Kiavahr



Kiavahr is the heavily industrialized world around which its natural satelitte, the former prison-moon of Lycaeus - better known today as the Raven Guard’s home world of Deliverance - orbits. Although no true domain of the Mechanicum, together Kiavahr and Deliverance easily rival a Forge World’s output in terms of quantities of goods, weapons and ammunition produced there. Much of Kiavahr’s output has benefitted the XIXth Legion and even today Kiavahr still produces almost all the equipement required by the Raven Guard Chapter. While officially under the jurisdiction of the Raven Guard, Kiavahr largely governs itself - toiling under the watchful eye of its masters from the Adeptus Astartes. A tumultous history ties Kiavahr to its moon, a history forever changed by the arrival of one of the Emperor’s Primarchs : Corvus Corax who would subjugate the powerful Tech-Guilds and lead Kiavahr into the fold of the Imperium.

History
Little is known of Kiavahr’s distant past except for the fact that it was settled sometime during the Dark Age of Technology. Ruled throughout Old Night by ruthless and entrenched guilds that controlled every aspect of Kiavahr's society, the surface of that world was long ago scoured to blasted wastes by centuries, probably millennia of industrial exploitation. It is also during this age that Kiavahr rose to become a powerful hive of technology, its city-spanning manufactoria providing many goods of great quality to systems near and far. Kiavahr survived the Age of Strife with much of its technology intact and succeeded in staying in contact with its neighboring worlds through interstellar void travel. With these worlds Kiavahr established profitable trade agreements which served to further enrich and empower the Tech-Guilds that governed it. Each one of these powerful Tech-Guilds was governed by a Guildmaster, a being of immense wealth and whose power was almost unlimited. These individuals cared little for the well-being of their workers and ruled over millions of souls by violence and strength of arms, employing a caste of guards whose brutality kept the workers at bay. As Kiavahr's own mineral wealth was slowly depleted, the Tech-Guilds were forced to impose even harsher working shifts and conditions to meet the imposed production-quotas.

As a preemptive measure to ensure their people's compliance, the Guildmasters commonly decided to exile and imprison those that would speak out against them, try to negotiate better working conditions for their fellow coworkers or who didn’t meet their allotted production-quota. To banish these dissidents and prevent any form of rebellion, these agitators would be locked away on Kiavahr's moon, Lycaeus where immense force-domes were erected to house several thousand of political prisoners. Here, the slave-prisoners would live out what remained of their lives in forced labour. Soon after the establishment of the prison moon, a wealth of mineral deposits was discovered beneath its surface and so the prisoners became slaves, their every effort devoted to feeding the industries of the world they had been exiled from and furthering the staggering wealth of its ruling elite. To feed the ever-hungry forges of Kiavahr more and more prisoner were required, and thus new laws were implemented and even minor offences were soon punished by exile on Lycaeus. The amount of ore and other precious minerals harvested from Lycaeus soon required the construction of a gigantic mass-lifter, the towering structure using Kiavahr’s and Lycaeus’ gravity fields to continously ship the refined ore from the moon to the Forge World’s surface. The prison-moon’s population soon numbered in the millions, as not only the condemned but also their children and grandchildren were forced to toil in Lycaeus mines, constantly watched by a well-equipped and brutally effective corps of guards. It was into the midst of the ruthlessly oppressed and maltreated slave caste of Lycaeus that Corvus Corax came, and it was by his hand that the guilds would be cast down.

The Coming of the Raven
When the nascent Primarchs were scattered across the galaxy, the nineteenth Primarch, Corvus Corax manifested in a barren chamber, deep beneath Lycaeus’ glaciers. If it hadn’t for the timely arrival of a team of Lycaean miners, the Primarch would likely have never been discovered. On Kiavahr however, this event passed unnoticed, as the new-born Primarch quickly killed the only Kiavarian present: the cruel overseer of the work detail. As the miners decided to hide the strange boy they had discovered deep within the mines, Kiavahr’s ruling elite, blissfully ignorant of their final fate continued to amass riches and wealth by exploiting the miners.

As Corax reached his maturity so the rule of the guilds drew to an end, though the overseers would not know of it until it was too late to avert their doom. Corax led a masterfully conceived campaign that bled the prison authorities dry, taking small cells of freedom fighters on a range of missions, some to steal weapons, other ammunition, still more to sabotage key systems so that they would fail at the moment of his choosing. Eventually, that moment came and Corax led the uprising that would cast off the shackles of centuries of oppression. In a necessarily bloody battle, Corax and his fellow freedom fighters took the prison. The bloodshed was great, for not all of the slave-prisoners had been imprisoned for their radical ideals; many were convicted killers and worse, the Primarch forced by necessity to utilise their fighting abilities and overlook their previous crimes, on condition they never repeat them after their bondage was cast off.

