About

It is the 41st Millennium. Humanity rules a million worlds beneath the banner of the Imperium of Man, a vast and decaying empire stretching across the stars. Its armies fight wars without end against alien empires, daemonic horrors, traitors, and things better left unnamed. Entire generations are born, labor, and die without ever knowing peace. Yet the Imperium is more than its battlefields. Behind every crusade are worlds whose people must simply endure. Miners descend into ancient shafts. Manufactorums thunder through endless shifts. Merchants argue over cargo manifests. Children hurry through snow-covered streets. Priests tend their congregations, laborers drink after work, and somewhere an overworked clerk discovers that even in the grim darkness of the far future, paperwork remains immortal. Among these worlds is Valken. A frozen Death World beneath a pale and distant sun, Valken exists in an eternal winter. Colossal forests cover much of its surface, their black trees disappearing beneath mountains of snow. Predators stalk between their trunks, storms can swallow entire convoys, and temperatures beyond the settlements kill the careless with brutal efficiency. Humanity survives through stubbornness. Ancient fortified towns have grown into industrial settlements. Mines and extraction stations reach deep beneath the ice. Vast tracked convoys crawl between civilization's scattered lights, while hunters and resource crews venture into the wilderness for valuable meat, hides, timber, and stranger prizes. Technology came unevenly to Valken. Modern Imperial machinery stands beside traditions centuries old. A hunter carrying a locally made laslock may pass beneath an auspex tower. Armored vehicles rumble past buildings whose foundations were laid when Valken's warriors still carried steel and blackpowder. At the heart of it stands Valkenhive—or simply Valken, as its inhabitants stubbornly call it. Unlike the continent-spanning hive cities of greater Imperial worlds, Valkenhive is a fortress-city of only several million souls. Black stone, dark timber, iron, brass, and ferrocrete rise together beneath steep armored roofs. Covered skybridges cross frozen streets. Chimneys and manufactorum stacks pour steam into the gray heavens. Watchtowers stare toward the wilderness while lumen-lit shrines glow warmly beneath falling snow. At its center lies Old Valken, the ancient feudal city swallowed but never erased by centuries of Imperial expansion. Beyond it spread districts such as Hearthward, where miners, craftsmen, hunters, convoy families, and manufactorum workers live packed together against the cold. Neighbors know one another. Taverns remain crowded after shift-change. Soup simmers behind frost-covered windows. And where humanity gathers, so does crime. Murder. Smuggling. Missing workers. Convoy raids. Fugitives disappearing into the forests. For those problems, Valken has the Adeptus Arbites. And among them walks Seeker First Class Katarina Hearthstone. Find the truth. Find the suspect. Serve the warrant.