Slaugth (Hektor Heresy)

This article describes a Xenos species in the /tg/ Heresy project, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40k universe.

Slaugth
Status at the end of the Great Crusade	Forced to establish the Compact of Free Galactic Interchange with four other races
Role in the Hektor Heresy	Stay in the shadows, helping both sides and making sure that both of them emerge from the conflict as weakened as possible
Area of influence	Eastern Fringe

Repulsive on the outside as well as on the inside, the inscrutable Slaugth are uninvited guests from the dark times that are better left forgotten. Arrogant to the point of a severe egomania, they consider themselves to be the true heirs to the Old Ones and the galaxy to be their lawful inheritance, squatted by savage races and infested by vermin during their unwilling absence. Consequently, they see themselves as the only creatures worthy of free will and intellectual work, viewing every other race as either potential slaves or an obstacle on their way to absolute power. A crushing defeat at the hands of the Imperium of Man during the early stages of the Great Crusade forced them to form the Compact of Free Galactic Interchange with four other races that they otherwise wouldn't consider worthy of kissing the ground they slither on, but few within its ruling council have any doubts that the Slaugth will betray their allies as soon as the right time comes. And may the Emperor be with us when it does.

History

To most Inquisitors and Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the origin of the Slaugth is one of the greatest mysteries the Galaxy can offer. They clearly display a baroque and sophisticated culture and a level of technology that must have taken countless millennia to develop, yet there are absolutely no records of their presence anywhere in the Galaxy prior to the Great Crusade. Likewise, there are no relics of their presence to be found anywhere from Ultima Macharia to the Eastern Fringe. It's almost like the abominable worm people just suddenly materialized in Segmentum Pacificus out of nowhere.

Only the great Craftworld libraries of the Eldar hold the answer to this enigma. And yet, the tomes describing the rise and fall of the Slaugth are covered with centuries-thick layers of dust and locked behind impenetrable wrathbone contraptions that only the Farseers can unlock, should the need arise. For the Eldar do not remember the time of the worms fondly, and wish they could erase this grim page from the annals of history. But nothing is ever that simple. The Slaugth live, and the traces of their evil will forever permeate the Galaxy even if their vile kind is exterminated.

The War in Heavens

Wait until dark, put your cogitator aside and walk up to your window. Look skyward, and, if the heavens of your world are not enveloped by heavy clouds, you will see hundreds upon hundreds of stars punctuating the celestial tapestry. If you're especially lucky, you will even see a magnificent river of lights flowing from one edge of the night sky to the other. Let pride fill your heart when you see it, for this is the domain of our glorious race, our blessed Galaxy. Our realm is colossal beyond imagining: it harbours hundreds of billions of stars, measures an entire tredecillion of kilograms in mass and a hundred thousand light years in length. To a casual observer, it may almost seem infinite. And yet, sixty million years ago, two ancient races found it too small for the both of them.

One of those two was the Necrontyr, a race of brilliant scientists and engineers whose stride towards progress was only hampered by their brutally short lifespans, physical frailty and vulnerability to afflictions of all kinds - such was the dubious gift of their merciless radioactive sun. But, possessed of an unbreakable determination and will to live, they eventually managed to leave the confines of their untender homeworld and forge an empire amongst the stars. Alas, this empire was not to last, for the same stubbornness and inability to concede that guided them to greatness eventually led to a diplomatic breakdown between the numerous dynasties that formed the realm of the Necrontyr, and it wasn't too long before a full-fledged civil war broke out between them. To put an end to this infighting that threatened to spell doom for the entire race, the supreme ruler of the Necrontyr, known as Silent King, decided to find a common enemy for all of his subjects to unite against. The search wasn't very difficult, for another ancient star empire thrived just outside of Necrontyr space - that of the Old Ones.

The reptilian Old Ones were as different from their scientifically minded neighbours as day from night. Unlike the Necrontyr, who played obediently by the strict rules set by the laws of nature, the Old Ones believed that all laws existed only to be broken. Peerless psykers and explorers of the Immaterium, they revelled in doing the impossible and fighting the inevitable. Unable to travel faster than light, they created the Webway, a network of stable tunnels in the Immaterium connecting the farthest corners of the Galaxy. Discontent with the inevitability of death, they discovered a secret of immortality through gene engineering boosted with Warp sorcery. Wonders and miracles were their trade, and they truly excelled at it. Whereas for the Necrontyr the life was an unending, relentless fight for survival, the Old Ones saw the Galaxy as a magnificent canvas to express themselves on, a wonderful plaything. It shouldn't be too hard to understand why there never was much love between the two ancient empires.

Looking for a casus belli, the Silent King demanded from the ruling council of the Old Ones that they share the secret of immortality with his people. Both parties understood full well that this was out of question, for immortal Necrontyr could become a major rival for the Old Ones, and the reptiles had no desire to shoot themselves in the leg. Satisfied with the response he got, the ruler of the Necrontyr declared a total war against their arrogant neighbours, a war for the secret of eternal life. He had hoped that their clearly superior technology and weaponry would make short work of the Old Ones. He couldn't have been more wrong, for no amount of technical superiority guarantees a victory over an enemy who refuses to play by the rules. Using the Webway for logistics, the Old Ones managed to outnumber the Necrontyr dramatically in almost every battle they fought, until the aggressors were pushed to the far northern fringes of the Galaxy, their star empire shattered and their glorious fleet reduced to dust. Thinking that finishing the enemy wasn't worth the effort, the Old Ones decided to leave the humiliated Necrontyr to their own devises. This grave mistake sealed not only their fate, but also that of the entire Galaxy.

Hundreds of years later, few remembered the war with the Necrontyr - it became little more than a curiosity, one of the many in the history of the ancient reptiles. When Necrontyr ships were spotted in the northern provinces of the Empire, the Old Ones were greatly amused by the unexpected persistence of their ancient enemy, rather than shocked. However, the first skirmishes with the new Necrontyr army shattered the ivory towers of the arrogant Old Ones. These new enemies were not like the Necrontyr they fought before. Sure, they used the same technology and employed the same tactics, but from creatures of flesh and blood who could be killed, they turned into soulless immortal constructs that kept getting back to their feet and fighting on relentlessly no matter how many times they were killed. Nightmarish shadows shrouded in clouds of liquid metal followed these new Necrons in battle, displaying awesome powers befitting of gods. This time, the roles reversed: the Necrons were capturing system after system, while the Old Ones were permanently on the retreat, looking frantically for any means to stop the implacable enemy's unrelenting advance.

It was then that one of the members of the ruling council suggested to use their superior gene engineering to design a number of allied races as a last desperate measure. Running out of both ideas and resources at this point, the other councillors supported this plan unanimously, and so the great xenurgy began. Many of the races that still inhabit the Galaxy were brought into being by the geneurges of the Old Ones as a last ditch effort to stem the iron tide of enemy advance or at least slow it down. Although multitudes of sapient species were spawned back then, most of them were in fact just variations around a few basic concepts. One popular idea was to give a new warrior race an instinctive understanding of technology at the expense of true intelligence - this is how the savage Krork and the simian Jokaerro were born. Another was to make the new allies psykers, similar to the Old Ones themselves, so that they could exploit the weakness of the Necrons to Warp-based sorcery. The Eldar were one such race, though they weren't the most powerful psychic race designed by the ancient reptiles. That honour goes to their unlikely siblings, the Slaugth.

The Brotherly Alliance

The Slaugth were the pinnacle of the Old One experiments in creating sentient colonial species. Each planarian forming a single Slaugth specimen was engineered by the reptilian geneurges to be a weak psyker. Together, they amplified the psychic powers of each other, allowing the Slaugth to reach levels of psychic potential that even the Eldar could only dream of, and in some exceptional cases even surpass their creators. Unfortunately, as it all too often turns out, there was a major flaw to this ingenious design.

Initially the Old Ones intended to teach both of their proteges the secrets of using the Webway. However, they were forced to abandon these plans when preliminary tests showed that the enormous psychic potential of the Slaugth combined with the composite nature of their minds destabilised the Warp tunnels and damaged their structure. Theoretically, a single Slaugth ship entering the Webway would be enough to destroy a whole section of it. Although the Old Ones shared their best FTL travel technologies with the worm people to compensate for their inability to enter the Webway, poor logistics made the Slaugth easy prey for the Necron legions. This is why they had to form an alliance with the Eldar to be able to effectively fight the undead machines.

