Bellom

Bellom is the name of both the Dead World and its star system. Once a massive trade hub for the Imperium, the fall of the Jericho Sector left it barren of all life for centuries into the present day.

History
The Bellom System was once one of the most prosperous trading hubs in the old Jericho Sector, its fortunes built upon the flow of luxury goods passing along a spur of the Hyades Ebb Warp route that led directly towards the old sector capital of Verronus.

That passage no longer exists, for with the rise of the Warp Storms that heralded the Age of Apostasy, the route became unstable and then collapsed entirely.

At some point during the Jericho Sector's Age of Shadow, the raw stuff of the Warp spewed out of the old passage to Verronus, and engulfed the glittering spires of Bellom, cutting it off from all outside contact for many hundreds of years. When the warp storms eventually subsided, the passage to Verronus was gone, as was every living thing on the surface of Bellom.

The only survivors of the warp storm that engulfed the system were the Deathwatch Battle-Brothers present onboard Watch Station Bellom, which orbits in the system's outer reaches. When the warp storms came, the crew of the Watch Station raised its Gellar Field and used their sus-an implants to enter a deep state of suspended animation in which they slept through the centuries until the storms lifted and they could resume their vigil.

Just what the station stands sentinel against is unknown, not even to the Chamber of Vigilance, but the fact of its existence is reason enough to maintain it.

Of late, a number of efforts have been launched to reopen the old Bellom-Verronus Warp passage in the hope of establishing a new front by which the servants of Chaos infesting the central regions of the Jericho Reach can be assaulted.

To date, even the most skilled of Navigators has failed to locate any such passage, and several of their number have perished in the attempt. Nonetheless, Lord Militant Solomon Tetrarchus has ordered the effort to continue, for now at least.