Screaming Vortex

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION "Listen! Listen, don’t you hear? They sing to us, such a sad lament..."

- Last recorded words of the Navigator Sol Burgundus

The Screaming Vortex is one of the zones within the region known as the Great Warp Storms that separates the Calixis Sector of the Segmentum Obscurus from the Koronus Expanse region of the Halo Stars. It takes the form of a vast, seething cauldron of empyreal energies which, while not as large, are every bit as intense as those spewing forth from the Eye of Terror, the Maelstrom or any other such Warp/realspace overlap in the Milky Way Galaxy. As a permanent Warp Storm, the Screaming Vortex is a region of space beset by the unreal forces of the Empyrean, where the thin skein between reality and that impossible dimension has been torn viciously asunder. A volume of space far larger than the average Imperial sector is to all intents and purposes cut adrift from the physical universe, the laws of nature no longer applying within. Beyond the boundaries of the Screaming Vortex, the Ruinous Powers of Chaos hold sway and for a mortal to even contemplate crossing into its weirdling energies is insanity of the very worst kind. The interior of the Vortex cannot be described in terms that even the greatest mortal mind could comprehend, and so descriptions are largely limited to the worlds on its verges and, when describing those places further in, to allegory and myth.

The Screaming Vortex is so named because the ebb and flow of its tides are accompanied by a concomitant wailing, audible to psykers and Sorcerers. The most gifted of psykers can hear the ceaseless, discordant psychic wailing that emanates from the Vortex from dozens, sometimes hundreds, of light years away, their dreams haunted by once beautiful faces turned ashen by fear and shrill, plaintive screams for mercy. The closer those gifted in the psyker’s arts travel to the Vortex, the louder and more desperate the screaming becomes. Soon, it is not only in his dreams but in his every waking hour that the psyker hears the wailing, and most are driven to the very brink of sanity by the experience. On occasion, such as when the tides of the gibbous storm wax, the screams are so loud that even those born without the power of the psyker can hear them, scratching at the edge of their sanity and seeming to beg them for a mercy that none have the power to grant. [[Category:S]]