Initially, theirs was no easy alliance. As different as day and night, the two species thought very little of each other and were perplexed as to why the Old Ones needed to create whole two psychic races where one would be enough. The only thing they had in common was their love for their creators and desire to protect them. Starting from this point, they eventually managed to find a common language and formed an extremely effective duo. The Eldar with their swift and manoeuvrable fleet delivered thousands of cuts to the Necron armadas from all directions, weakening them and subtly guiding them into a trap. The Slaugth were the heavy hitters, striking when the machines were at their most vulnerable, weakened and confused by constant Eldar attacks, and utterly decimated the enemy with psychic storms worthy of the Old Ones. As the two races learned to trust each other and work together, their successes started to mount. For the first time in centuries, the Necrons began to retreat, losing one system after another. But, just as the tables finally turned, an unexpected new menace befell the Old Ones and their children.

The doom came from whence no one expected it. Although the psychic activity of the Old Ones had always sent ripples into the Immaterium, distorting and corrupting it ever so slightly, their sorcery never had any lasting effects on the realm of potential. But the cumulative activity of three powerful psychic races finally managed to tip the fragile balance between the Materium and the Immaterium, turning the latter from a peaceful and calm ocean of dreams into a distorted mirror, reflecting the ugliness of the material world right in its face. Clusters of energy began forming around the most powerful emotions caught in the Warp, slowly attaining a strange semblance of sentience and an inescapable craving for souls. More natural phenomena than living creatures, these were the Enslavers, the primitive precursors to the Daemonkind. Drawn to psychic activity like moths to a flame, they used it as gateways to the physical world, where they proceeded to consume the soul of the unfortunate psyker who drew their attention. Although countless Eldar and Slaugth fell to the Plague of Enslavers, these pseudocreatures have always considered the Old Ones a special delicacy. And so they perished, without ever truly realising why. The Old Ones never saw the long-awaited counter offensive they had fought so hard for, undone by what they had always considered their main trump card.

The tragic fate of the Old Ones did not make the Eldar and the Slaugth falter before the Necrons; if anything, it strengthened their resolve to see the work of their creators and teachers through and send their soulless enemies back to the grave where they belonged. The two races redoubled their efforts to put an end to the Necron menace once and for all. And a wonderful thing happened that seemed all but impossible mere centuries ago: seemingly realising their precarious position, the Necrons laid down their arms and secluded themselves in myriads of stasis tombs scattered throughout the Galaxy. Or maybe they were content to see the demise of their sworn enemy, at their hands or not, and decided to take some rest after their Pyrrhic victory.

With the departure of both ancient races, the Galaxy was left for the Eldar and the Slaugth to rule. Wishing to preserve the bonds of camaraderie forged by centuries of fighting back to back, the two races agreed to divide their inheritance in two equal halves. Their leaders swore an oath of eternal peace and friendship, and thus began the age of the Brotherly Alliance. Both races collaborated on numerous scientific and esoteric projects, conquering numerous heights that they could never dream to achieve on their own. Together, they found a way to fight and contain the Enslavers and other malicious entities of the Warp, putting an end to the Plague that took their beloved creators away from them. They carefully studied the legacy of both the Old Ones and the Necrons, understanding that eschewing science in favour of sorcery or vice versa can not possibly lead to a satisfactory outcome. It was then that the Eldar discovered the potential of Wrathbone and the Slaugth began to experiment with time manipulation. This was the the golden age of both races, and it seemed that the Galaxy had finally found peace under their rule.

And yet, this age of friendship and cooperation was not to last. Curiously enough, the Old Ones were to blame for this.

A Failsafe Mechanism

For you see, millions of years spent around the perils of the Galaxy taught them extreme caution. When the Old Ones spawned countless warrior races to pit them against the Necrons, they built failsafe mechanisms into each one of them, making sure that they don't become a nuisance once the undead machines are defeated. They instilled a nagging animosity towards anything that moves and a predisposition to anarchy into the Krork to guarantee that the green-skinned warriors could never unite as a race. They gifted the Jokaero with a burning wanderlust to ensure that they never settle down in one place and establish a star empire to rival that of their own. To the Eldar, they gave curious and artistic minds, more interested in self-expression than in power and expansion. But of all the races born in the geneforges of the Old Ones, the Slaugth truly got the shortest end of the stick.

The geneurges behind the Slaugth project understood full well that they were creating a race whose psychic powers rivalled those of their own. A probable Slaugth rebellion had the potential to be as damaging to the empire of the Old Ones as the War in Heavens itself. The geneurges were instructed by their superiors to prevent this outcome by any means necessary. Therefore, the maggot men were from the beginning on made a dying race, doomed to wither quietly away within millennia. It was with a heavy heart that the Old Ones gave life to a sentient race that they themselves robbed of any future - after all, they felt a sort of parental attachment to every species that originated in their laboratories. But of course, the glory of their empire took priority over everything else, and so the Slaugth had to die once their usefulness was exhausted.

Of course, the Old Ones did their job as subtly as possible - so subtly, in fact, that the Slaugth never even realised that they were predestined to go extinct. Instead of integrating a pathological sequence into their DNA or programming it to deteriorate over time, they simply made reproduction extremely hard and inefficient for the Slaugth. To begin with, the maggot people have whole eight genders, all of which are required for the elaborate mating rituals that can last for weeks. To make matters worse, the reproductive organs of the Slaugth have a severely limited number of charges spent on copulation which never regenerate, so the total number of mating rituals a Slaugth can take part in during its lifetime is finite. The periods of sexual activity are very short and different for all the eight genders. Slaugth pregnancy takes several years and always results in the death of the mother. Miscarriages are extremely common, and even if the pregnancy is successful, only a small part of the litter usually survives into the adulthood, not enough to keep the population stable.

The Shackled Age

Of course, a race with such a severe handicap was in no position to rule over a half of the Galaxy. As time went by, the population gap between the Eldar and the Slaugth was growing wider and wider. While the former kept colonising one world after anothet to sustain their rapidly growing population, the Slaugth had a great difficulty holding onto the few worlds they controlled. There were not enough soldiers to defend them against the constant Krork raids, not enough miners to gather natural resources and not enough engineers to make a good use of what little was gathered, and, perhaps most importantly, not enough scientists to look for solutions to this problem. Probably this is why the solution the maggot people eventually came up with was so primitive and brutal, more befitting of bronze age savages than an advanced spacefaring race.

To compensate for their crippling numerical disadvantage, the Slaugth became slavers. Using their exceptional mind control capabilities, they began to enslave the numerous primitive races scattered throughout their empire and force them to do their bidding. Robbed of their free will, those unfortunates began to fight wars for their masters, gather resources and manufacture goods for them, so that the Slaugth could focus on art, science and sorcery. Due to the composite nature of their intelligence, controlling a great number of slaves all at once was child's play to the Slaugth. Their mind reading abilities made slave conspiracies and uprisings impossible, and telepathy allowed them to control their slaves from great distances. Ironically, it almost seemed like the Slaugth were made to be the perfect slavers. Thinking that this couldn't possibly be a coincidence, the slave drivers began to believe that the Old Ones deliberately created them this way and intended for them to enslave the Galaxy.

Initially, there was quite a bit of resistance to slavery in the Slaugth society. Many prominent thinkers pointed out the barbarity of stripping a sentient race of its free will and turning it into living, breathing machines for all practical purposes. The apologists of slavery retorted with the age old argument that the goal justifies the means, the former being the survival of their race. In spite of the obvious weakness of their argumentation, the slavers were slowly, but steadily gaining the upper hand as the dependence of the Slaugth industry on slave labour grew. Over the course of several decades, the slavers rose to the very top of the Slaugth society and violently purged any dissenters, labelling them as traitors who would rather see their whole species go extinct than hypnotise a few useless savages. To safeguard their prosperity, they introduced reforms that institutionalised slavery and entrenched it in the Slaugth culture.

Eventually the slave drivers took over the media as well, using it to spread their chauvinistic ideas. As official propaganda entirely replaced pluralistic journalism, more and more Slaugth began to subscribe to the idea that their race was chosen to rule the Galaxy. According to the new official doctrine, the Old Ones always knew about their impending doom and created the Slaugth as their heirs, gifting them with mind control abilities to subjugate any who would refuse to serve them. Thus began the Old Ones renaissance which forever reshaped the Slaugth culture and worldview. No longer content with their amorphous bodies, they began to assume humanoid shapes reminiscent of the Old Ones and use hooded cloaks to further conceal their true nature as colonial organisms. Discarding their original culture entirely, they started thoughtlessly aping their creators instead, giving their children Old One names, using Old One hierarchy and imitating their art. And, of course, they also started rediscovering the advanced science of their makers, starting with geneurgy.

