The vast majority of Dark Eldar found within the Screaming Vortex operate from the Nexus of Shadows, a dark and forbidding artificial world these vicious xenos have dominated for hundreds of years. For more information about this terrible realm and the foul creatures within, see rogue Trader adventure supplement The soul reaver.
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MAMMON
“You have not tasted perversity until you have visited Mammon, and witnessed first hand the glorious, unquestioned faith with which its inhabitants strive to prove their worth… there is no better proof of the Corpse-God’s impotence than these poor wretches, ever-striving in his name, who are driven to live, fight, and die for generations, never to know reward or relief. It truly is exquisite.”
–Belia Dustari, Violatrix of Estaba
F
rom orbit, the planet Mammon appears to be a dun-coloured, lifeless rock marred with huge, circular scars of craters, some of which stretch across entire continents.This is not due to natural occurrences, but instead the work of its natives. War dominates life on Mammon, and has for as long as living memory within the Screaming Vortex. Ancient wars heated the planet very nearly beyond human endurance, boiling off the oceans, killing most plant-life, and leaving instead a barren desert that stretches from pole to pole and all the way around the girdle of the world. What water remains is polluted beyond use from forge run-offs to become foetid morasses of effluvia and concentrated poisons.
Two factions have battled their way across the planet for thousands upon thousands of years, knowing only warfare and strife, with no interruption to the violence and the acrimony. They are bitter rivals made even more violent and intractable through the iron will of complete righteous indignation and unshakeable faith. For upon the cursed world of Mammon the cruellest of all celestial caprices is being played out in bloody earnest every day.
Both of the tattered coalitions roaring back and forth across the blasted surface of Mammon truly believes itself to be the true servants of the God-Emperor on Earth, while the other faction is seen to be the perfidious minions of the Ruinous Powers, whose ascendance keeps the world in thrall. Each and every soldier on the planet, from the highest ranking general to the youngest raw recruit, truly believes, to the very marrow of their bones, that they fight on the side of righteousness. In a region where belief defines reality, their absolute belief has become a power of its own and is the source of both fascination and amusement throughout the Vortex.
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ndThe war is a ceaseless quest to prove themselves the True Disciples of He Who Sits On Terra. Harping demagogues dominate both factions, and extort their people to greater and greater feats of violence and depravity against the enemy. Both firmly believe that only through the utter eradication of the other can they prove they are worthy of salvation. All live for that glorious moment when the last infidel is put to the blood-drenched sword, and the Emperor finally descends unto them and takes them bodily back to Terra. There, they believe they will be rewarded with all manner of foods and other pleasures that have been eternally denied to them upon the ravaged world of their parturition.
Through millennia of warfare, nearly everything has been destroyed upon Mammon. Not even vague records speak of a time when the cities and monuments that now lie broken and scattered upon the sands of the planet were first created.
The hordes of the true believers live in the blasted-out shells of former glory, often finding the only shelter from acid rain
and toxic clouds of ancient bio-weapons in the warped and rusted remains of vehicles they no longer have the ability to maintain or use. Villages are seeded in sheltered valleys all over the planet, where the few true-born children are raised in an atmosphere of pure faith, hatred, and fear of the dreaded Other.
There is no such thing as a non-combatant upon Mammon, for the Emperor wishes only for them to spill the blood of their enemies onto the sand of this crucible of faith.
For that is the framework upon which hangs every living soul’s life struggle. Each person on Mammon is judged upon the depth and conviction of their faith in the distant Emperor only through the pain and suffering they are able to inflict upon the vile apostates. Every moment of every day is spent trying to please the cardinals-militant through their devotion and blind acceptance of what passes for the Imperial Creed on this hellish, benighted world. There is no value assigned to any person, no matter their age or ability, that does not directly catenate to the death or punishment of the heathen foe.
What little treasure is left on the planet after countless ages of strife and warfare is collected in ramshackle cities constructed from the blasted ruins of ancient days. Tottering towers guard shaky walls of rubble and debris as central keeps, the tallest structures in the cities, are thrown together to house the dented, dulled wealth of former empires. These treasures are no longer seen as valuable in their own right, but rather as a means of keeping track of the sanctity of one’s faction. Those with the most gold or other treasures, seized from the enemy and kept from them through any means possible, are seen to be in the ascendant in the eyes of the Emperor and thus have struggled that much closer to the gates of heavenly Terra.
Life upon the degenerate world of Mammon is a brutal struggle for survival against not only the hated foe, but against the very planet itself, as the dun orb has suffered such great indignities of warfare that only within the twisted realities of a Warp rift might any life cling to it at all.
Food is scraped from the blasted landscape in the form of foul weeds, dry mosses, and the emaciated bodies of scavenging rodents. In the extreme conditions that dominate much of the planet, the holy warriors are forced to eat their own dead, denying even unto death any form of glory or dignity that might be recognised by the wider galaxy. The soldiers of Mammon do not fight for glory in death, but for the return of the Emperor and the salvation of future generations, and thus even the raw materials of the dead are seen as merely fodder for the eternal struggle. Such is the depth of their faith that they live, breathe, and die not for their own glory, but for the glory of descendants yet unborn, smiled upon by the distant Emperor in future days the current warrior generations cannot hope to feel themselves.
The clothing worn by the righteous warriors of Mammon is fit to cause the most stoic Heretic to chuckle beneath an upraised claw. Ancient synthetic fabrics, tattered and worn from centuries of use, are embellished with crude, hand-made fetishes and decorations that attempt to mimic the regalia of the true Imperial Creed. Having nothing but the debased efforts of previous generations, however, the original source of inspiration for these tokens can barely be ascertained from the maladroit efforts of contemporary artisans.
