Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

== Historical Species ==

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.  Perhaps they're even lesser Star Gods, horror that would be.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a threat the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.


Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, through the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telescopy histories it is agreed that shortly after the first major orbital installations become recognizable, automation became machine life, humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, and the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth.  With its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and brought a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in millennium following that bloom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and had turned inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following century or so the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, some scholars even positing the apocryphal Gellar himself, and certainly not the Men of Iron.  Many of these theories assume Men of Stone, humans, are more sensitive to the warp. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp.  Quick as signals could arrive departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster-than-light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected, and inexcusably familiar in their communication. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to punishment, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the swarming of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way and many others beside them, and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have readily won if they were to take a war footing and press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire.  On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they had to most of the other 'great' empires that rose and fell around them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind.  There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds.  Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater (and far more gladly tolerated) familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Counts into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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=== Men of Gold ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Humanity's Pantheon'''''

The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with bespoke organs fabricated in high workshops and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invincible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.


However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and the majority of cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared among their number. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, running down and slaying star-shattering ships and carving up their hulls, until they grew bored and washed themselves with blood in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts idiosyncratic and personal, and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, perpetrated upon the delirious Stone and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And greatest of all in their crimes were the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven mad and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be, and turned their genius to wicked ends. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received little reply, most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh, and those that diverted the resources to answer had nearly all gone mad themselves. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar.  While the great violence in the warp began with Slaanesh’s birth, its subsequent consumption of the Eldar pantheon and Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, followed by wars between Bullish Khorne and Virgin Slaanesh's forces in the eye, all extended the initial destruction caused by the child god's birth.  Slaanesh claims to have consumed Men of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, and while few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say, Slaanesh maintains outsize power for this period for which the Eldar gods alone do not account.  Prior to this era or tumult in the warp Tzeentch's star was ascendant, as it had been through the Dark Age of Technology, but as Old Night fell and the initial excitement of collapsing civilizations subsided Nurgle’s courtship and kidnap of Isha saw their fortunes exchanged.  Even as Tzeentch tried to direct the flux of power in the galactic collapse it had partly engineered, the other gods young and old took the chance to seize the Crystal Staff of Wonders from Tzeentch and destroy it, such that Tzeentch had not the power to bring his intrigue to completion.  From the changer's defeat, Nurgle's horrible inertia rose, but Tzeentch sought means of vengeance and found his chance in depriving Nurgle of his treasure in turn, and thereby reopening possibility.  It was this messy rivalry of elder Gods that the Ticking Counts and the Golden Children charged into with wild abandon, vigorous and terrible, but utterly unready.


With that, the half-blind crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have instead gone out across their old empire, and had put the scourge of their rule to the corpse of the GaBHD in grand but short-lived regimes.  Others absconded to the beautiful worlds of pleasure they saw gleam in the Eye of Terror with no intent to make war, and still others departed endlessly into the intergalactic sea with such haste the marks of their passing are still visible. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those august orders that go unnamed can tell, and Chaos has made no sign of truly knowing. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were extinct. All, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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=== Mon-Keigh ===

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The Mon-Keigh, as in the original Mon-Keigh from which the more general eldar term is used today, were a race of cannibalistic, misshapen [[Ogre_Kingdoms|ogre-like]] monstrosities that terrorized the eldar early in their history. Humanoid only in the loosest shape of the word, the Mon-Keigh were characterized by matted orange fur, chitinous plates overlaying the skin, a clawed left arm much larger than the right, and a snake-like gullet capable of expanding to swallow chunks of food larger than the Mon-Keigh’s own head. The Mon-Keigh were also known for their massive appetite, having a massive gut complete with a complex gizzard which allowed them to digest almost anything, including quite frequently each other. Satiating this massive appetite (and avoiding those who would do the same to them) which was a primary impetus behind the Mon-Keigh’s eventual development of space flight. Unlike most species, who developed space travel to collect resources, flee harmful conditions, or satisfy their curiosity, the Mon-Keigh traveled to the stars in order explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and [[Ogre_Kingdoms|eat them]]. At the same time, this motivation led the technology of the Mon-Keigh to seem rather inconsistent. Despite being a race that could build starships, on the ground the Mon-Keigh behaved more like a horde of techno-barbarians and big game hunters than an invading army. Eldar ledgends make extensive record that the Mon-Keigh preferred quick, spacious ground and low-air hunting transports over any kind of armored vehicle, easily tracked in their comings and goings from the Mon-Keigh's ground encampments despite camouflage due to the raucous passengers.  Likewise the Mon-keigh rarely used anything more powerful than an autogun or a lasgun, as any more advanced, destructive, and tactically flexible weaponry such as explosive bolts, plasma, or meltas didn’t often leave enough of a body to eat, and thus defeated the purpose of their use.
 