Believing themselves to already be perfect and not willing to mingle with the creation of the Old Ones, the Slaugth banned any experiments on the members of their own race - ironically, this could have saved them from the curse of infertility and remove the need for slavery. Instead, they focused their genetic research on their numerous slave races, aiming to create perfect servants for themselves. Removing the skills and abilities they considered useless and making their slaves better at a limited range of tasks, the Slaugth spawned legions of freaks who couldn't speak, feel taste or sleep, but could operate advanced assembly machinery starting from birth. They also reduced the intelligence of their slaves to the lowest level acceptable, while making them more vulnerable to mind control. For all practical purposes, those geneforged slaves became little more than living tools, perfectly optimised for usage by the Slaugth. To further improve their usefulness, the maggot people mastered the art of fusing flesh and metal and began augmenting their mutant servants with robotic parts that couldn't be grown organically. As horrible as it may sound, most of the disgusting half-organic, half-cybernetic machines and appliances the worms that walk use in the thirty first millennium started off as sentient species with cultures, dreams and aspirations.

Worse still, some of the slave races were used as cattle. The consumption of brains of sentient species gives the Slaugth powerful narcotic experiences, so it's little wonder that soon after slavery had become ubiquitous, the more intelligent of the enslaved races began to be farmed for their delicious brains. As the pleasure derived from consuming a brain depends directly on the intelligence of its owner, the brain cattle was genetically altered to be smarter. One can only imagine the horrors of being a highly intelligent creature and living in a pen, waiting to be slaughtered and cerebrotomised.

This was a dark age for the Galaxy, which later came to be known as the Shackled Age. Like maggots on a corpse, the slaver fleets of the Slaugth led by the merciless Intendants burrowed their way deeper and deeper into the Galaxy in search for new races to enslave and mutate into drooling blobs of pale flesh who can open any can with a minimal effort. Of course, not all races were deemed useful enough to enslave. Some of them, such as the Krork, turned out to somehow be resistant to Slaugth mind control, most likely due to the primitive nature of their intelligence. The races that couldn't be enslaved or were found to be of no use to the empire were mercilessly exterminated to their last member for having no place in the Galaxy. There were also a couple of races that the Slaugth spared in spite of their uselessness, mostly because the maggot people found them too primitive, insignificant and harmless to warrant wasting resources on their extermination. One of the species that the Slaugth found too pathetic to even waste plasma on were the Eyp - or, as they're better known these days, the Humans.

The Alliance Shatters

Of course, the Eldar weren't completely blind to the grim events that transpired in the realm of their eternal allies. As the scale and brutality of slavery in the Slaugth domain grew, so did the disgust of the Eldar officials who witnessed these events. Some hot-headed generals, traumatised by the horrors they had seen in the Slaugth space, proposed to break the treaty of eternal friendship, arguing that the Eldar cannot be allied to a race so utterly evil. Yet their voices were silenced by the members of the upper echelons of the Eldar hierarchy. Some of them still remembered fighting back to back with the Slaugth during the War in Heavens and couldn't bring themselves to break the bonds of camaraderie that tied the two races. While they were deeply concerned by the dramatic transformation their friends and allies underwent, they hoped to convince the Slaugth to abolish slavery and return to the old ways. Unfortunately, their hopes were in vain.

Constant criticisms of slavery coming from their Eldar allies annoyed the Slaugth elites to no end. By this point, slavery became the cornerstone of their society, which would surely collapse overnight if the slaves were to be freed. The rulers of the worm people began to wonder whether they really needed allies who considered themselves in the position to teach the designated heirs of the Old Ones how to run their empire. And the conclusion they reached was that they needed no allies at all - only subjects. A realisation dawned on the Slaugth elites: the Eldars were in practise just another race originally created by the Old Ones to serve them, and were essentially no different from any of the savage races toiling in the countless mines of their glorious empire. The only reason the pointy eared monkeys managed to forge a realm that rivalled that of their own was because they fooled their naive ancestors and used their help to seize what rightfully belonged to the Slaugth. But it was about time to rectify this ancient mistake and put the uppity savages in place - that is, in chains. And so the Slaugth principals began working on a secret plan to destroy the Eldar empire and enslave their race.

They started by infiltrating all levels of the Eldar society. This wasn't particularly challenging, as they were still more than welcome in the Eldar empire, the common citizens of which viewed them as their greatest ally and a brotherly race. Subtly using their mind control powers to incept certain thoughts and emotions into the minds of the high-ranking Eldar, they were slowly building a network of sympathisers and assuming control over the rival empire. It wasn't too long before the majority in the Eldar senate belonged to the Slaugth sympathisers and spies. They started a massive demilitarisation campaign, arguing that the Eldar didn't need a big army since their Slaugth allies were always ready to protect them from any threat. Pro-Slaugth propaganda flooded the media, and any compromising information on the eternal ally was brutally censored. As the Eldar fleets withdrew from the border worlds, no longer included in the dramatically shrunken military budget, the Slaugth took their place, covertly beginning to colonise the fringe worlds of their allies. Worse still, they started to enslave the Eldar living in the border worlds. The friends of the Slaugth in high places carefully monitored this silent invasion, making sure that no witness to these events escapes alive.

But nothing can stay a secret forever.

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.

The Homeworld

As Aenarion expected, an ambush was waiting for him on the capital world's orbit. Dozens of sleek, elegant warships were hovering over its cloud seas pierced with silver spires, ready to turn Aenarion's band of misfits into stardust. The Autarch was prepared for this turn of events, and he understood what needed to be done. Without telling anyone a word, he gathered his most trusted lieutenants equipped with Warp Spider teleportation devices, boarded a small shuttle and left his flagship in an insane bid to slip through the blockade and reach the capital world. Before leaving for his suicide mission, he left a recorded message for the officers under his command, where he said in a mocking tone bursting with vitriol that he had been using them the entire time to reach the home of the Senate and destroy the Eldar democracy. This was, of course, a foul lie, but this lie was intended to save the lives of his followers, should his mission fail.

Aenarion's way to the planet's surface was not unlike a flight through an ever-changing maze with walls of laser beams and deadly plasma clusters. The entire orbital fleet tried to concentrate its fire on the Autarch's shuttle, but they expected to face a sizeable squadron, not a single ship barely larger than a yacht, and in the resulting confusion their efforts failed. Still, the shuttle would be doomed were it not for Aenarion's exceptional piloting skills. Some say he possessed latent seer abilities, allowing him to peer into the near future; others assert that his prowess as a void pilot was the result of gruelling training he subjected himself to. Regardless, Aenarion was the only Eldar capable of safely guiding a spaceship through the ocean of hellfire unleashed by the entire planetary defence force.

Landing, however, was a whole different story. The Autarch realised that wherever he decided to land, the shuttle would be surrounded by tanks and soldiers in a matter of minutes, so he hatched another insane plan. Instead of landing his ship, he crashed it at full speed in the middle of the colossal square in front of the Senate Spire, while he and his followers used their Warp Spider devices to teleport out of the doomed vessel at the last second. Using the confusion their crazy manoeuvre caused to their advantage, they infiltrated the tower and started their ascent to the great assembly hall. Trying to prevent Aenarion's arrival before the Senate by all means, the traitors threw all of the forces left at their disposal at him. In their desperation, they exploded the stairs and sabotaged the elevators, filled entire floors with toxic gas and tore rifts in the fabric of reality, unleashing hordes of nightmare spawn. But none of these obstacles could slow Aenarion's advance, for his masterful usage of the Warp Spider equipment allowed him to teleport out of harm's way.

Before the Senate

In the end, the traitors failed. Nothing could stop the Autarch and his retinue, neither the Spire Guard armed with deadly gaseous blades nor stained glass warriors that walked out of the window frames and attacked Aenarion and his followers with iridescent swords. And although only five badly wounded lieutenants stood by his side when the gates of the assembly hall flew open and Aenarion walked inside, they were filled with pride. Their plan that seemed suicidal at first was a resounding success; in spite of all the odds stacked against them, they managed to fool the entire Eldar military and arrived at the heart of the Empire. All that was left was to present the evidence of Slaugth betrayal to the senators. Unfortunately, as they would all too soon find out, their mission was far from completion.

