Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

=== The Old Eldar Empire ===

Surprisingly, the inhabitants of the Old Eldar Empire weren't always depraved and horrible people. The eldar didn’t emerge from the Webway after the War in Heaven and immediately go, “well, the [[Old Ones|old bosses]] are gone, time to snort hookers, do blow, and murderfuck us a new god. At first they were actually good and reasonable people, trying to do right and hew to what they thought the Old Ones wanted. This can be seen in the fact that the eldar actually left Earth and many of the Old Ones’ other laboratory worlds alone, when they could easily colonized it when the ancestors of humans were little more than squirrels. [[High_Elves|For many years the old eldar Empire actually protected the galaxy from destabilizing threats]] like the Cythor Fiends.

[[Dark Elves (Warhammer)|Then started the slow slide into decadence]], a death of a thousand cuts made from decisions that seemed quite reasonable at the time. The democratic council of equals became a kratocracy with an nominal autocrat split into feuding noble houses. They picked a fight with their old allies the Hrud. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Ilmaea|They stopped the imperialistic aspirations of one would be conquering species much as they had before only this time they stole their suns and condemned them to a slow, agonizing death out of spite]]. They started doing drugs and seeing other species less as people and more as toys.

By the time humanity first started expanding into the stars, the eldar had virtually turned their back on the outside world and cared only about looking inward. For most the Dark Age of Technology humanity only knew of the eldar as “that inscrutable, isolationistic, highly advanced race that rarely if ever cares about anything outside its borders” except on the rare occasions in which they wanted to expand and bloody wars were fought. Then as the rise in influence of the pleasure cults grew, the eldar went from uncaring to outright malevolent, actively snatching victims from beyond their borders to satisfy their twisted whims. Thankfully by this point humanity and the other members of the Interstellar League were strong enough to repel such raiding incursions, though if the Old Eldar Empire had actually cared enough to put their mind to it they could’ve wiped us all out. That said, diplomatic channels didn’t dry up all at once. The eldar almost never allowed mon-keigh into their territory, but during times of peace you very rarely saw eldar (especially young eldar) in the GaB Human Dominion. Eldrad toured around the Dominion for the eldar equivalent of spring break in Cancun, but he barely remembers any of it.

And, of course, the depravity of the late empire [[Slaanesh|and what it led to]] is well-known.

Humanity and eldar both claim to have dominated the galaxy during the Dark Age of Technology, and to some degree the claims of both groups have merit. In terms of sheer space humans and their alien allies certainly occupied more planets, whereas from the human persepective the Eldar Empire appeared to consist of a few scattered, heavily-defended enclaves linked through the Webway. However from the Eldar perspective the Eldar had already chosen the best planets to live on, whereas the rest of the galaxy lived on the other 95% of planets that they didn't feel worth colonizing. Eldar planets were essentially all linked via the Webway, meaning the Old Eldar Empire was in effect one giant city and reinforcements could literally walk from planet to planet. For any invasion to succeed you either had to have the strength to take on the entire Eldar Empire at the same time or somehow cut the planet off from the Webway. Invading human worlds, on the other hand, was like kicking a hornet's nest, as the system's local Man of Gold and Iron Minds remotely activated and linked all pieces of human-built technology for the sole purpose of expelling the intruders.

The Senate of the Old Empire were protected by a praetorian Phoenix Guard, who were empowered by a fragment of Asuryan much in the same way that the Harlequins are empowered by a fragment of Cegorach and the Handmaidens are powered by a fragment of Isha. Asuryan created the Phoenix Guard through a loophole in his own decree when it became clear the eldar needed more direct intervention to maintain stability, Asuryan said no direct interaction with mortals, he said nothing about supercharging mortals with chunks of your power from across the veil. Asuryan wasn’t too happy about it, he expected his laws to be obeyed to the letter without question or criticism and then gets salty when they are obeyed exactly as far as the letter or actively hamper what needs to be done, and he was too proud to change things because that would require admitting he didn’t write a perfect law in the first place. Unfortunately, because he was still only indirectly interacting with them it meant they were in no position to stop the birth of Slaanesh.

One of the main purposes of the Phoenix Guard aside from protecting the Eldar Senate from outside threats was to maintain order in the Senate by keeping its members from openly trying to murder each other, as well as stop the super-psykers among them from simply trying to take what they wanted by brainwashing everyone else. Given that they were a semi-monastic order sworn to serve the eldar pantheon’s top god and therefore relatively independent of the power struggles and were gifted with the ability to shrug off mind control, this made them marginally more reliable than the actual Roman Praetorian Guard. At least in the late empire. At first they were probably just as noble they claimed.

