Fortress World Cadia

You hail from the fortress world of Cadia, officially known as Cadia Prime, is a terrestrial, Earth-like planet that has been classified as both a Civilised World and as the Imperium of Man's most important Fortress World by the Administratum. It guards the only known navigable route to and from the massive Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror, a passage called the Cadian Gate. The world's dangerous proximity to the Eye of Terror has made it necessary for the people of Cadia to heavily fortify the planet. Cadia is always the first target of the Chaos Warmaster Abaddon the Despoiler's assaults and Black Crusades, when the Forces of Chaos Undivided launch themselves from the Eye of Terror every few centuries in an attempt to break out and invade the Imperium proper as they did during the Horus Heresy.

Cadia's natural environment is much like Terra's was millennia ago, with a large ocean covering 70 percent of the planet's surface. The land mass that does exist is divided between incredibly thick pine forests and vast glaciers. The planet is slightly cooler than most human-settled worlds but not to the point that it adversely affects growing conditions. Settled before the onset of the Age of Strife by a branch of humanity that eventually fell to the worship of the Chaos Gods and played a major role in the ultimate corruption of the Space Marine Legions, Cadia was re-settled sometime in the early 32nd Millennium by Loyalist humans of the Imperium. The world's landscape is dotted by strange black pylons of clear xenos origin called the Cadian Pylons. These devices were actually constructed by the Necrons millions of years ago to hold back the psychic energies of the Eye of Terror from the world, which was an ancient Necron military base during their war with the Old Ones.

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The Cadian Pylons are what create the unusual area of realspace stability known as the Cadian Gate near the Eye of Terror that is unaffected by the constant Warp Storms that surround that Warp rift. Cadia's location directly adjacent to the dangerous Eye of Terror has made it necessary for the people of Cadia to fortify the planet to an extent where almost the entire population lives in massive fortress-cities known locally as "Kasr". Thus Cadia has an odd mix of dense urban areas and vast open tundras and other natural landscapes. It is always against Cadia that Abaddon the Despoiler, the Warmaster of the Chaos Space Marines and the Forces of Chaos, fields his continual assaults or Black Crusades from his hold in the Eye of Terror.

Cadian Homeworld

Cadian Society

Cadia is the home of the Imperial Guard's Cadian Shock Trooper Regiments, widely regarded as the best soldiers in the Imperium short of the superhuman Space Marines, as a result of their upbringing in Cadia's martial culture. Their leader is the indomitable Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed, the saviour of Cadia and hero of the 13th Black Crusade. Since Cadia is the capital world of the Cadian Sector and is often raided by various alien civilisations like the Eldar and Orks as well as the Forces of Chaos, the planet has been heavily fortified. All Cadians must serve at least a four-year-term in the military, and the amount of military presence on the world has lead to the civilian population becoming focused on weapons production. 71.75% of the Cadian population is under arms, either in the highly-skilled and very well-equipped Cadian Planetary Defence Force that is known as the Interior Guard or in the numerous Imperial Guard Regiments drawn from the planet's people. Chaos Space Marines from the Eye of Terror make frequent forays onto the surface of Cadia and must be hunted down. The bulk of the Cadian army is made up of the Shocktroops, with the remainder made up of the Whiteshields (conscript soldiers recruited at the age of 14 and trained to take place in Shocktroop regiments) and the elite Kasrkin soldiers. Cadian Regiments are consistently on average the most well-disciplined and most effective in the entire Imperial Guard. Because of its heavy concentration on military matters, Cadia's global economy is dominated by the manufacture of various weapons systems and exports vast numbers of weapons to its neighbouring Imperial planets, while importing very little other than food. Many other worlds use Cadian equipment to arm their own Imperial Guard Regiments, which explains how the Cadian Patterns of personal armour and infantry weapons have become the standard for the entire Guard.

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Cadia has a special and honoured place in the history of Mankind. Cadia stands upon the edge of the Eye of Terror within a narrow corridor of stable space called the Cadian Gate. This forms the one and only predictable passage between the Chaos-infested daemon worlds of the Eye of Terror and Terra. It seems that although many Chaos fleets have ventured out of the Eye, very few Imperial fleets have ventured in. No battle fleet of any size can rely upon other stable passages from the Eye of Terror and they must pass through the Cadian Gate. Cadia is therefore one of the most strategically important planets of the galaxy. On several occasions the Forces of Chaos have moved against Cadia and raging battles have been fought in the depths of space. Such huge battles are rare, but the constant intrusion of Chaos raiding craft is commonplace.

Before the later Imperial re-colonisation of the world in the 32nd Millennium, Cadia was the home of a lost fragment of humanity that worshiped the four Chaos Gods, probably since the onset of the Age of Strife. This society was encountered by the then-still-Loyal Word Bearers Legion 40 solar years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, and the prevalence of violet eyes amongst the populace was seen as a mark of mutation caused by the proximity of the Eye of Terror, which also appears violet in the visible light spectrum. This civilisation was eventually wiped out by the Word Bearers Space Marine Legion in the late 30th Millennium at the conclusion of the Pilgrimage of Lorgar some forty standard years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. Cadia was then resettled by Imperial humans of all creeds and genetic stock. The Cadian people today are naturally tall and solidly built. The fact that this new line of Cadians of untainted Imperial stock also sport violet eyes lends credence to the theory that the proximity of the Eye of Terror causes this mutation.

Cadian society in the 41st Millennium is more martial than civilian, mostly due to the disproportionate ratio of soldiers to citizens in its population. The birth rate and the military recruitment rate are synonymous. Most Cadian children learn to field-strip a lasgun by the age of ten, and many young Cadians serve in the Imperial Guard as Whiteshields. Cadian society is so martial that camouflage patterns have made their way into the everyday fashion of even the wealthy and successful. It is very easy to determine who is an outsider or local on Cadia simply by what they wear.

Being a constantly embattled world, Cadia suffers numerous casualties in the defence of Cadia and the Imperium. Cemetery space on the planet is at a premium so the local priests of the Imperial Cult routinely check the grave markers of the honoured dead for legibility. When a section of a Cadian cemetery's grave markers are deemed illegible, those graves are exhumed and the bones are added to a communal pit. The Cadian belief is that once the names on a grave marker are illegible, the honours are forgotten.

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Long ago Cadian cities changed from a plan of broad avenues to one where the streets of its cities were arranged in zig-zag patterns meant to make any intruding enemies fight for every block. At the heart of each Cadian city is a fortress called a Kasr in the local dialect of Low Gothic. The largest Kasr as of 241.M41 was Kasr Derth. Cadia's earliest Kasrs had been built in the High Terran Style, with the wide streets laid out on a grid system. Early in the 32nd Millennium soon after the planet's resettlement, during the first of the Black Crusades, most of the Cadian Kasrs were destroyed. The broad, ordered avenues of the Kasrs had proven impossible to hold or defend. Since then, the Kasrs have all been built in elaborate geometric patterns, the streets juking back and forth like the teeth of a key. From the air, Kasr Derth looked like an intricate angular puzzle. Given the Cadians' mettle and their skills at urban warfare, a Kasr could be held street by street, meter by meter, for months if not years.