Aenarion was watching the senators closely as he showed them the recordings of the atrocities committed by the Slaugth in the border sectors, and he didn't like what he saw. While most of them were disgusted and shocked, much like he was when he first witnessed them, some were clearly annoyed by the Autarch's presence and the uncomfortable truth he brought to light. It was only then that Aenarion begrudgingly realised that even the Senate, the very heart of the Eldar civilisation, was not exempt from corruption. Still he had confidence in the ability of the senators to discern truth from fabrication and in the inevitable triumph of justice. The Autarch ended his speech by calling upon Asuryan to be his witness, asking the creator god to burn him to cinder if he had said a single word of falsehood. He then walked straight into the sacred Flame of Asuryan, burning brightly in a pit in the middle of the assembly hall, passed through it and emerged on the other side completely unharmed. Aenarion hoped that this miracle would be enough to convince the senators of his honesty.

His hopes were crushed when the imperial tribune took the floor and delivered a burning philippic against him. He called the Autarch a traitor, a warmonger and a blasphemer, accusing him of fabricating evidence against the Slaugth and of using foul sorcery to fake a miracle of Asuryan. The tribune mentioned how many generals, seeing no place for themselves during the era of blessed peace the Eldar empire was graced with, tried to stir up a conflict to increase their power. Aenarion watched in disbelief as more and more senators expressed their support for the tribune, first the traitors, then the rest of them. As shocking as this outcome was for the Autarch, it was completely logical in the hindsight. The ugly truth Aenarion laid bare before the senate was just too much for the senators to swallow. It threatened the foundations of their cosy little worlds, and so they chose the comfort of denial and sided with the tribune, whose seemingly logical theory allowed them to preserve the status quo, no matter if it was built on foul lies.

Completely dejected by this turn of events, the Autarch and his lieutenants put up no resistance against the Spire Guard who entered the hall to arrest them. It seemed almost certain that the traitors had won, when suddenly one of the walls of the assembly hall exploded in a hail of Wraithbone shards, shattered by a point blank shot from a Prism Cannon. The hole in the wall revealed a shuttle hovering outside the spire, which, judging by the paint scheme, belonged to the orbital defence forces. That's why Aenarion was profoundly confused when one of his own men peered from the shuttle's hatch and ordered him and his followers to quickly board the vessel. Still not sure what had happened, the Autarch nevertheless followed the order and boarded the ship, which immediately took him to his own flagship moored on the orbit.

In Aenarion's Absence

It wasn't before Aenarion walked onto his command bridge that his men explained to him what had happened in his absence. It turned out that after listening to the recorded message he left, his officers saw straight through his simplistic deception, realising that their commander merely wanted to protect them. However, Aenarion's men did not want to live in dishonour after abandoning their Autarch, and so they decided to clear a corridor for him to escape from the planet, should his mission fail. In spite of their overwhelming numerical disadvantage, they brazenly attacked the orbital defence fleet. But instead of engaging in a broadside exchange, which would surely leave them completely annihilated, Aenarion's men decided to board the enemy flagships using the Warp Spider technology so favoured by their commander.

Using ingenious manoeuvring to avoid enemy fire, they approached the enemy ranks closely enough for a Webway jump, after which boarding squads in Warp Spider equipment teleported aboard the biggest enemy ships. Those squads rushed straight towards the command bridges; most of them were slaughtered on their way there, but some managed to reach their destinations. Once faced with the enemy commanders, they laid down their arms and asked for a chance to explain the real reasons for Aenarion's attack on the Eldar homeworld. Motivated by curiosity if nothing else, the enemy officers agreed to hear them out, after which they were presented with copies of the evidence against the Slaugth that the Autarch intended to show to the senate. But, unlike the corrupt and hypocritical senators, the officers in charge of the orbital defence turned out to be honest patriots, merely misguided by the disinformation coming from the high ranking traitors. The evidence presented to them by the Warp Spiders was enough for most of them to swear fealty to Aenarion and his cause.

While the orbital fleet was taken care of, the fate of the Autarch remained obscured. To find out whether his mission was a success, the Farseer of his fleet conducted an elaborate ritual that allowed his third eye to peer past the walls of the Senate Spire into the great Assembly Hall. His visions confirmed his worst fears: the Senators that ruled the entire Eldar race turned out to be either outright traitors or spineless cowards. Sensing that the commander's life was in great danger, he ordered a shuttle outfitted with heavy weapons to be sent to his rescue post haste. And while the rescue operation was a great success, the overall outcome of the Autarch's mission was undeniably grim.

Officially proclaimed a traitor, Aenarion no longer had a place in the empire he fought so hard to save. While there was a faint hope that some admirals could join his cause, his potential forces were dwarfed by the fleet answering to the cowardly Senate. The Autarch no longer saw any hope for his race and was contemplating surrendering to the enemy. However, one of the former orbital defence commanders who joined him, a pale Eldar whose skin was criss-crossed by a web of scars, suggested that there was still a way to turn the situation around. And although it involved Aenarion losing his soul, the Autarch was long past the point of caring about such trivialities.

The Wrath of Khaine

Although this notion may seem absurd in the 41st millennium, Khaine had once been strictly banned from the Eldar pantheon. There was no place for the bloody-handed god of murder in the decorous temples of the ancient Eldar, and the only prayers meant for his ears were pattered in hushed voices over lifeless corpses of fallen enemies. Considered inappropriate for an upstanding Eldar, his worship was reserved for madmen and outcasts. And yet, in spite of all of the attempts by the Senate to fight the worship of Khaine, his underground cult lived on. No race can escape its primeval violent urges, no matter how hard it tries to seclude itself in the ivory tower of civilisation. The more a society praises restraint and moderation during the day, the darker things happen during the night.

The scarred fleet officer who addressed Aenarion revealed himself as a secret Khaine worshipper, drawing the ire of many Eldar present on the command bridge. But, lost in the gloomy depths of despair, the Autarch agreed to hear him out. The scarred Eldar explained that Khaine was not the monster most priests made him out to be. He was certainly extremely violent and bloodthirsty, a patron of murder and warfare, but the truth was that sometimes violence was necessary. Not every enemy could be dealt or bargained with, some of them simply needed to be killed before they could kill you. The bloody-handed god's cult flourished during the War in Heavens, and it was about time to revive it for a new Galactic war, one that would eclipse the previous conflict in both scope and scale.

Aenarion promised to personally see to it that the cult of Khaine is restored if the god of murder could help him defeat the Slaugth and their pawns in the Senate. With a cold smile on his thin lips, the scarred officer began telling the story of the Widowmaker, the cursed sword of Khaine. It all started back during the War in Heavens, when Khaine fought side by side with the Eldar, shattering the C'tan with his mighty sword while the common soldiers fought their soulless minions. One warrior in particular drew the furious god's attention with his peerless prowess at arms. That was Eldanesh, the greatest champion of the Eldar of all times, blessed personally by Asuryan and destined for great deeds. Impressed by the warrior's mastery of the blade, Khaine assumed the form of an Eldar noble and approached him. After commending Eldanesh for his great skill, the god offered him a challenge: whoever would slay less Necrons in an hour would have to surrender his sword to the victor. Always eager to prove his skill, the hero agreed, and the challenge began.

Of course, this contest was merely an amusing diversion for the capricious god: he never even considered the possibility of losing to a mere mortal, and so he didn't bother fighting at full power. Eldanesh, on the other hand, fought like a lion, destroying several cursed machines with every strike. So, when an hour passed, Khaine found out that he was bested by a mortal warrior. With a smile on his face, Eldanesh reached out his hand to take his trophy, the fabled Widowmaker. But the furious god refused to admit his humbling defeat: instead of honouring his part of the deal, he angrily accused Eldanesh of cheating and drove his sword through the hero's heart. Unfortunately for him, Asuryan himself was watching over this contest, and he decided to punish the murderous god for breaking his word. First of all, he made Khaine's hands drip eternally with the blood of Eldanesh to remind him forever of his perfidy. Then he cursed the god's sword, making it burn Khaine's hands like if it was scorching hot. Asuryan judged that since the god of murder lost the right to the sword in a fair contest, he should never be able to wield it again. Cursing the creator god, Khaine thrust his sword into a large mountain with such fury that the planet's continents broke apart like thin ice, its mountains turned into volcanoes and its cities were levelled by earthquakes.

Looking over the destruction he had caused, Khaine swore an oath to throw the Galaxy at the feet of any mortal champion who would agree to wield the cursed sword in his stead. He then set up a number of challenges on the way to the relic to make sure that only the worthy could reach the sword's pedestal and left the planet forever. It's been known as the Blighted Planet ever since, and most Eldar believed it to be a legend, an allegorical tale of how anger can give great strength to those who can keep it under control. And yet, the scarred officer belonged to an ancient clan of Khaine devotees who not only knew that the planet was real, but could also point it on the map of the Galaxy. The khainite offered Aenarion to try and win Khaine's favour by pulling the sword out of the mountain. This plan was met with much resistance, especially from the Seer council of Aenarion's fleet. His trusted Farseer pointed out that Khaine was a bloodthirsty and murderous god who was well known for breaking his promises, so nothing good could come from striking deals with him. But at this point Aenarion was ready to swear fealty even to the C'tan if it allowed him to purge his race from traitors. And so the great expedition to the Blighted Planet began.

