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

==Additional Background Section 3: The Asur Revenant: The Actions of The Eldar==

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It would be remiss of this history to ignore one of the prime movers throughout the Eternal War. By the close of the second Age of Strife, to an outside observer, the Eldar race would have seemed utterly extinct, save for those last few burning embers. Indeed, most of the vast Craftworlds were naught but ghost ships, rumbling silently with the souls of the countless dead Eldar slain in the hopeless task of awakening their god of the Dead, while others were victims of the great Chaos Empires and Necron uprisings in the ascent throughout that darkest of times. Of the Craftworlders, only Biel-Tan remained active and defiant, attracting those few outsiders and rogues of their race to them, and forging a moderate empire of hundreds of worlds (''though these remained scattered across the galaxy, thus making their empire seem impossibly diffuse and hard to notice'').
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Yet, this is but a fragment of the Eldar race in total. For, running through the veins of the Webway like black Tar was a realm which had never stopped, and never repented of their actions.


Commorragh. The Second Age of Strife had a different name in the Dark City of Sin. It had been considered a golden age. With the fall of the Imperium, all order vanished and collapsed. Once secure worlds across the galaxy were now helpless before the Dark Kin and their ever-draining souls. Worlds were repeatedly ravaged by the Dark Eldar Kabals. Slaves souls and tortured screams filled the City in a great tumult. Yet, for all their building prosperity, the drain upon their own gangrenous souls grew too. Their raids were ever more frequent as the coiling embrace of Slannesh tightened as her power built in the anarchy of the wider galaxy.


The Dark Eldar continued on as they had always done, driven by insanity and malice and utter evil. They continued to conspire against one another and the dark pits were ever-filled with the shrieks of the damned and the dying. And at the center of all this, was Asdrubael Vect. The Overlord of Commorragh, however, was truly mad. One of the eldest beings alive, the Dark Lord's life drew on long beyond his ability to rejuvenate his soul; millions upon millions of slaves and minions had to perish every day to keep his soul from being drained away like bile in rainwater. He grew desperate and ever-more dangerous as his mind began to slip from him. To begin with, this mania was merely a deception; a lure to draw out conspirators against his position. But after thousands of years, deception became truth, and Vect became something far worse than a monster and a Tyrant to the Dark Eldar; he became a liability and a threat to all Archons.


Kabals who didn't bring back sufficient souls were destroyed as they entered the Port of Lost Souls, and their ruins were picked over by the parched and rival Archons alike. His punishments for perceived slights and threats against him were brutal even by his own standards. Some Archons were carved up into a thousand parts, re-grown through the oceans of agony generated by the Haemonculi, and each one was then butchered and tortured, before being deposited upon Slanneshi daemonworlds.


Yet, there was but one Archon who could hope to challenge Vect's entrenched position. Lady Malys. Disgruntled Kabals flocked to her banner secretly, and the old Noble houses slithered to her throne with tributes of the caged screams of billions of wailing infants and the hearts of an entire race made extinct in her name. And it was not just they who had her ear. The Harlequins, it was rumored, came secretly to her chambers, and danced the secret dances that nobody knew. Secrets and prophesies and words uttered only once and never uttered in all the countless eons of existence before or since. (''The rumors of bladed shadows that descended upon worlds assailed by the Nightbringer's forces during the eastern campaigns are perhaps not so far-fetched as once believed... but this is another story...'')


Yet the Dark Lord was not without his own allies; his sycophants and those Dark Eldar who truly wished to see the galaxy sicken and misery to reign, simply to see what would happen, and how it could be rebuilt in a vile manner of their own choosing. At every level of the twisted Hierarchies of Commorragh, a new division was brewing, amidst the various and multifaceted feuds and ambition which was normal and encouraged across the twisted realm.


Of course, to the outside galaxy, this was an unseen war, but it was not unnoticed. The Dark Eldar were being bred on an unprecedented scale, and the Haemonculi rejoiced as they could breed more eventual fodder for their labs. Abominations were released on millions of worlds across the galaxy, and no one could comprehend what these misshapen things were, or why they so desperately tortured, raped and destroyed them. Raids became even more frequent, as the raw material that formed Commorragh's bedrock was in ever greater demand.


While ambition brewed in the Dark City, the rest of the Eldar race was not idle. Biel-Tan engaged in a war against the Eastern Chaos Imperium. The realm of renegades and brigands was vast, bordering both Vulkan's new Imperium and the western domains of Abaddon himself. Yet, it was a cumbersome beast, with little order beyond the great fleets of Huron Blackheart, the rotting heart of the Chaos Imperium. The war was predominantly a naval conflict, as the Eldar made up for their lack of numbers by using Waystones and spirit gems to guide and control the massive numbers of orphaned craftworld fleets, greatly bolstering the numbers available to Yriel. Yriel was a genius in void warfare, yet Huron, despite his age and his increasing chaotic taint, was also a master of fleets.


