Great Warp Storms of the Halo Stars

[The Hive Mind]

Great Warp Storms of the Halo Stars
"Calixian history is littered with footnotes describing the lost and the dead who braved the Great Warp Storms beyond the worlds of Saint Drusus."
—from The Voids, scribed by Tarsimus of Archaos


On the rimward margins of the Calixis Sector boil vast Warp Storms that have since ancient times barred passage into the Halo Stars. This barrier of raging tempests has claimed the lives of many who would dare to find new passage to the unexplored expanses. They ebb and flow with a ferocity and maliciousness that can lure even the most seasoned navigator to destruction in a sudden rending surge. Though these Warp Storms are referred to as a group, they are in fact an amalgamation of individual Warp Storms that clash, overlap, and occasionally consume one another. Passage through this mass of tempests is almost impossible outside a few stable routes that run through the storms like narrow threads of calm. Some storms have persisted for long enough that they have acquired names of infamy amongst those who travel and navigate the Sea of Souls. Of these, the most famous are the Void Dancer’s Roil and the Screaming Vortex, which bracket the stable passages known as the Maw like daemon sentinels at the gates to a waiting hell.

The Void Dancers’ Roil is a mass of subtly sliding drifts and beguiling currents in the warp that can lead the most seasoned Navigator astray and carve apart the hulls of starships that dare their tides. It is said that ghost-ships have been sighted drifting amongst the Void Dancer’s Roil, their hulls as pale as carved stone.

The Screaming Vortex is a boiling mass of Warp turbulence and vortices that clash and grind against one another with unceasing fury and power, giving rise to a constant psychic wail that can be perceived by those sensitive to the flow of the Warp. It is this dread wail that gives the Warp Storm its name. The character of the Screaming Vortex is that of a raging beast whose teeth clash and gnaw in a neverending search of food, and it is said by the void born that it has claimed entire fleets to satiate its endless hunger.

Nesting within or beside the Screaming Vortex and the Void Dancer’s Roil are other lesser Warp Storms whose nature is permanent and distinct enough that they have acquired their own infamy and doom-laden titles. Some Navigators who have strayed within or to the edge of the great storms whisper of the Deathveil as a strange cascade of unnatural beauty that will draw the mind of the unwary to within its soft and silent embrace never to return. Old voyagers into the Halo Margins of the Calixis Sector exchange strange stories of the pocket of stillness within the fury that they name the Whispering Storm, where the fingers of the dead caress the hull and forgotten voices whisper inside the minds of the living in voices of crackling static. These strange storms within the Warp, and many others beside, all whirl and dance together and so create a wall within the Sea of Souls that cannot be crossed except by a rare few stable Warp routes. The greatest and most easily navigated of these is the Koronus Passage, or “the Maw” as it is more often called, which passes through the Great Warp Storms and into the dark unknown of the Koronus Expanse.