Archaeotect Collective

This page is a work in progress, part of the Imperium Asunder project, a fan remake of the warhammer 40 000 history.

History

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.

Phenex Prime

The future of the Archeotect Collective was unearthed, without particular ceremony, on a distant world beyond the edges of known space – the largest sphere in a system of nine. The discovery made on that barren, airless world would forever change the disparate remnants that flew under the Archeotect banner, and immortalize those heading the mission, both figuratively and literally. The distant stars beyond the light of Segmentum Obscurus had long been the aspiration of many an Archeotect seeking to unearth some great secret of the ancient past, but few could claim to have made it as far as the outer systems, wary of the ancient horrors that and remnants of Old Night that roamed those cold starways. It took a man with nothing to lose – a descendant of the old Mechanicum by the name of Isador Vanth – to brave the territory and eventually land upon the surface of Phenex Prime. By all accounts a star fading far too soon, the captain’s career had been one of disaster, brushes with the fledgling Crusader States having destroyed much of his parent fleet and cost him the greater part of his crew. Whether he himself was strong of character or command is not documented, and matters little, for he returned from Phenex Prime with the blood of kings in his veins.

Amidst the dust of an ancient kingdom, Vanth and his fellows discovered a technology long lost to the varying empires of mankind. In the years after his transformation, in the turmoil that would follow, Vanth described how it called to him - how he and his crew seemed to sense some presence infringing upon their waking thoughts, twisting in the dark hours of sleep, guiding them into the light. When they finally made planetfall amidst the ruins of the fossilized city, the shadows of its inhabitants splayed across its walls and arches, they trekked for hours before finding the source of their strange visions, deep below the bedrock of the metropolis. It was a shifting shape of perfect, unreflective pitch, its angles shimmering from one form to another, from cube to sphere to dodecahedron. Vanth's writings would describe it as spitting static light and filling their eyes with visions and truths, speaking to them in mathematical sequence, its angelic language blasting apart neurons and reshaping them in its image, too sacred and potent to be comprehended by mortal minds. But he and his crew understood that every vision had significance, every aching burst of will had meaning, and as they stood, mesmerized by its glory, it accepted them into its presence, reshaping them.

Vanth and his crew returned from their long sojourn beneath the pale light of the outer stars as more than mere men and women, imbued with the strength and knowledge of an age long passed, and they brought their discovery to every Archeotect fleet they could find a way to communicate with. This would eventually lead to the birth of House Vanth, the first of the Apotheotect Lineages, and the formation of the Archeotect Collective as it exists today.