Aubray's Anvil
“You see a place like this and you wonder. You wonder how it could fail. What forces could pull down a people who possessed technology like this? What blasphemy, what heresy could they have perpetrated to make the God-Emperor turn His loving eye from them? Whatever it was, you need only look to the piles of bones in the streets here to see the final fruits of their labour.”
—Attributed to the Rogue Trader Cort Saldanus Located on the far rimward side of the the region, Aubray's Anvil is one of the dead worlds recently discovered among the Ragged Worlds. Long bereft of human habitation and given over completely to beasts and plants, the Anvil more closely resembles an abandoned forge world than a typical hive. The face of the planet is covered with obscure laboratories and sprawling factories hundreds of kilometers long. Its great hives are a twisting maze of steel and stone and unidentifiable composites under crystalline domes thousands of meters high. Endless piles of rusted machinery and drifts of scrap materials clog the streets, where the bones of men lie tangled in snarls of wire or the limbs of long destroyed walking machines. Above it all orbit silent stations whose corridors are choked with dust and shriveled remains, and empty shipyards, some still with keels laid in their slips, waiting for shipwrights who will never come. While seemingly of human design, there are precious few hints as to the identity or fate of the previous inhabitants or the nature and purpose of their industries. A few antediluvian vox systems broadcasting repeated messages in an indecipherable language through the echoing ruins and the sun bleached bones piled in the streets are the only evidence that humans lived here at all. A relative newcomer named Cort Saldanus—praised by his peers as a master navigator and voidman—discovered (and named) Aubray’s Anvil. Rumours abound that he forced an unknown rival to battle in orbit at this planet, his foe driven into the atmosphere by the force of Saldanus’s guns.
—Attributed to the Rogue Trader Cort Saldanus Located on the far rimward side of the the region, Aubray's Anvil is one of the dead worlds recently discovered among the Ragged Worlds. Long bereft of human habitation and given over completely to beasts and plants, the Anvil more closely resembles an abandoned forge world than a typical hive. The face of the planet is covered with obscure laboratories and sprawling factories hundreds of kilometers long. Its great hives are a twisting maze of steel and stone and unidentifiable composites under crystalline domes thousands of meters high. Endless piles of rusted machinery and drifts of scrap materials clog the streets, where the bones of men lie tangled in snarls of wire or the limbs of long destroyed walking machines. Above it all orbit silent stations whose corridors are choked with dust and shriveled remains, and empty shipyards, some still with keels laid in their slips, waiting for shipwrights who will never come. While seemingly of human design, there are precious few hints as to the identity or fate of the previous inhabitants or the nature and purpose of their industries. A few antediluvian vox systems broadcasting repeated messages in an indecipherable language through the echoing ruins and the sun bleached bones piled in the streets are the only evidence that humans lived here at all. A relative newcomer named Cort Saldanus—praised by his peers as a master navigator and voidman—discovered (and named) Aubray’s Anvil. Rumours abound that he forced an unknown rival to battle in orbit at this planet, his foe driven into the atmosphere by the force of Saldanus’s guns.
History
Aubray’s Anvil was originally thought to be a long-abandoned Forge World, until closer inspection revealed that the structures though of human design bear enough differences to STC constructs to make their true origins a mystery. Covered with laboratories and forges of unknown purpose, this world lay abandoned for some time before its rediscovery, and whispers abound in the Expanse of lost technology and a Dark Age civilization sleeping beneath its surface.
Type
Planet
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Owner/Ruler
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Owning Organization
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