Editing Quest:The Long Night:Sparks at Midnight (section)

==The Galaxy goes on==
Ridcully is now busy on two main fronts with his divinations. The first one is Asdrubael Vect, who is trying to drive his sane brothers out of the Webway. The second is [[Ahzek Ahriman]].

What's the deal with that one, you might ask?

According to Rids' divinations, Tzeentch is a god who ascended from a mortal. Or rather, will ascend. There doesn't seem to be a way to prevent it, but the details, like the time and the mortal's identity, are as undetermined as anything about the guy. Ahzek is the main runner for the Bird's throne right now. While you don't care much for whether it will be him or someone else, newborn gods do tend to receive a major temporary power boost, so you would rather delay it until the galaxy is a bit less of a clusterfuck.

Rids is trying to track him, Areatha aids the Eldar with the hunting, and you have your own problems.

Perturabo's vanguard had arrived in the area to take over the local Chaos polities. The Eldar did their best to wreck the infrastructure, and are now raiding the Iron Legion forces.

You are expected to deploy your forces in twenty years, and decide to use the opportunity to fiddle with the army composition a bit.

The four trillion refugees start settling in the Trust. Issues are minor so far, except for the Vestri League people. They accuse one of the newcomer Marine Chapters of raiding their worlds.

Areatha tries to destroy Ahzek as he tries to gain a level by killing [[Iskandar Khayon]]. Unfortunately, Khayon summons an Exalted he had a pact with, but fails to contain it. While Ahriman is forced to flee with the Exalted pursuing, Areatha barely survives, with wounds Isha will have trouble healing.

The Avernus Army starts its reorganization. According to the plan, your militia and PDF are to focus on urban fighting and not to be deployed offworld unless really needed. The higher tiers now have better training and gear at the expense of quantity. Helltroopers are mainly assault units, while the Helguard has specialized formations for all kinds of tasks. Also, you create a new top tier called the Heljaegers. These are bodyguards, Titan Hunters and Astartes Hunters. However, most recruits of that quality go into the Psyker Hunter forces.

Perturabo arrives in the region, and Ridcully starts divining his plans. In a few years, that makes the Primarch take enough casualties to start reviewing his tactics. The raids on the Vestri clans are divined as well... yes, you might have guessed it. The [[Space Sharks]] are making resupply runs in their regular polite manner. Oh, and they want to join the Trust.

Then you go to another High Council meeting. This one, naturally, is mostly about the war. The Trust is generally capable of holding its worlds, though a few regions can't spare anything for counterattacks. For now, that's fine with you. After all, with a significant portion of the Iron Realm's 180-sector military in your vicinity, attacking a fortification expert like Perturabo appears... unwise.

With the Sharks, you propose the following idea. Most of the Chapter goes to protect the Vestri League as compensation for the raids. You keep a few Marines in your territory to bring up the Chapter's numbers. Hopefully, you'll manage to restore them into a form more appropriate for Sanity forces.

Also, you are elected to be in charge of the Trust's military. At least you manage to convince the rest to let you decide how hard to cling to each planet: it's not good being predictable when fighting a Primarch.

Ridcully divines [[Fabius Bile]]. It appears the guy is splicing Tyranid and Marine DNA, along with Primarch samples. The Eldar tip off the Silent King about his plans and location, confident that after all his struggles to exterminate the bugs, he'll take it personally enough to handle the problem.

As for Avernus matters, you contact the Troll Remnant Kingdom.

It appears the tribes we've encountered earlier are but some kids compared to a much larger realm. Good thing we've started negotiating when we did, because these guys were just about growing concerned about you bullying their baby brothers, and might have interfered. And these guys aren't stone age savages; they still retain a certain amount of the legacy of their ancestors; the True Trolls, some of the mightiest War in Heaven warriors. The Remnant people had spent sixty million years attempting to reproduce the power of the True Trolls, and while they did fail (the procedure was ''extremely'' Unobtanium-dependent), even the failure left them masters in advanced material and technology production. Great. You can trade now.

The Iron War divinations go smoothly, both for attacks and infiltration. However, it seems Perturabo is soon going to be annoyed enough for a general assault.

You face two major probes. Each one is numbering in the tens of thousands of ships. The Eldar take most of the ships out, but enough enemies land. One force is routed quickly, the other takes two years of siege.

Meanwhile, Vect is trying to drive the Empire of Ashes out of the Webway. For all of theirs and Ridcully's efforts, he is worryingly successful. Seeing the Eldar distracted, Perturabo brings up his schedule up a bit more.

Fortunately (or not so much), a new player enters the field. Normally, the Dark Eldar forces have to deal with a large Ork Waaagh! directed at them by the Empire of Ashes. However, lately, Vect had managed to shatter it, leaving him free for his assault. Fortunately, it seems Khorne doesn't like a servant of Slaanesh doing so well, and decides his favourite toy could use a change of scenery. [[Tuska Daemon-Killa]] leaves the Eye of Terror to take charge of the leaderless Boyz.

===A minor detour: The Triumvirate===

The Triumvirate. It started its existence centuries ago, as the Aetheric Concordat. As you might remember, while Ridcully and the others were scouting out Nurgle's mansion, the Eldar were providing all kinds of distractions. Among them, an alliance of gods working together against him. To everyone's surprise, the guys found they liked working with each other, and the alliance stayed ever since. At first, there were many gods of all kinds there, like a Magos who accidentally created an AI, with both becoming gods during their attempts to evade the Imperium, or a cook god who was so badly damaged by a Slaaneshi Exalted he only retained the skill to make sandwiches.

During the Grand Ritual, the Concordat was nearly destroyed. Only three remained out of it. Tempered in the fires of fighting Tjapa, they are now more powerful than most Exalted. The three are Zahhak, the Goddess of Free Will, Ruick, the God of Defiance, and Faust, the Goddess of Unity. Their followers are mostly the petty forces of the galaxy, like subsector powers, single planets, or worldless fleets. These are known as the Ten Thousand Points of Light.