Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

==== The Pale Wasting and the Thexian Trade Empire ====

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The Thexian Trade Empire was an interstellar Xenos Independens empire located in the Ghoul Stars that controlled nearly sixty star systems at its height. The homeworld of the Thexians and capital of their empire were the Bloodmoons of Thex Prime, so named because of their intensely oxidized sediments causing them to appear bright red in color. When the Imperium first encountered the Thexians in the late years of the Great Crusade, they were shocked when Thexian ships sought them out and tried to open diplomatic channels and trade agreements with them. Previously during the Great Crusade, the vast majority of xenos races the Imperium had encountered had either tried to kill them on sight or had either come to a spoken or unspoken understanding to stay out of each other’s way. Even the Eldar, when they had sought out an alliance to free Isha some years earlier, had done so in a way the Imperium could understand, cautiously and half-heartedly out of fear that one side was going to break the other’s shaky trust. The fact that the Thexians had willingly approached them with apparently amicable intent baffled the Imperium.

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In the end, the Imperium decided to neither declare war nor ally with the Thexians but kept them at arm’s length. The Thexians were considered not worth trying to wipe out for a variety of reasons. First, Thexian territory was considered less than ideal for human occupation. The Thexian Trade Empire was primarily located in the coreward front of the Ghoul Stars, areas which the Thexians had no problems inhabiting but humanity less so. The Ghoul Stars were also on the far side of the galaxy from the Segmentum Solar and were almost outside of the range of the Astronomican, making any attempts to hold them expensive and inefficient. Secondly, the Thexians made for a good buffer state. Much like the Eldar, Tarellians and later the Tau, the Thexians were much better neighbors than the vast majority of alternatives as they could actually be diplomatically reasoned with, unlike the vast majority of xenos races encountered during the Great Crusade. And finally, the Thexians quite frankly were not a threat to mankind. There was a heated disagreement over the existence of human populations on Thexian worlds, but the Thexians surprised the Imperium by being willing to relocate the majority of the human population on their worlds to Imperial territory, in exchange for trade agreements with the Imperium that is. If anything, the problem was the Thexians seemed too nice, which set off the Imperium’s sense of paranoia immensely.


However, the Thexians' friendliness covered up a more self-serving motivation. The Thexians, as a species, were motivated by a species-wide case of greed. The Thexians were an extremely long-lived species and reproduced very infrequently. Therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, greed made sense. Many species hoard resources for hibernation or periods of want, and if you live for thousands of years you can hoard quite a lot of resources, enough to let you survive even the longest lean periods until the next opportunity at reproduction came. The Thexians were so friendly and interested in trade because trade was one of the best ways for an individual to increase one’s holdings, and people were more willing to trade with a friendly face than a backstabbing or violent one. And the Thexians could afford to be friendly, for few unarmed or unaugmented beings could harm a Thexian in their true form. However, this did not mean the Thexians were soft. They were interested in amassing wealth and power, and when it suited them they were capable of oiliness that would make a Void Born proud. Nor were Thexians unambitious, power plays between Thexians were not uncommon, though they usually took the form of displays of subtle power behind the scenes or hostile takeovers of assets than open warfare.

The Thexians were a vaguely chiropteran species like the Khrave, though unlike the Khrave they did not spin webs and fed on flesh and blood rather than minds. The Thexians were a polymorphic race, capable of shifting into one of several different forms depending on their need. First and foremost was warform, a large, quadrupedal bat-like form capable of limited flight, covered in a leathery, squamous hide, and armed with fierce talons and massive fangs, which was believed to be the Thexian’s true form. There was flightform, a lighter-than-air shape somewhat similar to warform but with larger wings, a smaller body, and an almost ethereal appearance. There was thoughtform capable of emitting bolts of Warp lightning from its semi-corporeal shape. And perhaps most importantly among the myriad forms the Thexians were capable of taking was diplomacyform, their preferred shape when interacting with non-Thexian races, which resembled strangely androgynous humanoids that did not quite resemble either human or eldar.

Thexian society was organized into groups called aedes, feudal households comprised of a small ruling number of Thexian adults known as the Thexian Elite, their material wealth, other alien species that had sworn fealty to the Thexian Elite, and their immature offspring who had not amassed enough of a horde to become independent yet. Because they reproduced so slowly, less than 15% of the population of the Thexian Trade Empire was composed of Thexians, with the rest representing vassal populations of dozens of minor xenos species including some quasi-legal human populations that were missed by the resettlement or were the descendants of refugees into Thexian space.


