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 in the battles of the War in Heavens, 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.