Commorragh: The Dark City

Somewhere in the twisting non-space between the stars lies a city that has never known a dawn. Commorragh, the Dark City, is the black heart of the Drukhari - a metropolis of impossible scale folded into the hidden roads of the webway. It is older than the Imperium, crueller than any battlefield, and hungrier than the void itself. To its masters it is the last true civilisation in a dying galaxy; to everyone else it is a rumour of horror, glimpsed only by those dragged screaming through its gates.

A City Outside the Universe[edit]

Commorragh sits upon no world. It exists within the Labyrinth Dimension of the webway, the vast interdimensional network that threads between realspace and the Warp. Sheltered there behind ancient wards, the city cannot be charted by Imperial cartographers or besieged by any crusade, for no fleet can lay siege to a place that lies nowhere at all.

This concealment is also the salvation of its people. When the birth of Slaanesh consumed their kind, those who dwelt deep enough within the webway were shielded from the god's soul-devouring scream. Commorragh endured where craftworlds and maiden worlds did not, and so became the final refuge of the most decadent survivors of the ancient Aeldari empire.

The Foundations of the Dark City[edit]

Long before the Fall, Commorragh already existed as a lawless port within the webway, a haven lying beyond the reach of the old empire's authorities. Here the pleasure cults gathered to indulge appetites forbidden elsewhere, and here the seeds of everything the Drukhari would become were first sown.

After the cataclysm, the scattered cultists returned to this bolt-hole and raised a new sub-realm upon the ruins of the old. Across the millennia it swelled monstrously, swallowing neighbouring ports and stolen pockets of space until it became a single sprawling immensity - a city assembled from the plunder of ten thousand worlds.

An Endless Sunless Night[edit]

The Dark City has neither sky nor horizon. Its spires climb in every direction at once, crowded above chasms that fall away into lightless depths, the whole tangle stitched across countless sub-realms.

Light comes not from any sun but from the Ilmaea, the black suns - dying stars torn from realspace at the height of Aeldari mastery and hung within the city to bleed a crimson half-light across its towers. In the gloom between them, hungry shadows are said to move of their own accord, devouring the unwary.

The Rule of the Kabals[edit]

True power in Commorragh belongs to the Kabals, armed dynasties of warriors, schemers and aristocrats bound together by oaths that hold only so long as fear can hold them. Each Kabal fields fleets, armies and vast hoards of captive slaves, and each answers to an Archon who has clawed to the summit through murder, blackmail and flawless treachery.

Mightiest of all is the Kabal of the Black Heart, whose supremacy has outlasted the rise and fall of lesser empires. Its master, the tyrant Asdrubael Vect, claims to have founded the Dark City itself, and rules as a schemer so patient that his rivals are often dead before they grasp that he has beaten them.

Blood, Flesh and the Arenas[edit]

Beside the Kabals stand the Wych Cults, gladiators who worship violence as high art. In towering arenas such as the great Crucibael they butcher monsters and captives before roaring crowds, their killing raised to a lethal ballet under the command of merciless queens called Succubi.

Stranger and more dreaded still are the Haemonculi, the ancient flesh-sculptors of the covens. Masters of agony and living sculpture, they can rebuild a slain Drukhari from a smear of remains, granting a grotesque immortality at terrible cost, and their dark craft keeps the aristocracy of the Dark City forever young.

Aelindrach and the Deeper Dark[edit]

Around and beneath the glittering spires lie stranger districts yet. Aelindrach, the Realm of Shadow, is an ancient quarter that has sunk literally into darkness, existing in several dimensions at once; there the laws of matter bend, and only iron will keeps a traveller's senses intact. Amid its lightless domes lurk the Mandrakes, shadow-born killers few dare disturb.

Below the high towers sprawls the endless warren of Low Commorragh, ground of the desperate and the damned, where the weak are simply prey that has not yet been caught. Mercy is a word its inhabitants have long since forgotten.

The Predator's Endless Reach[edit]

What makes Commorragh so terrible to the wider galaxy is its web of gates. Through these portals the Drukhari can spill out beside any world where a gate still stands, fall upon it in a storm of bladed raiders, and vanish back into the labyrinth before a defence can be mustered, carrying away captives by the thousand into the dark.

This raiding is not mere cruelty, though cruelty it certainly is. Every Drukhari soul is slowly devoured by Slaanesh, and only by drinking in the anguish of others can they hold that damnation at bay. Commorragh is therefore a city that must torment in order to live - an eternal night sustained by the suffering of a galaxy, forever hungry, forever hunting.