Classification: Hive World
Subsector: Drusus Marches
Sector: Calixis
Tithe Grade: Exactis Median (Adjusted for volatility)
Climate: Hyper-urban, high-humidity, irradiated lower strata
Governor: High Hive-Council of House Antraxis (Hereditary Rule)
Population: Estimated 20 billion (excluding undocumented underhivers and mutants)
Primary Exports: Military recruits, mass-manufactured goods, toxic dyes, processed promethium additives
Status: Under Inquisitorial Observation – Ordo Hereticus Monitoring Tier Gamma
Overview
The Hive World of Piety is a volatile nest of humanity—a world of noise, narcotics, and mental erosion, clinging to Imperial authority through brutal enforcement and ritual frenzy. Though rich in enlistment fees and manufactorum output, the planet is more known for its cultural instability, narcotic dependence, and the terrifying mystery of the Glow—an ever-present auroral anomaly that defines daily life on the world.
Piety’s survival hinges not on order, but on containment.
Hive Structure and Governance
Piety’s vertical megacities stretch toward the ash-veiled sky in layer upon layer of habitation stacks, manufactoria towers, and fortified ferrocrete sanctums, built not for elegance but for containment and control. The world’s governance is divided in a tenuous balance of power between the High Hive-Council of House Antraxis and the militarized enforcement body known as the Suppressor Troops.
House Antraxis, a hereditary line of deeply paranoid and reclusive nobles, rules from within the sealed spires of the Elevated Vaults, high above the hive strata. Wrapped in layers of radiation shielding and political isolation, their decrees are issued through servitor-clerks, encrypted data codices, and ritualized bureaucratic channels. Governance is glacial, ritualistic, and intentionally redundant—designed more to delay catastrophe than to prevent it.
In reality, day-to-day authority is wielded by the Suppressors, a powerful, semi-autonomous amalgamation of Planetary Defense Force units and Adeptus Arbites personnel. Forged during the planet’s darkest insurrections and never truly dismantled, this hybrid force now serves as both judge and garrison. They are equipped to wage war, not keep peace—fielding suppression tanks, autocannon squads, flamer teams, and mobile command fortresses. Urban pacification campaigns are routine, especially in sectors where mutation rates, narco-activity, or Glow-induced unrest flare beyond control.
Though technically separate, the Adeptus Arbites maintain their own hierarchy within the Suppressor structure, answering only to the Lex Imperialis and the Ordo Hereticus. Their Fortresses of Correction loom like black monoliths across hive districts, launching purges and precision strikes against perceived heresy, cult activity, and Glow-induced deviance. Arbites action on Piety is swift, unrelenting, and frequently terminal—one of the few remaining deterrents to planetary collapse.
This shared governance is less a partnership than a mutually tolerated stand-off, maintained by necessity and fear. The nobles hold legitimacy. The Suppressors hold the guns. And neither trusts the other enough to blink.
The Glow and the Cycle of Radiance
At the heart of Piety’s instability lies the phenomenon known as the Glow—a shimmering aurora of argon-spectrum light that manifests across the lower atmosphere, seeping into hive interiors, tunnels, corridors, and even deep subhive vaults. It moves like fog, casts no heat, and ignores all barriers, passing effortlessly through voidsteel, ceramite, and radiation shielding.
Appearing randomly throughout the year, the Glow is widely feared and ritualized. Among the population, it induces:
- Hallucinations and psychotic breaks in latent psykers.
- Chronic agitation and sensory fatigue in baseline citizens.
- Aggression and swarming behavior in mutant populations, particularly the so-called “Glareborn.”
Yet most feared of all is the annual crescendo—the planet-wide event known as the Days of Glow.
Once per Terran year, for three to five days, the Glow blankets the entire world in pulsating auroral light. During this time:
- Latent psykers suffer uncontrolled warp episodes.
- Mutant hordes erupt in rampages.
- Narco-gangs declare open wars over territory and gang wars ignite across hive sectors.
- Glow-worshipping cults attempt mass ascension, ritual killings, or self-immolation.
