Velhuneth
House: Nox
Founding-era name (historical): Niflheim
Terrain: Glacian (frozen above, still-warm core below)
Summary
Velhuneth is the homeworld of House Nox, an ice world whose long nights and frozen surface met the first colonists like a closed door. They named it Niflheim, the world of mist and cold out of the old Norse stories carried from the Sol system. The grim joke lasted for generations, because the planet kept earning the name. It was the recovery of the previous civilisation's record that finally replaced it, returning the word those earlier inhabitants had used for their own world. Velhuneth is the best translation of that word the house has reached. Niflheim is a historical name now, though Nox families still use it of the surface weather sometimes, the way an old insult outlives the argument.
The world
The surface of Velhuneth is inhospitable, frozen over and scoured by cold, but its depths are unexpectedly kind. The previous civilisation had cut deep bunkers into the planet and warmed them off the still-living core. In the two hundred thousand years of their absence, the core's slow lava flows worked over the surface above, burying and burning away the wreckage of the ancient war until almost nothing of it remained when the colonists came down. The bunkers beneath those resurfaced fields had been spared. The hydroponics labs inside them were still intact, ready to be brought back to use. The Veil temple sits on the surface above all of it.