Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===An Unlikely Escape===

When Nresht interrupted a military briefing to present his opus magnum to the Panel of Principals, most council members thought that the mad genius had finally lost it. But the scientist quickly made them change their minds when he started explaining his devious plan. Nresht recognised that the war was lost and all the avenues of retreat were cut - except for one. An escape through time was still a possibility for the Slaugth, and perhaps the only way to save their race. Principal Nresht offered to build one hundred Vermidromes, colossal cities shrunk to the size of railway cars, which were to house the remnants of the Slaugth. He would then send these cities millions of years into the future, when the Eldar empire is long gone and the Galaxy is free for the maggot people to conquer. 

When the other Principals asked what would happen if the Eldar dominion would fail to collapse, Nresht revealed the second part of his plan. He suggested to use the sleeper agents who managed to survive Aenarion's brutal purges to plant seeds of debauchery and decadence into the Eldar society. Left on its own in the Galaxy, without any worthy rivals to keep them on their toes, the Eldar would be bound to become vulnerable to moral decay. And that's where the mind-controlled agents of the Slaugth would come in. They would begin innocently enough, staring pleasure cults for bored aristocracy seeking fresh experiences. But in time, these cults would grow into something much more debauched, and their rot would infect the entire Eldar society, undermining its foundations. The bloated Eldar Empire of the future would collapse on its own, without a single shot fired. And then, the Vermidromes would arrive from the past to take over the empty Galaxy.

The plan sounded utterly deranged, but the Board of Principals was desperate for any solutions to their problem; besides, Nresht had quite a reputation for coming up with the craziest ideas and making them a reality. And so, the Principal's plan got the green light. Mobilising nearly all of the slaves at their disposal, the Slaugth constructed one hundred Vermidromes in record time. Then their entire population was evacuated to these bottled cities. As the Eldar were mounting the final attack on the Slaugth home system, Principal Nresht's time machine sent the Vermidromes to the far future. Only a handful of volunteers were left behind to control the sleeper agents in the upper echelons of Eldar Empire. Aenarion and his generals were infuriated when instead of the grand battle they expected in the home system of their mortal enemies, they found only hordes of drooling slaves left without masters. To vent his fury off, the Phoenix Emperor ordered to subject the former Slaugth worlds to viral bombings anyway. 

The search for the mysteriously disappeared maggot men continued, with interruptions, for millennia. The Eldar have scanned every nook and cranny of the Galaxy, the vast expanses around it and even parts of the Warp, but their enemies were nowhere to be found. And so, for millions of years, the Slaugth became merely one of the dark legends of the past along with the Necrons. It was almost like the worms that walk never existed in the first place - the only traces of their existence that the Eldar couldn't erase were the deep scars in their own hearts. Betrayed cruelly by a race that they had considered their brothers in spite of all their differences, they could never trust any alien species again. Ironically, this made the Eldar almost as xenophobic as the Slaugth used to be. Any advanced Xenos race that they came in contact with, from the Saruthi to the Cyfecti, was brutally exterminated before it could become a serious threat. But the seeds of destruction planted by Principal Nresht were slowly taking root in their society. In fact, the mad savant greatly underestimated the Eldar propensity to decadence. The collapse of their empire was much more spectacular than he could have ever imagined.