Avignon Alpha was a thriving Imperial shipping hub 500 years ago, second only to Seriphos Primaris as a crossing point for the San Leor-Ophelia Holy Road and coreward routes. Then, after the crisis on Knight’s Reach and subsequent quarantine of the Oberon Cluster, coreward trade waned, and so did the fortunes of Avignon Alpha. Interstellar traffic dwindled, warrants to pilot, load and unload interstellar craft became increasingly scarce, and Avignonian society fragmented along rival guild lines. Two hundred years of anarchy followed, during which time blood feuds escalated and murder cults sprang up across the planet. Eventually, Inquisition-led suppression forces restored the Pax Imperialis to the Avignon system, by which time the majority of the population had been slaughtered and the tech-level reduced to a medieval state. A bureaucratic cypher of the Adminstratum was appointed to rule over the cowed and much-diminished populace of Avignon Alpha, and peace was established amid the ruins of former prosperity.
After Ork freebooters established a foothold on nearby Drakefell, Avignon Alpha came under attack from Snakebite Orks led by the deranged Pigmek. The Orks began systematically enslaving the human populace - indeed, the current planetary governor, Auldmann, was taken captive and forced to serve as an ammo runt. Before long, Traitor Marines of the Death Guard had also invaded the planet, and conflict between the xenos and traitors offered Avignonian loyalists a brief respite in which desperate calls for aid were broadcast across the sector. It transpired that elements of the Avignonian PDF had been infiltrated by other xenos elements, who joined forces with the Orks in their escalating struggle with the minions of Chaos.
In their role as wardens of the Seriphos Sector, the Mourn Hounds responded to Avignonian distress calls, sending a strike force led by Captain Ywain of the 7th Company to bolster loyalist defences. The Mourn Hounds encountered resistance as soon as they made planetfall, and elements of the Orks and Death Guard temporarily suspended hostilities to battle this common foe. Traitor Marines of the Word Bearers commanded by Lord Euphraxes arrived on the planet and allied with the Death Guard: only the efforts of the Mourn Hounds and Okassis Guard prevented a major daemonic incursion. Subsequently, Imperial reports identified the major threats to security on Avignon Alpha.
As the Mourn Hounds were forced to redeploy against emergent threats in the Hunt’s Founding sub-sector, loyalist forces consolidated in the polar hab zone of Avignon Alpha and, the truce ended, the Ork and Chaos forces continued their battle for control of the planet. The Sin Eaters, renegade Space Marines long-active in the Seriphos region, made planetfall, with Lord Slaughtian the Archanarchist leading the search for rumoured unholy artifacts dating back to the dark days post-Oberon crisis. The Chaos warbands fought for control of the fabled Eye of Lorgar, and the Sin Eaters were driven off, departing Avignon Alpha for an ill-fated invasion of Hunt’s World.
By this point, the world had descended into an irreparable state of anarchy. Aside from Ork and Chaos factions, xenos mercenaries flocked to the system. Besieged on all sides, the human populace were trapped in a desperate battle for survival, which the depleted Sin Eaters hoped to capitalise on by dispatching agents to recruit fresh footsoldiers. Many native Avignonians fell victim to the zombie plague introduced to the planet by the Death Guard. The infected crave brains, human or Ork, and it seems this growing tide of the undead may yet engulf this once-proud world in the name of Father Nurgle.
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