The Battle for Janus

When the first settlers made plantfall, Janus was entirely a paradise world. However, despite their considerable resources and the planet's perfect habitat, the settlers barely survived the first few years. 

In their lust, the colonists had disregarded strange beacons that ringed the planet and pulsed with dissonant harmonics that should have given even the most belligerent Ork pause. Self-stripped of flesh and mortal senses, the settlers disregarded the warnings as nothing more than a curiosity, to be investigated once the world had been reshaped into something more pleasing to the machine-God.

The Eldar had other ideas. On the seventh day, they attacked as if from nowhere, reaping lives with wild abandon and delighting in bringing pain to those who would trespass upon their domain. The settlers fought back with all manner of esoteric weaponry, and began the long process of arming themselves, dedicating their forges to the production of tanks, knights and eventually titans. 

The war was hard fought and for a time it looked as though the xenos would be triumphant. There seemed no end to them and the thin-limbed ones had no visible infrastructure or supply lines. Their might all but spent, the Mechanicum’s exhausted forces prepared to sell their lives dearly. As the first pulses of poisoned splinters and screaming shurikens assailed their positions, a god-scream rang out. Many of the Eldar died in an instant, their bodies withering to desiccated husks, while others were reduced to madness. Those few survivors fled, babbling in their incomprehensible tongue or wailing in inhuman tones. The Mechanicum settlers had been saved not by their might of arms, but by the birth of She Who Thirsts. The only data feed that remains from this time, the sense-log of Lexmechanic Noram Rimerk, speaks of strange dreams following the battle and a sense that something vast had looked upon the ragged survivors and… smiled.

As time marched on, Forgeworld Janus slowly began to take shape. The great forges, were founded in the northern hemisphere and were ruled by the Aidonic council, elected members of the Prater Ferrum. Over time, the waste products of industry and the strip-mining of the region’s incredible mineral wealth turned the north of the planet into a polluted wasteland that later became known as the Haidic Drifts.