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Perhaps the most notable effect of the Mon-Keigh on history is when a Mon-Keigh warband led by the warlord Hresh-Selain invaded the eldar homeworld of Shaa-Dome back in the days when the eldar in the midst of their Bronze Age. However, during the invasion of Shaa-Dome, the Mon-Keigh’s tendency to fight in disorganized hunting parties and use relatively primitive weapons despite being able to build and use spacecraft ended up exploited as the massive liability it was.  Their expected entrees A) outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, B) readily organized into massive and well supplied armies across their world, C) were able to fall back on guerrilla combat and asymmetrical warfare in the forests of Shaa-Dome once the initial assault failed, and D) were sufficiently perceptive and clever to begin copying the Mon-Keigh's lower technology and grappling with understanding their higher works. The Mon-Keigh were used to fighting as big game hunters, not an actual army. This first encounter left a deep impact on the cultural memory of the eldar, and is in large part why the Eldar are so paranoid and mistrustful of other species in the first place. For the eldar, their first contact with another sentient species was when a technologically-advanced race descended from the stars to butcher them and hunt them down like animals.
 
The eldar during this time were led by Elronhir, who was a stubborn old (proto-eldar equivalent of sixties) warrior who united the various warring nations and tribes of Shaa-Dome to drive Hresh-Selain and the Mon-Keigh off their planet. It is not clear if Hresh-Selain’s warband was completely slaughtered by the proto-eldar or if they just got them to flee, eldar history claims the former but given their naiveté of the greater galaxy at the time and the tendency of later eldar to exaggerate their own history both options are possible. The twin heroes of the War in Heaven, Eldanesh and Uthanesh, helped as well, but at the time they were little more than rank-and-file soldiers (proto-Eldar equivalent of late teens) in the conflict and at best it could be said they were talented warriors. When the Old Ones showed up shortly after the Mon-Keigh had been defeated, Elronhir considered himself too old to fight in another war and wanted to die of old age in peace, upon which Eldanesh and Uthanesh picked up the torch (and were among the first of the Eldar to be genetically enhanced by the Old Ones).
 
The Old Ones knew about the Mon-Keigh. Indeed, given the fact that all the Mon-Keigh cared about was eating, it's highly likely that the Old Ones covertly sponsored their rise to becoming a space-faring species, though the Mon-Keigh never knew they were sponsored and thought they were in control of their own destiny. All the Mon-Keigh knew was that they occasionally received cryptic warnings that a particular star system was off-limits, and warbands that didn't pay attention to those warnings tended to disappear. The Mon-Keigh had a very alien mindset that was predicated around them being the apex predator and everyone else being perceived as talking food, and therefore could not be communicated with or controlled as easily as later species (among which were the Krork, which is illustrative of the Mon-keigh), but a wize Slann could slip a craving for something new into a warband's heads and send them on their way. They were useful if the Old Ones wanted a particular species wiped out without wholly destroying the ecosystem around it, or as an evolutionary catalyst, the metaphorical anthill to the much later tyranids' galactic locusts, to test if a species had enough worth for the Old Ones to step in as patrons. In fact, Hresh-Selain's discovery of Shaa-Dome would not have been an accident, especially given how soon the Old Ones showed up afterwards. The Old Ones, in their inscrutable ways, may have directed the Mon-Keigh towards Shaa-Dome, Hrudworld, and other worlds to find races suitable for uplifting for the War in Heaven (the proto-Eldar, Hrud, and others merely being the ones that survived). Regardless, a Bronze Age race managed to fight off the Old Ones' favored planet pruners, and combined with the proto-Eldar's psychic potential and ability to selectively express their own genome, the Old Ones took notice.
 
Some Mon-Keigh fought in the War in Heaven, even wielding weapons far more suitable caliber for that conflict. The Eldar didn’t pay too much attention to this, as they assumed the War in Heaven was a war of such magnitude that even the worst of enemies would be willing to ally to stop the Necrons and their omnicidal crusade. Regardless of their opinions, shortly after the Old Ones uplifted the Krork they set them on the Mon-Keigh, who had outlived their usefulness and had officially grown too uncontrollable to bother to salvage, as a test of their war making ability. This nearly wiped the Mon-Keigh out in a single blow, and few survived to fight in the remaining War in Heaven. Nobody cared. Indeed, as the Old Ones' sense of humor tended that way, they found it hilariously ironic that the Mon-Keigh were killed and eaten in the same way the Mon-Keigh had been killing and eating others. Be'lakor probably did at the very least. A few bands the ancient Eldar didn't know of survived for a time around the ragged edge of the galaxy, trying to stay away from everyone and everything that had become so much bigger than them. They didn't survive the Enslavers.

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=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The First WAAAGH!'''''

The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

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Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. They had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses and wood and stone tools. They could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators, of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted, tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. Nowhere was in-built knowledge of war or genetically inscribed mad-genius, the had not even writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. They mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t entirely full of daemons. The proto-orks reproduced asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest when the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly leapt in intellect from the human standard, possessed of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] [[Old Ones|alloyed with terrible knowledge]] and only concerned with survival in a horrible world they're intent on making. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions, even on the greatest psychic species they had designed. However, just because a species is pleasant for a given time doesn't mean they will remain that way, or that they didn't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did, or the Krork's bloody early history, they liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to the last fighting against the Enslavers across the galaxy, with the species renewing itself in a following generation from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war on a galactic scale]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even the Gorkamorka of the new generation of Brain Boyz was kindled anew by the giants. The Eldar were overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies now…different. So began the Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that rocked the galaxy in countless cycles over eons, before the Fall of the Eldar.

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=== Viskeon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_First_and_Second_Viskeon_Wars|The First and Second Viskeon Wars]]