An age passed. One by one, thousands of years ticked by, until ten millennia had gone since the day Horus had struck down the Emperor and been struck down in turn. And during all that time, Iskandar Khayon and his Black Legion had held Cadia, keeping the armies of Chaos trapped within the Eye of Terror, with no open gate to bring them back to the Materium in massive numbers.

Yet even so, it had not been an age of peace. The galaxy was a dark place, filled with threats old and new, and while the Traitor Legions may be contained within the Eye, the Ruinous Powers that owned their souls were not so easily thwarted. After a few assaults on Cadia by warbands seeking the glory of taking the Necromancer's heads had all ended in abject failure, the Dark Gods had mostly turned their gaze away from their failed champions, leaving the Lost and the Damned to their own devices. Across the galaxy, cults of the Ruinous Powers rose, and the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes Chapters were tempted into following Horus' path.

The Duumvirate of the Crimson King and the Lord of Iron separated their duties : Perturabo would expand and protect the Empire's dominions within the Eye of Terror, while Magnus would search for a way to return to the Materium and a council of lords, led by the Exalted Sorcerer Amon, would manage the ruling of Sortiarius itself. With the Cadian Gate held by the Kingbreaker, Magnus turned his gaze to other avenues by which the Illuminated Empire could leave the Eye. One of the means he investigated was to use the Webway, that ancient network of portals scattered through the galaxy that used the Labyrinthine Dimension as a short-cut across the stars.

Once, the galactic region that had become the Eye of Terror had been the heart of the Eldar Empire, and though the vast majority of the Webway Gates it had contained were shattered with the birth of Slaanesh, many still remained open. Most of them, however, were in the control of potent daemons, and led only to utterly corrupted and sealed-off sections of the Webway. At Magnus' command, dozens of Sorcerers explored the Eye, searching for hidden Webway Gates, compiling their discoveries and bringing them back to the Tower of the Cyclops, where the Daemon Primarch assembled perhaps the most complete map of the Webway in existence.

With this map, Magnus conceived of a great plan to bypass the Cadian Gate entirely and bring the Illuminated Empire to the rest of the galaxy. Deep within the Webway laid the Dark City of Commoragh, domain of the Dark Eldar, these ancient xenos who appeased the hunger of Slaanesh for their souls through the suffering of others. Under the rule of the Houses, the nobility of that cruel race, the Drukhari preyed upon the rest of the cosmos, launching raids into realspace to capture slaves to torture in order to delay their own inevitable doom. A thousand years after his defeat at Khayon's hands, in what the Imperium called the 35th Millennium, the Crimson King launched an assault upon the Dark City. His goal was to capture it and turn it into a staging ground from where the Illuminated Empire would be able to strike at will anywhere in the galaxy.

The Dark Eldar nobles had spent millennia safe within their domains, the only threat they faced being the power plays of their own kind. They had grown arrogant, believing themselves untouchable, and not without good reason : after all, many of them had survived the Fall itself from their palaces of pain in Commoragh. Having survived the doom of their entire Empire and nearly their species, it was impossible for them to conceive of anything that could threaten them within their refuge. But they were wrong. For several decades, Magnus sent Sorcerers to secretly study the many, many wards that protected Commoragh from daemonic incursions. Once, the Eldar had been the most powerful psychic race of the galaxy, but since the Fall, the denizens of the Dark City had forbidden the use of psychic powers, lest they draw the attention of She-Who-Thirsts. They still knew how to maintain and replace the wards, but the actual practice of sorcery was one of the few things that would unite all the noble Houses against whoever had dared to endanger the whole City.

That lack of innovation was probably why Magnus eventually managed to figure a way to break through the wards and unleash an army of daemons, mutants and Chaos Marines upon Commoragh. The Houses were decimated, but they eventually managed to rally enough forces to force the incursion back. Commoragh was left ravaged by the weapons used by both sides of the conflict, with billions of Dark Eldar left dead in the ruins. Soon, the Houses were overthrown, as a new order rose, led by one Asdrubael Vect. Instead of a few lineages ruling by right of their ancient blood, merit became the way by which one rose through the ranks of the Kabals. This new order allowed the Drukhari to launch a vast campaign of plunder across the galaxy in order to secure the resources and slaves they needed to rebuild. For an entire century, despite their numbers having dangerously diminished, the depredations of the Dark Eldar were higher than ever before. Imperial historians came to call this period the Century of Woes, such was the cruelty of the Dark Eldar raiders.