The Blighted Planet

The way to Khaine's sacred planet was a long and tumultuous one. It was situated on the southern fringe of the Galaxy, in what we today refer to as the Veiled Region. Many sections of the Webway were blocked off by the Imperial fleet, so Aenarion's advance was fairly slow. On the positive side of things, his forces grew considerably in size on his way south, since several admirals deserted the Imperial fleet and joined the rebels after hearing tales of Aenarion's exploits. And the Autarch could certainly use reinforcements, for his fleet was constantly under attack by the traitors, the Slaugth and even the Krork, who always rush to join the fun whenever there's bloodshed. But, no matter how long a journey takes, each one of them has an ending, and the expedition to the Blighted Planet ended exactly one year after its start.

Finally, the planet's grim visage was right in front of Aenarion, who studied it melancholically from his command bridge. A lifeless obsidian orb lit up by turbulent oceans of lava, it convulsed in tectonic spasms and belched clouds of molten rock into space, threatening to fall apart any second. A single pin held this chaotic mess together, and Aenarion was about to pull it out. The scarred khainite advised that any champion wishing to attempt the trial of Khaine needed to descend upon the planet alone, and so the Autarch was the only Eldar aboard the shuttle that left his flagship for the Blighted Planet. Landing it was no trivial task, for the planet was plagued by constant earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

After a hard landing, Aenarion got out of his spacecraft and went in the first direction he saw. He remembered the advice of the scarred officer who told him that direction did not matter on the Blighted Planet and the challenges of Khaine would find a willing champion themselves. It wasn't long before the Autarch found himself in the middle of a vast field with scores of swords of all sizes and designs imaginable sticking out of the ground. As soon as he approached them, an unknown force pulled the swords out. Before he could as much as blink, the swords attacked him, as if wielded by invisible hands. Aenarion fought alone against no less than fifty opponents, but his fencing skills were impeccable, and most of the swords barely left a couple of scratches on his armour. Eventually he managed to break all of them with mighty strikes of his own weapon and proceeded onwards.

Soon he came across a giant Eldar head, chiselled roughly from a solitary piece of basalt. Streams of lava were running like tears from its eyes, forming a pool in front of the sculpture. Suddenly the lava in the pool rose up and assumed a grotesque, vaguely humanoid shape. With speed and agility unusual for such a brutish creature, the lava golem attacked Aenarion with its huge scorching fists. The Autarch threw his weapon to the side, for he realised that no blade could ever harm a monster made of lava. Another way of dealing with the creature needed to be found as quickly as possible, but Aenarion was good at thinking on his feet. Dodging the enemy strikes, he grabbed his Warp Spider teleportation device, quickly changed some settings, turned it on and threw it at the lava golem. One bright spark, and the monster was teleported into the solid ground.

The Widowmaker

Tired and angry at the loss of valuable equipment, but no less determined, Aenarion continued his way through the shivering wasteland. He had been walking for hours, but the next challenge was nowhere to be found. Yet the Autarch kept on plodding along until he noticed a strange bright dot in the sky. The dot soon grew in size and turned out to be one of his very own shuttles. The ship landed next to him and its door opened, revealing his trusted Farseer and five of his lieutenants he faced the Senate with one year ago. The Farseer embraced his commander, thanking Asuryan that he was alive, and urged him to come with them and leave that cursed place. When Aenarion vehemently refused his demands, the psyker revealed the reason for his coming to the Blighted Planet.

It turned out that he had spent the night before the Autarch's descent flipping through his ancient books, trying to find any information on Khaine that could be helpful to Aenarion. But he found more than he was looking for - one of his books, truly ancient and penned by an anonymous author, claimed that Khaine was nothing more than an aspect of Khorne, the Chaos god of anger, violence and hatred. On learning that, the Farseer realised that it was his duty to find Aenarion down below and save him from making a deal with the devil. He also decided to take five of his commander's closest lieutenants with him to help him convince the Autarch. Aenarion listened very carefully to everything his friend said, and, once he had finished, drew his sword and beheaded him. One of his lieutenants soon followed the Farseer to the halls of Ereth Khial, too shocked by what he had just seen to move. The rest of them quickly realised that their commander's prolonged stay on Khaine's sacred planet must have driven him insane and attacked him, but they were no match for Aenarion. Within minutes, the Autarch's closest friends and followers who had been with him since the incident on the Slaugth border were all slain by his hand. Looking at their lifeless bodies, Aenarion just sighed and wiped the blood off his sword. Maybe Khaine was really Khorne, maybe not. The Autarch didn't care any more. He just wanted to save his race, and if by doing so he was dooming his soul, then so be it.

As soon as the last one of his lieutenants hit the dust, a colossal rift opened in the ground in front of Aenarion. Jet-black smoke and distant sounds of a furious battle came from it. Then, an enormous obsidian pedestal rose from the depths of the rift, with a black sword protruding from it. Aenarion slowly ascended the pedestal and looked at the relic he had to kill his best friends for. The blood of Eldanesh was still wet on its blade. After saying a short prayer to Khaine that the scarred officer taught him, the Autarch drew the Widowmaker for the first time in millennia. As soon as the sword left the pedestal, the landscape was shaken by an earthquake of apocalyptic proportions - the planet had lost its sole reason for existence and was finally falling apart. And as the Blighted Planet was falling to pieces, so were the last remnants of the old Aenarion.

Several hours later, the Autarch's flagship was boarded by the most strange vessel. It was a red and black Eldar spaceship of a design not seen since the War in Heavens. Instead of the usual Wraithbone, the ship seemed to be chiselled from obsidian. But the passengers were surely the strangest thing about this peculiar vessel. Instead of Eldar, it carried eighty giant warriors with skins of superheated iron and hearts of molten lava, each one of them clutching a strange wailing sword the size of a good cannon. And the captain? The strange ship was helmed by no one else than Aenarion himself. The first thing the Autarch wanted to do when he reached his command bridge was to find the scarred officer who had led him to the Blighted Planet and reward him for his help, but he was nowhere to be found. Curiously, none of the men under his command knew much, or anything, about the mysterious officer: he just appeared practically out of nowhere on the eve of Aenarion's attack on the Senate, and disappeared without a trace once the Autarch returned from the Blighted Planet.

The Phoenix Emperor

As Aenarion's fleet headed back towards the Eldar homeworld, the roles reversed: now the rebels were mercilessly hunting the traitors down, and the Imperial fleet was trying frantically to regroup, confused by the Autarch's sudden counterattack. And yet, their clumsy attempts were all in vain, for Khaine himself guided Aenarion's vengeful hand. There was nowhere they could run, nowhere they could hide from him, neither on the ground nor in the heavens above, neither in the cold of the Void nor in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Webway. Aenarion became an avatar of Death itself, and anyone who dared to oppose him was as good as dead. For the Autarch forgot the meaning of mercy, slaughtering the guilty along with the innocent who happened to get in his way. His ultimatum to the Eldar army was brutally laconic: join his crusade or be executed. And many generals did join him, either out of respect or simply fearing his wrath.

He started out with but a handful of ships in a dire need of repair. By the time he reached Cadia, the forces under his command rivalled the remnants of the Imperial fleet in numbers. And yet, the outcome of the war was far from decided. Feeling the noose tighten around their necks, the Slaugth Principals finally decided to join the war openly and bolstered the forces of their incompetent underlings with the best war galleys at their disposal. They also tricked a handful of mighty Krork warlords into joining the battle on their side, so in the end the rebels were outnumbered four to one. And yet, not a muscle flinched on Aenarion's face as he beheld the cyclopean force his foes amassed to bring him down. Instead of a mighty enemy, he saw sheep flocking mindlessly to the slaughter.

The Battle of Cadia is so shrouded in heroic legends that even the Eldar scholars have trouble separating truth from fiction. Some accounts claim that Khaine personally manifested on that day and hurled a moon at the traitor forces, others mention that Aenarion sliced the enemy flagship in half with the Widowmaker. While such reports are dubious at best, one thing remains certain: the rebels handed the foe a crushing defeat, destroying what remained of the Imperial fleet. Two factors contributed to Aenarion's decisive victory. Firstly, several Imperial admirals decided to switch sides midway through the battle in a desperate bid to save their lives. Their decision proved to be ill-advised, as Aenarion ordered to execute everyone aboard their ships anyway. Secondly, rather than risk their lives in what seemed to be a loosing battle, the Slaugth abandoned their allies at a critical point. They departed back to their empire to start preparing for the inevitable war with Aenarion.

