The Gallowdark has drawn many interested parties into its ancient depths since it returned to realspace in Kill Team: Into the Dark. Now however, our shipboard sojourns are coming to a close – and with a name like Gallowfall, it’s pretty clear what’s coming next. So before the wounded hulk comes crashing down, we’re taking a look back at the illustrious kill teams who made a name for themselves up there.
The most important character is undoubtedly the Gallowdark itself. Formed over many millennia from an agglomeration of ancient voidfaring vessels – merged into a chaotic whole by the raw power of the empyrean – the space hulk has dipped in and out of realspace many times over its lifespan, each time larger than the last.
In recent centuries a vast number of Imperial vessels have joined the gestalt, including the battleship Victoria Magnus, lending the most navigable parts of the hulk a distinctly human design. It was these wrecks that drew the attention of the Imperial Navy’s War Group Alpha-VII, formed to investigate an odd warp signature that turned out to be the enormous hulk, and brought them into conflict with Kroot salvage parties from the warsphere Rak Varoyaw.
The warsphere was driven off, but many Kroot kinbands were left behind, and these Farstalkers hunted the Navis Breacher Teams mercilessly – though it was not the first time the avian xenos had drawn the Imperium towards the Gallowdark. Millennia before, Kroot mercenaries had provided intel of a strange, obsidian device to Inquisitor Rehnis of the Ordo Xenos, who’d hoped to prove the existence of a strange, skeletal alien race she believed once ruled vast swathes of the cosmos.
Though she eventually claimed the artifact from an asteroid base, Rehnis never made it home. Her ship – and the entire Cadian 15th Kasrkin Regiment aboard it – was lost in the warp, and after thousands of years adrift it eventually came to settle within the space hulk’s mass.
Shockingly, some members of its crew still lived, secluded within sanctified chambers. For the Kasrkin, only a scant few months had passed, though it was here their luck ended – the Gallowdark’s translation into realspace had allowed them to brave an escape attempt at last, but what became a year-long trek through hazardous decks got immeasurably worse when the Necrons arrived to reclaim their artifact.
It was no common rock Inquisitor Rehnis had claimed, but an Ark of Hamanet – the last Ark, in fact, of a series required to wake the Tomb World of Tsaremok. Hamanet the Relentless himself had come to return his property to its rightful place, but in their escape, the Kasrkin had snatched it and ran. Their experience within the Gallowdark‘s depths was pitted against the technological supremacy of the Necrons, and neither would find the fight easy.
Far removed from that conflict, the Dyad of Zaffre slammed headlong into the space hulk. It was a prison ship, filled to the brim with Imperial malcontents, and through a succession of seemingly freak errors its Navigators had plotted it on a direct course with the Gallowdark. Little did they know their fate had been orchestrated by a sinister band of Drukhari raiders.
The darkest cells held a particularly unstable alpha-class psyker – the primary charge of Proctor-exactant Kolkord’s Arbites Exaction squad. This was the true prize coveted by Lady Malys, and her Hands of the Archon were poised to snatch it from whatever stalwart Arbitrators survived the impact.
Few knew quite how much damage the impact of the prison ship had done, yet the Dyad of Zaffre had lanced into the Gallowdark like the tip of a spear. Though miniscule by comparison to the full mass of the space hulk, it smashed its way through the remains of many former voidcraft, leaving power cells, fusion reactors, and warp drives ruptured by its passing. As one sudden detonation triggered another, a cascading torrent of destruction ripped through the Gallowdark and dealt it a mortal wound.
As we come to Kill Team: Gallowfall, the stricken ship looms over a world wholly unprepared for its arrival. A team of intrepid salvagers from the Leagues of Votann – initially there to claim their own bounty of long-lost technology – now race to recover stranded Ironkin cerebral units after a distress call reached their ship.*
Between them stand the vicious Fellgor Ravagers, beastmen who called the Gallowdark home long before the advent of its recent interlopers. Time is rapidly running out for these would-be rescuers, and the devastation should the space hulk make impact with the planet would be immeasurable.
Discover the final fate of the Gallowdark soon when Kill Team: Gallowfall goes up for pre-order in just a few short weeks.
* After all, Kin is Kin.