The Deep Reef

Beyond the borders of the Brightsword Protectorate lies the junction between multiple gravitational halos. Millennia of cosmic impacts, Imperial mining and asteroidal capture has created a series of vast debris belts hundreds – sometimes thousands – of Terran miles in diameter.

Generally these belts are stable, slow-moving and navigable: however, owing to a quirk in the stellar geography, two belts have converged in a dramatic collision zone. The enormous clouds of coloured dust kicked up by daily crashes makes the region a spectacular, ever-changing rainbow.

The first T’au explorers to this patch of space named the area the Coral Passage after the magnificent multi-hued submerged kingdoms found on the T’au sea-world of Mar’Ina. As the Protectorate consolidated its borders nearby, the debris belts became more commonly known as the Deep Reef, with the collision zone becoming the Deepreef Confluence.

While the Reef itself is a relatively useful source of material wealth – wars have often been, and most likely will continue to be fought over its mineral zones – the Confluence has historically been considered to be utterly impassable. The gravitational slingshot effect of the convergence of halos has resulted in it becoming the equivalent of a waterway’s rapids, while the number of glancing hits each object within it inevitably suffers makes the movement within impossible to predict. Rogue Traders, explorers and wealthy thrill-seekers occasionally venture in under the misguided notion that a well-armoured vessel will endure the journey. They rarely survive.

A number of larger bodies within the Confluence have sufficient mass to be unaffected by the continual bombardment. However, even if it were possible to reach these rocks unscathed, they would be fit only for subterranean inhabitation. Careful observation from reinforced drones in the Confluence’s shallows has noted that a number of these bodies collide with each other more frequently than would be expected. This, along with the fact that they appear to both regenerate mass and sometimes travel against the tidal flow, leads the T’au to suspect that they may in fact be Ork Roks.

In recent years, the Deepreef Confluence has somehow become home to the enigmatic An’Thean T’au faction.