Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 34: The Empty East; The Desolation of The Fringe and The C’tan’s Revelation==

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''... poor lambs... abandon hope, all ye who...'' 

'''[Raucous laughter... unconfirmed audio interrupt.]'''
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Nowhere was the futility of war more aptly demonstrated than across the eastern spiral arm of the galaxy. Necrons and Krork, C’tan and daemons; all fought over this region to determine the destiny of the galaxy.

The wars that raged across this realm dwarfed the conflicts of most past ages, save for perhaps the original War in Heaven. Trillions of Krork were born and directly fed into this brutal, colossal war. They did so gladly and without fear. Just as the Necrons were compelled by their programming to reconquer the galaxy and enslave all, the Krork were programmed on a genetic level to thwart them.

Khaine and the Nightbringer, being both ageless and tireless, constantly clashed across planets and beyond space, in a futile attempt to destroy one another. Meanwhile, their minions, the Destroyer cults and the Khainite slaughterkin, destroyed every living thing they could find. When they killed everything living, they turned upon each other.

The C’tan took neither the Triarch nor the Krork’s side in this war; they gleefully attacked both sides, feeding greedily upon the flickering embers of escaping mind essences, like vile suckling leeches. 

Fifteen thousand years of war. One can scarcely even conceive of such a lengthy period of constant conflict. These battles were not just local bushfire wars, but all part of a single conflict, on a massive scale. Everyone lost.

The remains of the Tau Meta-Empire were reduced to a handful of isolated pockets; besieged Sept worlds turned bitter after the hope of a greater good turned to ash before their eyes. Ultramar survived, but it was a declawed creature. Despite token support from its western Imperium Pentum allies, there were barely enough soldiers and logistical supplies to protect the realm from the monstrosities of the Hadex Anomaly, which had expanded in that time to consume the Black Reef and turn every world nearby into hellish worlds of splintered timeframes and rampant mutation.

Pech, surprisingly, was spared any major invasions, for it was seen as utterly worthless by most. The Kroot, ever the pragmatic survivors, continued to scour the nearby regions for new meat. Meanwhile, the Tau children the Kroot had saved from the Necron invasions a generation ago had formed an odd sub culture within Pech’s forests. The castes interbred, and formed a culture quite independent of any notion of the greater good (aside from the relics of past years that had survived with them, which they considered sacred). The Kroot fostered these tribes, and sometimes even allowed them to aid them in their mercenary missions beyond Pech, in a surreal parody of the old order of things.

The Krork were severely weakened, despite their superhuman resolve. Though the will was still there, the Necrons had killed billions of their race; their ships all showed signs of extreme damage. The Necrons had also been given a contagion to use against the Krork, which compromised their spore-based life cycle. Every year, fewer and fewer Krork were being born. For centuries the Krork tried to find out who this shadowy ally of the Triarch was, but they could not be traced (''though I personally suspect the denizens of Commorragh had a hand in this. The motive, we shall never know; probably sheer amusement.'')

However, the Necrons were in poor shape at this point too. The Triarch Praetorians were struggling to gather large enough forces to adequately fight their multiple foes. Those Necrons not destroyed by Krork and C’tan, or subsumed by the demented Empire of the Severed, were going mad. The Destroyer Cults could not be controlled or relied upon, and the Flayed Ones were a hideous blight upon the Necron race as a whole. By this point in history, the original Necrons had been reduced to a mere billion individuals (though their android bodies could be replaced rapidly by their surviving tombworlds). 

The vast majority of the Eastern Fringe, by then, was hollow. Virtually every system was left eerily devoid of life. Not only were their worlds shattered by doomsday weapons or scoured clean by gauss, but there were some worlds that were simply empty. Cities and settlements covered the worlds, but the people who once lived there had simply vanished. Most had abandoned their worlds in abject terror, uprooting their entire populations upon hastily built refugee arks that fled westwards. They had nowhere to go and precious few supplies to sustain their numbers. The misery and suffering they endured was heartbreaking to behold.

Other worlds had been depopulated through the fallout from the wars of others, sterilizing their planets by accident. These worlds had slow deaths, where the despairing populations eventually detonated nuclear munitions under their own cities, simply to end the anguish.

Even Nurgle had no hold over this region, despite the great oceans of despair which permeated the Fringe, for there were no longer men there to experience such emotions. I cannot accurately inform you how many alien races went extinct during that period, but I can tell you the number was depressingly high. Such was the desperation of those few aliens left; they threw themselves upon the mercy of the Tau and the Astartes’ embattled bastions. To their credit, even the Astartes, taught from birth to regard xenos as their foes, allowed them to take shelter and bolster their numbers.