There were far too many naval actions, spread across centuries upon centuries, to document in their entirety here. For Yriel was a persistent threat and nuisance to Huron. His ships were arrow-swift and they only fought battles when they had no other choice. Most of the time, they avoided his great Corsair armadas. When they did strike, it was while Huron's armies were occupied in other wars against lesser Imperiums and against Abaddon and his Legions or the Astartes Commanderies of Vulkan. Whenever Huron was weakest, Yriel struck. It is testament to the skill of Huron and his Lieutenants that these battles were rarely one-sided; they always knew of some means to reply to the Eldar. Indeed, Huron's familiar whispered of coming threats weeks before they arrived.


One such battle was in the system of Maniforge, where Yriel came close to being destroyed. The world was a Dark Mechanicus forge world; a world infested with the Obliterator plague right to its very core. Huron's vessels, limping back to an allied port after a failed campaign against the Lead Bastion, one of Grand Sicarium's core worlds, were attacked by Yriel's hidden Void Stalkers, cruisers and wraithships as they burst into reality. Like daggers through silk, the Eldar engaged the chaotic vessels, laying waste to hundreds of vessels within hours. But Huron had picked the Maniforge for a very particular reason. He had made a pact with the Deep Entity known as Valchocht the Maker, the Ravager of Terra, Lord of the Obliterator contagion. These great Daemon was promised all of Maniforge, as well as the sanctified sacrifices of two hundred betrayed Red Corsairs. But what really sealed the pact was the promise of bright Eldar souls to devour. Eldar were so very rare, and it would please Valchocht to deny the young upstart God Slannesh some of her prize delicacies. When Yriel destroyed the first wave of chaos vessels, he sealed the deal, and Maniforge opened. Valchocht and his ilk were daemons from the deep warp; ancient and vast beyond all imagining. When he was reborn upon the plane of flesh, he bodily possessed all of the wrecked hulks at once. Vines of sulfurous daemon flesh and churning technologies flowed between the ruins, knitting them together into an behemoth as vast as a star fort. Huron eventually arrived hours later, and the battle of Maniforge began anew. Both sides were heavily battered and brutalized and not one vessel escaped unscathed. Yriel's flagship was almost consumed by a great destroyer-wide maw which burst from Valchocht's stolen flesh of steel and souls, but skillful piloting and the spear of twilight spared him of this end.


Another engagement in the long war led the two enemies to almost be destroyed by a third force, when they became becalmed in the dead warp around the Angyl world of Zone. Their engines failed and their crews became sluggish and weak, as the cold influence of the perfectly symmetrical world of order and obedience spread out from it like a vile halo. Luckily, they managed to repair their vessels just as their sensors picked up the great silver pinions of the Angyls of the Star Father, come to break their spirit and enslave their minds. Biel-Tan would never bow.


The hollow carcasses that were once the Craftworlds echoed with the sounds of skirmishing and violence. Bands of looters and pirates attempted to ransack these ancient worldships for their hidden technologies and the secrets that lay within them. They often learned too late that the capering ones in their cloaks of many colors still defended their kin's graves. And yet, Craftworld after Craftworld were pillaged by some great force, which could evade the defenders easily. They did not cause damage though, and they only took one thing. Each Craftworld found their Avatars spirited away. Only gory offerings and broken spirit stones marked their passing.


When the war of Commorragh finally came in M67, there was carnage (''which will be detailed further in later parts''). Yet, soon, the two rivals found that a far greater war had come to the galaxy, and for once, they could not hide from it, for it came for them. The full extent of this war will become apparent in later sections, but the Dark Eldar experienced their first real taste of this conflict when the great Jackal God began, in earnest, his war upon the Webway. Though the deceiver had little power there, the greater war had begun to awaken his more... esoteric allies from their slumber/imprisonment/banishment. The Ophilim Kiasoz, that great unknowable terror, had dimensions that bisected the Webway in certain sections. What is more, it had allies amongst the Dark Eldar themselves; creatures that had bonded themselves to the anomaly through some means mortals were not meant to know.


The Dark Kin would fight in the war for existence, or they too would perish.


And of course, all true Eldar grew to fear and despise those who rose from the Crone Worlds. Those who were Her favorites, brought back to drink deep of the fall of flesh and the accent of excess. The Chaos Eldar, who would attempt to bring the galaxy to its knees, at the head of the impossible legions that gathered for the End.
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