Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Cognomen (section)

===The Power of Names===

Names are crucial to Cognomen culture and lifestyle, and theology also.  Individuals may have as many as four or as few as one name, and may choose new names for their selves upon reaching adulthood at sixteen.  Each and every building in the great hive-forges has a name; individual cogitators have names stenciled on the side in indelible ink.  Every starship, Titan, Skitarii, and illegal Knight has its name emblazoned on its armored carapace in a place of honor and visibility, even compromising camouflage for some.
Names are power in a galaxy in which the Warp exists, and the Mechanicus knows it.  Cognomen takes these names as a point of pride, however, and woe betide a visitor to Cognomen who forgets the name of the Priest to whom they are speaking.  Cognomen Skitarii and Titan crews commit the names of their enemies to memory before battle, and gouge the names of the worlds on which they fight into the hulks of wrecked enemy vehicles after a victory or their own after a loss.  No fewer than fifteen star systems in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit are named after the forenames of specific Rogue Traders or Explorators, simply because their names became infamous in some other capacity shortly after making their discoveries, or because they wanted to stake a claim forever.

This belief extends to knowledge, too.  Cognomen is obsessed with learning the blueprints of the lost STCs, of course, as all Forge Worlds are, but they take their obsession to a less practical extent.  Cognomen doesn’t just seek out lost blueprints, but also the ancillary information of the STC files themselves.  The names of inventors who contributed to the great STC Datalibraries, the locations of the laboratories and workshops and Universities where those inventions were made, and the names of the materials from which the templates may best be built – all of these things are sacred to Cognomen.

The great Data Chapels of Cognomen have the titles and names of inventors and engineers, designers and scholars of the Dark Age and Golden Age scribed by hand onto great sheets of canvas, with abstract depictions of their lives’ works all around them, and frozen in expensive stasis fields.  Statues of Mechanicus and Terran inventors of the past decorate public squares alongside Fabricators of Mars and Primarchs.  Across the Great Canyon of Dolomblen, the yawning ravine that splits the main continent down the middle, vast train bridges stretch from Forge-Hive to Forge-Hive, and each bridge has a name emblazoned on the side in solid iron letters the size of Warhounds.  They are allowed to rust, staining them red, the color of the priesthood, and drip down into Dolomblen, like the blood the Mechanicus has shed for Mankind.

Given the Cognomen obsession with names and history, it is perhaps somewhat surprising to Martian observers that Cognomen is not equally fixated on the crime of Innovation.  This is especially surprising given the Cognomen preference for unobtrusive and functional augments, and their history of schism from Mars.  Cognomen, of course, has its sects and factions, like all large Forge Worlds, but by and large, they are obedient to Mars.