The true gems were just as varied in shade and hue. The alkali ochre of desert land predominated, planed smooth by the industry of colonisation or shattered in great chasm-rents by tectonic unrest. Oceanic worlds were turbulent sapphires and aquamarines swallowing sunlight beneath their immense depths – and many defied even water’s pure hue, instead saturated by endless seas stained chrysoberyl by choking clouds of bacterium life, or rippling carnelian depths playing haven to hosts of aquacarnosaurs.
Colour upon colour upon colour, many worlds blending their offerings together, landmass by varied landmass. And yet the blue-green of unriven Terran antiquity was rarest of all. Such an innocent shade defied inevitability: everywhere mankind set foot, it tore from the earth and sucked from the seas, it harvested and wrought. It claimed. It conquered. It destroyed.
Nowhere was this truer than amidst the worlds turning around Terra’s own sun. Ra hadn’t been surprised when he first saw Terra from orbit, seeing the Throneworld herself a sickly beige, strangled by pollution, raked by the scars of endless war. Mars, once terraformed into a place of palatial idyll where human ingenuity had brought forth vegetation from dead soil, had been war-torn back into the dustbowl barrenness of its pre-colonisation era.
Ra was far from those worlds now. He twisted bodilessly in the black, facing another cloud-wreathed sphere, this one a Pangaean orb of earthen continents and only modest seas. Cityscapes showed as grey bruising across the landmasses, becoming pinprick-lit beacons as night fell swiftly across the hemisphere. Mere heartbeats later, dawn returned to the visible hemisphere, extinguishing the cityscapes’ multitude of lights, restoring them to the grey blotches of any civilisation viewed from orbit. Millions of people must have called the world home. Billions.
‘What world is this?’ Ra asked the void.
There was no answer. With the ease of taking a breath, he was flung through the night heavens once more, soaring dreamlike without weight or momentum.
A migraine took form before his senses, painting the void with the retinal smearing of terminal brain cancer. Stars burned the nebulaic gases around them, sending streams of shimmering poison back into the void. They burned and strangled in the shifting tides of some alien substance that was and wasn’t gas; that was and wasn’t real.
The Ocularis Malifica. A warp storm. The warp storm, where the alternate reality of the warp had shattered its way into truespace and curdled dozens of star systems in its hostile miasma. Here was where two universes met, and both suffered with the union.
He stared at the rotting eye polluting the void. It stared back, somehow seething, malevolent without sentience.
‘Why are you showing me all of this, sire?’
+I am not. Not really. This is merely how you process what you are learning when our thoughts are linked. Your mind is attuning to the scale of what I am imprinting upon it.+
Absolute loyalty meant he took reassurance at the Emperor’s words. He did not, however, take much in the way of easy understanding.
‘Sire?’ he asked the void.
The void’s answer was to send him hurling through space, weightless and ethereal, surrounded by the scream of a dying species. Years ago. Centuries ago, when much of the galaxy’s human territories sweltered beneath the choking fire of Old Night’s warp storms.
Here, among the eldar, all was at peace. He saw orbital platforms of sorcery-spun bone, so delicate that a breath of solar wind would surely shatter their tenuous frailty. He saw lush worlds of vegetation where spires of crystal and psychically sung wraithbone formed great spires and connecting walkways, while webway gates flared with endless use inside the towers of grand bloodlines. He saw a race crying out for more, always for more; for music that stimulated the biology of their brains; for wine that sent fire through their nervous systems; for entertainment and pleasures that replaced dignity with the harmony of madness.
He saw things wearing eldar skin moving in the shadows of their society, caressing with blades, killing with biting kisses, drinking blood and eating forbidden flesh with filed-fang smiles.
The truth burst from pale, alien flesh. It erupted free. Claws tore eldar open from within, doorways of bloody meat ripping open in bodies and minds grown soft by decadence and indolence. Warp-things crawled from ears, from nostrils, from tear ducts, shattering the skulls of their hosts as they swelled and grew. Daemons of hybrid gender, as much scorpion as maiden and man, shrieked – newborn and blood-wet – at the burning skies.
And far, far from such horrors, the human race was locked away in the isolation of Old Night. A million different worlds with no capacity to contact one another, each one alone in the fiery twilight of eternal warp storms raking through truespace. Only as one species died could another rise.
The eldar fall, damned by their own vices eating into the wards around their psychic souls. Warp storms that had wracked every world bleed away, focusing in final clusters: the Maelstrom, the Ocularis Malifica, and others far lesser besides. The human race rises, Old Night giving way to the dawn as the eternal storms recede.
A new godling has been born – ‘Slaanesh!’ the eldar weep and cry, ‘Slaanesh! Slaanesh!’ – but the rest of the suddenly silent galaxy takes its first breaths in a new age.
Ships begin to sail. Stellar empires form. One of those empires will become the only empire: the Imperium of Man, the twin kingdoms of Terra and Mars binding together to conquer the now-serene night sky.
A crusade, then an empire, all beneath one man’s banner.
+Everything that has happened, will happen again. It is the way of things. Yet humanity’s death will eclipse the eldar’s annihilation tenfold, for we are evolving into a far more psychically powerful race. Uncontrolled psychic energy will tear reality apart. The warp’s entities will feed on the carcass of the galaxy. There must be control, and control must be maintained.+
‘Control…’ Ra repeated. The scale of such ambition…
+The necessity of it. Lest mankind face a far harsher extinction than the eldar. Their souls shine bright within the warp, drawing the predations of the beasts within its tides. Soon, every human soul will become a beacon of fire.+
How, Ra wondered. How can you know? What other unbelievable futures have you foreseen? How can evolution itself be conquered and controlled?
+Through vision, Ra. We see the warp as an alternate reality, and this is so. It is a mirror, reflecting our every thought and action. Every hate, every death, every nightmare and dream, echoing into eternity. We break into this place, into a realm that harbours the pain and suffering of every man and woman and child to ever live, and we use it to sail between the stars. Because we must. Because until now there has been no other choice.+
‘The webway,’ Ra murmured into the silent night.
+The webway. Mankind is ascending, Ra. Humanity is taking a great developmental step, evolving into a psychic race. Uncontrolled psykers are lodestones for the warp’s touch. A species comprising them would suffer as the eldar suffered. And for the eldar, this evolutionary juncture was their final step before destruction. I will not let humanity be destroyed by the same fate. The eldar had the answers within their grasp but were too naive and too proud to save themselves. They had the webway, which could have been their salvation. But they never fully severed their connection to the warp. Their soulfires drew damnation upon their entire species.’