The Death of the Emperor
Panorama of the Endtimes
Part I
Space. The Great void. The Sea of Eternity.
Space is a many things to many peoples, each as wild and differing a notion as there are stars burning in the night skies. To the countless, endless eyes that attempt to pierce it’s vastness it appears endless, a tract of blackened ocean, dotted with tiny points of light and life. Untold mystics gather around fires, trading wary gazes with the oily depths, scraping at some means to convey the origins and purpose of the great beyond.
To the tribes of old Terra, the night sky was an ocean, a roiling and beautiful spectacle were the ancestors of humanities ancestors sailed in ships of gilded light. The planets and stars were the minds and bodies of Gods, staring down in judgement at their peoples. In later years, when the secrets of Mankind’s own oceans had been revealed to the sterile and harsh light of discovery, men again turned their eyes skyward for answers. They flew blind into the wild night, for glory, for discovery, for their Emperor.
To the auld Eldar Empire, Space was simply another aspect of their endless domain. A rich tapestry of blues and blacks, of midnight purples and star-wrought reds, the void was simply another tool to be bent and fashioned to their wills. From its many irregularities and phenomena, the Eldar took bold steps in science and art, the culmination of which would be their endless arrays of webway Tunnels, vast psionic constructs both within and without the spectrum of the galaxy. Now for this most ancient of races, it is the sound and sight of their death, a spanless carrion dirge to sound of the dying days of the High Species.
To the youthful Tau, it is progress. They look upon the stars without the tainted noise and superstition of the immaterium to cow their collective hopes and dreams, and see the universe as a place of opportunity and power. They, who in the great schemes of time and place are but mewling newborns fresh from the womb, see the stars for what they are: atoms, gas, chemicals, energy and they bend each to their will. More so than any other species, the Tau see the bounty in the great dark, and strive to bring light to illuminate its wonder and divinity.
To the Greenskins, space simply is. It is a means of conveyance to the endless war that all Orks are born into. To question the whys, hows and therefores of the galaxy is a concept so totally alien, so anathema to an Ork, that to even think about thinking about the galaxy is ludicrous.
Space is a many varied thing. To the predators of the old stars it is a feeding ground, a stinking hovel were they can sup on the endless despair that festers at the heart of all mortal races. To their servants, it lost all meaning and beauty long ago, their souls bound to metal centuries upon centuries ago, all sorrow, joy and wonder at the infinite complexity of their own home washed clean away in a tide of ignorant servitude.
And amongst the stars of our sky creep new predators, creatures whose eyes have seen stars and spans the likes which we could never conceive, and which we will never behold: the predators having stripped their own skies of beauty long ago, before our own skies even existed.
Every species from every walk of life have their own tales of the skies, their own beliefs and names for void: The Ceiling of Creation, The Wellspring, The Eyes of Gods, Hashu’nivaal, The Maddening Space, The Sea of Souls. But there is one thing, one solitary fact that all creatures must know.
Space is Madness.
Space is Despair.
Space is War and Blood and Fire.
The Void is the end of all.
For behind the midnight curtain of the cosmos is the Infernal Realm. The Endless Great Lunacy, The Realm of Chaos itself: The Warp.
A diverse echo of our own reality, the Warp is madness and sorrow distilled. It is the tears of rage that soil a scorned lover’s visage as they loose their rage upon the adulterer. It is the shrill, piercing scream as the terrors of the night descend upon the unwary. It is the first cry of the newborn, as they are met by the infinite horrors of the waking world. It is everywhere, and it is nowhere. It is everything you have know, and the countless things you will never be. It is the souls of all in an endless cycle of decay and death.
And it is within this realm that the final act of hate, the cry of horror, the final breath of pain and the last twist in the strands of fate have begun.
Timeless minds course through the roiling currents of the maddened ocean, like monolithic predators of the deep; they consume the very world around them to give themselves function. Conceptual creatures the size of nations will themselves into cohesive forms in the scarlet lunacy, the world around them warping and shifting to accommodate their expanding forms. Smaller predators and scavengers swim in panic in all directions, but are pulled by maddening currents back to the solidifying masses, their screams and objections lost in the droning din of the new monstrosity’s gravity. The warp bleeds and flows around the blackened shapes, like mountains torn from the living rocks and thrust into the endless skies, turning slowly in the current, their bodies inviting madness to any who would look upon them. The four shapes hover in silence in the maddening sea for spans that are both seconds and life-times, existing always and never in the roiling depths. All four turn their monstrous intellects to a single point in time and space, their eyes piercing the very skin of reality itself and pour their collective wills into the material realm.
Somewhere in the endless night of space, dozens of parsecs from old Terra, a singular world catches fire. Its jungles and oceans erupt into a boiling cacophony, it’s atmosphere feeding the growing conflagration below it. Screams and cries echo off the evaporating clouds as the worlds populace burns in wanton act of genocide. A humanoid, tribal species, undeveloped and living a peaceful coexistence with their world is snuffed from reality, their lithe bodies burning at the will of beings who until that moment cared not if they lived or died. Pillars of ash and detritus billow into the sky, the stench of burnt meat and living matter swell as hot winds whip through the frenzy of death and horror, and as one the four Great Powers force their will onto the virgin world.
And in a few horrifying minutes, it is over.
The eyes of the creatures close as they each start to drift back into the obscurity of their own realms, their work done. The world below burns, its entire populace sacrificed to the will of the Dark Gods. They had begun the final move, the last act of cruel and malicious violence they can enact upon their sister-realm.
Upon the burnt world, a shape crawls from the mud and ruin of the scorched earth. A man stands, albeit a giant of a man, perfect in body and mind. The man stands unsteadily to his feet, his form naked and robust, and his features broad and handsome even under the ash and mud that soils him. His scalp is clean-shaven, and his eyes shine a warm copper in the twinkling fires of the vast pyres. He stares about him in abject horror at the destruction and death around him, and as memories and thoughts of a different time flood into him, he staggers to his knees in the boiled mud. Gripping his head in his hands, his body shakes violently as he weeps at what has been done on his behalf, and at what he himself has done. Faces flash in his mind, acts of violence, thoughts of desire and infinite rage, he sees his own hands covered in the blood of millions, and a face, a mirror of his own lined with sorrow and disappointment. He sees his own hands strike out and the face winces and all about him the universe cracks, and sorrow, and hate, and wrath and entropy flood into reality. He speaks unbidden, Father, as the final memory of who he is and what he must do falls into place.
His eyes snap to the infinite, smoked-streaked skies of this nameless world, and with all the horror and pain and mourning in the cosmos, Horus Lupercal, First Son of the Emperor screams his rage to the monstrous Void, only to meet the uncaring silence of infinity.
Other Volumes
Volume I:http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/The_Death_of_The_Emperor_-_A_Continuation_of_the_40K_Universe_by_Dark_Lord_Seanron
Volume III:http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/The_Death_of_The_Emperor:_Vol._3_by_Dark_Lord_Seanron
Volume IV: [ http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/The_Death_of_The_Emperor:_Vol._4_by_Dark_Lord_Seanron]
Volume V: http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/The_Death_of_The_Emperor:_Vol._5_by_Dark_Lord_Seanron