Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===Aenarion's Quest===

Of those few who had known Aenarion before his name became a legend, very few thought that he was destined for greatness. Although he was a gifted officer and quickly rose up the career ladder to command a small fleet stationed at the border to the Slaugth space, his superiors have always considered him merely competent, not exceptional in any way. Their consensus was that while he had the potential to become a great leader, he was extremely unlikely to realise it during the era of sleepy peace. It also didn't help that Aenarion himself seemed to lack any kind of ambition: he simply tried to serve his race as best he could, which prompted many of his fellow Autarchs to dismiss him as a mediocrity. They couldn't have been more wrong.

It all started when Aenarion received a set of highly suspicious instructions from the eastern fleet headquarters, strictly prohibiting his ships from patrolling certain sectors along the Slaugth border. The headquarters justified this strange order by their unwillingness to offend the eternal ally with mistrust. And yet, Aenarion felt that there was more to it than simply diplomatic courtesy, especially since the scout ships under his command kept filing reports of Slaugth vessels entering these sectors without asking for permission. Fearing the worst, Aenarion decided to violate his orders and personally led a small squadron of light reconnaissance ships into the forbidden sectors to sound out the situation. 

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw on this fateful expedition, not even in his worst nightmares could he have imagined the horrors that awaited him there. Surrounded by a cloaking field, he watched in shock and disbelief how the worm people brutally slaughtered the defenders of the Eldar worlds, shattered the minds of their inhabitants, corralled them into their nightmarish slave galleys and took them away - presumably to the dismal slave pens of their empire or to their sadistic research facilities to be experimented on. The scientists, seers and other intellectuals were lobotomised and had their brains consumed by the Slaugth Intendants feasting on the ruins of the decimated Eldar cities. 

But it wasn't the atrocities committed by the maggot men that troubled Aenarion the most. As soon as the shock from having seen such horrors wore off somewhat, he realised that the Slaugth were working in tandem with high-ranking traitors from the Eldar elite, who went to great pains to cover up the atrocities taking place on the eastern borders. Since the fleet was definitely infiltrated by Slaugth spies and the army was also under heavy suspicion, the Autarch saw only one course of action open to him: to present his evidence of a Slaugth invasion in front of the High Senate of the empire. Rapidly gathering all forces under his command, he entered the Webway and raced to the capital world, fully expecting to be ambushed by the traitors. 

His expectations were well grounded. It didn't take long for the maggot men and their lackeys in the Eldar fleet to connect the sudden disappearance of the forces under Aenarion's command to his mistrust of the Slaugth and draw the conclusions. All of the forces that the traitors could muster without raising suspicion were sent into the Webway to intercept the Autarch before he could reach his destination. The officers in charge of those forces were led to believe that Aenarion was a dangerous traitor out to attack the Senate and instructed to destroy his ships and leave none alive by any means necessary. Nearly all of the routes leading to the Eldar capital were blocked off by the Eldar fleet, and yet Aenarion's superior Webway navigation skills helped him to avoid nearly all of the traps laid out for him. In spite of all attempts by the traitors to stop him, he edged closer and closer to the capital world, until his ships finally left the Webway in the home solar system of his race.