After the glorious victory at Cadia, the way to the homeworld was open. Years after his adventure in the Senate Spire, the Autarch returned to his race's capital, this time as a conqueror. Although the Senate managed to mount some meagre defence, it was brutally swept aside by the mighty rebel fleet. In a couple of days, Aenarion entered the Spire for the second time in his life. This time around, he was personally escorted to the assembly hall by the commanders of the Spire Guard hoping to ingratiate themselves with the new tyrant. This was, of course, just a waste of time on their part, for the Autarch did not believe in such a thing as a former enemy. Many of the Senators chose to commit ritual suicide rather than face Aenarion, and those who didn't envied them. The Autarch's trial of the Senate was swift, his verdict harsh: all of the Senators were to be hurled alive into the sacred Flame of Asuryan, burning brightly in a pit in the middle of the hall.

So ended the ancient Eldar republic. Aenarion was fundamentally opposed to the idea of democracy, believing it to be inherently prone to corruption, so he decided to crown himself the emperor to replace the power vacuum created by the demise of the Senate. He styled himself the Phoenix Emperor to commemorate his miraculous walking through the Flame of Asuryan, but the Creator God was no longer his favoured deity. As he promised on the Blighted Planet, his rule saw the resurgence of the Cult of Khaine. The bloody-handed god's disciples came out of the shadows to become powerful priests and templars, parks and shopping districts of many Eldar metropolises were burnt down to give way to imposing obsidian temples and fountains of lava. Not everyone was happy with the changes introduced by the Phoenix Emperor, but they were too scared of his already legendary wrath to voice their concerns. The entire race was ordered to celebrate the dawn of a new era, and so they did, even if their whimsical carnival masks hid scared, troubled faces.

However, the celebrations were kept to a minimum. After all, there was little time to be lost - while the enemy within was soundly defeated, the true foe was still as strong as ever. As the Eldar danced in the streets, the Slaugth were reinforcing the border regions and gathering forces for the imminent war that would leave only a single race to dominate the Galaxy.

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.

The Space Lord

Unlike most of the Slaugth Principals who were powerful slavers or mighty sorcerers, Nresht was a brilliant scientist who had earned his place in the ruling council with his groundbreaking research. Even in a race where genius level intelligence was considered the norm, he was seen as a prodigy way ahead of his time. Nresht had always been fascinated with dimensions, from which all existence was woven like a magnificent tapestry, and so he chose to pursue a career in topomancy instead of much more lucrative geneurgy. At the time, many of his colleagues scoffed at his strange decision, writing it off as one of the innumerable quirks of the eccentric genius. But all of his doubters had to admit their mistake when Nresht presented his first major invention - relativist generators that used focused dark energy to distort and shape the three primary dimensions of space like clay.

This machine quickly revolutionised all aspects of Slaugth live. Living conditions improved tremendously as everybody moved into apartments that were much larger on the inside than they were on the outside. Vehicles that shortened travel distances by shrinking the space in front of them made even intercontinental travel a matter of minutes. Art and architecture flourished as the artists cast down the confines of the three old-fashioned dimensions. One invention such as this would be enough for any Slaugth researcher to end his career and rest on his laurels, but Nresht wasn't motivated by fame and recognition. Barely a couple of centuries have passed since his first breakthrough when he presented his new reality-defying creation - an engine that allowed to unravel the seven hidden dimensions of space and make practical use of them. Again, the entire Slaugth culture made a gigantic leap forward, thinking in three dimensions quickly became a thing of the past. And yet, Nresht was far from satisfied. There was still one more elusive dimension that he couldn't conquer, namely time.

And he had a good reason to be obsessed with time. With machines that could distort it, the Slaugth could finally put an end to the extinction of their race, or at least make it irrelevant. By manipulating time, they could extend their lifespans indefinitely, thus achieving immortality and rendering reproduction unnecessary. But this task was too hard even for a genius like Nresht to perform. He needed to break too many fundamental laws of nature to achieve his highly coveted goal, but such trivialities could never stop the deranged savant. His experiments continued well into the war with the Eldar, he kept building new prototypes even as the windows of his laboratory were being shattered by shurikens. But in the end, the Principal was triumphant. When the enemy fleet was preparing to deliver the final strike, he finished his time machine that enabled travelling to the future.

An Unlikely Escape

When Nresht interrupted a military briefing to present his opus magnum to the Panel of Principals, most council members thought that the mad genius had finally lost it. But the scientist quickly made them change their minds when he started explaining his devious plan. Nresht recognised that the war was lost and all the avenues of retreat were cut - except for one. An escape through time was still a possibility for the Slaugth, and perhaps the only way to save their race. Principal Nresht offered to build one hundred Vermidromes, colossal cities shrunk to the size of railway cars, which were to house the remnants of the Slaugth. He would then send these cities millions of years into the future, when the Eldar empire is long gone and the Galaxy is free for the maggot people to conquer.

When the other Principals asked what would happen if the Eldar dominion would fail to collapse, Nresht revealed the second part of his plan. He suggested to use the sleeper agents who managed to survive Aenarion's brutal purges to plant seeds of debauchery and decadence into the Eldar society. Left on its own in the Galaxy, without any worthy rivals to keep them on their toes, the Eldar would be bound to become vulnerable to moral decay. And that's where the mind-controlled agents of the Slaugth would come in. They would begin innocently enough, staring pleasure cults for bored aristocracy seeking fresh experiences. But in time, these cults would grow into something much more debauched, and their rot would infect the entire Eldar society, undermining its foundations. The bloated Eldar Empire of the future would collapse on its own, without a single shot fired. And then, the Vermidromes would arrive from the past to take over the empty Galaxy.

The plan sounded utterly deranged, but the Board of Principals was desperate for any solutions to their problem; besides, Nresht had quite a reputation for coming up with the craziest ideas and making them a reality. And so, the Principal's plan got the green light. Mobilising nearly all of the slaves at their disposal, the Slaugth constructed one hundred Vermidromes in record time. Then their entire population was evacuated to these bottled cities. As the Eldar were mounting the final attack on the Slaugth home system, Principal Nresht's time machine sent the Vermidromes to the far future. Only a handful of volunteers were left behind to control the sleeper agents in the upper echelons of Eldar Empire. Aenarion and his generals were infuriated when instead of the grand battle they expected in the home system of their mortal enemies, they found only hordes of drooling slaves left without masters. To vent his fury off, the Phoenix Emperor ordered to subject the former Slaugth worlds to viral bombings anyway.

The search for the mysteriously disappeared maggot men continued, with interruptions, for millennia. The Eldar have scanned every nook and cranny of the Galaxy, the vast expanses around it and even parts of the Warp, but their enemies were nowhere to be found. And so, for millions of years, the Slaugth became merely one of the dark legends of the past along with the Necrons. It was almost like the worms that walk never existed in the first place - the only traces of their existence that the Eldar couldn't erase were the deep scars in their own hearts. Betrayed cruelly by a race that they had considered their brothers in spite of all their differences, they could never trust any alien species again. Ironically, this made the Eldar almost as xenophobic as the Slaugth used to be. Any advanced Xenos race that they came in contact with, from the Saruthi to the Cyfecti, was brutally exterminated before it could become a serious threat. But the seeds of destruction planted by Principal Nresht were slowly taking root in their society. In fact, the mad savant greatly underestimated the Eldar propensity to decadence. The collapse of their empire was much more spectacular than he could have ever imagined.

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.

The Fractured World

Planet T'au was a harsh stepmother to its dwellers. A desert world enshrouded with blazing hot winds carrying vicious sandstorms, it almost appeared hostile to all life. And yet, life did bloom there. Instead of succumbing to the manyfold challenges of their planet, the sons of T'au were hardened by them, forged into masterful survivors. It was a cruel, eat or be eaten world, but it also had a fair share of savage beauty. The slender and elegant bodies of its numerous predators, perfected by millennia of natural selection, were not unlike the austere shapes of firearms in their deadly beauty. This was especially true in regard to the Tau, the planet's vicious apex predators turned a sapient race. But, in spite of their ascension to sentience, they never quite forgot their roots. Theirs was a race of cruel hunters and ruthless merchants, unscrupulous spies and double-dealing diplomats. It's safe to assume that there were at some point kind-hearted Tau committed to a greater good than personal gain, but most of them ended up with a dagger between their shoulders.

