A Noctilith Crown
A Noctilith Crown is a blackstone device polarised to attract the psychic energies of the Warp and utilised by the forces of Chaos to enhance the power of Chaos psykers and to overwhelm other users of the Immaterium's energies.
Its potent Warp energies can even affect non-psykers once they get within range, assaulting them with nightmarish visions.
The presence of these devices on a world can lead a population within close range to have dreams and nightmares that begin to materialise into reality as Warp-gheists.
History[]
Origins[]
The ring-like structures of blackstone known as Noctilith Crowns brought a loathsome new energy to the war effort on Vigilus during the War of Beasts early in the Era Indomitus.
The crowns had been constructed on Nemendghast, perfected en route to Vigilus in the guts of Abaddon the Despoiler's forge ships, and raised on the Sentinel World by work gangs of indentured Chaos slaves.
Where the Black Legion's Masters of Possession determined there was a site of geomantic significance, the crowns were aligned to the exacting specifications of Abaddon's ritualists, and driven into the surface of the planet with long steel spikes.
Wherever the Noctilith Crowns were planted, the minds of Chaos psykers flared with a frisson of forbidden power. Those who had any form of psychic sensitivity found strange new phenomena manifesting around them when they approached these sites. Even slaves and Chaos Cultists without a flicker of psychic potential were assailed by searing visions.
The Noctilith Crowns were designed to bring the raw forces of the Warp to Vigilus. They had been created from deposits of noctilith stone harnessed by the Black Legion over the course of their Black Crusades from the Eye of Terror, imbued with Chaos energy, and distributed across the galaxy. This too was part of the Despoiler's greater plan to win the Long War.
Over the course of the Gothic War in the early 41st Millennium, the Warmaster of Chaos had learned that blackstone could be polarised either to attract the energies of Chaos, or to repel it. That knowledge had informed his grand strategy ever since.
Where there were deposits of blackstone polarised to repel Chaos energy, Abaddon would do everything in his power to destroy them. Where there was blackstone that could be polarised to attract Chaos energy, he would seize it and turn it to his advantage.
By chiselling into the stone blasphemous phrases and runes in the dark tongue, a sorcerer could align its aura with the dimensional bleed of the Immaterium.
Channelling these unpredictable energies using a Noctilith Crown could lead to a tremendous psychic backlash. In places upon Vigilus, more power than any mortal could possibly use flooded into the minds of those supplicants that sought to harness the crown's supernatural aura.
This too served the greater cause, for whereever a psychic disaster struck, the raw stuff of Chaos was soon to follow.
War of Beasts[]
Noctilith Crowns form vital strongpoints for Chaos Space Marines and other forces of Chaos, for these arcane devices can draw in the raw energy of Chaos itself.
The Noctilith Crowns were perfected by Abaddon and his original master of summoning, the Darkling Liege Narcus Tharanda.
Though single Noctilith Crowns had been used to blight a dozen worlds before Abaddon's alliance of Heretic Astartes reached Vigilus during the phase of the War of Beasts remembered as the War of Nightmares, the crowns were first deployed en masse when Abaddon set foot upon Vigilus and deemed it the right time to make use of his hard-won resource.
Each was painstakingly carved with runes in the Dark Tongue of Chaos, bathed in the blood of hundreds of sacrificial victims, anointed with the oily residue of scores of rendered down psykers and installed in great iron housings before being bulk-lifted down to the planet's surface and sunk deep into Vigilus' crust.
The Noctilith Crowns, aligned so as to channel the empyric force of the Great Rift as the planet turned, established a continent-spanning network of psychic amplifiers that thrummed with Chaos energy. Wherever they resonated the strongest, the visions and nightmares that had troubled the people of Vigilus began to manifest in reality as Warp-gheists, ethereal horrors that plagued the citizenry for a hundred kilometres around each site.
The anarchy that resulted only added fuel to the fires that looked set to consume the planet entirely before the Imperium managed to drive the Chaos forces off-world, though at great cost.
Sources[]
- Imperium Nihilus - Vigilus Ablaze (8th Edition), pp. 31, 64, 173