Castobel

For almost six thousand years, we have stood strong against sedition, heresy and xenos domination, holding true to the light of the God-Emperor. For almost six thousand years, we have been alone in the darkness, a single beacon of light amidst the shadows of discord and depravity. No longer must we suffer so, no longer must we endure in silence… for we are reunited with our distant brothers, who return to deliver us from the shadows that have encroached upon this Sector for millennia! Praise the Emperor, and praise His valiant Crusaders! –Lord Commander Ortana Lokk

Castobel is a Hive World within the Orpheus Salient of the Jericho Reach. Regarded as the jewel of the Orpheus Salient, Castobel remained loyal to the Imperium through the Age of Shadow and welcomed the Achilus Crusade with open arms, turning its resources to the support of the re-conquest of the Jericho Sector.

The planet is a bustling, industrious hive world, with a production capacity that eclipses that of every other world so far conquered by the crusade, and the sheer numbers of people within Castobel's hives provide an ample supply of recruits for the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy.

Castobel is a fine example of how Lord Militant Achilus envisioned the progression of his namesake Crusade -- conquered worlds contributing to the conquest of others, forging a newly self-sufficient Jericho Sector with each victory.

In recent years, Castobel's fortunes have changed. With the arrival of Hive Fleet Dagon, Castobel has come under siege by the Great Devourer and a world once responsible for supplying a small but significant proportion of the crusade's men and materiel has virtually shut down. The Tyranid blockade and the invasion force on the ground has all but caused Castobel to grind to a halt, and its populace now huddles in fear of the ravenous beasts outside their walls.

However, all is not yet lost. Of all the worlds in the Orpheus Salient under assault by the Tyranids, Castobel may yet be freed of their menace. Castobel is barren and lifeless but for the masses in the four remaining hive cities, with little in the way of resources for the Tyranids to consume.

Thanks to the decisive action of Lord Castellan Ortana Lokk, an unsteady stalemate has arisen, with the Tyranids unable to gain ground and bio-mass enough to replenish expended forces quickly, stealing away their greatest advantage: seemingly limitless numbers.

With time and bloodshed, the Tyranid threat on Castobel could be ended, leaving a population hardened by war and eager to enact revenge upon the monsters that tried to destroy their home.

History
And the stars will be blotted out, and men shall despair saying that they are without light. And in that moment of heresy they doom themselves most surely –From the sermons of Sebastian Thor

Castobel is ancient, with some historical evidence to suggest that it predates the Imperium, having been colonised by humanity at some point during the Dark Age of Technology. In the days of the Great Crusade, Castobel joined the Imperium after a brief and bloody war eliminated its original ruling caste, which was swiftly replaced by a governor installed by Crusade forces.

When the Imperium first claimed Castobel, it was already a prosperous hive world, with four colossal cities emerging from the lifeless ash wastelands of a world dedicated to industry. Under Imperial rule it grew further, with several of the smaller wasteland settlements developing together into two additional Hives by the middle of the 33rd Millennium, and gaining stewardship of Battlefleet Jericho's primary dockyard a few centuries later.

When the Jericho Sector collapsed into anarchy, Castobel endeavoured to remain aloof from the disarray, remaining staunchly loyal to the God-Emperor in spite of the Sector's collapse. Using what remained of the Sector's fleets, including loyal remnants of Battlefleet Jericho, Castobel's Imperial Commander worked tirelessly to maintain the Emperor's law on several nearby worlds.

Still, the isolation took its toll on Castobel and its colonies, and the world could not remain as it once was. After centuries separated from the Imperium, the hive cities on Castobel had become virtually independent city-states, unified only by their common faith in the Emperor.

That faith was fought for more fiercely than almost any other facet of life on Castobel. Separated from the higher authorities of the Adeptus Ministorum, the ruling families of the six cities found common ground in the need to maintain the religious structure that had for so long defined Castobellan life.

The result was an organisation known as the Aquilan Pluracy, which took the place of the old Castobel Diocese as the highest religious authority on the planet, maintaining the temples and ensuring the populace remained appropriately reverent towards the Emperor.