Is it, then, any surprise that a race of such ambitious and cruel individuals couldn't live in peace? At the time of their discovery by the Slaugth, the Tau were going through an era which later historians would call Mont'au - "The Time of Blood". The entire population of the planet was divided into four major blocks waging a brutal war of extermination against each other. The Burning Horde united the countless warrior tribes of arid steppes and rocky deserts. Still little more than the vicious predators their race descended from, these brutal nomads saw civilisation as a sign of weakness and lived by raiding and pillaging. No settlement was ever safe from their raids, no treaties or agreements could guarantee peace with them, for their minds were as fickle and volatile as the fire they worshipped.

Their incursions were most often directed against the megalithic bastions of the Stoneheart Tyranny, a corrupt empire holding the metalliferous hills of central T'au in its iron fist. The expansion of this technologically advanced dominion was driven by the insatiable avarice of its aristocratic rulers, whose greed was so immense that they often supplied blackpowder guns and electromagnetic catapults to the raiders of their own towns in exchange for large gold nuggets found in the desert. On the other hand, they feared losing even an inch of their property so much that they were constantly working hundreds of their subjects to death constructing endless lines of defence, each one grander and more elaborate than the other.

The trade between the Horde and the Tyranny was facilitated by the enigmatic monks of the Order of the Wet Shroud. A secretive organisation of hypocritical charlatans posing as holy men, they used their constant pilgrimages in boats of porous stone along the knee-deep rivers of T'au as a cover for smuggling, drug and tau trafficking, and, perhaps most important of all, espionage. They sold the lords of the stone cities information about the movements of the nomads and provided the chieftains of the steppes with detailed plans of the Tyranny's bastions - for a hefty pay, of course. But these duplicitous hypocrites were much more than simple spies and smugglers: the secret protocols of their sect described a complex agenda of fuelling war and conflict in order to weaken the other nations of T'au and, when the time comes, take over the world. Too few in numbers to wage a full-scale war, they used assassination to further their political goals.

Only the fourth and final major Tau faction wasn't infiltrated by the spies of the Wet Shroud. The xenophobic, racial supremacist dwellers of the Celestial Utopia only allowed foreigners into their mountaintop cities as slaves or prisoners. Theirs was a strictly hierarchical society ruled by eugenics and scientific racism. Only the tall, azure-eyed and purple-haired Tau with elongated skulls could receive citizenship in their cities; those not conforming to these standards were labelled as metics and forced to break their backs performing hard menial jobs. The arrogant mountain dwellers looked with disgust at the inferior races crawling like insects on the ground down below, and used their hot air balloons to bomb any settlements founded too close to their borders. The ground dwellers were believed to carry disease, and even speaking to them was rumoured to cause stupidity.

It was clear to the Slaugth that in order to turn the Tau into a formidable spacefaring civilisation that could effectively oppose the Imperium, they first needed to unite them as a race, give them a common purpose. The opinions of the Principals divided on how this needed to be done. The more straightforward of them proposed to conquer the Tau, those with more subtlety suggested to use mind control to steer the race into the right direction. But Principal Txont had a much better plan. One that involved remaking the Tau society from scratch.

Enter the Ethereals

The first stage of his plan involved kidnapping thousands of Tau. This wasn't particularly hard to accomplish, since by this point all four major nations of the planet were infiltrated by Slaugth Intendants using their psychic powers to pass as ordinary Tau. Slaves, prisoners, vagrants, everybody who wouldn't be missed was tranquillised, shoved into slimy galleys and brought to Principal Txont's nightmarish biomanteion. No one save for the Slaugth lord himself can tell what sadistic experiments these unfortunates were subjected to, and probably for the better. He turned innumerous innocents into slobbering freaks of nature, and those who escaped this fate learned the true meaning of pain. Rumours were abound that the Principal could have finished his project in a couple of months if he didn't enjoy toying with a brand new slave race so much. Regardless, after several years of research and experiments, Txont was ready to present his creation - a new subspecies of Tau.

His children looked surprisingly seemly for creations of a Slaugth biomancer. Not too different from the four main Tau races, they were marked with unnatural beauty, unattainable for beings born of copulation rather than grown in a vat. But what really set them apart from the normal Tau was the diamond-shaped bone crest in the middle of their foreheads. This crest served to protect the weapon with which Txont aimed to conquer T'au without a single shot, his diabolical masterpiece - the Diocetic Gland. This small organ exuded a powerful pheromone which made all Tau and, to an extent, most other sentient species docile and obedient by suppressing their individuality and critical thinking. A small band of such mutant Tau could easily take over the entire planet by simply ordering everybody to surrender and submit to their rule. But such crude interventionism went against the Principal's love for subtle manipulation. And so, instead of arming his minions and sending them to the planet below, he began training and instructing them for their upcoming mission.

The Siege of Fio'Taun marked a pivotal point in the history of Tau. This battle was the final stage of a dastardly scheme concocted by the city's despot Fio'El Shes'kra. Months ago, he had set the events that led to the siege in motion by selling lots of rifles and even some cannons from the city arsenal to the marauding tribes of the western steppes. To make sure that Fio'Taun would come under siege, he tipped off a Wet Shroud bishop to encourage the nomads to attack the wealthy city. The despot planned to wait until the city walls are inevitably breached and use the ensuing chaos to steal the contents of the city treasury, only to blame the raiders for it. Better still, he could then ask the central government for some gold to pay the workers for rebuilding the walls - most of which would, of course, end up in his own pocket. His plan was nearly perfect and it definitely would have worked, were it not for a most unexpected intervention.

In the middle of the siege, when it seemed like the megalithic walls of the city were finally beginning to crumble, two figures clad in expensive robes walked leisurely onto the battlefield. Bullets and shurikens pierced the air around them, explosions raised fountains of dirt mere paces away from the two, heat rays focused by parabolic mirrors melted the very ground they walked on, and yet the mysterious strangers were completely unharmed, as if protected by some strange power beyond comprehension. Eventually they started drawing gazes of soldiers on both sides of the walls; even the despot found himself strangely drawn to the spectacle in front of the city gates. Meanwhile, the strangers walked up to one of the helepolises used by the besiegers and ascended to the platform on its top. None of the soldiers guarding it dared to stop them.

Once they had the full attention of every soldier on the battlefield, the two began to preach. Not in a stern, profound voice expected of a prophet; instead, they talked fast and smooth, like a pair of seasoned advertisers pitching a new project. Their words were not particularly wise or enlightening, but they were brimming with common sense and harsh materialism. The strangers said that violence was unnecessary, unless it was profitable; that in the long term, commerce was much more lucrative than war. They pointed out that by hiring the nomads to guard their settlements, the city dwellers would avoid much greater costs of constantly rebuilding ruined fortifications, and the nomads would get a steady inflow of income that would eventually exceed the sporadic spoils from their infrequent and dangerous raids. Several times they mentioned the great Bottom Line, a philosophical concept that was central to their teachings. It stated that the value of any action depended only on the profit gained as a result, and nothing else. Ideals, principles, dreams and aspirations were all illusionary and insignificant, serving only to lead astray from the path to wealth and success.

Everybody present found the extremely materialistic philosophy of the twin preachers much to his liking. The warlike nomads were seduced by the promises of a guaranteed income, while the city dwellers enjoyed the prospects of using nomad mercenaries to do their bidding. Before the day was over, both the defenders of the city and its besiegers became the first followers of the mysterious strangers. The despot quickly calculated how much money he could make by getting close to the leaders of a promising new cult early on, so he proposed to personally help them travel across the Stoneheart Tyranny and spread their word. The next morning a caravan departed from the Fio'Taun with the two preachers at its head. When asked by their guards where they came from, the two just laughed, called themselves Ethereals and left it at that.

Fio'Taun was the first documented occasion when the Ethereals made their presence known, but many others soon followed all across the globe. Some showed up in the mountain cities of the Celestial Utopia and explained to their racist citizens that making business with the lowland dwellers is much more profitable than exterminating them. Some visited gatherings of the Wet Shroud monks and offered them to drop all pretence and embrace their role as information brokers. Wherever they went, their preachings achieved great success. Was the Diocetic Gland responsible for it, or did their teachings simply appeal to the nature of the Tau? Nobody can say for sure, not even Principal Txont. Regardless, in several years the cult of the Bottom Line managed to unite the entire planet for the first time in history. The four nations of T'au became four castes, grand empires were replaced with megacorporations led by the Ethereals. And the Ethereals secretly answered to their Slaugth Lords.