- Spontaneous pogroms against suspected mutants.
- Burning of hab-blocks accused of harboring impurity.
- Violent purging between rival zealot factions, sometimes with entire districts collapsing into fire and ash.
- Suppression forces choose to withdraw, allowing the riots to “burn out in the Emperor’s judgment.”
The Cycle always aligns with the Night of the Faithful, the most infamous planetary holiday, ostensibly honoring the martyrdom of Father Faithful, a non-sanctioned local saint. The tens of millions who parade in his name quickly devolve into riots, self-flagellation mobs, drug-crazed processions, and glow-blinded fanatics hunting mutants with improvised weapons and stolen flamers.
Fires consume entire districts. Suppression forces retreat behind armored lines, and sanctioned killings number in the hundreds of thousands. And through it all, the Glow intensifies, pulsing brighter each night, as if it feeds on the belief, the hatred, and the blood.
As this chaos unfolds, the nobility of House Antraxis and associated ruling families quietly evacuate to orbital sanctuaries, abandoning the hive-world below to burn. Protected within gilded orbital-citadel, they watch the carnage from afar—claiming spiritual retreat, yet always returning only once the flames have gone out and the streets are once again ruled by force, fear, and narcotics.
Vice and Control
While faith burns bright across Piety, it is vice and violence that bind its hive society together. In a world haunted by the ever-present Glow, chemical sedation and ritual aggression are the only tools left for population control.
Narcotics are everywhere. Lo-sticks, obscura, detergent vapors, sedatives, and memory-dulling injectors are technically illegal under Imperial law, but on Piety, their use is quietly sanctioned. The Glow’s psychological strain—particularly during the annual Cycle of Radiance—would tear the population apart without widespread chemical numbing. Thus, drugs are tolerated as a necessary sacrifice.
The nobility fuels this system, running sprawling narco empires behind the guise of manufactoria syndicates and religious patronage. Street-level gangs handle distribution, protection, and the suppression of unsanctioned dealers. In this pyramid of complicity, Suppressor Troops—a hybrid force of PDF and Arbites—act as the hammer. They conduct high-profile raids, eliminate non-compliant factions, and extract bribes as part of “stability maintenance.”
Precinct commanders often coordinate directly with cartel emissaries, maintaining sanctioned “dose zones” in exchange for loyalty and silence. Some narcotic dispensaries even bear Ecclesiarchal benedictions, cloaked as “pacification missions” for the spiritually afflicted.
But beneath this chemically sedated surface lies a raging current of sanctioned hatred, focused entirely on mutants.
On Piety, mutants are not simply abhorred—they are hunted. From the underhives to mid-tier districts, mutant scalp is the most acceptable currency of loyalty and faith. Public lynchings are common. Armed mobs patrol streets with improvised weapons, dragging suspected mutants from hovels, work pits, or transport lines. Accusation is often enough. Physical deformity is a death sentence.
Suppressor units routinely look the other way, or provide fire support if mob action escalates into full-blown pogroms. Glow surges often trigger these frenzies, as fear of “mutation spread” becomes religious mania. In such times, even children with birthmarks are burned alive in purification rites.
Suppression Crusades—organized purges combining military, Ecclesiarchal, and gang support—are staged regularly. Entire hive levels are declared “tainted” and subjected to chemical gassing, flamethrower sweeps, or subterranean cleansing charges.
Piety’s social order does not survive despite this violence—it survives because of it.
Drugs calm the mind. Hatred sharpens it. And mutants provide the scapegoat that keeps the society intact.
Faith on Piety
“Be pure! Be vigilant! Be human!”
The Ecclesiarchy holds immense power on this world—not as spiritual guide, but as arbiter of wrath and purity. The High Confessors, shrine-priests, and Redemptionist preachers of Piety preach a doctrine of militant orthodoxy, where the only path to salvation lies in visible, violent hatred of the impure—chief among them: mutants.