This state of affairs remained largely unchanged for several millennia in spite of raids by aliens, renegades and heretics, until 789.M41, when Battlegroup Santos arrived at the edge of the system to be greeted by vessels that had once belonged to Battlefleet Jericho. Upon discovery of their kinship, a message was sent to Lord General Curas immediately, informing him that Castobel was loyal to the Imperium and wished to return to the fold.

A hundred days of celebration followed, and at the end of that time, the 1st Castobel Reborn were raised and sent forth to serve the Imperium, while Lord Commander Ortana Lokk of Hive Tyralos was selected to rule as Imperial Commander and Lord Castellan of Castobel.

By the end of that year, a further hundred regiments had been raised, with more on the way in every passing year. In the years since, over two thousand regiments of Castobel Reborn have been mustered and distributed across the Jericho Reach, alongside vast quantities of materiel.

That all changed, as so much in the Orpheus Salient did, when the Shadow in the Warp descended upon the Jericho Reach. Castobel came under assault in the early months of 817.M41, after more than four years of mounting interference within the warp.

Once again isolated from the Imperium, Castobel's forces—its planetary defence force and the three hundred Imperial Guard regiments mustered since 812.M41 but left stranded by increasingly difficult warp travel -- immediately set about bolstering their home world's defences and preparing for the arrival of a monstrous aggressor.

The Tyranid onslaught was swift and terrible, and they managed to overrun Hive Trimalov within six weeks of the first creatures making planetfall. Billions died, torn apart and devoured by mindless, slavering beasts and towering, malevolent monsters.

As the Tyranids destroyed Hive Trimalov and began to spread outwards to the other hives, Lord Castellan Lokk withdrew with his advisors to contemplate how best to defend against this enemy. When he returned after three days, he was grim and humourless, but stated that he knew what must be done.

While this occurred, the Tyranids had begun to move for Hive Tyralos, the second most densely populated of Castobel's hive cities. Hundreds of thousands of men -- both soldiers and civilians bearing simple weapons as ragtag militias -- stood in defence of Hive Tyralos as the evacuation began, selling their lives dearly to allow as many people to flee as possible.

Then the order came through: withdraw into the city, lure the Tyranids in. An hour later, the skies burned with crimson light as Hive Tyralos died in atomic fire, the incandescent fury of its ancient reactors and generators unleashed to obliterate the swarm.

Both sides now exist in an unsteady stalemate. Castobel's defensive forces are depleted, weary and demoralised, and epidemics of Tyranid-spawned maladies rage through the populace.

The Tyranids are similarly depleted in number and having been denied the bio-mass of Hive Tyralos -- both their own and that of its populace -- they cannot swiftly replenish their numbers nor easily muster the power for another assault. The war has settled into a routine of probing raids and attempted infiltrations of the remaining cities, with the defenders fearful of the skulking, hissing monsters that lurk outside their walls.

Yet hope, of a sort, remains. With the Tyranids starved of bio-mass and the reinforcements it would provide, the swarm is at its most vulnerable. If Castobel's defenders can deny the Tyranids long enough, the Tyranids might be crushed utterly, leaving the ships in orbit starving. This hope is a distant one, but one that many are clinging to.

Key Locations
Below are a number of significant locations across Castobel's surface.

Hive Tyralos
One of Castobel's oldest and most populous hives, Tyralos predated the Imperium by several millennia, and contained a wealth of ancient technology dating back to the era of its original construction.

When the Jericho Sector still stood, Tyralos was home to a major Adeptus Mechanicus presence, containing a coven of archaeotechnologists eager to uncover the secrets of the technology hidden within the depths of the hive.

As the largest congregation of tech-priests on Castobel, Tyralos’ coven became the highest Adeptus Mechanicus authority on Castobel when the Age of Shadow descended upon the Sector, granting the hive considerable power and leverage over the other cities.

The Cult of the Machine prospered within Hive Tyralos during its isolation, growing to challenge the Aquilan Pluracy within the city's depths.

