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From Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum
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It is a notorious [[Fire Caste]] world containing the oldest and most respected academy, founded centuries before. The warriors produced here are especially aggressive and skilled in the art of death. The sept warriors of Vior'la are usually painted with hot colours, like red and orange, and usually have many [[Fire Warrior]]s and [[Battlesuit]]s.
The surface of Vior'la is hot and dry, even for a Tau world and Tau from Vio'la tend to have darker skin pigmentation than most. Due to its orbit around a binary star, it swelters in a virtually constant summer. The majority of the planet's surface is dry and inhospitable; dusty red plains cover millions of square miles and parched deserts circle the equator. In both hemispheres mountain ranges stretch for thousands of miles and seem to scrape the stars themselves, lending credence to the theory that much of Vior'la's surface was once under water and some catastrophe in ancient times caused the seas to dry up, leaving Vior'la the arid place it is today.
While there is no empirical evidence to support this, [[Air Caste]] stellar cartographers have noted an apparent discrepancy between the ages of formation of VioVior'la's binary stars. The larger star appears to be much younger than the smaller; a fact that none of the Earth caste astrophysicists can yet explain, though its unexplained birth may have been the cause of the scouring of its oceans. Vior'la moves in a short elliptical orbit around its stars and once every six Tau'cyr its trajectory passes between the two stars (a Tau'cyr is the annual cycle of the Tau home world, made up of six Kai'rotaa. Each Kai'rotaa is dedicated to a particular caste, with the sixth dedicated to the race as a whole).
This time is known as the Trial by Fire and lasts for exactly five Kai'rotaa (roughly two hundred and fifty [[Terra]]n days). During this time, VioVior'la passes relatively close to the largest star and powerful waves of electromagnetic energy and sprays of plasma wash over its surface. A complex series of interactions between the planet's geomagnetic field and the solar wind constantly ripple the surface of the magnetosphere. Normally this passes unremarked, but the violence of the Trial by Fire is an order of magnitude greater than normal. The geomagnetic disturbance it causes grows and rages, finally developing into a fully-fledged magnetic storm. The net effect of this is a hugely unstable magnetic anomaly in VioVior'la's ionosphere, resulting in massive degradation of communication, satellite and sensor performance.
Glittering plasma tornadoes, as wondrous as they are deadly, howl across Vior'la's sandy expanses, vitrifying whole swathes of desert sand. The spectacular Prism Desert in the southern hemisphere is one area of the planet that often bears the brunt of this, and once Vior'la has come through the Trial by Fire, the newly created rippling glass dunes and delicate crystal seas are a breathtakingly beautiful sight. Arcs of rainbow colour and rippling light refract through the gracefully moulded glass waves and many among the [[Earth Caste]] take particularly exquisite examples of this phenomenon to fashion into much sought-after ornaments and decorations. Each Trial by Fire reshapes the Prism Desert and those Tau able to travel from other septs frequently come to Vior'la to see them before the next.
