Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

=== Post-War of the Beast/Pre-Age of Apostasy (M32-M35) ===

==== The Throne Before the Emperor ====

EDITOR'S NOTE: Need to add history of Golden Throne itself, where it came from and what Emperor did with it.

It is a little known fact, even among the historians of Old Earth, that before the events of the War of the Beast the Steward was privately planning to crown Sanguinius as Emperor at the end of the Great Crusade. All of the other primarchs had flaws that disqualified them from the position, and the Steward had not encountered any other humans who seemed up to the task. Lion, Ferrus Manus, and Mortarion all lacked the necessary charisma, and Ferrus was more loyal to the Mechanicum than anything else. Perturabo, Angron, and Curze were all psychologically unstable. Magnus was too approving of the use of the Warp for anyone’s comfort. Horus the Steward considered too ambitious and disagreed with ideologically. Alpharius and Omegon were too shifty and he suspected they were hiding something. Corax, Khan, and Russ were all good leaders and loyal to the Imperium, but they were “front-line” leaders for whom the day-to-day tasks that would be required of them as Emperor would have driven them mad. They also would have been torn between the duties to the Imperium and their loyalties towards their own people, and would have been seen as a niche pick. Lorgar would have turned the Imperium into a theocracy. Vulkan was beloved, but had similar problems to Lorgar and his coronation would likely have alienated the eldar. Guilliman was too much of a perfectionist. Dorn was too harsh and blunt to function in politics. Fulgrim would have turned the Imperium into a self-aggrandizing horror show praising his own ego.

Sanguinius was the right combination of humble, charismatic, beloved, a capable bureaucrat, and perhaps just as importantly he had a similar vision for humanity as the Steward. Sanguinius was not a perfect choice, for example he hated Conrad Kurze and Mortarion and had his own personal flaws, but finding someone else who fit that criterion and was still qualified for the job in the teeming masses of humanity was probably an impossible task. Sanguinius was also well-liked enough that his coronation would not have driven any more of a wedge between the various primarchs than already existed. Even Horus would have supported putting Sanguinius on the throne, because it supported his pro-transhuman political narrative. It's kind of hard to argue for the purity of human form when your Emperor of Mankind has gigantic angel wings.

When Sanguinius died at the Battle of Eternity Gate the Steward was too shaken over the loss to even try thinking of another substitute (especially given that none of the other primarchs fit the bill) and wouldn't really start looking again for several millenia. At the same time, the primarchs as a whole mutually agreed in private that none of them were worthy candidates for the Golden Throne. By that point, many of the primarchs had their own personal black marks and those that didn’t felt guilty over not being able to prevent Sanguinus’ death. It was one of the only thing they ever agreed upon. Lion’s confidence was shattered by the betrayal of his brother Luther. Corax was devastated by the events of Azoth and what his self-percieved hubris had wrought upon his own legion. Russ felt he had no right to rule after what had been done at his command to the people of Fenris. Even Horus, ever ambitious, thought twice, having been shaken by the fact that the Chaos Gods had tried to tempt him and how it was his gamble that had almost led to the death of the Imperium.

In the years between the Battle of Terra and the Age of Apostasy, there were many who aspired to be crowned Emperor. Imperial history is littered with pretenders from throughout the Imperium that nominated themselves in aspiration to the throne and failed in whatever task the Steward gave to prove themselves. These legends are particularly popular farther out from Old Earth where they took on a folkloric and mythological aspect, equal parts folk legend and morality tale, that demonstrates a peculiar truth of the Imperium. Despite the laws on faith and presence of traditional religions, the century spanning, generation transcending politics of the high Imperial court have an undeniable quality of momentousness and immortality that have made the resulting tales akin to civil scripture.

