Khyris (Frontier World)

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Khyris is a frontier world with a long history. It was settled by refugees fleeing the inner worlds of the Jericho Sector before the fall of Verronus, either late M36 or early M37. It was a time of increasing turmoil and hardship, and the conditions on the main hive worlds were going from bad to worse. Violence and starvation went hand in hand, and the Dark Gods were starting to be openly worshipped.

Khyris was a good choice for a colony world, except for its extremely long seasons. Ten years of summer, followed by ten years of winter, half of them utter dark and frozen. The local biosphere was well adapted, but for humans, it's a different story. The refugees opted for building massive stasis chambers where they would slumber while servitors took care of things. Then, as winter waned, they would wake up and resume their lives.

It worked well enough for a time until one winter the servitors turned against their masters. Tearing their overlords from their stasis pods, they ate them all in a twisted parody of a cannibalistic feast that lasted for five years. Only a handful of humans survived, forced into the wilderness, where they had to lead nomadic lives, moving around the globe, always staying ahead of winter.

When the Achilus Crusade made contact, some of the original servitors were still operational, fuelled by the powers of the warp. Forever hungry, these ghoul-servitors roamed Khyris seeking always flesh to sate their hunger and machine parts to keep themselves functioning.

Both ghouls and nomads were declared heretics, and the planet was resettled by refugees from Calixis. Without access to macro-scale stasis chambers, these settlers must endure the long winters locked inside their settlements. According to reports now twenty years old, there are signs that murder and cannibalism are becoming widespread during the cold spells. Let's hope the story doesn't repeat itself.