Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===One Million Years Later===

The Eastern Fringe was a lonely, deserted place at the beginning of the thirty first millennium. Devoid of any valuable resources or major civilisations, it could without a doubt be called the godforsaken backwater of the Galaxy. It's fairly safe to assume that no spaceships were traversing the desolate expanses of the Fringe at the turn of the millennium, so the mysterious events that transpired around the tip of the Sagittarius Arm most likely went unobserved. A shame, for this incident was quite something to behold even for seasoned space voyagers. For a split second, it looked like the space itself disappeared, giving way to an indescribable nothing, the antithesis of existence. And then it was back, but it wasn't quite the same. Where moments ago there was but stardust and space rubble, there ominously hovered a squadron of strange, asymmetrical spaceships, the alien shapes of which caused nausea and headache. Those were the dreaded Slaugth galleys, not seen in the Galaxy for millions of years. The maggot men had finally returned. 

They found themselves quite far from their deserted homeworld: in their absence, the Galaxy drifted thousands of light years to the west, while the temporal wormhole through which the Slaugth travelled remained static relative to the Universe. This left them on the eastern outskirts of the Galaxy, but this turn of events suited the worms that walk just fine. For the time being, it left them in the shadows, allowing them to scout out the Galaxy and find out what changed in their absence without drawing too much attention to their return. Hundreds of sleek Nautilus class galleys departed in all directions to gather information about the current state of affairs. It took them several years to gather enough data, and not all of them returned; but those that did brought news so bewildering that it made even the wisest Principals shake their pseudoheads in disbelief.

On the positive side of things, Nresht's plan was a great success. Not only did the Eldar empire collapse, it came crashing down so hard that its fall tore a hole in the fabric of reality itself, turning their homeworld into a colossal portal into the Warp. The Eldar were now a dying race, brutally persecuted by a new Chaos god that wasn't around when the Slaugth escaped into the future. The news of their enemy's utter demise caused much gloating amongst the Principals. However, the news that followed were much less to their liking. While the Eldar were finished, eking out a meagre existence on a handful of giant space arcs, the Galaxy was not exactly free for the Slaugth to claim. Another race came to dominate it, one that the maggot men never considered worth paying attention to. One that wasn't even worthy of a footnote in their complex schemes. The humans.

To make matters worse, it seemed that the humans were in process of consolidating their power. A so-called Great Crusade, a massive campaign of conquest led by a psyker whose powers surpassed even those of the Principals, was currently advancing in all directions from the human homeworld of Terra, bringing ever more worlds into the fold of the Imperium of Man. The upstart savages needed to be put back in place, but the Slaugth lacked the resources needed for a full-scale war. It was then that Principal Txont suggested to use the old Slaugth strategy of tricking other races into fighting their wars for them. A brief search around the Eastern Fringe soon revealed a promising young civilisation that could become a worthy rival to the humans, grey-skinned humanoids calling themselves Tau. Their technological level left much to be desired, but the Slaugth were willing to uplift them, if only to use them as pawns in their inevitable conflict with the Imperium.