Then, of course, came Vandire. Despite all the muttered curses and epithets posthumously directed at Vandire after the Imperial Civil War, there were actually no signs of the monster he would become. Vandire was known for his humility and kindness, and was a brilliant administrator, one of the best the Adeptus Administratum had ever seen, What’s more this charisma and talent were real, not just skin deep masking some deep pre-existing psychological problems. He was also well-liked by the eldar, having treated them fairly when the Administratum dealt with the Craftworlds and Exodite worlds, which made him a favorable choice from their point of view. Ironically, Vandire probably could have become an Emperor so great that Oscar would pale in comparison (which is what Oscar wanted) but he wasted his potential obsessing over what others thought of him than doing his job and letting his actions speak for themselves. What drove Vandire to madness was the pressure of running an entire galaxy and living up to the Steward’s example, and the fact that he believed that people were only listening to him because the Steward told them to.

After the Age of Apostasy and the ensuing Imperial Civil War, there was really only one acceptable candidate for Emperor: Oscar. For humanity this was obvious, Oscar was a hero to almost every world in the Imperium and everyone knew he would rule well and not abuse his power. He had six thousand years of history backing him up on this point. Inquisitor Sebastian Thor articulated this to Oscar very clearly in addition to the succession crisis issue when they argued over who got the Throne. The Steward pointed out that Thor had organized a galaxy-wide rebellion with little more than words, but Thor retorted that he was a firebrand, not a leader. Oscar had stopped a civil war just by showing up. Oscar insisted that humanity be free to choose its own leader, and to his surprise they had turned around and chosen him.

For the eldar the Steward was also the only acceptable candidate, but for reasons that are less obvious. To the eldar, Vandire was definitive proof that baseline humanity could not be trusted with power (the fact that the eldar were just as divided by the civil war and certain Craftworlds sent Vandire eldar bodyguards being quietly swept under the rug). Additionally, the short lifespan of humans compared to eldar means you would have Emperors turning over all the time, which would be ridiculous for consistency (by eldar standards) in Imperial policy. Oscar was a known quantity, and even though the safety of humanity was his first and foremost concern, his actions showed that he would treat the eldar fairly. He was also biologically immortal, which quelled any such worries about a succession crisis. Additionally, he was married to Isha, so putting Oscar on the throne basically meant putting Oscar and Isha on the throne, meaning eldar interests would always be represented in Imperial politics.

==== The First and Second Viskeon Wars ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The [[Viskeons|Viskeon]] are an extinct xenos race native to a planet on the very southern edge of the Segmentum Ultima right near the border with the Segmentum Tempestus. An asexual ectothermic reptilian or amphibian-like species (though with some similarities to Earth starfish), the Viskeon were known for their extreme regenerative abilities. Although they normally reproduced by budding, Viskeon regenerative capabilities were so extreme that a Viskeon cleaved into large enough pieces could regrow into four or five individuals.

The Viskeons are notable in that despite being capable of interstellar travel their military capabilities seemed downright primitive by most species’ standards. Viskeon lived by a strict honor code, which glorified face-to-face melee combat and saw most projectile weapons (ranging from bows and arrows to stubbers and lasguns) as dishonorable. The only ranged weapons the Viskeons ever used were thrown javelins and bladed discuses, which they typically used as skirmishing tools before closing to melee combat. Of course, when your skin is thick enough to blunt the impact of anything short of a bolter and your body can easily heal from such injuries, the use of ranged weapons might not seem immediately intuitive.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">


The First Viskeon War happened roughly concurrent with the Fourth Black Crusade in M34. Spreading out in all directions from their homeworld on the southern edge of the galaxy, the Viskeon put several sectors in the Tempestus and Ultima Segmenta under siege. The Imperium, which had not known about the Viskeon and the few star systems they controlled, were caught off guard by the appearance of the Viskeon armada. They were used to attacks from Xenos Horribilis and Obscuras from the fringe, but not one this organized from a direction they didn’t expect.

