Nastrond

Nastrond (destroyed)
Type: feudal/death world
population: approx 500,000,000
Main export: Sago beasts

Nastrond was the homeworld of the Sagodjur Fjorlag until mid M34 when they were compelled to have it destroyed and the Necron tomb beneath it.  A mostly alpine world, it once possessed many strange and beautiful creatures that were bred and sent to all corners of the Imperium for war and obsessive collectors.

Render of pre-heresy Nastrond; note the blood-tinged cloud

General appearance

Preserved imagery of the planet's surface show it was a mountainous world, with tussocks and lichen typical of an alpine environment.  Images taken from orbit, of which there are precious few, reveal a strange phenomena; the entire planet was hollow-- merely two halves held together with vast pillars of stone and chains of an unknown material.

History

Before recorded Imperial history, Nastrond was said to have been a mad world riven constantly with war.  Petty battles between squabbling nobles grew in frequency and intensity until whole provinces were made battlegrounds and it was said it sleeted and snowed blood most days of the long, cold year.  The dead far outnumbered the living on a global scale, and whole alpine lakes were set aside for burial pits, left open to the elements, too cold to decay.

Period artist's sketch of ancient Nastrond at war

The end of all things

A much-prophesied event called the Dragon Rain quickly brought on the Terrorwinter, where the great wyrms melted the northernmost ice cap and lowered the temperature of the whole world as evaporated water spread across the world and rained for many months without cease.  During the terrorwinter, this all froze into glaciers that ran across the world like veins, all eventually running into the void between the two halves and vanishing, leaving a dry, thirsty world behind.  Those who weren't killed by the war or drowned in the Dragon Rain were frozen in the Terrorwinter or starved of thirst in the following droughts, for the water that had vanished would never return.

The Nastrondites

The only race to survive the war and the cold were the later-to-be-called Nastrondites, a race of humans who had found a way of preserving their kind through the magic of the sidhe.  Small and pale-skinned, as time passed their appearance became more and more faerie as did their conduct and manner of warfare.

Death Guard plague marines; sourced from 40K wiki

The Imperium intervenes twice

The Death Guard legion were the first of the great crusade to find the bizarre planet, and after a feeble resistance the Nastrondites begrudgingly tacked the Imperial truth to the end of their own religions.  It proved to be pointless, in the end, for the legion turned to Nurgle and tried to take the planet down with them, bringing many of the frozen dead back to life in their service.
If the Nastrondites did not have the strength to match the traitor legion, they certainly had the defense to withstand them, and so they lived until an unknown number of companies of the Imperial Fists legion found them beleaguered so.  The ensuing war was short but intensely violent, and only by a shaky truce with the Nastrondites did the VIIth legion overcome, for their knowledge of siegecraft was essential, but  in spite of the intent the native populace were more than wary of these new warriors from the stars.

These warriors proved to be of a different sort to the last, so they were eventually accepted and built many fortresses across the planet-- even taking Nastrondites as initiates to replace their losses.

They are forsaken

Rumors circled that Rogal Dorn Himself was planning on visiting the planet, but hope faded when he recalled his entire legion in the defence of Holy Terra.  The VIIth, unwilling to leave the planet unguarded, left behind an assault company of local-born Astartes with commands to defend the world and expect the eventual arrival of the Praetorian of Terra.
He never made it, but that was not theirs to know.  From this day on the Sagodjur Fjorlag, as they began to name themselves, lived in expectancy of Rogal Dorn's visit, and even now they seek him, all in vain.

The space hulk brings their doom

It is unknown how or when the space hulk appeared, but it did, and within easy reach of the planet.  For two decades, the Sagodjur Fjorlag scoured the depths of the hulk, finding little in the way of hostile life; their largest and most surprising discovery was the existence of a ruined piece of hive city in a vast central cavern deep within the hulk.

rememberancer's image of the Doom Chair

They brought the hulk into orbit around the planet in quarantine for further screening, but the gravitational pull of such a large body caused many earthquakes across the world that resulted in the awakening of a Necron tomb of the ++data pending++ dynasty.  In the desperate war that caught them around the ankles, the Sago Astartes took up as much of the Nastrondite populace as they could into the depths of the space hulk with little or no warning or preparation, and eventually the situation became so dire they requested an exterminatus to be committed on the planet while they ferried away the population deep into the void.  There they built a new fortress-monastery, the Doom Chair, and became the wandering fleet-based Chapter we know of today.

Go back to main page

Gallery

pseudo-3D render of ancient Nastrond

Render of pre-heresy Nastrond; an example of rare sub-alpine beech forests

Render of ancient Nastrond, showing the blood-tinted cloud