Laeran, designated Twenty-Eight Three by the Emperor's Children Legion, was an Ocean World and a Xenos World located in the Ultima Segmentum that was the homeworld of the Laer, reptilian, serpent-like xenos exterminated by the Emperor's Children during the 28th Expeditionary Fleet's campaign of the Great Crusade later known as the Cleansing of Laeran.
An Ocean World lacking any major continental landmasses, the Laer's population centres were based on floating atolls made of a peculiar form of crystalline coral. The atolls were holed by a myriad number of tunnels and burrows, with towering spires and narrow streets covering the surfaces. Flaring pillars of an unknown energy type emerged from the centre of the atolls, directed downwards and upwards; it was theorised by the ancient Mechanicum that these pillars kept the atolls airborne through some form of anti-gravity technology.
The glare of the energy pillars reflected in the crystal coral, combined with the shrieking of the wind whistling around the towers, made the Laeran atolls a disorienting place for Human senses, though the discordance was pleasing to the Slaaneshi-corrupted Laer.
In the wake of the Emperor's Children's conquest the world and its surrounding system were eventually cleansed of Chaos corruption and resettled by Imperial colonists.
History[]
Shortly after the beginning of their participation in the Great Crusade on their own terms after ending their time with the Luna Wolves, the Emperor's Children Legion's 28th Expeditionary Fleet encountered a hitherto-unknown serpentine alien species who called themselves the Laer. Analysis of captured scouts and envoys showed the Laer to be concentrated in a single star system on a single homeworld completely covered by a global ocean called Laeran, officially codified in Imperial records as Twenty-Eight-Three.
Nonetheless, the Laer had the potential to be a powerful foe. Like the Emperor's Children themselves, the Laer prized the pursuit of perfection in all aspects of civilisation. By the use of chemical and genetic manipulation from birth, individual Laer were biologically adapted to their socioeconomic roles in Laer civilisation.
Observers from the Imperial administration accompanying the III Legion's expeditionary fleet wondered if perhaps the Laer might be made a protectorate of the Imperium as conquering such an efficient species could prove to be a long and costly endeavour. Fulgrim was disgusted by any notion of co-operation or alliance with a xenos species. Only Humanity was perfect, he insisted. For an alien species to hold its own ideals to be comparable to those of Mankind was unthinkable, and deserved only annihilation. He ordered his Lord Commanders to attack immediately, and initiated a war that the Council of Terra had predicted would last for several solar decades.
Fulgrim heard this prediction, and shook his head. In one solar month's time, he promised, the Imperium would rule Laeran. The Emperor's Children, in concert with Lord Commander Fayle's Archite Palatine regiments of the Imperial Army, attacked the Laer in space, on the surface of their homeworld, beneath their oceans and over the hulls of their orbital platforms.
Laeran itself was a remarkable world in which the serpentine Laer had used anti-gravity technology to float massive coral platforms above their planet's global ocean. It was on these platforms that they had chosen to live after global warming had sunk all of Laer's continental masses beneath encroaching waves.
Everywhere the Astartes faced enemies adapted to their conditions by genetic and chemical enhancement -- warships connected directly to their serpentine crews' minds using cybernetic technology, amphibious warriors who could breathe underwater through gills, scouts capable of moving as fast as a Land Speeder, gunners possessed of eyesight so acute that it allowed them to target individual Space Marines who were kilometres distant. The casualties on both sides were horrendous -- it is estimated that, if not for the excellence of the III Legion's Apothecaries, more than half of its warriors would have died from their wounds.
The Laer never surrendered -- their last warriors died fighting in the ruins of their capital city to protect their central temple dedicated to the worship of the Chaos God Slaanesh. One solar month after he had begun the attack, Fulgrim planted a standard displaying the Imperial Palatine Aquila over the last of the Laer's corpses, leaving it the only thing standing unblemished on Laeran.
Over seven hundred of his warriors were dead, six times that number injured, but Fulgrim believed that he had kept his promise to the Council of Terra. Against the most finely-honed alien warriors ever encountered, Humanity had proven itself more powerful.
Of course, the conquest of the Laer represented the beginning of Fulgrim and the entire III Legion's damnation and their turn away from the service of the Emperor, as many members of the Legion, including Fulgrim and several of the civilian Remembrancers who entered the Laer's temple, were unwittingly exposed to Slaanesh's touch. Only the strongest-willed among them would prove able to resist the temptations of the Prince of Chaos.
Yet the Laeran System, for ten thousand standard years now, has been home to three Imperial cities and a dozen mining colonies, and all traces of its former xenos rulers and their Chaos corruption are long gone.
Sources[]
- Fulgrim (Novel) by Graham McNeill, Chs. 1-2
- The Horus Heresy Book One - Betrayal (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pg. 1