When Castobel was reunited with the Imperium, so too were the coven’s members reunited with their brother techpriests, and efforts to unlock the secrets of Castobel's ancient technology were renewed by the newly arrived explorators.

Many secrets were passed back beyond the Well of Night to forge worlds far from the Jericho Reach, for detailed investigation by the Mechanicus. With the Tyranid invasion and the fall of Hive Trimalov, Hive Tyralos became the next most obvious target for the Tyranids.

At the height of the Tyranid attempt to overrun the Hive, the Lord Castellan gave the order to sacrifice Tyralos to deny it to the enemy, an order met with much hostility from the Adeptus Mechanicus, who regarded the hive's contents as sacred.

After fierce debate that raged for days, the tech-priests relented, under the condition that they would have a week to salvage what they could from the hive’s depths and perform the correct rites to overload the hive's generatoria.

Hive Tyralos today is an irradiated ruin, barely resembling the towering city-complex it once was. As a testament to the fury of the city’s destruction, the land a hundred kilometres in every direction around the city’s ruins is irradiated and vitrified ash, utterly inhospitable to even the massively adaptable Tyranids.

Hive Trimalov
Once the largest and most powerful of Castobel's hives, Trimalov is now utterly devoid of human life for the first time in thousands of years. Possessed of a populace of more than twenty billion souls and home to Castobel's grandest cathedral, Trimalov was, for millennia, the world's capital, ruling in the Emperor's name over the other five cities.

Trimalov was, as well as the political heart of Castobel, the centre of the world's religious life. The Castobellan Diocese was based within Trimalov's cathedral, an immense edifice of gleaming marble and stark obsidian capable of containing over a million worshipful servants of the Emperor and dominating the hive’s central spire.

This cathedral grew in magnificence and opulence with every passing century, the tithes of the devout furnishing generations of Cardinals with the finest of goods. The cathedral's glory did not diminish during the Age of Shadow, thanks to the Aquilan Pluracy, which sprang from the long alliances between the church and Castobel's ruling families. The Aquilan Pluracy saw the temples maintained and the people kept faithful through the long ages of isolation, ensuring that the world remained true to the Emperor's rule.

When the Imperium returned to Castobel, it was Trimalov’s Lord Commander Ascendant who was made Imperial Commander and Lord Castellan of the entire world, elevating Trimalov once more to dominance over Castobel. However, the return of the Imperium was not as simple as some had believed it would be.

The Imperium had changed since the Jericho Reach fell, most notably in the form of the Ecclesiarchy. Castobel's priests found themselves proponents of a heretic religion, adhering to a creed cast out after a brutal war of faith millennia after the Age of Shadow began.

The priests of the Adeptus Ministorum descended upon Castobel to find the Temple of the Saviour Emperor still holding sway over the people, and set about replacing it with a more modern creed, to the dismay of the Aquilan Pluracy.

Trimalov is no more. It was torn open and infested by the Tyranid menace, its people butchered and devoured to feed their eternal hunger. The structure remains, a hollow shell standing in mockery of the long isolation Castobel endured. Its form is corrupted by spore chimneys and spawning pits, and vile xenoflora writhes with a mindless malice for kilometres in every direction, bursting from the ash and entangling steel, basking in the atomic heat of the city's ancient generatoria.

Hive Kevor
One of the four remaining hive cities, Kevor was constructed after the Horus Heresy within the spine of a mountain range, burrowing deep into the crust and extending for almost two hundred kilometres across the peaks. Possibly the most securely located and heavily defended of the cities, Kevor's highest spire now serves to house the Lord Castellan and his command staff.

Hive Kevor grew out from a string of mining settlements running along the length of the Kevor Mountains, the hive taking the mountains’ name as the settlements expanded into one another and spread further and further out from their humble origins. By the time the mines within the mountains had run dry, nearly twelve billion souls inhabited Kevor and the city had become an established part of the landscape.