Approximately during the latter half of M34, the Thexian Trade Empire became afflicted with a condition that became known as the Pale Wasting. The Pale Wasting exaggerated the normal Thexian tendency towards greed to extremes, to the point where it became an obsession. The Thexians began hoarding in earnest to attempt to sate this craving, throwing out all reason or subtlety, but no matter how much they hoarded they could never get enough. Eventually, the affliction developed into a physical craving for sustenance as well, turning their bodies growing gaunt and emaciated as they resorted to guzzling blood and shoving gore-filled chunks into their mouth in an effort to quell their bottomless hunger.

It is generally thought that the Pale Wasting was Chaotic in nature, given its corruptive effects and mental deterioration, though those that think so debate whether it was the work of Khorne (because of the hunger for blood and gore), Slaanesh (because of the excess), Nurgle (because it acted like a plague), Tzeentch (because of its strange nature) or all four Ruinous Powers together. If it was, it is possible the Pale Wasting could have been transmitted to the Thexians via the Loxotl, whom the Thexians had some contact with despite the warnings of the Imperium. However, it is not out of the possibility that the Pale Wasting was caused by contact with C’tan/Necron technology or some form of C’tan vampirism.

While humans and other xenos species were immune to the Pale Wasting, they could easily act as carriers transmitting the disease between the Thexian Elite. From there, the Pale Wasting could easily reverse the roles, corrupting the vassals underneath Thexian fealty through their connection to the Thexian Elite. When the Thexian Elite finally shrieked their declaration to go to war, millions of brainwashed thralls responded to their call. The result was all out war between the Thexians and their neighbors, resulting in a massive military response from the Imperium in which more than a dozen Adeptus Astartes chapters were wiped out in the fighting. In the end, as the corruption and Thexian Nightmare Engines wreaked havoc the Thexians and the Pale Wasting could only be stopped by mass-Exterminatus tactics and a scorched earth policy, leaving numerous Dead Worlds across the Ghoul Stars including the sixty or so worlds held by the Thexian Trade Empire.

A few Thexians survived, those immune to the Pale Wasting. Some fought alongside the Imperium, warforms tearing into infected kin with ferocity and thoughtforms banishing Thexian thralls with blasts of Warp lightning. Others fled the conflict, hitching rides on the starships of the Nicassar and hiding where they could. Today, through various quirks of history, most remaining Thexians can be found under the Imperial aegis, mostly as diplomats, traders, advisors, and occasionally members of government. Their numbers are spread so thin that members of the species can go without seeing another one of their kind for more than a century. Some have tried to live outside the Imperium, setting up small fiefdoms that are pale imitations of the aedes once seen throughout the Thexian Trade Empire A few corrupted Thexians afflicted with the Pale Wasting are also still in existence, but thankfully like their uncorrupted counterparts are rare.


The Pale Wasting had several long-term effects on galactic politics. Perhaps the greatest long-term effects of the Pale Wasting was that it helped set the stage for the Imperium to start admitting other races into the Imperium. When debate was raised over the possibility of admitting other races into the Imperium, the Thexians were a prime argument by those in favor of admission. The Thexians had been an advanced, relatively friendly xenos empire, and (in the minds of the pro-Admission advocates after nearly two thousand years of hindsight and nostalgia) the Imperium had left them out in the cold. Such a policy had not only let the Thexians get corrupted by the Pale Wasting, but created a massive interstellar threat that had cost the Imperium a significant amount of lives and resources to contain. If the Thexian Trade Empire were still alive today, they would have been classified Xenos Familiaris with little difficult and would have been easily admitted into the Imperium, so long as efforts were made to prevent Thexian ambition from subverting the functioning of the Imperium, and none of this would have happened.

The second impact of the Pale Wasting was perhaps more insidious. The Pale Wasting wiped out most of the conventional life in the Ghoul Stars, though it soon became a lawless hellhole filled with little respect for law and order or the conventional laws of physics. Although outside the light of the Astronomican, for many millennia the Space Marine chapters such as the Death Spectres stationed on the edge of the Ghoul Stars did a good job of defending the Imperium’s borders from any threat that might come from the Ghoul Stars. Unfortunately, the northeastern galaxy and the Ghoul Stars in particular had once been the heartland of the Necrontyr Star Empire nearly sixty six million years ago, and the mass extermination of life in the Ghoul Stars meant that there was little opposition and a sizeable buffer from any external power when the surface of many of these “Dead” Worlds cracked open and thousands of Necron warriors rose from beneath the earth in mechanical unlife.

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