Slaugth (Hektor Heresy)

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

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 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 materialised 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.