The Planet of the Sorcerers, officially named Sortiarius, is the current homeworld of the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion. The Planet of the Sorcerers was originally a Daemon World located deep in the Eye of Terror, though it recently returned to realspace through the use of a potent sorcerous ritual.
With the fall of his original homeworld of Prospero to the Space Wolves at the start of the Horus Heresy during the Scouring of Prospero, the Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion, Magnus the Red, used his sorcerous powers in the final act of his pact with Tzeentch to transfer his beloved and infamous City of Light, Tizca, through the Warp from Prospero to a new planet.
In this way, all of the precious (and heretical) knowledge hidden within its libraries that the Thousand Sons had gathered from all across the galaxy during the Great Crusade would be preserved.
For ten thousand Terran years the Planet of Sorcerers has been the staging ground from which the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion has launched their raids into realspace. A nightmarish world of daemons, it was nested deep within the Warp until Magnus' hand had it drawn through the veil and thrust into the Emperor's domain in the waning years of the 41st Millennium.
It now has taken up position above the Thousand Sons' original Legion homeworld of Prospero. The Thousand Sons have finally come home in a most unexpected way.
History
Whether the Planet of Sorcerers has a natural origin or is merely a by-product of Tzeentch's will, none can say. It is a warped and twisted place, even compared to the worlds of other Traitor Legions -- a locus of Chaos energy that the Thousand Sons use to fuel their diabolical craft.
While it existed within the Warp rift of the Eye of Terror it orbited a constantly changing sun, an erratic orb that passed through nine distinct waxing and waning phases.
The world itself is dark, rocky and violently volcanic. Leaden skies are riven by unholy power, and kaleidoscopic lightning illuminates the skyline with impossible hues, stealing all notion of night and day, with the heavens drowned in a swirling, tormented chorus of the restless dead. Clouds of ætheric vapour release deluges of liquefied warp energy, which flow out to the seas that lie between the planet's vast, shifting continents.
The warped surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers.
Like Saturn in the Sol System and the planet Kelmasr, orbiting the white sun Clovo, both planets are haloed with rings of rock and ice, marking them out from their celestial brethren. Sortiarius has a similar ring, spectrally white against the tumultuous violet of Eyespace.
It was formed not from ice or rock, but from shrieking souls. The Thousand Sons' exile-world is quite literally crowned by the howling spirits of those who have died by deceit.
This world is wholly a Daemon World of Tzeentch, ruled by Magnus as its Daemon Prince; it is dark, rocky, highly volcanic and suffers from constant climatic turmoil and change. Its skies are scarred by relentless storms of Warp energy.
Though the Planet of the Sorcerers is anathema to natural life, its surface is rife with Tzeentch's Warp-spawned children, whose hideous screams fill the air as they coalesce into existence and disperse again. Other strange beings also manage to cling to a wretched existence among the erupting peaks and flux plains.
Tzaangors -- horrendous hybrids of beast, bird and man -- roam the wastelands in nomadic warbands. Enormous monstrosities march beneath raging empyric storms leaving wide wakes of devastation. Most nightmarish are the shambling Chaos Spawn, fleshy amalgams of living creatures and raw Chaos energy.
The Tower of the Cyclops
The only place bearing any semblance of order on this constantly mutating planet is Tizca, the capital city of the Thousand Sons that was transported through the Warp in its entirety from the devastated world of Prospero. The majestic spires that once lined the city have been replaced with disfigured obelisks that meld into the bedrock. The mighty pyramids of old have given way to mounds of crystalline earth-matter, and pillars of molten stone that pupate into metamorphic towers.
These grotesque structures house the halls of the Thousand Sons. Inside them lies the dark lore the Traitor Legion has harvested over its long existence, stored in endless rows of profane librariums whose walls pulsate and echo with daemonic wailing. Those mortals brought inside the sanctums are flensed of their sanity by the raw psychic resonance, preparing them perfectly for the Thousand Sons' sorcerous experimentations.
A Chaos Warfleet of the Thousand Sons Legion protects its homeworld of Sortiarius.
Many are the malshapen edifices of Tizca, but they are all dwarfed by the innermost megalith -- the Tower of the Cyclops. Looming ominously over the planet's surface, its highest levels contain Magnus' personal sanctum, and from the pinnacle comes a flood of iridescent light, cast by an entrapped tempest of glowing Warp energy.
This raging storm is enveloped by an orb of profane wards, and through the eye of the storm Magnus watches the manifold paths of the past, present and future.
The great, glowing eye of the tower watches over the planet, its gaze penetrating the Warp into the material galaxy beyond the borders of the Eye of Terror. This allows Magnus to sense the arcane artefacts and gifted psykers which fascinate him, so that he can dispatch his Thousand Sons through the Warp to raid the Imperium of Man.
For thousands of standard years Magnus has observed the material universe from his tower, biding his time and planning his master strokes of revenge.
Led by the Daemon Primarch Magnus, a Thousand Sons conclave enacts a sorcerous spell within the Tower of the Cyclops.
Yet the Planet of the Sorcerers is not merely a secluded refuge in which the Thousand Sons toil at their dark arts; it is a base of warfare, a staging ground for campaigns of annihilation that are waged against the Imperium of Man.