In yet another convergence of great events, it was in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the prison moon Lycaeus and the opening salvoes of the atomic bombardment of Kiavahr that the Emperor arrived to reclaim his lost son. Unlike events surrounding so many other such meetings however, the Emperor came alone, and the next day left alone. While it is known that the Master of Mankind and the XIXth Primarch spoke for long hours, what passed between them remains a matter of conjecture. Whatever the truth, one thing is known to have passed between father and son that night. The Emperor would leave Corax to complete his missions and to defeat the guilds of Kiavahr. Only later would he be ready to assume command of his Legion. It was as if in leaving Corax to liberate Kiavahr on his own, the Emperor was ensuring the Primarch learned and assimilated the most vital lessons of war. The Emperor departed, leaving his son to complete his task using only those weapons he had at hand. Those weapons turned out to be stockpiles of atomic barrages and mining charges the masters of Kiavahr had secreted on Lycaeus, believing them safe from the multitudes they ruled over. In their hubris the guilds never imagined that the slave-miners might one day cast off their shackles and claim those weapons as their own.

Even as the guilds sought to launch a counter-attack against the massively outnumbered freedom fighters, Corax knew the terrible order he must give. Using the steep gravity well that tethered Kiavahr and its moon, the Primarch committed to a full scale bombardment of the vast manufactory cities below. Even as the atomic fires blossomed on the face of Kiavahr, Corax demonstrated that by slaying thousands, millions would be saved. This, some would later claim, was the lesson the Emperor meant Corax to learn, and one that would temper his nature against the numerous challenges few but the Primarchs of the Legiones Astartes can fully comprehend. Their greatest cities decimated, the guilds had no option but to capitulate. Kiavahr was liberated and Lycaeus renamed Deliverance. The Primarch had confronted that most terrible lesson of war -- oft times, the innocent must suffer for the sake of all. It was a truth the Emperor knew well, and one that humanity as a whole would experience on an unprecedented scale within a century.

Under the Raven's Banner
By the time the Raven Lord took command of his Legion, the Great Crusade was over a century old. Corax was quick to impose the style of war he had perfected on Lycaeus over that which had come to define the XIXth melding stealth and guile with vigilance and swiftness. During its restructuring, the Legion commissioned several innovations from the forges of Mars, all of them cunningly wrought to further its mastery of the arts of stealth and speed. As the Thunderhawk Gunship entered widespread service, the Raven Guard secured for themselves a variant known as the Shadowhawk, sporting all manner of technologies that made it invisible to all but the most sensitive of augurs. In addition, the Legion gained access to the Whispercutter, an open airframe flyer constructed about a gravitic impellor and capable of dropping ten Legionaries into a war zone in utter silence and with practically no chance of detection. Such technology was created not by the Martian Mechanicum nor any of the Forge Worlds, but by those master artificers of Kiavahr who formerly served the guilds. Utilising strands of machine canon unknown to the mainstream of the Mechanicum, the guild artificers created all manner of systems at the behest of the Raven Guard and in time the Legion's Techmarines were inducted into these mysteries, although it has been speculated that the Kiavahrans might have been declared outcast by the jealous lords of Mars, were it not for the patronage of so august a body as the Legiones Astartes and the Primarch Corax.

As the Great Crusade ground ever onwards, Kiavahr assumed its position in the Emperor's Imperium of worlds. While its output was not equal to that of a fully-fledged Forge World of the Mechanicum, with the aid of the Tech-Priests of Mars, its forges and manufactories produced and exported vast quantities of materiel as well as a number of the more specialised machines and weapons required by the Raven Guard Legion. The guild artificers attempted to retain their closest secrets from the Mechanicum with some small measure of success, and clung on to their independence from Mars. Having remained self-sufficient throughout the lonely dark ages, Kiavahr remained unwilling to cede its secrets to outsiders, the only authority it recognised was that of the Raven Guard. Of all of the Mechanicum's subsidiary domains, Kiavahr maintained relations with only one -- Gryphonne IV. The terms of this relationship remain unclear, but because the Legio Gryphonicus fought alongside the Raven Guard throughout several of its larger scale campaigns, it can be assumed that some manner of reciprocal pact was, and perhaps still, remains in place.

The Seed of Dissidence
While it was widely believed that the power of the Tech-guilds had been broken in the wake of the Lycaeus Uprising, unknown to the Raven Guard and the wider Imperium, some of the former Guildmasters still lived, their livespan augmented by foreign techniques that were almost immediately outlawed by the Mechanicum when the Adepta’s grip tightened on Kiavahr. Eeking out an existence in the inhospitable rad-wastes or hiding among the teeming multitudes of the planet’s workers, the Guildmasters, some of them the very same individuals that were cast-down by Corvus Corax and his freedom fighters lurked in the shadows. Yet, they still held a measure of power, commanding the respect of sizeable parts of the population as not all had suffered under their rule to the same extend as the miners on Lycaeus had. To some the Guildmasters had brought wealth, a position and even prosperity, all that was now threatened by the Imperium. These last survivors howere maintained an extensive network of spies within Kiavahrian socierty and even commanded the semblance of a military might but never truly posed a threath to the Raven Guard or indeed the Mechanicum. But then came the Dropsite Massacre and things quickly changed.

