Additional Background Section 29: The Building Dissolution; The Bane of All Creation. An Overview
No living creature in the galaxy of 60K could possibly ignore the dissolution; the name sane men gave to the Ne-[REMOVED] and its building influence upon reality. Every living thing that had a connection to the sea of souls could feel the sickness working through it like venom in the blood. The barriers between warp and realspace grew ever thinner, tearing in some places like a moth-eaten satin veil pulled taunt across the thorny plate of a beetle. Sometihng from the deepest warp was rising and descending, everywhere and nowhere at once. No one could say what had caused it, for to know such things was to go utterly insane. However, I have gleaned much (and my sanity was never in peril; I lost it decades ago... but I digress). (Author’s note: This section is written, for the most part, in overview, for even a demented fool such as myself cannot begin to explain the intricacies of gods and daemons who boast such labyrinthine minds that I might become lost in them should I attempt to consider them. Yet, I will continue, for I feel this information is essential for my readers, so that they might fully appreciate the events which saw the close of the Age of Dusk, and may yet lead us to extinction...)
To explain what caused the first warp rifts, and what set the great game into motion cannot be fully explained until I depict the crossing of the Well and the charge of Revelation’s Host across the plain of Geometry-Abominable. However, I can divulge here the course of events which brought forth the Draziin-maton and the latter stages of dissolution.
It began with the Lords of Twilight; the most ancient and proud of the Eldar that still festered in Commorragh. They scorned Vect and his new order of the Dark Eldar, and resented the Dark Lord’s ban upon the old, forbidden arts. The Lords of the Iron Thorn and many senior members of the old Solar Cults were members, as well as the scions of the long-vanquished El’Uriaq dynasty of Shaa-dom. Their unofficial ruler was the warp-scarred Archon Ysclyth. Many had thought he had been destroyed in M41, when Vect collapsed his sub-realm of Talon Cyriix, and allowed the daemons under his command to usurp his kabal. But he had escaped, and he fled to the deepest and most secluded corner of the Dark City; deep in a realm which was not fully in the webway, or fully in the warp.
There, amidst wraith-kind and mandrakes, his mind was warped, and his body was disassembled and remade a thousand times. When El’uriaq returned to the world of the living, his lacerated soul was forever changed. He had witnessed such horrific and glorious sights in his hellish limbo that they alone could fill a dozen madmen’s libraries of scribbling. He was reborn as El’Uriaq the Daemonmancer, and when he returned from taht dark place, he took his Lords of Twilight into council. He had found a way to control daemons, and to bind them to his will.
He knew this, so he claimed, for there was an entity that lingered beyond the warp, beneath and above it, beyond the endless deep; trapped but ever-living. This creature was known to the Eldar as Eldanesh the God-Caller, the mythical first King of the Eldar race. Gods and devils had once bent the knee to Eldanesh, yet Khaine had slain him long ago. El’Uriaq came back to reveal the truth. Eldanesh died yes, but El’Uriaq claimed taht his death was not like that of a Dark Eldar, to be consumed by She Who Thirsts, nor to dissolve like the mon keigh’s putrid little soul embers. His soul when to the place where the Unborn and the neverwere held court, like impossible kings over a realm which did not exist, nor could exist. A realm where all the paths never taken resided.
The daemonmancer promised the lords of twilight the universe. They would become gods, more powerful than the Dark Muses. More powerful than the old Gods, or the Primordial Usurper Gods combined. They could drink the life of entire galaxies with the power El’Uriaq envisioned. His plan was one on a truly impossible scale, and he drew them in with his serpent words.
Thus, they set their plans into motion; plans which began in the dimly remembered times of the Imperium of Man, in M41. Throughout this period, their primary aim was to hide their efforts from Vect’s spies, they did manage to install a daemon, Hamadraya, to guide Huron Blackheart, and made pacts and brought to heel many daemonic forces. In the darkest of ceremonies, the Lords of Twilight allied with the Crone World Eldar; the Eldar who had fallen to chaos and become terrible daemonic caliphs of frightening power. Yet, it wasn’t until the fall of the Imperium that their plans could come to full fruition.
Using their agents across the galaxy, El’Uriaq’s minions located the old warrior machine sof the once mighty Eldar Empire. The machines had once laid waste to entire armies on the orders of ambivalent eldar, and quenched suns with their power. The Lords of twilight would bring them back, more powerful and terrifying than ever.
