History of the Imperium

Though the founding of the sector is shrouded with the ashes of history, most of the endlessly copied records indicate it occurred during the ages before the Imperium rose, when humanity seeded itself across the stars. The epic saga Lay of Askellios contains this commonly held recital, though many hold it to be allegory and not a factual accounting. Its most famous copy, a gilded tome many metres tall enshrined in a massive stasis chamber on Juno, relates of "a huge fleet arriving after a long, perilous journey to a region of space unmarred by storms. Finding the area peaceful and unsullied, they decided to build a grand civilisation and await other ships to eventually arrive. Stable Warp routes connected a handful of worlds, and the fleet split to settle them".

For reasons that many of the tales refuse to codify, "one ship refused this scheme and the others turned on it, refusing to allow it to hinder this grand vision. Myths state it was filled with sinners and heretics, and though heavily damaged it managed to get away, never seen again". The settled worlds grew and prospered, though, mastering the space around them into a stable union that managed to weather the terrible Age of Strife. For generations it remained isolated, until the blessed day when the one of the nascent Imperium’s Expeditionary Fleets arrived as part of the Great Crusade.

Compliance brought the region, now named Askellon, into the Imperium. Some of the legends of this time consist of nothing but "tales of the grand ceremonies that many hold lasted several years and included the unnamed Space Marine Legions accompanying the Imperial fleet". They also relate of scattered worlds attempting to resist the Emperor’s Will, but that they were "swiftly crushed". Of them, no more is spoken and none know of their names, though several still-charred planets perhaps give some evidence of their fate. "No world living now would ever admit to such unthinkable betrayal in its past, and all are content knowing that none from those planets still live".

From A Primeval Inheritance:

...key among Gregornian myth-cycles is the tale of the Iron Kings, the legendary precursor rulers who founded the various royal families and tribes in ages past. This tale tells that "in times gone by the ancient Kings walked the land in gigantic suits of iron armour, striding taller than trees. It is said that they were so mighty that they harnessed the power of the sun, casting spears of golden-white sunlight before them that could fell even the greatest giant Carnidon with a single blow. The tale tells of great, epic battles fought between the various kings over slights real and imagined; of lost cities and castles within the deepest jungles where heroes once undertook great quests. The tale describes how the world was humbled before the might of the Iron Kings, and how they chose to populate the forests with beasts from among the stars so as to keep their blades keen. Packs of Gula—now regarded as so deadly that entire clans move miles to avoid them—were said to have been hunted for mere sport by these ancient lords".

The tale ends in blood and fire. At the height of the age of the Iron Kings, a glowing light from the sky fell to the south, searing the sky in its path and sending up a vast cloud that covered all the land in darkness for years on end. After the darkness came the creatures of darkness: Orks. Creeping across the lands in tens, then hundreds, then thousands, they were at first hunted by the Iron Kings for sport in the manner of beasts, but the greenskins eventually overwhelmed them in long battles lasting hundreds of years. For every Ork burned by white hot light, ten more stepped into his place. Eventually all of the Iron Kings were pulled down and torn apart, their bodies rent and battered, their armour used to create foul weapons for the Orks to despoil and ruin yet further.

Those few Imperial scholars who have negotiated the minefield of Gregornian etiquette in order to hear this tale regard it of "crucial importance" in determining the history of the vanished pre-Imperial culture that once ruled here. Some even believe it might hold the secrets to ridding the world of the greenskins once and for all.

From Basilica of Valerius Risen:

the sector’s pre-eminent saint, ... a legendary figure about which very little is actually known, but who appears to have been instrumental in converting the people of the sector to the worship of the Emperor early in its history.

From Cerix Magnus:

Fragmentary records hint at an unnamed treachery during this period, but areas of the three Forge Worlds' archives have been deliberately sealed or even destroyed, and the truth may never be known. Echoes of this terrible occurrence, whispered as the Brass Scouring, still ring across the millennia, however.

From Epochs of Askellon:

Almost unnoticed amongst these early days of unification and rebellion were the first recordings of terrible Warp storms raging across the once-peaceful region. Twisted legends began that "the storms were growing in appetite, and only abated after they had devoured sufficient ships or worlds to sate themselves temporarily."

Enkidu later became a pawn in a sector-wide conflict between rival Imperial branches. It was in the aftermath of the Nova Terra Interregnum that the sector was gripped by a period of bitter recrimination, as the Ecclesiarchy attempted to gain ascendancy over the Adeptus Terra. As part of the so-called Cataclysm of Souls late in the 36th Millennia, coinciding with a powerful surge of the Pandaemonium, the Ecclesiarchy of Askellon sought to use the sector’s current woes as palpable evidence that the Emperor had found the people wanting and refused to aid them. In so doing, they unleashed a wave of zealous redemption. Wars of Faith raged everywhere, as fanatical militias purged the unrighteous system by system. Seeking to further its power, the Ecclesiarchy laid claim to many worlds, justifying many through ancient records showing of missionarius landings.