Though that particular endeavour only resulted in indirect damage to the Imperium, there were others way for the Illuminated Empire to inflict its evil upon the Emperor's dominion. In his laboratories on the Planet of the Sorcerers, Fabius Bile refined the unnatural essence of the shape-shifters he had brought back with him from Tallarn, creating a new, improved lineage of the cursed beings. After several years of tests and experiments, Bile set his new creations upon the task of exterminating the previous breed of shape-shifters, proving their superiority over them in a fratricidal war that ended with the slaughter of the surviving Ancients, who had served the aims of the Illuminated Empire for millennia only to perish once the Clonelord judged them to be no longer of use. Then, with the help of several Exalted Sorcerers, portals were opened leading to sites of power across the galaxy, and the new shape-shifters were scattered across the stars. Many perished within the first few days, or found themselves stranded on alien worlds of no value to the Empire, but a few were delivered to human worlds. There they spread their gift to others. In most cases, such lineages hid in the shadows, working in secret to weaken the Imperium from within. But on a few worlds, the shape-shifters spread like a plague, transforming millions in mere months before revealing themselves in bloody, nightmarish uprisings. Entire systems fell to such inhuman revolts, before being purged in fire by the Inquisition, which scoured whole planets to cleanse this scourge.

The promise of eternal life drove many to willingly serve the shape-shifters, in the hope of being one day transformed themselves. Such vile heretics were ready to do anything to escape the shadow of death, and Tzeentch delighted in the depths to which they were al too willing to sink in order to please their inhuman masters. But the most favored progeny of the shape-shifters were those who rejected Chaos with all their heart – Fabius and Ahriman's dark gift could break the faith of all but the most devoted servants of the God-Emperor, who perished during their transformation instead of having their very soul rewritten by the power infused within the accursed "gift".

The threat of the Chaos cults and the shape-shifter infestation soon resulted in the creation of a new branch of the Holy Ordos, dedicated to hunting down and rooting out the twin cancers of corruption and heresy before it was too late. Named the Ordo Hereticus, this division of the Inquisition was a mix of witch-hunters, going about their work with great bombast and leaving behind them a trail of smoking pyres, and more subtle hunters, fighting a hidden war against the minions of Chaos. Acolytes hunted mutants and shape-shifters through the seedy underbellies of hive-cities, while Lord Inquisitors matched their wit and intrigue against that of immortal monsters.

And all the while, Tzeentch watched, and laughed, caring not whether his pawns succeeded or failed. The struggle was all that mattered to the God of Lies.

By that point, the loyalist Primarchs had all vanished. Rogal Dorn had disappeared during the Scouring, hunting down the remnants of a Word Bearers force in the Halo Stars. Russ and Corax had both disappeared, going on their own hunts for their treacherous brothers. Roboute Guilliman's body had been put into stasis on Maccrage after his confrontation with Fulgrim. Vulkan had simply vanished after the Heresy, and though there had been word that he had been sighted during the War of the Beast, in the end he hadn't reappeared before Sigismund had sacrificed himself to destroy the Great Beast on Ullanor. Jaghatai Khan had been lost pursuing the Dark Eldar who had preyed upon Chogoris during the Heresy, and the Lion had fallen on Caliban, battling his own mentor turned heretic, Luther. The Imperium had lost its demigods, and in truth, there were many within it who were quite happy with that state of affairs, no longer having to dwell in the Primarchs' shadow.

On the ice-world of Fenris, the sons of Leman Russ had gathered after the Battle of Tallarn and the Fall of Cadia. The descendants of the Space Wolves who had burned Prospero had found their legends of the witches of the Fifteenth Legion proven true in the worst way possible, and though the memories of the survivors of Tallarn were confused and fractured in the aftermath of the Grey Knights' departure, they still remembered enough. For several days, the lords of the Vlka Fenryka discussed their course of action, now that they knew their ancient foe still survived, and had in fact grown even more powerful and corrupt in their exile. Like the High Lords, they too had received Khayon's message, and like the High Lords, they didn't trust it at all. Plans were made for the numbers of the sons of Russ to grow, so that they might garrison the worlds around the Eye of Terror, becoming the watchdogs of Hell's borders, guarding against any future Black Crusade.

They did not know that, just as they made plans against their ancient foe, so too did that foe made plans against them. And cunning as the Wolves may be, their foes were much more so.