Their efforts did not go unnoticed however. A mysterious being with no name and no face came to them in the guise of a captured slave, yet it spoke with the words of a daemon of frightful power. It called itself the Changeling, and it claimed that the Lord of Change was with them. Through this creature, a galaxy-spanning conspiracy was hatched. Kor Phaeron, the Black cardinal himself, grew to learn of this scheme of conquest and desecration, as did many others. Schemes within schemes were born in the years following the New Devourer and the collapse of civilisation. Warlords betrayed Archons, who swindled sorcerers, who vanquished expendable pawns on the deceitful words of daemons. Ahriman sought to pre-empt the Lords of Twilight, and took the opportunity to raid Terra, stealing its secrets while their plans were still in motion.
Through subtle manipulation, the Anarchy Child, Sparrod, caused oddly-specific acts of demented carnage and chaos on many worlds that bordered the Eye of Terror. As previously mentioned, these attacks were not random, but they formed a pattern; a ritual. A symbol; eight hundred and eighty eight worlds all dying in sight of the light coming fromt he Eye at a specific date, at a specific location in the eye. And on that date, through the massive soulstorm caused by the Anarchy Child, time was paused at the heart of the Eye. At the centre of a rift that plunged into the very heart of the warp, time and space were obliterated utterly. The soul storm... burrowed through the warp, piercing it utterly. Such an event had occurred only twice before; the first came before the birth of Man, the second came at the fall of the Eldar. But for a brief instant, the Deep Warp was opened. And from there, the-
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[Chronicle repaired. Strange malfunction.]
-and the Crone Worlders managed to finally store them, though it cost so very much. Nevertheless, the automatons of the Old Empire were now filled up with the stuff of the madness within madness; the warp beyond reckoning. But this was jsut the start.
For the Lords of twilight were deceived. Tzeentch was never a servant or ally of theirs. Tzeentch had set into motion the great game, and all the playing pieces were his. The newly-born Draziin automatons, or Draziin-maton, were no slaves for disgruntled eldar nobles to toy with. Tzeentch was a mere facet of their master, who lay beyond the veil and had no form, for it was a being born to end form and function and sanity.
The Draziin-Maton had animus and purpose now, but they were trapped in their impossible world at the heart of the Eye. El’uriaq was, in fact, one of their agents, and he used his twisted, half-shade form to destroy the Lords of Twilight. The Decapitator was unleashed upon them, and though their Kabals vainly sought to ward off his attentions, he found them all in the end. As Commorragh fought the Wolf and Raven in bloody combat, the Lords of twilight were quietly, silently killed. Their skulls were taken into Aelindrach, and there, the Decapitator added them to his collection. Unbeknownst to all Commorrites, Aelindrach would prove to be the weak chink in their City’s armour...
Meanwhile, beyond the webway, the Draziin-maton and their allies in the material universe conquered the Eye. El’Uriaq allowed himself to be ‘captured’ by the Word Bearers. He was tortured, and eventually gave the greedy heretics access to many sorcerous secrets even Lorgar did not know. He taught them new powers and divulged information. Entranced by the thought of an ever deeper understanding of the Sea of Souls, the Word bearers threw in their lot with the Draziin-maton, and together they usurped Abaddon, and chased him from the Western Chaos Imperium, while they remotely controlled the Eastern Imperium. As the power of Lorgar the Annointed King grew, so too did the warp’s grip on realspace.
Across the galaxy, they attempted to weaken the veil, to flood the warring galaxy with warp energy, until there might occur a total event collapse; the end of the materium entirely. This total event collapse had begun with the first chaos god, and with every new god born, the veil grew thinner and thinner. As the galaxy fought itself; as Angyls fought daemons, Krork fought necrons and man fought man, more terrible things were being born. Valchocht the maker, the Daemon King of the Soul Forge, finally constructed for itself a body of purest warp stuff. Through this new grand vortex of a body, it became another Chaos God, and the galaxy got a little darker. Everywhere, the universe was unraveling, slowly but surely.
However, the Draziin-Maton did not understand the minds, or the natures, of their foes. They were beings of potential, not fact. They had no idea that there were forces arrayed against them, with plans in place to take the fight directly to their very heart.
When retaliation came, when the final war was launched, it would be a great Revelation to them...