The Tau Fiasco

Several centuries later, the Tau Plutocracy was bar none the largest and most prosperous Xenos empire of the Eastern Fringe. The young civilisation managed to make lightning fast technological progress, not least of all thanks to Slaugth Intendants constantly planting new concepts and ideas into the heads of their scientists and engineers. With their trademark ruthlessness, they subjugated numerous worlds in the galactic East. Although they preferred taking over other civilisations by ruining their economies with unfair competition and then getting them into debt bondage, they were also not above using brute force where perfidy failed. Once they had subjugated an alien civilisation, they destroyed the remains of its industry by aggressive takeovers in order to turn it into one more market for their goods. The resource rich planets the Tau managed to get their hands on got even harsher treatment: they were brutally exploited until pollution rendered them unfit for habitation. Uniquely for a stellar empire, their state was run like a joint stock company, with any affluent Tau able to purchase the Imperial stock and vote in the council of directors to determine the Plutocracy's strategic course. This was, of course, merely a spectacle, for only the Ethereals had enough money to purchase the government stock, and all of them were obedient puppets of the Slaugth anyway. Unbeknownst to the Principals, this was about to change.

For you see, the Ethereals grew too fond of their new wealth and power and became less than willing to risk it all in a suicidal fight with the mighty Imperium of Man. While they were originally created to be but passive pawns to the Slaugth, centuries of life on T'au, far away from their creators, made them more independent than Principal Txont expected them to be. Ironcially, they were eventually seduced by the same ideology they were instructed to seduce the people of T'au with. After generations of loyal service to the maggot men, they finally broke and succumbed to the irresistable beckoning of the Golden Calf. The Ethereals decided to break off the leash and become the true masters of their rapidly expanding empire, but this was much easier said than done. On their own, they stood no chance against the worms that walk, their reality-shattering sorceries and hordes of biomechanoids. The Tau needed a very powerful ally if they wanted to challenge their race's secret overlords. And so they began to search for allies in the dark corners of the Galaxy, covering their true intentions with an expedition to find rare resources. Fairly confident in the loyalty of the Ethereals, their Slaugth masters didn't object to it.

It became a big surprise for the Principals when the Tau squadron dispatched to search for resources in the south eastern outskirts of the Galaxy was accompanied by a much larger fleet on its return. Never, not in a million years have the Slaugth seen anything quite like the monstrous ships escorting the Tau. Their brutalist, crudely functional designs almost appeared to be made ugly on purpose; they were little more than clusters of colossal featureless boxes made from a concrete-like material and painted in a garish shade of yellow that any race with retina-based vision would find painful to look at. Such starships could only be built by a race completely bereft of a sense of beauty, one that not only lacked good taste, but couldn't even being to conceptualise what good taste is. Before the Slaugth could react to the arrival of these unexpected guests, they received a message from the Ethereals aboard the Tau explorator ships. The Tau offered their masters a choice - to welcome their new friends at the Vermidromes or to face a war with them. The maggot men reluctantly agreed to have a talk with the new allies of the Tau, whose name turned out to be Vespid.

The masters of the yellow ships turned out to be similar to their creations - unsightly, monstrous humanoids combining the ugliest features of crustaceans, chiropterans and insects. They behaved in the Vermidrome like if they owned the place, scratching the interiors with the numerous spikes of their chitinous armour and leaving stains on everything they touched with their dirty hands. The Vespid could even pass for bipedal animals, were it not for the heavy arms they carried, which were as brutal and hard-featured as their spaceships. Although the Slaugth were aghast with the complete lack of manners their uninvited guests displayed, they agreed to their demands of meeting the Board of Principals. Disregarding any diplomatic courtesy, the apparent leader of the Vespid plainly ordered the Slaugth lords to leave their Tau allies alone and immediately withdraw all Intendants from T'au. Otherwise, he threatened to exterminate all Slaugth, and, from what little the Principals had seen of the Vespid, they suspected the insectoids were incapable of lying or bluffing.

And so, with thousands of Vespid strangelet projectors aimed at the last cities of their race, the Slaugth had no choice but to abandon the Tau project. The Intendants were told to return to the Vermidromes, and the Ethereals were formally given complete freedom to rule their race as they see fit. With their ingenious plan foiled by their own rebellious creations, the Board of Principals descended into raving fury not seen since the War of Sword and Tentacle. But an ancient and devious race such as theirs could never allow emotions to cloud their judgement. The Slaugth were used to looking for opportunities even in the direst of circumstances, and so they quickly came up with a plan to turn this horrible fiasco to their advantage. Instead of one slave race to pit against the Imperium, they would now get two!

The Compact of "Equals"

The Ethereals and the Vespid Foremen were surprised when they received an invitation by the Board of Principals. Much to their puzzlement, they were treated as equals aboard the Vermidrome housing the ruling council of the maggot men. And, of course, they could hardly believed their ears when Principal Txont himself asked them to accept the Slaugth into their alliance. Instead of a Tau-Vespid pact, he proposed a much grander structure - the Compact of Free Galactic Interchange, a pan-Galactic organisation focused on trade and self-defence, open to any race that would like to join it. Within the Compact, any Xenos race could strive for prosperity and enrichment without its bare existence being threatened by the darker forces of the Galaxy, such as the Ruinous Powers or the Imperium of Man. While the Tau were greatly suspicious of their former masters and rushed to decline the proposal, the Vespid Foremen got extremely agitated on mentioning of the Imperium - it seemed that the speech of Principal Txont hit a nerve with them. They immediately agreed to the creation of the Compact and put an ultimatum to their Tau allies - either they join together, or they abandon their alliance. Ultimata were, after all, the only form of diplomacy the Vespid recognised. The Tau realised that without support from the Vespid they would have to face the brutal vengeance of their former overlords, and so they begrudgingly agreed to join the new Galactic alliance.

"If you can't defeat them, lead them" - so says an ancient Slaugth proverb. After realising that they stood no chance in an open confrontation with the Tau-Vespid alliance, the Slaugth opted to pull the same trick on them as they did on the Eldar millions of years ago - become their trusted allies and slowly usurp the real power in the alliance through a combination of shrewd politicking, intrigue and a liberal usage of mind control. Once in the familiar position of the shadowy mastermind, they could easily manipulate both the Tau and the Vespid into doing their bidding without ever realising they're being used. Of course, posing as equals to savage primitives was extremely humiliating to the ancient Slaugth, but at this point they were willing to sacrifice their pride to achieve their goals.

Several decades after the founding of the Compact, its armed forces were put to test for the first time. The enemy came from the Galactic North East, carried by ships that used advanced Abominable Intelligence rather than Navigators to plot a safe course through the Warp. After the first skirmishes with the mysterious foe's relentless robotic hordes, the Slaugth started suspecting that the Necrons had awoken to reclaim the Galaxy as their own. But the truth was much more bizarre than that: the Compact was attacked by the forces of the Grand Reconquista, a large scale campaign of conquest conducted by the humans from the world of Terra. This may sound familiar, but there is a catch to it: this Terra was located in the Scutum–Centaurus Arm of the Galaxy rather than in the Orion Arm. Although these humans abhorred genetic modification and relied on robogogy instead, they were every bit as belligerent and well-versed in the art of war as their namesakes from Segmentum Solar. Even the combined forces of the Compact found this foe too strong for them, and, for a time, many Principals believed the Compact had outlived its usefulness and needed to be abandoned. However this war was eventually interrupted by a well-timed invasion from the Imperium of Man. The Xenos and the Humans of the galactic East were forced to band together to stand a chance against the might of the Imperium. When the Imperial forces were repelled, the Compact had one more member: the Empire of Humanity.

The expansion of the Compact continued when the enigmatic Saharduin decided to join the organisation. The Slaugth were appalled by their blatant worship of the C'tan, which they still hated and considered the greatest threat to the Galaxy even sixty million years after the War in Heavens. However, the Tau and the Humans insisted on accepting the Saharduin into the Compact, not least of all in order to weaken the Slaugth influence. Their calculations proved correct, and the accession of the Saharduin ended the era of Slaugth dominance. The Principals realised, much to their annoyance, that the Compact was slowly turning from an asset into a hindrance. Perhaps it was finally the time to leave this ridiculous spectacle behind and move on; time to pit the other Compact members against each other and enslave those who would manage to survive in this conflict. The age of subtle manipulation was nearing its end; the dawn of the Neo-Slaugt Empire was about to break...