There were other worlds, beneath the baleful glare of the Red hole of Hadex, who suffered horrendously. Daemons and cultists descended upon them and violated them in every way you can imagine. They were defiled and ruined by the horrendous cruelty of their enemy. Any thought of freedom or free will were forgotten. They wished only to be safe. Foolishly (or perhaps rightfully; who can tell?), they turned to the one god who despised anarchy above all else. The Star Father.

Upon these worlds, the daemons found themselves cast back by Angyls of blinding light. The Angyl Prince Draigo led the charge against the mewling abominations, battling daemons in single combat and dragging them kicking and screaming into the hell that had spawned them. The people of those besieged worlds praised and fawned over their Angyl saviours. They eagerly accepted the demands of the Star Father; they were told to kneel, and they knelt. Soon, their worlds were safe, and as silent as all the rest...

... I see another event, unfolding at that time, but at other times and places, all at once. A confluence of minds, a bending of the rules of the cosmos...

Amidst the silence, the eldest beings took their fill of energy; when the minds of sentients ran low, they gorged upon starlight and lingered in their coronal halos like languid dancers made of naught but glittering glass shards. The Dragon returned in this time, alongside his broken brethren. Yet, thought the various C’tan shard entities fed and rampaged in glorious freedom from Necron bondage, they sensed a signal; a message written in decades-long syllables only the first races knew. The Nyadra’zatha the Burning One’s many forms sensed this, as did the Endless Swarms of Iash’uddra, the capricious many-selves of Mephet’ran and even the ancient bane itself, the Void Dragon. Though space and time separated them in vast gulfs, the C’tan nevertheless stepped across these gulfs with ease. They came to heed the words of the one who thought to speak their tongue; Orikan the Diviner.

The plane they met upon was a planet, but it was somehow utterly two-dimensional, and sliced through realities like a worrisome splinter lodged in flesh. Terrible winds of desolation wracked its surface, destroying the disk-entities that scurried across its depthless surface. As the glittering shards arrived, the world extruded into three dimensions with frightful, mind-shredding power. Together, they built a hall upon which to have this dread conference.

(The following is a mortal’s approximating and abstraction of what occurred on that artificial planet. There were no witnesses to this event, so I must assume the previous scribe of this tale tapped into some upon wellspring of knowledge in order to speculate upon these events... or else she fabricated the event entirely; another fabrication within her ill-mind. I cannot be certain.)

Each C’tan crafted thrones of starlight and condensed time, conjuring grandiose forms to inhabit simultaneously. One cannot say where this realm was, or even what dimension they deigned to meet upon. I do know that at the time of this meeting, three planets in the Eastern Fringe imploded upon themselves, without any obvious reason. If the two events are linked, then the Fringe was the most likely location/primary time period of this meeting.

Orikan appeared before them, a tiny entity compared to the colossal entities that glowered at the Cryptek, who vainly clutched a staff of tomorrow in his claws, as if the totem would protect him should he displease the Star Gods.

However, the Stars were right. Their light shone through the great windows that rose like mountains upwards and descending. The golden light made his form indistinct, ever-shifting. However, the Dragon knew this being, no matter what form he took.

It named the being Orikan, shard of Mephet’ran, one of many. “But why seek to lie to us? Or to yourself?” the Dragon contemplated.

The Cryptek laughed, and the laugh was mockingly imitated by the other Deceiver shards that sat upon their thrones, each a slightly different prince with a different crown of golden horns, but always with the same smirk.

“I am a thing of lies. It is always my way. In truth, the Necrontyr did me a service, in shattering me...” Orikan Mephet’ran chuckled.

Another Deceiver, in a form like a robed daemon prince covered in golden feathers, spoke up. “How else may I play my little games, when caged in dull... singularity? How else may I lead the Despoiler to his pet sword?”

Another Deceiver rose, with a jackal’s head instead of its own. “Or guide the First Born's children on a merry dance...?”

“... a dance without end?” another Deceiver laughed, laughing until his crystalline form shattered and fled away on the wind.

The other C’tan were unmoved, simply asking whether the Deceiver even knew which side he was on anymore. The Orikan Deceiver shrugged theatrically, twirling its staff like a baton.

But why had he gathered them there? A trap?

“It would be a foolish trap, to ones such as us, Lord Oblivion,” the Deceiver grinned. “We see the turn of eternity; you would see the outcome of such a trap eons before I set it. No, I have set no trap." However, if the C’tan did not follow his instructions, they would perish.

The Dragon scoffed. Nothing in his calculations hinted at such a destination for the universe. The Deceiver mocked him for his willful ignorance. “You have been asleep too long, Dragon. You, as ever, refuse to acknowledge the immaterial realm. Reality is your dominion, but you see nothing else beyond it. No matter how omnipotent you consider yourself here, amidst the membranes of reality, the warp shall ever elude you. You fail to see what is at stake.”

