The History and Armed Forces of Merenn

[TDF]

Merenn

History
Merenn was one of hundreds of worlds settled by the Mechanicum during the dark, mysterious days before the alliance of Mars and Terra. After a brief golden age of prosperity and trade with neighbouring systems Merenn was cut off by the warpstorms that characterised the Age of Strife. The tech-priests had little choice but to wait for the prophesised coming of the Machine God Incarnate, their solitude broken only by the intermittent invasions of orks, vrakk and other vile xenos.

Around six decades into the Great Crusade the 119th Expedition Fleet appeared in the skies above Merenn. According to legend the Omnissiah Himself descended to the planet’s surface to welcome the world into His Imperium of Man. The tech-priests immediately committed their armed forces and manufacturing capacity to His war effort.

Over the following century-and-a-half the armies of Merenn, led by the god-machines of the Legio Ctesias, fought on hundreds of worlds across the galaxy. Perhaps their greatest triumph was the role they played in the extermination of the vrakk, finally avenging the precious knowledge lost to the xenos during their invasions of Merenn during the Age of Strife.

At the outbreak of the Horus Heresy the forces of Merenn were scattered across nearly twenty different expeditionary fleets. The largest contingent of the Legio Ctesias was deployed on Eight-Hundred-and-Seventy-Two Eleven when the Legio Damnosus declared for Horus and turned on their former allies. Although able to hold off the traitors long enough for some of the IX Legion and Merenni Taghmata forces to evacuate off-world, in the end the Ctesias engines were overwhelmed and destroyed. Their sacrifice was not in vain however as the Legio Damnosus suffered heavy losses and the surviving loyalists went on to cause much devastation to the Warmaster’s supply routes and client worlds.

During the Great Scouring the Legio Ctesias spearheaded the Imperial assault on Cnaeus VI, home of the traitor Legio Iaculum. By this time most of the Legio’s forces had already fled into the Eye of Terror but the forge world’s defences were still formidable. Ctesias conducted themselves with tremendous skill, losing only one engine in the entire campaign. Although the Legio Iaculum had willingly abandoned their homeworld its destruction still wounded their warrior pride and they swore an oath of vengeance against the Legio Ctesias.

The mutual loathing between the Legio Ctesias and the traitor Legios Iaculum and Damnosus endured across the millennia. It finally came to a head in 714.M38 when both traitor Legios launched a full-out assault on Merenn. The Legio Ctesias and the other armies of Merenn fought long and hard, making the traitors pay dearly for every inch gained, but eventually the superior numbers and foul warp magicks of the invading engines won out. Merenn was sacked; every scrap of knowledge and every piece of divine machinery plundered or destroyed. The traitors escaped Imperial wrath and remain a vile threat to the Omnissiah’s domains to this day.

Legio Ctesias

http://i1379.photobucket.com/albums/ah131/tdf4638/40K/Legio%20Ctesias_zpsr2wcu7hf.png

Heraldry of the Legio Ctesias

Merenn’s moon Harranar is covered in sandy desert and the sand mined there was perfect for manufacturing extremely high precision optics for laser weaponry. The titans of the Legio Ctesias, known in Low Gothic as the Manticores, frequently eschewed close-combat weapons in favour of pouring more laser and plasma fire onto the void shields of enemy engines. The connections between the Ctesias engines were very strong and they would operate in close synchronisation to maximise the damage they could inflict on the enemy. They could not have been more opposed to their rivals in the Legio Iaculum whose fall to Slaanesh only accentuated their desire to gain individual glory and fame by despatching foes in close-combat.

Skitarii
The skitarii of Merenn were primarily genhanced vat-grown warriors. Most of the original gene-stock came from subjects incarcerated on a nearby penal world although dark rumours – never proven – would occasionally surface of Merenni tech-priests abducting soldiers from Imperial Guard regiments they fought alongside.

Merenni skitarii frequently went to war transported inside Fistuca APCs. These vehicles, originally designed for transporting miners across the sandy deserts of Harranar, have a very low profile, thick armour, eight independently driven wheels and are armed with twin-linked radium jezzails.

Notable Battles
The Loup Expedition
In 476.M32 the warpstorms that had cut off the Kuurai Drift from the rest of the galaxy since the Age of Strife finally dissipated. Archmagos Veneratus Adotus Loup of Merenn led an Explorator Fleet into the Drift to explore the newly revealed worlds and seek out lost technologies. From an Imperial perspective the expedition was a great success, bringing seven inhabited worlds into the Imperium of Man and identifying a dozen more ripe for colonisation. Loup himself held a more negative view, with only one world yielding significantly useful data. Dosora was a death world possessing a thick, poisonous atmosphere kept out of the underground settlements by STC-pattern air-scrubbers 28.506% more efficient than the closest Imperial equivalents. Although the STC datasheets were long lost Loup was able to acquire several of the devices for further study and reverse engineering. A final note of triumph came at the end of the mission when the previously identified world of Kyo launched a rebellion against the Missionarus Galaxia preachers sent to facilitate their entry into the Imperium. The Merenni skitarii quickly crushed the natives and Loup claimed Kyo for the Adeptus Mechanicus by right of conquest. Over the following centuries the world was developed into a productive forge world closely allied to Merenn.

The Huumdin War
For over two centuries the Imperium of Man battled a tenacious xenos race known as the huumdin. The huumdin were first discovered by the rogue trader Kristan Adegoke. Their society was built on a rigid hierarchy where honour was everything and no measure too extreme for an individual seeking to avenge a slight. It is not known how Adegoke dishonoured the huumdin, but the species took grave offence against the entirety of humanity and launched a series of brutal retaliatory strikes on nearby Imperial worlds. Although horrific for those caught up in the conflict, on the grand scale the huumdin were less than an inconvenience and nothing but token forces were sent to oppose them. Over the following decades and centuries the huumdin attacks grew bolder and further in reach until the fateful day they destroyed a merchant vessel oathbound to the magi of Merenn. In response the forces of Merenn were mobilised and despatched with all haste to the huumdin pocket empire. Less than three years later the species had found extinction beneath the guns of the Legio Ctesias.

[Machine God]

Nice work there TDF!

 

I'm out of likes for today.

[MithrilForge]

there you are scion of ferrus use one of mine in spirit

and yes TDF very good,which reminds me i have to start mine right now ....

Mithril

[TDF]

Thanks!

[Guest Musketeer12]

Nice!

 

Musket