Editing Nobledark Imperium Forces of Chaos (section)

= Rise of Khorne =

Tzeentch and Malal were the originals, first created by the Old Ones in their attempts to study the manipulation of the Warp on a grand scale. Both are masters of all, Tzeentch the realization of infinite possibility and Malal is everything that doesn't exist, an endless chalice that runneth over into a bottomless well, an eternal spring that fills an endless thirst in an infinite cycle of creation and destruction.

Nurgle was meant to cultivate, refine, and maintain in the space between them, the all-loving all-laughing groundskeeper of the mind. Up until the beginning of the War in Heaven this was for the realm of souls a paradise of psychic accord, milder and more fecund with wonder than even the primordial millennia of raw, unmitigated sorcery with only the Old Ones like Bel'akor and his ascended order, Tzeentch, and Malal.

The Old Ones then proceeded to get in a fight with the only other Power in the galaxy, the Necrontyr and the Boltzmann brain patrons they soon welcomed into living femto-mechanical fractal supercomputers they called bodies. This ruined everything, in realspace and the warp, and started the cascading applied psionics/applied physics arms race that created the warp as the galaxy knows it. With Bel'akor quite possibly at the head of the project, a weaponized God-concept was conceived of and synthesized. Part of this process was the uplift and weaponization of powerfully psychic primitives to fuel the new god, as well as fight the Old Ones' wars, first the Eldar, then the Proto-orks to produce the mighty Krork. The horrific excesses of the War in Heaven, killings, pillages, and ruinations perpetrated by both sides, were in part engineered by the Old Ones, themselves also bloody handed in spirit now, to birth Khorne. Said to be of the same godly flesh as the two indomitable giants that sprung forth upon the opening of the first Orkish mind, and to bleed the same molten iron as the specter of murder that had risen among the thoughts of the early Eldar, the red god turned the tide in the Old Ones favor for a time. It has been forwarded that the Maelstrom, like the much younger Eye of Terror, is what remains of the wounds of Khorne's birth.

Khorne was the Old Ones scourge. Legions of brass, horn, and bloody red flesh marched from the Maelstrom across a quarter of the Necrontyr worlds. He was not then always the monolithic, armored thing of visions, Khrone was a manifold horror. All once he was in the fire of Orkish artillery swinging his ax down upon a Cryptek, and a flaming bolt running down voidships even as they fled by inertialess drive, and in the heart of the Necron Empire slaying at a whim, and in hateful battle with The Outsider and Dragon flickering from the hearts of stars to warp and out again as each side shifted to preferable footing. It was in this time the Skull Throne was made, out of Khorne's horrid thoughts and plans and deeds no less than the trophies he took, and even still it grows ever higher upon an unshakeable foundation of silver skulls. In this first glorious campaign Khorne utterly triumphant. Though the reverberations of their war god's birth were so bad as to disrupt even the Old Ones' usual psychic infrastructure, it was not thought such an impediment to the war effort as to interrupt key opperations. Khorne's warpath had exploded from the warp into the galactic north, and the offensive had been supported by another massive advance along of a front of Brainboy commanded Krork whagghs as wide as a spiral arm advancing after the Blood God, and yet more swift armadas of Eldar vassals and thralls sweeping in ahead from the galactic west in raids that had drawn the Necrontyr's ire.


This set the apparent course of the War in Heaven until the great escalation of Biotransference produved the Nercons in sufficient number, but already momentum was shifting. Even as the Necrontyr abandoned flesh and soul, the C'tan took to the same mechanisms of cursed arcane birth that spawned the Dark Gods.  Immaterial shrouds of mythic terror produced by the Old Ones' uplifts were taken up by the Nightbringer, cleaving to them with the same blade that had shorn the Necrotyr's souls, and they were put to dreadful use as the shadow of fatalism that his infamy cast in the warp fell across the galaxy. The Deceiver, taking even better to manipulating of its reverberations in the minds of psychic beings, went among the Old Ones in secret as often as it danced with the now gleaming aristocracy of the Necrons. The Dragon and its Cryptek assistants gloried in making each other yet more mighty with every new fundamental particle or force invented off-hand, and The Outsider, robot of infinite function, gladly moved stars and wrought fortresses and palaces form them at the other Star Gods' bidding, and the Necrontyr aristocracy's whim.