While the mountains no longer contain the resources they once did, the self-sufficient and stoic attitude of Kevor's populace remained strong, and the city's primary trade soon turned from mining to warfare, with much of the population joining Kevor's militia or leaving the city to serve on Castobel's few remaining warships.

When the Imperium returned to Castobel, Hive Kevor provided over a third of the men recruited into the Imperial Guard, eclipsing all but the colossal Hive Trimalov in the number of soldiers mustered.

At present, Kevor remains defiant of the Tyranids skulking through the ash-choked mountain passes and swarming through the skies above the city. Its populace accepted the realities of war more swiftly than any others on Castobel, and their fortified mountain-hive promises to be difficult for any foe to overcome, even the Tyranids.

Hive Hessax
A short, broad hive spread across a vast expanse of ash desert, Hessax is the youngest and smallest of Castobel's hives, though still several thousand years old and home to more than ten billion loyal servants to the Imperium.

Hessax's location, as distant from the other hives as possible, is tied inexplicably to its purpose. Intended to manufacture components with which to maintain the vessels of Battlefleet Jericho, Hessax's isolation was a deliberate security measure to limit access to starship parts of such rare quality.

With the coming of the Age of Shadow, Hessax's role became increasingly crucial, its forges serving to maintain the limited flotilla that supplied and protected Castobel and its colonies from outside aggression.

Production increased dramatically, for the city was the only place capable of providing the needed components to Castobel's makeshift fleet.

Since the return of the Imperium, Hessax has been no less busy. With only limited repair and resupply stations within the Jericho Reach, Lord Admiral Arkelius proposed to take advantage of any supply routes that could be found.

In short order, Hessax's forges were turned to serving the Achilus Crusade’s battlegroups. However, with the arrival of the Tyranids, fewer and fewer ships have been able to reach Castobel’s orbit to resupply, and thus Hive Hessax stands dormant, its comparatively small size and isolation proving to be their best protection from the swarms of Hive Fleet Dagon.

Hive Orolan and Hive Ibellus
The two remaining hives on Castobel have long been regarded as a pair, rather than singly. Had the world continued to grow as it had done when the Jericho Sector still stood, they would likely have expanded into one another, becoming a single, massive hive rather than two distinct cities.

Situated less than fifty kilometres apart, the "twin hives" of Orolan and Ibellus are similar in many ways, their histories and populace intertwined by industry and tradition. Orolan has traditionally been dedicated towards the refinement and processing of raw materials, while Ibellus contained many of Castobel's most prolific manufactories, turning those refined materials into machinery and munitions.

Largely untouched by the politics that defined life in Tyralos and Trimalov, few but the nobility in the twin hives saw much change when the Age of Shadow fell, save for variation in work schedules and shipment deadlines. Similarly, the return of the Imperium saw increased activity within Orolan and Ibellus, but little else of note until recently.

The situation changed in late 816.M41, mere months before the Tyranids arrived; slightly more than two companies of Blood Drinkers Space Marines arrived in Castobel orbit aboard the Battle Barge Crimson Sacrament, damaged in conflict with some monstrous enemy.

Several squads immediately made for Hive Hessax, seeking repairs and resupply from the forges there, while two full companies arrived in Hive Ibellus. Within weeks, the forces in Hessax had returned to orbit, but the 3rd and 4th Battle Companies that had come to Ibellus had spent the time fortifying the hive's tallest spire against an impending attack.

Whether the Crimson Sacrament departed Castobel entirely or if it fights against the Tyranid fleet is unknown, but no sign of the vessel has been seen since it left orbit.

The arrival of the Tyranids saw Orolan and Ibellus subject to brutal orbital bombardment from the orbiting bio-ships, followed by wave after wave of monstrous aggressors. While Ibellus stood firm thanks to the prowess and tenacity of the Blood Drinkers, Orolan suffered greatly.

Though it did not fall, thousands of warriors and millions of civilians were slain before the Tyranids could be driven back. The Blood Drinkers have remained within Ibellus, and much of the population of Orolan has retreated to the safety of their sister city and the Astartes who stand guard over it.