Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 12: The Warpish Tumult==

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The sea of souls is not a place of form or structure. We gaze upon it through a distorting lens of sanity and analogy which conjures up the false images of alien vistas and towering edifices; mythology and metaphor become stark and real in our minds, for this is the only way we can perceive it. This... repository of information which I find myself within likewise records events ‘within the warp’ in this same legendary and somewhat baroque style. Therefore, I shall use a similar style to explain the far-reaching effects of the expanded war between Pantheons which had been building ever since the birth of the Star Father, the paradoxical master of order within madness.
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Older accounts depicted how he fought the chaos gods into a stalemate, and became part of the great game, but his legacy went further. Throughout the realm of chaos, the forests of decay constantly shifted and groaned as Nurgle’s power waxed and waned. Likewise the sensory vistas of delirium conjured by Slannesh easily faded or flourished depending upon which god was master at the time. The same went for the crystalline Tzeentchian mazes that shattered and constantly realigned themselves, and the war industries of Khorne.

The great irony of chaos’ game was that for the most part, between their realms, there was utter formless howling wilderness; only the most bitter of furies could maintain their forms within the fluid border regions; no god laid claim to them, for no god could. Thus, when the souls of mortals were tossed from reality into the churning sea of souls, they mostly dissolved; their component parts being then picked over and parceled off into the bellies of opportunistic daemons, or eventually coalesced into the great form of the chaos realms; disembodied anger washed onto the bloody shores of Khorne’s realms, and formed the foundations of his factories of annihilation, for instance.

But the Lord of Order disrupted this imbalance. He had great spires which never changed, but rather they loomed over all like heavy steel turrets in a fast flowing river. Great rigid bridges joined them like a box web, as unchanging and horrifically deranged as any hellscape conjured by his rivals. Upon these bridges, souls were trapped; they never moved nor did they so much as scream in torment. They whimpered and mumbled mindless praises to the living embodiment of Domination. The Star Father would roar ‘OBEY!’ and they would chime their approval, while the Angyls flitted amongst them, slowly draining them and feeding them to the Star Father. This denied them to the chaos gods. It was but a negligible drop in the vast intake of souls the chaos gods constantly gorged upon (and, contrary to the belief of some, even if all life was erased from existence, the chaos gods would still persist, for the souls they had already consumed would sustain them indefinitely. How I know of this warp metaphysics cannot be related here at this moment. I fear you may try to emulate me when the time comes, and that should never happen...) 

In the Materium, the effect was if anything, even more horrific. Some mortals, when they died, remained conscious, for their soul was trapped and fixed in position; becalmed in the warp. Thus, as their bodies died, decayed and were buried, their souls and minds remained, screaming silently in the worst kind of horror imaginable.

However, this denial of souls to the other gods did not go unnoticed by the rival powers. Slannesh grew petulant at being denied even more sweetmeat morsels, and chased his daemon princess concubines from his palace, before demanding answers from the most ancient serpent daemons; Shaimesh, Lhiemeth, Fulgrim and others too numerable and profane to name. He gathered his most beautiful of creations, the daemonette Illuria, and infested her with fearsome venom crafted by Shaimesh. The dark prince set her out to the Star Father’s bastion, in an attempt to seduce the monolithic God-King. Though he was a God of oppression and control, his molten Gold flesh bore emotional chinks, too small for all but the lord of perversion to see. Illuria playfully submitted to the Star Father, begging to be bound and dominated, all the while hiding a venomous bard beneath her flesh. As he bound her and dragged her before him, she struck. Though she was immediately obliterated by his merciless power, the poison took effect and distracted the Star father for long enough for the other Gods to gather against him.  

Tzeentch gathered them together to decide upon a means to rob the Father of his sedated souls, but Tzeentch himself was of little use; his plans were too complex, contradictory and multifarious to have a lasting effect. Khorne favoured a frontal assault, but he only desired a war if he could face the full might of the Star Father, with all his Angyls at his side; he wished to pit his daemonic herald Skulltaker against the Angyllic herald Draigo, the faceless champion of the grand Star-Gate. However, Draigo was not present then for he was in the Materium on an errant for his master which he hardly disobey(his story shall be related later in this history).

Yet it was a most unusual ally who devised the most cunning plan. Malice, the outsider God, approached Nurgle’s spouse, Isha the mother, in the form of a black pinioned raven, and whispered to her many dark and dreadful secrets. Isha, at the secret behest of Malice proposed a most radical of ways to denying the Star Father his captive prizes. She, lover of life, pleaded with Nurgle to unleash a warp infection into the Materium which would raise the helpless souls from their living death. They would not die, they would live. And Nurgle did so, through his mortal agents. In the Materium, the decade of the fifteenth zombie plague was the result; billions upon billions of mortal creatures who had died but not passed dragged themselves from graves and funeral pyres in a single great epidemic of horror spanning light-years. In the warp, the Star father howled in frustration as his bridges collapsed for it was no longer supported by the mass of souls beneath them. This frustration made Khorne swell in power, and led to his great war against the Star father, or so they say. Khorne may have won that war if it had not been for the theft of his great black sword by Malice, who tossed the Sword into the wilderness. 

The reason for the absence of the blank visage of Draigo in this calamitous war may seem strange, until we access another one of the accounts that linger in this great place.

We must look to the Chronicles of Telion, and the mythological cycles surrounding this account. Particularly, we must look to the most important sections of his Chronicles; those that depict the fall of Grand Sicarium and its deranged Astartes King.
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