“The galaxy was vast beyond mortal comprehension. It was common to visualise it as a great spiral of light, but this was an illusion. The stars were only tiny specks scattered across the endless night. To travel between them required risking a still greater darkness, the maddened hell that was the immaterium. The only light in that twisted nether-realm was the Astronomican, the soul-blaze guided by the Emperor Himself. Yet even the divine beacon had limits. In the far reaches it thinned and faded to nothing. There, at the very edge of where the shadows reigned unchallenged, sat the Blackstone Fortress. It was older than human civilisation. Whatever hands had built it were no longer around to explain its opaque workings. Such a shadowed existence led, unsurprisingly, to superstition. It had borne many names through the slow creep of years. The Dark Star. Old Unfathomable. The Eater of the Dead. Thousands more across hundreds of languages. That last name was given for a particular oddity of the ancient station. Its gravity obeyed no known rules. Instead, it seemed almost hungry. It pulled in debris and ships, a train of wreckage and ruin that spiralled in from the stars to be consumed into the lightless hull. There in the belly of the beast everything was slowly absorbed. Perhaps that was how it repaired itself. Perhaps it was how it learned. Perhaps it was growing. There was no one to ask.”