Mordane

Mordane was the first planet of the star system Gandii Prime. It was a small planet (2,678 km diameter) that orbited a class three red giant star. It had three major land masses, each divided into sectors.

Each sector was assigned to a particular race, species or planet, for use as a cemetery for their dead. Each sector had a major Necropolis. A day on Mordane was only ten hours, with some days of the year having only two hours of daylight.

Humans from the colony worlds of Folflower, Mayside, Riverville, Wystone and Humberville had buried their dead in the allocated human continent (Alpha) for over four hundred years before the planet was declared a grade two quarantine world and any contact forbidden under Galactic Union Law. The Union quarantined the planet when the dead started to come back to life after dark. There was no official reason given and attempts were made to remove all references to the planet. It was believed that an arrangement with the Darksmith Collective was responsible for the reanimation of the dead that led to the quarantine.

The Mordane Incident was a reference to the Darksmith Collective's activities on the planet. Brother Varlos sought to meet the greatest challenge of the Collective, that of creating life from dead matter. To this end a machine was constructed with a limited degree of success; dead cells were reanimated but they did not have the capacity to rejuvenate.

The project was brought to a sudden close when the power source (the Eternity Crystal), along with Brother Varlos, "disappeared". The planet was quarantined because the dead were reanimated after receiving a signal from the tower. The signal was only received by the dead cells during the night, when the signal was bounced off of one of the planets orbiting satellite.

Eighty years later, following a visit from the Tenth Doctor and the crew of the chartered craft Elizabeth the Fourth, the planet was deemed safe and restored to its use as a burial place for the dead of many worlds. (PROSE: The Graves of Mordane)