Editing Archaeotect Collective (section)

==The Great Diaspora==
The fall of the Imperium plunged human space into chaos. As word spread of the Emperor’s death and the Warmaster’s ascension to power, the Imperial machine was shaken to its core, individual parts straining against one another in directionless panic. In time, the fist of the Warmaster would secure the worlds of his new Imperium, but for now, disorder reigned. Amidst the death throes of the old order, countless undesirables, malcontents, and condemned saw their chance at freedom delivered to them, and there was a great migration out of Imperial space. Directionless and alone, many thousands of these refugees saw their journeys cut short, or found themselves plunging into dangers greater than any they could have imaged, the galaxy burning around them as Chaos tightened its grip upon what was once Segmentum Solar. For every vessel that was lost, however, ten more sailed on into the great unknown of the void.

It would be many years before the first of these travellers began to gather, banding together to scrape into being something resembling a unified nation. Hereteks and criminals, Mechanicum deserters, terrified refugees, conquered peoples from advanced civilizations like the Interex – slowly but surely, they came together, with little to bind them but a truth that burned like fire in each and every mind. The Emperor had been wrong. His way had ended in a galaxy aflame. His vision had destroyed their homes, torn down their accomplishments, and delivered humanity into the arms of something greater and more vicious than even He. Even in an abject state of exile, lost and adrift amidst the stars, that thought offered a measure of vindication, and from that came the desire – the ''need'' – to rebuild. To recover their past greatness, snatched away from them by the Emperor and his Imperium.

How precisely the first Archeotect fleets came into being, or when, is hard to pin down. What can be said for sure is that, by the closing days of M32, there were vessels of the burgeoning order observed moving between the stars with startling regularity. Their mission was one of recovery, at least at first. They picked the galaxy for remnants of days long passed – a time when mankind was altogether greater than it had ever been since. Their efforts were disparate, coordinated only in the vaguest sense, and were it not for a sudden twist of fate on the eve of M33, the Archeotects might have remained a footnote, eventually stamped out by time as much as by any number of eager jackboots. Without no banner to call their own and no allegiance to any but those close to them, these ragtag flotillas gradually migrated far to the galactic north, seeking to be free of the constant warring that characterized life in a galaxy of the Emperor's making. They sought to find isolated worlds and untouched, ancient relics of the Old Night, far beyond the borders of the squabbling Crusader States and the rapacious hordes of Chaos. So it was that more and more of these fleets congregated in the dark space at the very edges of Segmentum Obscurus and Ultima, where the stars were spread thinly and there were no jealous kings to lay claim to their findings.