Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===The War of Sword and Tentacle===

The Slaugth were completely confident in their inevitable victory. After all, the Eldar fleet was devastated by a brutal civil war, and the massive purge of the officer corps orchestrated by Aenarion reduced the combat effectiveness of the Eldar military even further. Besides, the maggot men had always considered their allies to be vastly inferior to themselves and never perceived them as a real threat. But, in spite of their superior intellects, they forgot to take a very important factor into account - namely, hatred. The Eldar weren't simply upset that their greatest, most trusted allies turned out to be foul traitors plotting the downfall of their race. They were truly furious, and the fury of the Eldar is not a thing to be taken lightly. Like any race praising restraint and composure, they were akin to a compressed spring, ready to explode once the pressure was released. And it seemed like this moment had finally come.

The first battles of the war illustrated vividly how unfounded the hubris of the Slaugth truly was. For the first time since the War in Heavens the maggot people had to deal with an enemy that wasn't millennia behind them in terms of technology. The Slaugth generals were shocked to finally find out that their glorious army was only good against primitive savages with blackpowder pistols. The lack of a worthy enemy made them arrogant and complacent, while the Eldar had just gone through the turmoil of a brutal civil war that tempered their hearts and reminded them of the ancient art of war. The baroque weapons of the Slaugth were designed to impress and show off, so on the battlefield they proved to be inferior to the simple and elegant Eldar arms, which were created with only murder in mind. 

But what truly sealed the fate of the worms that walk was their overwhelming numerical disadvantage. True, they could send hordes after hordes of combat slaves at the Eldar, knowing that their reserves were practically infinite. But those tidal waves of badly trained, undernourished soldiers corralled into battle by merciless slavemasters crashed impotently against the immovable breakwater of Eldar infantry. It was only once they realised the futility of using slaves that the maggot men saw the true gravity of their situation. Although their potent psychic powers allowed a single Slaugth to take on a whole squad of Eldar soldiers, their race was simply too few in numbers. Even back during the War in Heavens they were less numerous than the Eldar, and their numbers had been shrinking consistently ever since. By the time of the War of Sword and Tentacle, the Eldar outnumbered the Slaugth ten thousand to one. Moreover, their difficult and complicated reproduction process effectively made it impossible to replenish the losses sustained in the war, so the Slaugth could not afford to fight in the front lines.

But even in such dire straits, hubris prevented the maggot people from admitting defeat. It took the viral bombing of several core Slaugth worlds to finally wake their Principals from their deluded dreams of grandeur and reassess the situation. The Eldar fleet was rapidly approaching the Slaugth heartland, poised to attack their homeworld. In panic, the Principals attempted to surrender on any terms the enemy would demand, but the Eldar executed their ambassadors without even hearing them out. Aenarion was adamant in his determination to exterminate the vile maggotkin, and there was not a thing in the Galaxy that could prevent him from going through with it. The realisation dawned on the Slaugth that they could be a hair's length away from extinction. The Principals started coming up with all kinds of crazy plans to turn the situation around, each more insane than the other. Some wanted to unite the psychic potentials of their entire race to spawn a new god, others argued for a pact with the Ruinous Powers. 

This is when Principal Nresht entered the stage. And he was absolutely convinced that he had the perfect solution to the problem at hand, for he understood that his peers in the ruling council were just pompous short-sighted fools. They couldn't see the big picture, couldn't realise that all of the troubles that plagued their race - the low birthrates, the reliance on slavery, the war with the Eldar, were but symptoms of their true disease. The real enemy of the Slaugth was Time. And this foe, formidable though it was, was about to get beaten.