All attempts at making contact and communicating with the Viskeon failed. They claimed they had been directed to attack the Imperium as part of a holy war demanded by their god, the Three-Eyed King. The Imperium initially struggled against the Viskeon, although they lacked ranged weaponry the Viskeon were able to regenerate from most glancing shots until they could close to melee combat (where they had the strength advantage over baseline humans and eldar) and killing them often made their numbers larger. Even shooting them with a bolter was a gamble, the resulting explosion could blow the Viskeon into small enough pieces that it wouldn’t regenerate, but it could also blow their limbs off and send them flying where one couldn’t see them, where they would regenerate into four more Viskeon.

However, as the Viskeon front line buckled, the weaknesses in their strategy became clear. The Viskeon had overextended themselves in order to attack multiple targets, hoping to overwhelm their opponents with shock tactics and surprise due to their smaller numbers, but this left them with few assets to reinforce holes in their formation. The Imperium also discovered the Viskeon’s ectothermic physiology and ruthlessly exploited it, hunting Viskeon down in the dead of night when they were at their most sluggish and least able to fight back. The Viskeon retreated back into the void from which they had come, and the Imperium were unable to track them down.


The Second Viskeon War happened roughly 800 years after the first, in M35. Once again the Viskeon set out from their unknown homeworld to wage war. The Viskeon moved out in a much tighter, directional formation instead of an omnidirectional campaign to prevent their front line from being overrun but surprisingly beyond this their military tactics had not changed to account for what they had learned in their first conflict with the Imperium. The Imperium, on the other hand, had learned from the encounter and adapted accordingly. This time, instead of Cadian Doctrine troops specializing in ranged lasgun and shuriken fire, the Imperium had brought in flamers and plasma weaponry to negate the Viskeon regeneration factor, with the Imperial defense spearheaded by the close-quarters, flamer specializing Salamanders, who had called for a Reformation of the Legion for this occasion.

The Second Viskeon War went much more in the Imperium’s favor, and this time the Imperium were able to dispatch forces after the Viskeon when the Viskeon forces routed rather than tending to their wounds. They tracked the Viskeon forces back to their home planets, a mere dozen in total, and burned them through a combination of orbital bombardment and ground operations. Today, the Viskeons survive only in the form of genetic samples collected by the Adeptus Biologis before their world was destroyed.

As the Adeptus Biologis and Imperial xenologists sifted through the rubble of the Viskeon worlds, trying to find an answer as to why a species would suddenly decide to attack an interstellar power they didn’t even know existed, they came upon a handful of startling discoveries. Based on Viskeon carvings and representational art of their god, the Three-Eyed King of the Viskeons was clearly the Warp entity known as [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Be’lakor|Be’lakor]], and from the remaining samples of Viskeon genetics and physiology they bear various marks of subtle but extreme artificial enhancement to produce their observed capabilities.

</div>
</div>

==== The Pale Wasting and the Thexian Trade Empire ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Thexian Trade Empire was an interstellar Xenos Independens empire located in the Ghoul Stars that controlled nearly sixty star systems at its height. The homeworld of the Thexians and capital of their empire were the Bloodmoons of Thex Prime, so named because of their intensely oxidized sediments causing them to appear bright red in color. When the Imperium first encountered the Thexians in the late years of the Great Crusade, they were shocked when Thexian ships sought them out and tried to open diplomatic channels and trade agreements with them. Previously during the Great Crusade, the vast majority of xenos races the Imperium had encountered had either tried to kill them on sight or had either come to a spoken or unspoken understanding to stay out of each other’s way. Even the Eldar, when they had sought out an alliance to free Isha some years earlier, had done so in a way the Imperium could understand, cautiously and half-heartedly out of fear that one side was going to break the other’s shaky trust. The fact that the Thexians had willingly approached them with apparently amicable intent baffled the Imperium.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