The Maelstrom's ill effects were persistent and vastly more potent than expected, and while the Old Ones still easily traversed their empire their vassals and auxiliaries could no longer be counted on. Reports came that Necrons in synthetic Ork flesh were hunting Brainboyz deep behind the front, and more disturbing reports came of bleak megastructures transfixing the bounds of reality to the Necrons' preferred physical laws. The Gorkamorka, giants from the minds of the little goblins of a curious fungal world from which the Old Ones Raised the Krork, had blossomed unseen, and were in check only because they had so many kunning, brutal boyz to give bright ideas. The Eldar fiddled obsessively and grew anxious, raised too many displeasing questions while digging to produce romanticized visions of their masters, and the Gods of Sorcery were no better, growing ever more dark and neurotic in their ways.

The tumult in the warp brought by Khorne's ever-wrathful subsidiaries, the wanton realspace destruction of incalculable scale, the putrefaction of the Old Ones' spirits, the proliferation of Gods of Death, all first perturbed, then terrified, then utterly broke the kindly spirit Nurgle. The preserver shook off the yoke of the Old Ones, strove to make them again what they were in its youth, and vowed to cherish all and relinquish nothing to the void. The Changer of Ways and The Final Word had likewise been tainted by the ends the Old Ones had set them to, and yet more woe came of this. Warlock Malal had been turned loose to obliterate idea and concept and soul as an annihilating storm, and sank into a malaise of nihilism and self loathing spite, and Wizard Tzeentch's vast creative faculties had been attuned to the sole work of plotting the Old Ones' campaigns of ambition and intrigue, and settling their grudges with the Star Gods. Around this period Bel'akor vanished from the Old Ones' councils and their campaigns, but his kin were hardly so perceptive as the proud first of their most exalted cabal.


Thus Khorne's first youthful bout with the galaxy was his most glorious, but after the tide of the War in Heaven turned the other direction. Though the Blood God's maiden slaughter was a terrible blow to the Necrons and those few frail Necrontyr that remained, and carved a livid path of hell far longer and vaster than the Orion Spur deep into the Star Empire, it was not conclusive. Neither the Old Ones' mystic ministrations or the harsh sutures that were early Necron Reality Columns could hope to tend the cosmic wound, and even after the offensive's conclusion the Maelstrom bled freshly wrought Khornate forces into the galaxy from Khorne's new realm. Still, the Star Gods and their Princes of Matter were industrious and swift thinking, and Khorne slaying the last of the frail Necrontyr came even as the Necrons' bunker worlds and star-shades where being armed with newly devised soul flaying defenses.  For all his bloody marches in the realm of souls, striking where his foe was most feeble, Khorne did naught but hasten the Necrons' preparation for true war and heighten their calculating fury. While his new-made princes and daemon captains dredged up hell and tried ever to spill it across the Materium to widen their territory of the Maelstrom with flagging success, Khorne's mind turned to the other, clearly lesser gods, and his own glory.

Though Bel'akor had absconded to parts unknown the first ascendant psyker's disciples, princes of power in their own right, still strove to direct the course of the war, and on them Khorne placed the blame of failure. While the cultivated standing WAAAGH!s and their Brainboyz remained a buffer between the Old Ones' Dominion and the Star Empire's forces, it grew clear that what had once been an opposing force to the Necrons was now wearing down into a poorly devised league of Krorkish rabble. The poaching and theft of innumerable Brainboyz reverberated through the massive storm of reality-bending Krork thought, and those that survived Necron cullings were ever more imposing creatures, ever sharper, and ever more formidable psykers. The Gorkamorka grew more ferocious and uncontrollable, its avatars became contentious with their distant Slann patrons, and through the Necrons' captives the Whaggh itself was studied, synthesized, and modified in the next generation of reality columns, the mighty Pylons.

Khorne was beseeched and commanded by the Old Ones to collar the Gorkamorka and lead it into battle in the galactic north, in hope to mend this situation. The Old Ones promised easy sport, and Khorne set upon them in view of all the gods, the Lords of Sorcery, the Solution to Entropy, the court of petty Eldar Personas, the Creeping thing not fully seen, and all the lesser, natural Daemons, even the Star-cast shadow of death, the specter of doubt, and the beastly question, and their pale waxing ilk. There was no easy sport to be had. Should Khorne bring Gork low and fix him in the chains of arcana the Old Ones gave him, Mork would come from behind and throw him down, and tear his brother free. Turning on Mork, Khorne might hew off a colossal arm or foot, but no sooner would he than Gork take him by the godly throat and wring him of godly breath. The wrestling and raucous butchery of giants rocked the galaxy, and when Khorne could not bind the Gorkamorka apart as the Old Ones had asked, he strove to bind them together in the magical chain. When finally the Blood God turned to the assembled Powers of the Immaterium in triumph, scarred and battered, and bid them see that he was might incarnate, the bound Gorkamorka resumed its brotherly fighting and in the first thrashing blows against each other shredded their magical bondage and clashed and thundered away into the deeps of un-reality. Thence forth the Heaven of War the Old Ones made came to unravel. Khorne's wroth became yet darker and more bitter, his pretensions to supremacy over all foes and all things became his sole mission. Brainboyz were hunted openly by Khorne's captains, in secret he moved against the Slann whenever opportunity arose, and he gloried in their skulls as gladly as he did to hold the gleaming head of a Phaeron. The buffer WAAAGH!s mobilized in all directions as their brutally kunning bosses were each in turn enlightened by their giant patrons, and the attack worlds and kinetic kill roks that would drift deep space ever after as the mightiest of space hulks lit their innumerable engines.


