they would devour us and destroy everything we have made. And why? Because they fear us—and rightly so, for we are humanity and the stars are ours."

- Lord Commander Solar Macharius, on the eve of the Macharian Crusade

The Halo Zone is the name of the region beyond the light of the Astronomican beyond the borders of the Segmentum Pacificus and known human space which is a part of the Halo Stars. This thin halo of Old Stars that surround the galaxy is home to ancient worlds where men have never known the Emperor. Their ancestors having left old Earth over thirty thousand years ago at the dawn of human history. So dimly does the Emperor's light shine at the fringes of this region of space that even Navigators can sense only darkness. Due to the difficulties in navigation in this region of the galaxy, the time to cross it would be increased while also increasing the time differential between realspace and the Immaterium.

During the end of the Macharian Crusade led by the famous Lord Commander Solar Macharius in the latter 300's in the 41st Millennium, after seven years of campaigning and having brought nearly a thousand worlds under Imperial control, his expeditionary fleet reached the edge of known space. When the Lord Commander attempted to push his crusade onwards into the Halo Zone, it was here that his generals wavered. They pleaded for him to reconsider. His men, tired and ageing, hesitated. The halo was dark and forbidding. Navigation was slow without the guiding beacon of the Astronomican. The Astropaths were virtually beyond range of psychic communication. There was a sense of growing unrest amongst the armies and fleets. Macharius knew that the end was come. His armies had simply run out of energy at the moment of his greatest challenge. To make matters worse, some of the exploratory teams had failed to return from their missions, whilst others reported mysterious phenomena. The troops whispered that the Old Stars were haunted, that the worlds which orbited them were inhabited by ghosts, and that the halo was not a place for living men. Eventually, the Lord Commander gave in, and with a heavy heart he ordered the fleets back into the Imperium. Though his solders cheered for their hero and his generals sighed with relief, Macharius was a broken man and eventually died on the return journey.