Freya

Just as the dead were once as we are now, so the dead places of this galaxy may once have equalled our most mighty or glittering worlds. As the cold wastes are now, then so too may our worlds be in times yet unborn. –Admonishment from the Seven Books of Vigilance

Freya is an Imperial Dead World that succumbed to the forces of Hive Fleet Dagon within the Jericho Reach. Before the Reach fell into its Age of Shadow, Freya was a Mining World across which millions of indentured workers toiled in vast open-cast mines to feed the now lost Forge Worlds of the Reach.

History
During the long millennia of the Age of Shadow, the Freya fell into disorder and anarchy; its mine-scarred surface the battleground for countless gangs of techno-barbarians, dark-souled cultists, and flesh-eating mutants.

The last fragment of Imperial dominion remained in space; a sensor array circling one of Freya's many moons. This special Astropathic relay was one of many scattered throughout the reach that served the Deathwatch in their secret vigil.

In a warning of what was soon to befall the entire Orpheus Salient, the Freya relay (which had endured through thousands of years of darkness and cold) fell suddenly silent. On 001814.M41, the Deathwatch warship Thunder's Word entered the Freya system to investigate the troubling silence.

It found no trace of the relay and no trace of any life in the Freya system. Preparing to leave the system, Thunder's Word encountered two Tyranid drone ships that had been lurking in the orbits of Freya's moons -- a rear guard left in the wake of larger predators -- and did battle.

Its hull scored and pitted with acid and its magazines nearly exhausted, Thunder's Word arrived at Watch Fortress Erioch like a messenger riding before a storm: the Tyranids had come to Jericho Reach. Subsequently, no attempt has been made to return to Freya.