Rifts of Hecaton

[The Hive Mind]

Rifts of Hecaton
"The light of the Emperor is like a lamp that shines in the dark, but as one passes further from its source, all becomes indistinct, and what one can see seems made of doubt and fear. And at the outmost limit of the light, where all is dark and light but a distant memory, that is where terror dwells."
—Kobras Aquairre

The Rifts of Hecaton are an unnatural darkness in the far depths of the Koronus Expanse, like the anger of gods fallen upon worlds long ago. Their presence casts a long shadow across the Expanse; the Rift stars are guttered and dead, and the bold Rogue Traders who go there do not return. The Rifts long ago swallowed the potent Lord Inquisitor and Rogue Trader Kobras Aquairre, and many suppose the same fate to have befallen the Disciples of Thule who followed in his wake. The stars that exist in the shadow of the Rifts are ill-omened places of which little is known apart from the uncertainties of myths and prophecy.

Melbethe
"Look on my works and despair."
—apocryphally attributed to an ancient Terran king

Near the Rifts of Hecaton lies an angry, churning star. Around it, the void is choked with debris and flare energies. The Disciples of Thule are among the only Imperial explorers to venture this far into the Expanse and return. They hold that Melbethe once hosted a strange xenos civilisation who sculpted black palaces of the asteroids and left vast obsidian sculptures hanging in the void. They are long-gone, vanished to some unknown fate, leaving behind only broken wreckage.

Far Corpse Stars
"There are some ventures that only the mad would undertake -- you will be rewarded only with ashes and the laughter of the dead."
—warning to Kobras Aquairre
Many are the corpse stars of the distant reaches of the Koronus Expanse: the Seven Dooms, the Pyres, and the ragged, nameless embers that drift within the very fringes of the Rifts of Hecaton. These are stars that guttered and died long ago in some vast and sweeping catastrophe. Now veiled by the cast-off gases of their destruction, they await the coming of Mankind. Dire forces, dead for aeons, may now stir upon blasted worlds in those distant regions, and the Warp is troubled.