Overview
Cadia’s children grew up within sight of military works. Roads served the bastions. Training grounds stood among the places where people lived, and the next generation was expected to learn what the last had learned before it went away to fight. Beyond the defences lay the approaches to the Eye of Terror.
The planet held a position on which much of the Imperium depended. Its destruction left surviving Cadians with their training, their regimental colours and no home to return to. New orders still found them. Commanders elsewhere knew the value of soldiers who could keep a formation together after seeing what had happened to their own world.
History
Generations of Cadians lived through alerts and musters at the Gate. Their world supplied regiments as well as the soldiers needed to maintain its own defences.
The Thirteenth Black Crusade destroyed it. Surviving formations carried its name into continued service, while Imperial authorities made its fall a reason for other soldiers to keep fighting.
Military significance
Cadian Shock Troops provide a model of combined arms warfare built on drill, marksmanship and professional command. Their discipline allows formations to remain useful under severe losses. After Cadia’s fall, surviving regiments retained those skills alongside a history commanders elsewhere were quick to invoke.
M41 and M42 status
Standing fortress at the Cadian Gate.
Cadia stands at the Gate, heavily burdened and continuously prepared. Its bastions hold a position for which there is no easy substitute.
Destroyed fortress world; its name persists as a military oath.
The world is destroyed and its surviving soldiers serve elsewhere. Its shattered remains, largely swallowed by the widening Rift, pass from a Black Legion garrison to Iron Warriors control. The people still fighting under Cadia’s name cannot recover their home by winning a conventional landing.
Timeline
Gate defense schedules expand as traffic from the Eye intensifies.
Additional fortress belts are audited for readiness against mass incursion.
Shock troop musters increase after confirmed enemy fleet movement.
Cadian regiments are reinforced and rotated through multiple fortress belts.
Pylon and bastion reports enter emergency classification.
The world is broken during the great crisis at the gate.
Surviving Cadian formations carry the planet's identity into new war zones.
Related charted locations
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Cartographic positions and several administrative details are intentionally approximate where published Warhammer sources conflict or provide no canonical coordinate system.