Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===The Shackled Age===

Of course, a race with such a severe handicap was in no position to rule over a half of the Galaxy. As time went by, the population gap between the Eldar and the Slaugth was growing wider and wider. While the former kept colonising one world after anothet to sustain their rapidly growing population, the Slaugth had a great difficulty holding onto the few worlds they controlled. There were not enough soldiers to defend them against the constant Krork raids, not enough miners to gather natural resources and not enough engineers to make a good use of what little was gathered, and, perhaps most importantly, not enough scientists to look for solutions to this problem. Probably this is why the solution the maggot people eventually came up with was so primitive and brutal, more befitting of bronze age savages than an advanced spacefaring race. 

To compensate for their crippling numerical disadvantage, the Slaugth became slavers. Using their exceptional mind control capabilities, they began to enslave the numerous primitive races scattered throughout their empire and force them to do their bidding. Robbed of their free will, those unfortunates began to fight wars for their masters, gather resources and manufacture goods for them, so that the Slaugth could focus on art, science and sorcery. Due to the composite nature of their intelligence, controlling a great number of slaves all at once was child's play to the Slaugth. Their mind reading abilities made slave conspiracies and uprisings impossible, and telepathy allowed them to control their slaves from great distances. Ironically, it almost seemed like the Slaugth were made to be the perfect slavers. Thinking that this couldn't possibly be a coincidence, the slave drivers began to believe that the Old Ones deliberately created them this way and intended for them to enslave the Galaxy. 

Initially, there was quite a bit of resistance to slavery in the Slaugth society. Many prominent thinkers pointed out the barbarity of stripping a sentient race of its free will and turning it into living, breathing machines for all practical purposes. The apologists of slavery retorted with the age old argument that the goal justifies the means, the former being the survival of their race. In spite of the obvious weakness of their argumentation, the slavers were slowly, but steadily gaining the upper hand as the dependence of the Slaugth industry on slave labour grew. Over the course of several decades, the slavers rose to the very top of the Slaugth society and violently purged any dissenters, labelling them as traitors who would rather see their whole species go extinct than hypnotise a few useless savages. To safeguard their prosperity, they introduced reforms that institutionalised slavery and entrenched it in the Slaugth culture. 

Eventually the slave drivers took over the media as well, using it to spread their chauvinistic ideas. As official propaganda entirely replaced pluralistic journalism, more and more Slaugth began to subscribe to the idea that their race was chosen to rule the Galaxy. According to the new official doctrine, the Old Ones always knew about their impending doom and created the Slaugth as their heirs, gifting them with mind control abilities to subjugate any who would refuse to serve them. Thus began the Old Ones renaissance which forever reshaped the Slaugth culture and worldview. No longer content with their amorphous bodies, they began to assume humanoid shapes reminiscent of the Old Ones and use hooded cloaks to further conceal their true nature as colonial organisms. Discarding their original culture entirely, they started thoughtlessly aping their creators instead, giving their children Old One names, using Old One hierarchy and imitating their art. And, of course, they also started rediscovering the advanced science of their makers, starting with geneurgy.

Believing themselves to already be perfect and not willing to mingle with the creation of the Old Ones, the Slaugth banned any experiments on the members of their own race - ironically, this could have saved them from the curse of infertility and remove the need for slavery. Instead, they focused their genetic research on their numerous slave races, aiming to create perfect servants for themselves. Removing the skills and abilities they considered useless and making their slaves better at a limited range of tasks, the Slaugth spawned legions of freaks who couldn't speak, feel taste or sleep, but could operate advanced assembly machinery starting from birth. They also reduced the intelligence of their slaves to the lowest level acceptable, while making them more vulnerable to mind control. For all practical purposes, those geneforged slaves became little more than living tools, perfectly optimised for usage by the Slaugth. To further improve their usefulness, the maggot people mastered the art of fusing flesh and metal and began augmenting their mutant servants with robotic parts that couldn't be grown organically. As horrible as it may sound, most of the disgusting half-organic, half-cybernetic machines and appliances the worms that walk use in the thirty first millennium started off as sentient species with cultures, dreams and aspirations.

Worse still, some of the slave races were used as cattle. The consumption of brains of sentient species gives the Slaugth powerful narcotic experiences, so it's little wonder that soon after slavery had become ubiquitous, the more intelligent of the enslaved races began to be farmed for their delicious brains. As the pleasure derived from consuming a brain depends directly on the intelligence of its owner, the brain cattle was genetically altered to be smarter. One can only imagine the horrors of being a highly intelligent creature and living in a pen, waiting to be slaughtered and cerebrotomised. 

This was a dark age for the Galaxy, which later came to be known as the Shackled Age. Like maggots on a corpse, the slaver fleets of the Slaugth led by the merciless Intendants burrowed their way deeper and deeper into the Galaxy in search for new races to enslave and mutate into drooling blobs of pale flesh who can open any can with a minimal effort. Of course, not all races were deemed useful enough to enslave. Some of them, such as the Krork, turned out to somehow be resistant to Slaugth mind control, most likely due to the primitive nature of their intelligence. The races that couldn't be enslaved or were found to be of no use to the empire were mercilessly exterminated to their last member for having no place in the Galaxy. There were also a couple of races that the Slaugth spared in spite of their uselessness, mostly because the maggot people found them too primitive, insignificant and harmless to warrant wasting resources on their extermination. One of the species that the Slaugth found too pathetic to even waste plasma on were the Eyp - or, as they're better known these days, the Humans.