In the end, the Imperium decided to neither declare war nor ally with the Thexians but kept them at arm’s length. The Thexians were considered not worth trying to wipe out for a variety of reasons. First, Thexian territory was considered less than ideal for human occupation. The Thexian Trade Empire was primarily located in the coreward front of the Ghoul Stars, areas which the Thexians had no problems inhabiting but humanity less so. The Ghoul Stars were also on the far side of the galaxy from the Segmentum Solar and were almost outside of the range of the Astronomican, making any attempts to hold them expensive and inefficient. Secondly, the Thexians made for a good buffer state. Much like the Eldar, Tarellians and later the Tau, the Thexians were much better neighbors than the vast majority of alternatives as they could actually be diplomatically reasoned with, unlike the vast majority of xenos races encountered during the Great Crusade. And finally, the Thexians quite frankly were not a threat to mankind. There was a heated disagreement over the existence of human populations on Thexian worlds, but the Thexians surprised the Imperium by being willing to relocate the majority of the human population on their worlds to Imperial territory, in exchange for trade agreements with the Imperium that is. If anything, the problem was the Thexians seemed too nice, which set off the Imperium’s sense of paranoia immensely.


However, the Thexians' friendliness covered up a more self-serving motivation. The Thexians, as a species, were motivated by a species-wide case of greed. The Thexians were an extremely long-lived species and reproduced very infrequently. Therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, greed made sense. Many species hoard resources for hibernation or periods of want, and if you live for thousands of years you can hoard quite a lot of resources, enough to let you survive even the longest lean periods until the next opportunity at reproduction came. The Thexians were so friendly and interested in trade because trade was one of the best ways for an individual to increase one’s holdings, and people were more willing to trade with a friendly face than a backstabbing or violent one. And the Thexians could afford to be friendly, for few unarmed or unaugmented beings could harm a Thexian in their true form. However, this did not mean the Thexians were soft. They were interested in amassing wealth and power, and when it suited them they were capable of oiliness that would make a Void Born proud. Nor were Thexians unambitious, power plays between Thexians were not uncommon, though they usually took the form of displays of subtle power behind the scenes or hostile takeovers of assets than open warfare.

The Thexians were a vaguely chiropteran species like the Khrave, though unlike the Khrave they did not spin webs and fed on flesh and blood rather than minds. The Thexians were a polymorphic race, capable of shifting into one of several different forms depending on their need. First and foremost was warform, a large, quadrupedal bat-like form capable of limited flight, covered in a leathery, squamous hide, and armed with fierce talons and massive fangs, which was believed to be the Thexian’s true form. There was flightform, a lighter-than-air shape somewhat similar to warform but with larger wings, a smaller body, and an almost ethereal appearance. There was thoughtform capable of emitting bolts of Warp lightning from its semi-corporeal shape. And perhaps most importantly among the myriad forms the Thexians were capable of taking was diplomacyform, their preferred shape when interacting with non-Thexian races, which resembled strangely androgynous humanoids that did not quite resemble either human or eldar.

Thexian society was organized into groups called aedes, feudal households comprised of a small ruling number of Thexian adults known as the Thexian Elite, their material wealth, other alien species that had sworn fealty to the Thexian Elite, and their immature offspring who had not amassed enough of a horde to become independent yet. Because they reproduced so slowly, less than 15% of the population of the Thexian Trade Empire was composed of Thexians, with the rest representing vassal populations of dozens of minor xenos species including some quasi-legal human populations that were missed by the resettlement or were the descendants of refugees into Thexian space.


Approximately during the latter half of M34, the Thexian Trade Empire became afflicted with a condition that became known as the Pale Wasting. The Pale Wasting exaggerated the normal Thexian tendency towards greed to extremes, to the point where it became an obsession. The Thexians began hoarding in earnest to attempt to sate this craving, throwing out all reason or subtlety, but no matter how much they hoarded they could never get enough. Eventually, the affliction developed into a physical craving for sustenance as well, turning their bodies growing gaunt and emaciated as they resorted to guzzling blood and shoving gore-filled chunks into their mouth in an effort to quell their bottomless hunger.