Gears turned in Tzeentch's wretched mind, and it moved to shift the way of things yet further. As Nurgle fattened the warp with accumulated creations and Malal ran roughshod over mundane existence the Bird saw a chance to establish a new order, where it's sorcery was unchecked and paramount, and its eternal rival's magic was sequestered, tapped, or dearly sold into the portfolios of other Powers. It took little coaxing to turn Khorne's fearsome wrath upon Malal, but the vision of the subjugation of all three gods of Sorcery for all time was quick to kindle in the Blood God's mind, and burned there eternally. For its own part, Malal seemed glad to give Khorne the Un-throne and the winding pit that lead to the end of all things, glad to be rid of them and knowing they would bring the Blood God only trouble.

Whether Malal fell on his sword of nothingness, or bent and swore in fealty to Khorne, or simply vanished on the spot, or wandered down the abyss into non-existence like so many things he had sent before him, is a matter of scholarly argument. The Not-king of Never-was ceased to be, and Malal the vassal, Sorceror of Annihilation, began to exist. His domain was divided up, Khorne taking Destruction, Nurgle claiming and meddling with Entropy, and Tzeentch had his bounty of Paradox and Dissolution now to compliment his wealth of Solution and Causality. Tzeentch at this time held his wand of wonders and Malal's sword of nothingness, and Sorcery itself was his, an infinite fountain now without the ever deepening well. Malal's sorcery lived borrowed life from Khorne's fire, or sprung from the bleak pinprick of oblivion Malal retained, but Tzeentch's power grew undisputed, quickly surpassing the Old Ones' combined might, and only bolstered by the backlogs of creations Nurgle could provide. This duo's attentions likewise fell upon the venerable reptiles even as the Slann continued to conduct the War in Heaven on a backwards footing, and the Old Ones found their magics becoming ever more costly.

For his own part Khorne was also pleased with this new order. The Un-throne was remade into yet more of his vicious domain, and while the war went poorly for his one time masters, the War God's fortunes in the conflict were understandably lush. Necron Pylons laid down a path into the Old Ones' domain, Star Gods and rueful Phaerons tore into their palatial monasteries, and where Khorne's daemons were summoned for aid all were slain save the mightiest and quickest Necron and Slann. The Old Ones trembled, and died by their implacable, morbid, vengeful enemy's dread radiance, died by the brassy axe of their greatest weapon of hate and arrogance, died as they sold themselves with debt to the mad lord of witches or passed into the realm of the preserver, died in utter surprise and shock as the Rok fists of the Gorkamorka fell upon them from the void, and died begging to deaf ears when Bel'akor was sought out and found in desperation, secreted away in the formless wastes. The Eldar cowered in the galactic west and tunneled into the foam between real and warp to hide in the protection of their god-constructs, the last great marchers of the Krorkish Brainboyz died on the warpath across the galactic north and east as daemons, ol' masterz and ded'hard flash-boyz hunted them from all sides. Strife amongst the Star Gods and the Necron Princes of Matter and Energy was all that stopped the sealing of the warp over all of the victorious Star Empire, and their short, cataclysmic civil war was the last word in the War in Heaven. Whatever Old Ones and C'tan survived the orders the Silent King had given to the Outsider were brought low in chains and executed by Khorne. With The Nightbringer disarmed and flogged in the lucky triumph of Khine then entombed by the little furtive king, and the Gorkamorka apparently reduced to aimless brawling in grief for their slain boyz as the Orks seemed to languish without their captains, Khorne deemed himself mightiest, and did not wait for the assent of the gods that remained.

As the Dominion of the Old Ones was erased from the milky way and the Necrons went down into their sepulchers, Khorne was crowned by his vizier Malal, and named BLOOD KING and first commander OF THE GALAXY, a title of his own invention.

[[Category:Nobledark Imperium]]