Kiavahrian Society
Since the times of the Great Crusade, Khiavarian society has been notable for its lack of homogenity. The streets of Kiavahr are crowded with figures ranking from vat-grown slaves, half-machine servitors and the augmentically-enhanced forms of the priesthood of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The mighty Tech-guilds that once ruled Kiavahr still exist today, although their true power has long been subdued by the Imperium. However the Tech-guilds are still powerful organisations which have benefitted for the last ten thousand years from the protection and patronnage of the Raven Guard. So far this patronnage has allowed the guilds to retain some of its independance towards the intrusive nature of the Martian Mechanicum and keep some of their greatest technological achievements for themselves. With the extremely high pollution-levels, Kiavahr also harbours a sizeable population of mutants, which at least in theory exceed the tolerance levels established by the Adeptus Ministorum, but the quality of the goods produced on Kiavahr has always spared the planet from the brutal purges this branch is rightly famed for.

Notable Locations

 * Diagothian mountains - Diagothian mountains of Kiavahr are known for the great black-birds that inhabit them. Raven Guard Chaplains climb these mountains in search for their spiritual quest of killing those birds and making trophy of them.
 * Nabrik - Nabrik was Kiavahr's former planetary capital, the city from which the Tech-guilds ruled before their submission to Corvus Corax and the installment of the Raven Guard as the new rulers of both Kiavahr and its moon. Nabrik is both the largest and most productive city on Kiavahr, its many forges toiling day and night to provide the Imperium and the Raven Guard with goods ranking from Bolter-shells and power-couplings to entire gunships. The former political power resided within the Wellmetal district, one of the oldest quarters of the city which consisted of important manfactoria-complexes that were both factory and palace. Much of the city has been undermined, offering countless hiding places to the last scions of the Tech-guilds, tech-heretics and mutants that hide in the deep vaults and abandoned cellars of Nabrik. Most notoriously, one of the twin-Primarchs of the Alpha Legion, Omegon, would hide within these cellars and tunnels during the infiltration of the Raven Guard Legion during the dark days of the Horus Heresy.
 * The rad-wastes - During the Lycaeus Uprising, Corvus Corax ordered his freedom fighters to use the atomic mining charges as improvised bombs, which he subsequently used to bombard Kiavahr. The atomic fire unleashed by this bombardment burnt for almost a century, a daily reminder to the world not to defy their new master. When the fires mostly died down, they left gigantic bowls of glass-fused rock and heavily polluted ruins and rust-plains. One of the first bombs to fall had been aimed at Nairhub where the orbital elevator's twisted stump still accusingly points at Deliverance. The rad-wastes are a broken landscape with ruined buildings, rad-lakes and sluggish river, illuminated by still-roaring fires where the nuclear blast had ignited gas or fuel mains. Closer to the blast, nothing remained and the soil which is covered in heavily contaminated rust-dust that Kivahr's dominant winds mould into ferocious sandstorms. It is a landscape profoundly inimical to life, but yet some chose to live there: the outcasts, the mutants, the heretics and those that still seek to bring about the return of the Tech-guilds, all those forced to hide from the gaze of the Imperium and its allies. In 10,000 years, little has changed as the Raven Guard always have more pressing matters at hand than purging these wastes and the Adeptus Mechanicus has equally shown little to no interest to reclaim the lost and forgotten technology which might still rest in within the heavily polluted wastelands.
 * Ravendelve - Continuously bathed in the noxious fog of rad-wastes, a single three-storeyed building stood out, defended by armoured towers and lascannon batteries but otherwise unremarkable. The slab-sided building was named Ravendelve and was one of the Raven Guard Legion’s training facilities. What made Ravendelve so valuable was its location, deep within the enormously dangerous and inhabitable rad-wastes. During the Great Crusade, Ravendelve’s primary utility was as a training ground, where Raven Guard Legionaries and aspirants both learned to cope with the harsh environment of a nuclear wasteland. Its isolation would later lead the Primarch Corax to select it to harbour his most secret endeavour: the accelerated rebuilding of the XIXth Legion following the crippling losses sustained during the Dropsite Massacre. Most of the complex was subterranean, and the parts which were not were well-defended and located in the most inhospitable region of the planet - isolated and secure - this must have been how Ravendelve had seemed to the Ravenlord, and yet, by a cruel twist of fate Ravendelve would become one of the Raven Guard’s most humbling defeats.