The Dragon rooted Orikan to the spot, and for a moment, the Deceiver knew true fear, as the Dragon pulled more of his essence into the hall; the shadow of many wings loomed. “You speak of the warp’s looming apocalypse. Do not presume ignorance ancient perfidity,” the Dragon explained coldly.

“I speak... of the destruction of actuality...” the Deceiver replied. The suggestion stunned the Oblivion entity enough to release the silver-tongued one.

The others denounced this claim; nothing could destroy actuality. Even the Necrons, with all the might of the living universe, could not damage actuality. It was impossible.

“I have seen much, my brethren of the star-smith. I know the true path of destiny. My predictions are never wrong.”

“They are never wrong, for you alter reality to suit your whims,” another shard replied. “You are tainted by the madness of the planet-born organics. We know you awoke the Ophilim Kiasoz; even Aza’gorod, childishly infatuated with mortal death as he is, was not that foolish. Do you think you can control the broken spiral at the heart of the pattern? It would devour you whole...”

The Deceiver ignored the barbs. “Be careful how you threaten me, my beloved ones. The One Who Dwells Outside once thought she saw the weave of my patterns and it drove her mad. She welcomed her prison by the end. Now, heed me.”

The C’tan, without any words we would understand, eventually subsided in their retaliations, and allowed the liar to set up his con. They asked him how reality would perish.

“The dissolution will spread like a cancer, feeding and drawing itself up by the hooks it has in mortal souls. First it will consume heir souls, and then it will pierce reality. Then... it will breach the Orrery.”

This got the attention of the C’tan. If the Orrery was turned into a plaything of the Nex-[PAINENDLESS], then the warp would become a self-sustaining contagion of ever magnifying destruction. Omnipotence in the hands of perfect madness from the time before and after time was time.

“If this lie is true, then we face a total event collapse. This universe will die; as a contagion storm expands from this galaxy, to devour all galaxies. But I have devised a solution," the Dragon claimed. "Without life, the monster will be strangled at birth. My tides will sweep the galaxy clean.”

The Deceiver shook its head condescendingly. “You will only speed its passage, and feed it souls ever swifter. You must stop your rampages; if you stop, you know that our opportunity will come.”

The Dragon, intrigued, asked him what opportunity. 

“The opportunity? The opportunity to escape of course. This realm is beyond saving. I turned upon you, in the last years of the War in Heaven. You recall that I turned upon you. Played both sides. Or perhaps, I was never on your side? I forget... sometimes, my memories... but nevertheless, I joined our cold nemesis. I became their champion. Or rather; a renegade shard of me became their champion. It is so much easier to thread the way of webs into my veins as an ally than as a foe; you were clumsy when you breached their Webway, Nyadra’zadra,” Mephet’ran added as a spiteful aside. “I promised to defeat you; I drove her into the sphere and made her mad. I betrayed the shards of Nightbringer and I told the Eldar where the Necrontyr whelps slept. But our old enemy... tricked me.”

The confession intrigued his brothers. “You were... deceived?”

“The irony is not lost upon me either. But I was indeed deceived. The Old meddlers did not perish.”

“They fled into the warp; ascended beings. We know this. We are C’tan,” another star god interrupted. 

“Your memories are shattered, like your body, Jek’thalzar the Frost! They did not ‘ascend’, but they did flee. They-”

The C’tan as one realized what their hated foes had done. Eternal gates crashing down. Barriers crossed; safety compromised. The C’tan lived, at least partially, in every moment in reality. However, only the Deceiver avoided the Tesseract Labyrinth prisons of their foes. Only he was conscious at the time of the Old Ones' final sins; the sins which saw them vanish, and saw the Eldar rise into an inevitable fall.

The Laughing God, Cegorach, the rebellious shard, empowered by actuality and the warp, had tricked them for millions upon millions of years. This was in an attempt to keep the C’tan distracted. But the Laughing God could not trick his own shards forever; the Deceiver knew what the Old Ones [first and forever ancient. Worship them!] had done. But what was more; Mephet’ran knew when and where they had performed this act.

The conference lasted for millennia, but the time passed in only a year of subjective time. In that time the C’tan endlessly argued and discussed their schemes; some fought each other, and consumed their fellow shards in order to gain more complete mental faculties. Eventually, they reached a consensus; the opportunity would occur on the seventh year after the five Golems of the Anathema made their climactic war upon the Draziin-maton never-borns. At that time, the Lord of Compassion and His cronies would at last find the Well of Eternity. 

And when He did, the C’tan would be there to murder Him, and take the prize for themselves.

Orikan had seen it, and he was never wrong...

... Or so the Star Vampires believed...
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