It is generally thought that the Pale Wasting was Chaotic in nature, given its corruptive effects and mental deterioration, though those that think so debate whether it was the work of Khorne (because of the hunger for blood and gore), Slaanesh (because of the excess), Nurgle (because it acted like a plague), Tzeentch (because of its strange nature) or all four Ruinous Powers together. If it was, it is possible the Pale Wasting could have been transmitted to the Thexians via the Loxotl, whom the Thexians had some contact with despite the warnings of the Imperium. However, it is not out of the possibility that the Pale Wasting was caused by contact with C’tan/Necron technology or some form of C’tan vampirism.

While humans and other xenos species were immune to the Pale Wasting, they could easily act as carriers transmitting the disease between the Thexian Elite. From there, the Pale Wasting could easily reverse the roles, corrupting the vassals underneath Thexian fealty through their connection to the Thexian Elite. When the Thexian Elite finally shrieked their declaration to go to war, millions of brainwashed thralls responded to their call. The result was all out war between the Thexians and their neighbors, resulting in a massive military response from the Imperium in which more than a dozen Adeptus Astartes chapters were wiped out in the fighting. In the end, as the corruption and Thexian Nightmare Engines wreaked havoc the Thexians and the Pale Wasting could only be stopped by mass-Exterminatus tactics and a scorched earth policy, leaving numerous Dead Worlds across the Ghoul Stars including the sixty or so worlds held by the Thexian Trade Empire.

A few Thexians survived, those immune to the Pale Wasting. Some fought alongside the Imperium, warforms tearing into infected kin with ferocity and thoughtforms banishing Thexian thralls with blasts of Warp lightning. Others fled the conflict, hitching rides on the starships of the Nicassar and hiding where they could. Today, through various quirks of history, most remaining Thexians can be found under the Imperial aegis, mostly as diplomats, traders, advisors, and occasionally members of government. Their numbers are spread so thin that members of the species can go without seeing another one of their kind for more than a century. Some have tried to live outside the Imperium, setting up small fiefdoms that are pale imitations of the aedes once seen throughout the Thexian Trade Empire A few corrupted Thexians afflicted with the Pale Wasting are also still in existence, but thankfully like their uncorrupted counterparts are rare.


The Pale Wasting had several long-term effects on galactic politics. Perhaps the greatest long-term effects of the Pale Wasting was that it helped set the stage for the Imperium to start admitting other races into the Imperium. When debate was raised over the possibility of admitting other races into the Imperium, the Thexians were a prime argument by those in favor of admission. The Thexians had been an advanced, relatively friendly xenos empire, and (in the minds of the pro-Admission advocates after nearly two thousand years of hindsight and nostalgia) the Imperium had left them out in the cold. Such a policy had not only let the Thexians get corrupted by the Pale Wasting, but created a massive interstellar threat that had cost the Imperium a significant amount of lives and resources to contain. If the Thexian Trade Empire were still alive today, they would have been classified Xenos Familiaris with little difficult and would have been easily admitted into the Imperium, so long as efforts were made to prevent Thexian ambition from subverting the functioning of the Imperium, and none of this would have happened.

The second impact of the Pale Wasting was perhaps more insidious. The Pale Wasting wiped out most of the conventional life in the Ghoul Stars, though it soon became a lawless hellhole filled with little respect for law and order or the conventional laws of physics. Although outside the light of the Astronomican, for many millennia the Space Marine chapters such as the Death Spectres stationed on the edge of the Ghoul Stars did a good job of defending the Imperium’s borders from any threat that might come from the Ghoul Stars. Unfortunately, the northeastern galaxy and the Ghoul Stars in particular had once been the heartland of the Necrontyr Star Empire nearly sixty six million years ago, and the mass extermination of life in the Ghoul Stars meant that there was little opposition and a sizeable buffer from any external power when the surface of many of these “Dead” Worlds cracked open and thousands of Necron warriors rose from beneath the earth in mechanical unlife.

</div>
</div>