Salaine Morn - Archon of the Kabal Of The Shadowed Thorns

GM Note: This information is provided as out of character knowledge to begin with, as we play online its hard for me to go into detail about stuff without losing Jamie to Boredom, Tom to watching videos or John popping off to the shop or to make his dinner. So as you read this imagine this as a chance to coax more roleplay out of each other as you try to understand what is going on within the Nexus of Shadow and its origin story. Dont start using it OOC with everyone and bypassing potential investigation and roleplay, use it to enhance play or I wont put this sort of information on the boards again.

"There is no good story without a villain. I shall provide you with an antagonist beyond your imaginings or even your comprehension, and as you die you will curse my name exquisitely."
— Drecarus, Master of The Sutured Helix

The Gaelan Sphere, upon which the Nexus of Shadows was built, is an ancient relic of a long-forgotten age of technology. The size of a small moon, covered with towers and antennae, the sphere was crafted around a solid core, the remnants of some mineral rich asteroid that its automated systems are slowly eroding away as it adds more and more levels to the sphere. Neither the Gaelan Sphere's alien inhabitants nor those few explorers from the Imperium who have had a chance to study it know its true purpose. How the sphere came to enter the webway is also a mystery. Abandoned for untold ages, the sphere could have drifted through a web-gate or even been drawn towards one by the ancient programs and protocols of its cogitators seeking to study a breach in the webway that it perceived as a celestial phenomenon. Alternatively, it is possible that some unknown force moved it into the webway for some inscrutable purpose. Once it entered the webway, the sphere spent aeons drifting from one region to another before becoming trapped in a confluence of ancient forces and alien powerfields. Now, it floats in a relatively stable position, more debris of a forgotten age of enlightenment.

It was Salaine Morn and her Kabal that first rediscovered the Gaelan Sphere and decided to put it to use. After being exiled from Commorragh, the Archon spent years wandering the webway with her fleet, raiding worlds and looking for a place to claim as her own. The sphere, with its well-hidden location and ancient technology, presented the perfect place for a new home. Unfortunately for Salaine, the sphere's defences and legions of servitor guardians were too numerous and powerful for her Kabal alone to overcome. Thus, Salaine forged an alliance with Zaergarn Kul and his Kabal of the Splintered Talon, and together they purged the city of its ancient human defences, destroying that which they could not control and sealing away the areas that they could not inhabit.

Even though their forces had secured a landing zone and deactivated the aging orbital defences, it was to take years for the Dark Eldar to carve out the areas where they would build their city. As more Dark Eldar came to the Nexus, new sections would be cleared of their ancient automated defences. Often the Dark Eldar would drive thousands of slaves into an area to identify these dangers, or simply to exhaust a turret's ammunition so it could be destroyed. Other xenos races were also allowed to settle in the Nexus as part of trading missions, though these aliens had to clear their own areas for inhabitation. The lasting result of this wanton conquest by the Dark Eldar and their allies is that many areas of the Nexus still show signs of battle, and the stripped remains of the combat machinery of the sphere is a common sight along its shadowed streets. Occasionally, the Nexus' old defenders rear their heads once again, but the Dark Eldar usually put them down swiftly.

Almost immediately after the arrival of the Dark Eldar and its establishment as a port, the Nexus began to operate as a hub for trade and a base for raiding. Close to the Koronus Expanse and the Calixis Sector, it opened up fresh opportunities for slavers and worlds that before had been out of reach or too dangerous to raid using the fractured remains of the webway. The Nexus of Shadows quickly grew in size and wealth on the backs of its slaves, despite the fact that most Dark Eldar of Commorragh at least openly shun the cursed place and the outcasts who live there. The xenos of the Koronus Expanse and the renegades of the Screaming Vortex have no such compunctions, however, and have found the Nexus to be a useful place to trade and congregate, a place far from the reach of the Imperium and utterly hostile to its agents. Salaine welcomed such factions into her city on account of the wealth and influence they offered, as well as the added protection it afforded her against those who would try and take the city from her. Unfortunately for Salaine, it was not an outside force or an alien that was to oust her from power. In the end one of her own, Zaergarn Kul, usurped her, and exiled her once more into the webway before she could do the same to him. For many of the inhabitants of the Nexus this change in power meant little, especially for the slaves, to whom one Dark Eldar Archon is much the same as another.

Salaine Morn intentionally projects a presence that is both evasive and unmistakable; her dread majesty is as hard to put into words as it is to ignore. Appearing at once menacing and tempting, the Archon catches many of her foes off-guard, uncertain of the obfuscated nature of this ancient being. Morn is several thousand years old, though only she knows for certain how long she has been alive, and has seen and done much that would long haunt the nightmares lesser beings. Like all Archons, she is possessed of a deadly martial prowess, but her true weapon is a mind finely-honed by the lethal intrigues of Commorragh's high society. She finds it utterly distasteful, then, that she and all those she commands are exiles from the Dark City and now even the Nexus of Shadows. At her grudging command, the warriors of her Kabal have turned to mercenary work, selling their efforts to lesser beings as part of a plan to regain the power she once possessed. On the rarest of occasions, she deigns to speak to these prey-creatures herself.