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Reproduction upon Mammon is one of the greatest mysteries to those intrigued by life there. A small number of natural children are born to the true believers of both sides each year, but hardly enough to feed the ravenous needs of their eternal holy wars.
No regulated attempt has ever been made to ascertain where future generations are produced, but many theories have been bandied about. Some believe that each faction has discovered ancient cloning facilities beneath the ruins of Mammon’s lost glory, and use these debased factoria to create poor copies of themselves to carry out the fight. Others opine that the gods themselves seed the planet with fresh fanatics, dropping them unnoticed into single-minded mobs too absorbed in their own hatred to even notice. A few more fanciful theories speak of the spontaneous creation of human simulacra springing forth from the utter rancour that pervades the planet.
The one constant of life on Mammon is unquestioning faith. These fanatical warriors wage their holy wars with only the most rough-hewn melee weapons such as clubs and spears crafted from rusty rebar or support material pulled from the ruins. Almost all warfare upon Mammon takes the form of large, unruly mobs with makeshift weapons rushing across the blasted landscape at each other screaming their bastardised psalms and litanies in cracked and broken voices, their overpowering faith radiating from their crazed faces in waves. However, occasionally a cardinal-militant dares the shame and ignominy of dealing with the vile Vortex-dwellers to purchase weapons with some of his hoarded cache, such is his frustration with the bloody status quo. Despite the inevitably inferior quality of even these off-world weapons,
they are invariably prized given the low quality of local weaponry. As such, these prizes are only entrusted into the hands of the most lauded champions, and entire wars have been fought to reclaim a single, poor-quality laspistol lost when the champion who bore it into battle fell.
Glory, that most ephemeral of rewards, is often promised to those who fall in the Emperor’s name on Mammon, but the never-ending warfare allows for no time to bury the dead with any sort of ceremony no matter how high they have risen. From the lowliest child-soldier or the highest cardinal-militant, all are merely cast aside when they fall. No monuments are raised in their honour, no reminders of their deeds or sacrifices remain. The dead, if they are not eaten to nourish the next wave, are simply churned underfoot by the next assault of the next battle in the next war.
The depths and scope of the faith of Mammon is of never-ending fascination to their celestial neighbours. Mammon is treasured as a living work of art dedicated to the sheer power of human faith as well as the abasement of the Emperor’s loyal slaves. There are many theories as to the identity of the artistic genius who could have conceived of such a magnum opus, and many wonder at a mind capable of creating a situation like that upon Mammon and how it could be maintained in the face of an eternity of hatred and bloodshed without let.
There is much speculation as to what power might have brought about the situation on Mammon among the enthusiasts who look to the planet as an ever evolving work of performance art. Some speak of Daemon Princes or even the direct intervention of the Dark Gods themselves, given
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the incredibly complex nature of the farce playing out upon the demented denizens of the benighted planet. By far, the majority of the contemplation upon this most glorious work of craftsmanship and ingenuity pertains to the loyalty of the powers behind the eternal dance of violence.
One of the most common theories ascribes the bloody handed god Khorne to the paragon of violence playing out eternally across the planet. Others see Mammon as a vast experiment of the Architect of Fate, allowing Tzeentch to watch how the puppets of the Corpse God might operate under intolerable stress. Some claim that only Grandfather Nurgle would be able to orchestrate such a foetid swamp of spiritual, societal, and material decay. The most common power attributed to this artistic triumph, however, is that most theatrical of entities, the Prince of Sensation himself. The skill to drive an entire planet to the very edge of devotional ecstasy, mindless worship, and beyond, to plumb the very depths of perfect faith, could only be the provenance of Slaanesh.
Whatever the initial source of the planet’s grand vision, the contemporary reality of Mammon’s fate is a much more pressing topic of speculation among the most high-ranking heretics in the Screaming Vortex. A favourite theory, spoken only in hushed whispers, tells of the dreaded Word Bearers and their never-ending quest to find new excesses in devotion and faith as well as to humiliate the believers of the Emperor. These ancient warriors and their hatred for all proponents of the corpse-god is well known, as is their never-sated desire to push the boundaries of faith to their most bloody and crazed extremes. Many speculate that the Word Bearers use the population of Mammon as a recruiting ground for their slavering cult armies, converting the screaming faithful into bloodthirsty killers wild with abandoned ideals and destroyed faith.
Many heretics cannot envision a more loyal follower than a true zealot for the Imperial cause who has had the caul painfully torn from their eyes. Based upon the truism that there is no fanatic so ardent as the convert, many descend to the planet’s surface with the sole purpose of selecting out the most powerful warriors, capturing them, and forcing them to realise the error of their lives by revealing the empirical truth of the planet’s position. When confronted with this bleakest of truths, most of the warriors of Mammon experience a mental break, immediately reduced to blubbering, mindless husks with no hope of recall.
A rare few, however, will emerge from the dissonance of this break filled with a furious anger and a righteous ardour to strike out at the Emperor who left their people to languish in animal misery for millennia. These men and women, creatures of nearly pure faith all their lives, have reattached this singular focus upon their new masters and will serve them with all of the mindless loyalty and devotion they had spent their lives squandering upon the corpse-god. It is the existence of these devoted followers that many point to as proof that Mammon is a massive, global laboratory of the Word Bearers, allowing them to manipulate faith and belief with the finesse of a race of maestros.