Xenos
Altansar
The Returned · The Craftworld in the Eye
XENOS · AELDARI · CRAFTWORLD
The Craftworld That Fell Into the Wound
Altansar was a small craftworld that lived through the Fall of the Aeldari only to be claimed by a slower doom. As the birth-scream of Slaanesh tore the warp open, the great vessels fled — but Altansar drifted too near the spreading wound, and within five hundred years it was caught in the gravity of the Eye of Terror and dragged whole into that hell. For ten thousand years it was simply gone, mourned as lost, a name spoken in the Aeldari litanies of the dead. What it endured in those millennia inside the daemon-haunted warp is known to no outsider, and the Aeldari who survived it do not speak of it at all.
The Silence They Keep
What sets Altansar apart from every other craftworld is the void where its history should be. The truth of those ten thousand years in the Eye is held only by Maugan Ra and the survivors themselves, and they guard it absolutely. Around that silence rumour curdles. Some of their kin whisper that Altansar must be tainted, that no soul could dwell so long amid the Dark Prince's domain and emerge unstained. Others murmur of a dread bargain struck with Ynnead, the nascent Aeldari god of the dead. The people of Altansar offer no answer. They simply endure the suspicion as they endured the Eye — in a quietness that is itself a kind of wound.
The Veterans of Hell
Altansar fights as a people who have already faced the worst the warp can show and lived. Like all craftworld Aeldari they wage war along the Paths of the warrior — the disciplined Guardians, the masked Aspect Warriors each embodying a sliver of the war-god Khaine, the wraith-constructs piloted by the spirits of the honoured dead. But there is a grimness to Altansar's host beyond even the usual Aeldari fatalism, the hardness of survivors who measure every foe against the daemons of the Eye and find them wanting. They move with the speed and cruelty of all their race, here and gone before the enemy can answer, every blade-stroke carrying the weight of a people who refuse, after everything, to die.
Maugan Ra and the Long Rescue
Altansar's salvation came through its most famous son. Maugan Ra — "the Harvester of Souls," Phoenix Lord of the Dark Reapers and founder of their grim shrine — was long believed the craftworld's only escapee from the Fall. When the Thirteenth Black Crusade flung the Eye of Terror open in 999.M41, he undertook a perilous quest into its malignant depths in search of the remnants of his kin. There, against all hope, he found Altansar still enduring, and guided what was left of it back out of that hell, leading its warriors against the forces of Chaos as they went. The lost craftworld returned to the galaxy at last — bearing the marks of ten thousand years no living thing should have survived.
Welcomed by None
Altansar's return won it no embrace. To the Imperium, every craftworld is alien witch-kin to be purged, and the returned vessel is merely one more nest of xenos sorcerers drifting where the Eye still festers. Yet the deeper cold comes from Altansar's own people. Other craftworlds — Ulthwé chief among those that brush the Eye — keep the returned at arm's length, unwilling to gamble that a thing pulled from Slaanesh's realm is truly clean. So Altansar walks the galaxy doubly exiled: hunted by mankind as all Aeldari are hunted, and held in wary suspicion by the very kin whose litanies once mourned it as dead.
The Returned in the Age of the Rift
Altansar emerged into a galaxy on the brink of breaking, and the breaking soon came: the Great Rift split reality and joined the Eye of Terror to a second sea of warp-storms across the heavens. For a craftworld that has already dwelt inside such horror, this darker age is grimly familiar ground. Its future remains as veiled as its past — its true loyalties, even its true nature, known to almost none. Altansar drifts onward through the wounded stars, a vessel that came back from a place nothing returns from, carrying ten thousand years of unspoken memory and the quiet, dangerous patience of survivors who have nothing left to fear.
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