Amarah Prime, also just called Amarah, is the second planet of the Amarah System.
Amarah Prime was once a teeming Hive World of old and noble provenance. As the oldest Human settlement within the entire Orpheus Sector, having been founded in the distant 30th Millennium by the legendary Rogue Trader Militant Lady Arica Orpheus, Amarah had known a first existence as a minor Imperial outpost before being destroyed in the wake of the Horus Heresy. When the Imperium reclaimed the Orpheus Sector during the Dark Marches Crusade, Amarah Prime was naturally chosen as the sector's capital world, a position it kept over the next four standard millennia.
As well as being a Fortress Imperialis in its own right, Amarah also serves as Battlefleet Orpheus' principal fleet anchorage, making it the political and military heart of the Orpheus Sector. Despite the power it harboured, Amarah was devastated in the last major battle of the Orphean War, the famed Battle of Amarah. Like the two other Hive Worlds in its system, Amarah Prime is now reduced to a broken landscape of toppled towers, broken bastions and ravaged hab blocks, the heavy fighting having left the world an ash-shrouded wasteland, partly covered in radioactive fallout and burning skies.
Sources[]
- Imperial Armour Volume Twelve: The Fall of Orpheus, pp. 42-43