Tizca is replete with labyrinthine armouries that contain racks upon racks of Warp-infused weaponry. Corrupted manufactoria -- either gifted from the Dark Mechanicum or wrenched through the Warp from incinerated Forge Worlds -- belch smoke into the auroral atmosphere as they churn out waves of daemonic siege engines.
Between the twisting forms of the buildings themselves are enormous mustering grounds ringed by inscrutable Tzeentchian runes. Here the rows of Rubricae are gathered, ready to be marched into the corridors of the awaiting Silver Towers. From there they are unleashed upon the unforgiven enemies of the Sorcerer-Lords.
Ruling Hierarchy of the Planet of the Sorcerers.
When the Thousand Sons first arrived on the planet, they found it unpopulated. Over the millennia, however, the Thousand Sons have acquired tens of thousands of human slaves through their raids into realspace. This has created a servant underclass on the world, some of whom have escaped their masters to eke out a miserable but free existence in the hostile land surrounding Tizca.
These escaped slaves then join the nomadic warbands that roam the Planet of the Sorcerer's wastelands and are led by both sorcerous Champions of Chaos from the Thousand Sons as well as those chosen few of the Lords of Change who have arisen within the ranks of the escaped slaves.
Often these Chaos Champions are recruited from these nomadic warbands to serve the Thousand Sons. Over thousands of standard years, a large population of mutant Beastmen has also developed on the planet, forming a subordinate warrior caste for the Thousand Sons Legion.
While some of these mutants -- specifically referred to by the Thousand Sons as Tzaangors -- serve various warbands, most remain "wild." Little else is known of the other flora or fauna present on the world, apart from the presence of Chaos Hounds amongst some of the roaming warbands.
The Warp Fleets of Magnus
The Silver Towers of Tzeentch emerge from the Warp.
Scarring the minds of all who look upon them, the Silver Towers are the largest remnants of ancient Prospero's citadel spires. Each of these mighty fortresses exists across dimensions, and wherever they go they spread the chaotic influence of Tzeentch.
Though they manifest in realspace, the Silver Towers contain chambers that are fragments of the Crystal Labyrinth entwining the Grand Conspirator's kingdom in the Realm of Chaos.
For millennia the Silver Towers have been harbingers of madness and death, appearing from Warp fractures above Imperial worlds across the galaxy. Arcane lightning lances out to incinerate anything that draws near to them while cruelly mawed cannons and more esoteric weapons open fire. When the gates of the Silver Towers open, rank upon rank of Thousand Sons march forth to enact destruction.
Magnus leads his Warp fleets from his flagship, Tizca's Revenge. This vast and monstrous voidcraft is fashioned from the plundered resources of an entire Imperial world, fused together with unfathomable Warp energies as a simulacrum of the Great Pyramid of Tizca.
Return to Prospero
"The attack on the Fenris Sector had been more than just simple revenge. Within sight of Prospero's surface, the empty void shuddered as if in great pain. Heralded by the death screams of Midgardia's population, the planet of the Crimson King burst into being. The damage its violent transition did to the barrier between realspace and the Warp was irrevocable. A tide of madness and blood began to ripple out across the galaxy, spreading like cracks in a pane of glass and signalling a thousand dooms to come. The Imperium would never be the same."
- —From the sagas of the Space Wolves, telling of the Planet of the Sorcerers entering the material universe.
Imperial vessels flee as the Planet of the Sorcerers bursts into the material realm above the remains of Prospero.
The catastrophic effects of a full-scale Thousand Sons invasion are exemplified by the Legion's Siege of the Fenris System in ca. 999.M41. The attack drew the Space Wolves back to defend their homeworld, allowing the Sons of Magnus to wreak vengeance upon them.
Unnatural footsoldiers from the entire Chaos pantheon joined in the slaughter before Magnus himself stepped forth from the warp onto the surface of Fenris, there to face the Chapter that had thought to execute his sons on Prospero. Space Wolves, Dark Angels and Grey Knights champions fell to Magnus' psychic might, their minds and bodies dashed to particulate matter.
The surface of Sortiarius after its return to realspace.
But the Great Wolf Logan Grimnar was able to land a blow on the Crimson King, allowing the Daemon Hunters of the Grey Knights to work their rites of banishment.
Though the invasion was driven back, its purpose had been achieved. The psychic anguish of a billion deaths rippled through the Immaterium, providing the final component in a ritual millennia in the making.
The psychic energy taken from the worlds of the Space Wolves saturated the Planet of the Sorcerers. It vanished from the Warp only to burst violently into realspace, appearing near the burnt husk of lost Prospero.
The old and new homeworlds of the Thousand Sons now orbit the same cursed star -- a star that has become an omen of doom in the skies throughout the Imperium.
Trivia
The Eye of Magnus atop the Tower of the Cyclops is similar to the Eye of Sauron atop Barad-dûr, the Black Tower, in the Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Sources
- Codex Heretic Astartes - Thousand Sons (8th Edition), pp. 14-15
- Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned (1st Edition), pp. 268, 274
- War Zone Fenris - Book 2: Wrath of Magnus (7th Edition), pg. 123
- The Talon of Horus (Novel) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, pg. 12
- Battlefleet Gothic Armada II (PC Game) (Fleet Image)