Enkidu was one such world. A minor force swept across the planet, but its fate was never noticed amidst the roiling storms of war. In the aftermath of the Cataclysm, the Ecclesiarchy sought to consolidate their newfound holdings, and, on discovering their loss in this system, was determined to take it. Their zeal was multiplied when the Kappellaxian Secrets were woven into a routine Astropathic transmission to the Basilica on Juno. There was no authorship for the data, but then Arch-Cardinal, Vasil Bordo, seized on it as a sign from the Emperor of the world’s holy nature.

He convened a mighty gathering of Ecclesiarchy leaders across the sector in the Convocation of Arakadi. For many days the matter was debated, as sermons were preached and arguments were presented. At length, the Arch-Cardinal prevailed and his arguments swayed the majority of the leaders present to his cause. A new, final War of Faith was declared, its intent "to conquer Enkidu and make it a stronghold of the faithful where they might find sanctuary from the taint of the ever-seething Warp". Secretly, his trusted prelates knew his actual goal was to subvert the entrenched Askellon nobility under the pretence of a religious war, and establish himself as ruler of a new, impregnable sector capital.

The War of Suppression

The "Enkidu Suppression", as this new War of Faith became known, was launched almost before the echoes of Arch-Cardinal Bordo’s frothing sermon had faded away. The Ecclesiarchy mobilised the faithful of numerous worlds, herding many thousands of armed civilians onto bulk cargo vessels on each for delivery to the Enkidu system. All too soon, the skies over Enkidu were aflame with the bright contrails of descending vessels of every size and class. Across entire continents, hordes of zealous holy warriors spilled into the forests, desperate to take what many believed would prove their promised land. Bordo himself lead the first landing, ceremonial flame-pike held high as his chem-altered warriors assaulted the enemies they knew must be hiding in the verdant darkness. In his final words, he decreed that no other feet should trod upon the world until he emerged victorious, blessed to lead the sector in the Emperor’s Name.

The cardinals in the Basilica eagerly awaited word of the righteous crusade, but only found silence for many weeks. The astropathic choir there finally could pluck a single, fragmented message from the turbulent Immaterium, "curdled with such powerful emotional layering that half the choir fell to gibbering insanity". Only two words could be discerned: “It knows.”

“Warning, approaching vessel: this planet is quarantined and has been declared perditionem in aeternum by order of the Office of the Praefectrix, the Holy Askelline Synod, and the Ordos Askelline. You are entering a nominated exclusion zone and will be fired upon by vessels of Battlefleet Askellon if you continue on your current course. Turn about, say again, turn about...Warning, approaching vessel: this planet is quarantined... “

–Automated warning signal from Kul Exclusion Zone Orbital XVIII

From The War Above:

... the Tide of Ruin brought not one group of conquering xenos but two, both of whom ignored the natives in their continued attempts to annihilate one another...  Whilst the two warring species fought bitterly, the Vouxian population dug down and created a system of underground habitats... Soon the underground cities rivalled the surface dwellings in both scale and beauty, and the world’s population all but abandoned the surface world... The two alien forces exhausted themselves and stripped the surface clean, in the end destroying one another in a series of cataclysmic battles that flattened the planet’s uninhabited surface cities.

From Emerging Eminence:

...by the time the people returned to the surface, their planet’s position in Askelline prominence had changed, and that the Vouxis system now sat directly on the Grand Processional.

From Aquillan Origins:

There are many accounts of the battles for the Diomedea Stella system, most of them highly fictionalised to highlight a specific family’s contributions to the defeat of the Orks. The two things that are consistent in all of them, however, are the resolve of all who fought for humanity, and that without the D’Amitri family’s aid, they would have fallen. That universally accepted truth enabled the D’Amitris to unify all factions into a single entity that would shape the system and later the sector: the Greater Askellon Trade Combine.

From Kalto:

...a merchant vessel arrived to discover Kalto’s verdant lands and gothic structures inexplicably abandoned, with fields of overgrown crops and livestock wandering loose. Search as they might, the crew found no answers to the mystery, save for a few desiccated corpses locked inside a tarnished security spire, and a grainy vid log of spectral figures. This sudden disappearance of the planet’s inhabitants precipitated an intense famine amongst nearby Hive Worlds.

From The Consanguinity:

Founded on Pellenne three centuries ago, ...the cult has in recent years spread its tendrils throughout the Stygies Cluster and beyond. It is highly dogmatic and refuses to allow for any possible usefulness of mutants in any aspect of the Imperium. Brothers of the Consanguinity do not accept any accommodation with mutant communities, and insist upon taking steps to destroy them where local authorities refuse to do so.

Warr: The Vaxi Atrocity was a confused, brief and tragically lethal campaign during which, spurred on by conflicting orders and the ever-present fog of war, an entire Askelline levy massacred itself on the Departmento Munitorum depot colony of Vaxi. The political, military and socio-economic shockwaves of the massacre have kept the sector on the back foot for the last few decades, leading directly to the assassination of the previous Sector Praefect, the series of localised conflicts known collectively as the The Aftermath Wars, the rise of multiple heresies, the ongoing war consuming Myros Kappa, and the all-but-total disappearence of the Inquisition from the sector, to name but a small handful of events.