==== The Many Atrocities of the Last Days of the Eldar Empire ====

*There was a certain drug that, when consumed by an Eldar, briefly boosted the user's telepathic abilities while also forcing the user's body to slowly crystallize into an array of other drugs. The exact effects and potency depended heavily on the physical qualities and mental state of the user over the course of the transformation; therefore, the lords of the Empire kept 'Eldar farms' where slaves were force-fed the catalyst-drug while carefully kept in certain states of mind. The most potent mixes (although subject to personal taste) were often considered to come from newborn infants, kept in a state of terror and confusion through the entirety of their short lives. The children's mothers were often forced to witness the slow deaths and subsequent consumption of their babies; this did nothing for the quality of the drug, and was done exclusively for the sake of assholery. 
*Billions if not trillions of members of various alien species were kept as slaves. Many Eldar took to breeding specific varieties of slave-species, much as humans breed specific varieties of horse and dog. Although initially this was for practical purposes, aesthetic values quickly took precedence, and most of the slaves of the late-stage empire suffered from multiple types of deformity, features deemed 'aesthetic' becoming grotesquely exaggerated over generations. Of course even this was not enough, and for many Eldar slave-breeders deformity and defect became an end-goal rather than side-effect, engaging in perverse competitions with each other to see how many genetic defects one individual could have and still produce offspring.
*It was the fashion for Eldar nobles to show off the skill and obedience of their slaves by having one prepare him, her, or itself for dinner. The exact procedure varied according to physiology, but the general outline remained the same. First, surgical sorceries were layered upon the slave to allow him to continue functioning despite massive blood loss and organ trauma. Then, preparation would begin; the slave would skin himself, flense his muscles, and remove his own organs to provide the meat for the meal. Then, the slave would cook his own tissues, a process that often took days given late Empire cuisine, every moment sending jolts of agony through exposed nerves. Then, the slave would serve his master and guests; finally, the slave would crack open his skull or closest equivalent, offering his brain-meats to the master as the final course. If the slave had performed sufficiently flawless, the master would honor him by consuming the brain, finally killing the slave; otherwise, hideous tortures awaited, often with the participation of the guests as apology for subpar service. 
*There were artisans, bone carvers, who would make their works from the bones of the living, often surgically and sorcerously fusing four to thirty slaves together to ensure there was a large enough lump of bone to carve.
*In many noble families of the Eldar Empire, it was a tradition to initiate a child into adulthood with incestuous torture, often with prayers to Isha for a child to result from the various couplings. In some families, those children of incest, twisted by the sorcery used in the torture that conceived them, started an honored line of breeding. In others, they became the centerpiece of a feast to celebrate their parents.

==== Eldar "Robots" ====

Despite having a sixty six million year head start over humanity, the eldar never really made widespread use of advanced self-aware artificial intelligence like the Men of Iron and the Iron Minds, mostly because they really didn’t need them. Eldar “robots” such as they were, were more like automata the eldar puppeted with their mind to do work while the actual body lazed around and engaged in hedonism. The bulk of Old Empire armies tended to be composed of these constructs supplemented by flesh and blood forces. The Men of Iron and Iron Minds actually sneered at the eldar over this, saying unlike the eldar’s creations they were partners with humanity and at least their creators had the balls to give them free will. A lot of this was bravado, for despite being a lot more intelligent than their eldar counterparts the Men of Iron and the eldar’s robots were at best evenly matched one-on-one due to the Old Eldar Empire having about sixty six million years of research and development on the Men of Iron.

After the Fall, robotics generally just fell out of use among the eldar, Exodites and Craftworlders didn’t use them because the amount of leisure time their use created is the kind of thing that led to the Fall in the first place, and most Dark Eldar don’t have the psychic juice to power them anymore. The Dark Eldar do use more advanced constructs like Pain Engines, however. However, the shells used to make the puppets were used to make the first wraithguards, modifying them for use as a whole-body prosthetic for a single soul instead of a projected handpuppet for a corporeal body. Indeed, just like how Imperial Knights were originally designed as megafauna busters and Terminator armor are weaponized hazard suits, most modern Eldar technology is civilian-grade stuff repurposed for a lower tech level. The actual military equipment of the Old Eldar Empire are mostly located in the Crone Worlds, much of which was either damaged by the Fall or fell into disrepair during the five thousand years the Crone Eldar spent fighting and fornicating one another in the Eye. The biggest collection of what remains of actually working Old Empire military equipment is monopolized by Arrotyr.

This is also the reason why the Craftworld/Exodite eldar despite being a part of the Imperium for more than ten thousand years never tried to use their influence to reverse the stigma on artificial intelligence (though it should be noted that building A.I. is technically not one of the Rules and exists in kind of a gray area). It didn’t hinder the eldar or their way of life, so they didn’t feel much of a need to complain about it. Additionally, they saw the status of self-aware A.I. and the Men of Iron as an internal concern of humanity, and so mostly deferred to humanity on how to deal with A.I. because humanity would know more about how to deal with their creations than the eldar would.