On Piety, all societal ills—poverty, collapse, addiction, infertility, industrial sabotage, even weather anomalies—are blamed on mutants and their sympathizers, known as “mutant-lovers.” Entire sermon cycles are devoted to identifying hidden corruption, and the faith teaches that the Emperor’s gaze passes over the merciful in favor of the zealous.
Every citizen is taught from youth that to tolerate mutation is to betray the Emperor Himself. The result is a culture in which faith is action, and action means denunciation, violence, and fire.
The Days of Glow
During the annual Days of Glow, when the atmospheric Glow floods the planet in ghost-light, the planet descends into religious frenzy. Zealots from competing sects flood the hive streets in robed processions, bearing flaming censers, purity banners, relic weapons, and spiked icons.
Rather than unify in worship, these groups often turn on one another, each declaring the other to be heretical, insufficiently pure, or worse—soft on mutant-kind.
What begins as processions becomes street-wide clashes, with hymnals shouted over chainsword revs, and holy litanies drowned out by las-fire
The Ecclesiarchy does little to prevent this, and in some regions, actively encourages it—viewing the bloodletting as a planetary exorcism.
Vault-Orbitale Atraxis: The Gilded Retreat
Suspended in stationary orbit above Hive Peritas, locked in perpetual shadow during Piety’s sunward rotation, the Vault-Orbitale Atraxis is both sanctuary and stronghold—the ancestral voidhold of House Antraxis, and the primary refuge of the ruling nobility during the annual Cycle of Radiance.
From the surface, it appears as a dark speck among the stars. Up close, it is a cathedral-shaped station of stained adamantine and voidglass, inlaid with veins of gold and dark green electrum—a mobile palace built by Mechanicus voidwrights during the early colonization era, long before the Glow intensified. Its hull bristles with ancient point-defense weapons, multiple shielding arrays, and augury systems.
Within its sealed vaults lie generations of hoarded wealth: rare relics of the Great Crusade, priceless pre-Imperial artworks, data-vaults containing noble lineages, private gene-labs, and unblemished stasis-preserved delicacies. During the Cycle, entire noble households are shuttled into orbit, their finery and heirlooms in tow, leaving the burning hives below to the fanatics and the flames.
The Vault-Orbitale is guarded by contracted Mechanicus retainers, oath-sworn armsmen, and the House Solarum Wardens, a hereditary noble guard in gilded carapace armor.
To a common citizen, the vault is the Emperor’s paradise. To a daring privateer with the right connections, it represents a floating, vulnerable trove of ancient riches.
It is whispered in certain void-dens that a single strike on Vault-Orbitale Atraxis during the Cycle could net the plunder of ten hive-lifetimes—if one is mad enough to reach it through the point defense weapons and focused augur fields.
Glow-Population Equilibrium Notice
At the onset of Piety’s colonization, Glow manifestations were rare and unpredictable, initially dismissed as planetary atmospheric anomalies. However, as the planetary population grew, Glow events became more frequent, intense, and deadly, culminating in surges of mass psychosis, mutation outbreaks, and hive-level casualties.
Long-term data compiled by the Ordo Hereticus and Mechanicus Savants suggests a disturbing correlation between population density, latent psychic activity, and Glow intensity. Simply put:
The more humans reside on Piety, the more violently the Glow manifests—until it kills enough to restore balance.
Over millennia, this cycle has produced a grim stability: Piety’s population self-regulates around 20 billion, as the Glow culls excess growth through psychic flashpoints.
However, analysis indicates that this limit can be raised—and currently is—due to the planet’s pervasive use of emotion-dampening narcotics. Substances such as obscura, detergent vapors, and injector dull fear, rage, and despair, all of which are believed to fuel latent psychic discharge that seems to exacerbate Glow resonance.
In essence, chemical sedation suppresses psychic volatility, reducing the number and severity of Glow-related deaths. This has led some to speculate that Piety’s continued survival at its current population scale is not due to social order or Imperial oversight—but the narcotic fog that muffles the very thoughts of its people.
This theory remains unconfirmed and is not to be discussed outside secure Ecclesiarchic and Inquisitorial channels.
Ignis Aeternus WH 40K campaign notes 