Though the Thousand Sons had learned that Horus was the one who had altered the Rout's orders from capturing Magnus to killing him long ago, their hatred for the Space Wolves was often undiminished. The Warmaster may have been the one who had given the order, but it had been the Sixth Legion who had slaughtered their people and destroyed their world without question. On Sortiarius, Exalted Sorcerers designed means by which they could project their consciousness beyond the confines of the Eye, possessing the bodies of their thralls across the galaxy. A cabal was formed, led by the Exalted Sorcerer Madox and dedicated to bringing ruin to the sons of the Wolf.

Playing upon the notorious barbarism of the Space Wolves and their refusal to entirely submit to the rule of the High Lords and the Inquisition, Madox managed to drive a wedge between the Space Wolves and the rest of the Imperium. His attempts to get the whole Chapter excommunicated and wiped out failed, but the dream of a great cage around the Eye manned by sons of Russ was lost.

A few hundred years after the Century of Woe, at the end of the thirty-fifth millennium, the forces of Chaos struck again at the Imperium. The shape-shifters and the cults of Chaos had spent centuries worming themselves throughout the Imperium's power structures, burrowing deep unnoticed while leaving other cults to be discovered and destroyed by the Ordo Hereticus. Using techniques perfected in the Blind City of Jerelos Prime, the agents of the Illuminated Empire slowly eroded the faith of entire worlds in the God-Emperor, causing heresies to rise and be put down with extreme violence by the Imperium. By manipulating the flow of information about these heresies and subsequent purges, the Illuminated Empire was able to slowly drive the Imperial elites to ever more drastic measures to maintain control of their population, until the time was right.

Within the Ecclesiarchy, these agents pushed for a unification of the Adeptus Ministorum with the rest of the Adepta, turning the Imperium into a true theocracy led by the priesthood of the God-Emperor. The inevitable push back by the other powers of the Imperium was carefully cultivated, alongside thousands of other petty feuds and grudges, until the entire empire was divided by a civil war unlike any since the days of the Horus Heresy itself, with both sides convinced that they were in the right, that they alone were acting as the Emperor willed. A group of powerful individuals, calling themselves the Ur-Council, was established on the world of Nova Terra, declaring themselves the true representatives of the God-Emperor and accusing the High Lords of treachery and heresy. Agents of Chaos on both sides worked to prevent peaceful resolutions and escalate things into open warfare, with the Ecclesiarchy at the center of things. The cupidity and ambition of Cardinals, who ruled over entire worlds and had entire armies of fanatics at their command, was used as an example of the Imperium's corruption. Rebellions erupted on thousands of worlds.

To further fuel the fires of civil war, the agents of the Illuminated Empire exposed the great shame of the Dark Angels. Having learned of what had transpired on Caliban during the Heresy from the Fallen who had arrived into the Eye of Terror and joined the Illuminated Empire to survive, these agitators revealed everything to as many Inquisitors and Imperial nobles as possible. In that moment, they struck a terrible blow against the Dark Angels and their Successor Chapters, who for thousands of years had hunted their Fallen brethren in secret, ready to murder other Imperial servants in order to hide their ancient sin. These acts of treason were also exposed, and the fractured First Legion was called into account by the Council of Terra, while among its own numbers, the revelation of what had been kept secret for thousands of years caused great distress to the sons of the Lion. The First Legion had always been a secretive one, but now, its obsession with secret orders and layers of forbidden knowledge was on the verge of causing its damnation.

In that chaos, Cypher, the Lord of the Fallen, was revealed to be part of the Ur-council of Nova Terra, and he called for the sons of the Lion to rally to him against the tyranny of the High Lords. A great schism tore the Dark Angels and their Successor Chapters apart, as different versions of what had happened on Caliban spread and warriors came to believe that the right thing to do was to stand against the High Lords for their perceived crimes against the people of the Imperium. A full third of the Angels of Caliban's descendants rallied to Cypher's banner, joining the other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes who had joined the Nova Terra Interregnum, believing that the High Lords had betrayed the ideals of the Emperor.

To make things even worse, the cults of Chaos that had been suppressed by the Ordo Hereticus were also on the rise. In the Eye of Terror, with Erebus dead and Argel Tal disappeared, Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, had solidified his hold onto the Dark Council of Sicarius. His adoptive son still withdrawn in contemplation of the Primordial Truth, Kor Phaeron was free to lead the Word Bearers. The Seventeenth Legion was trapped in the Eye along with the other Traitor Legions, but the Dark Apostles knew many rituals unknown even to the Exalted Sorcerers. Using their sorcery, they were able to inspire hundreds of Chaos Cults across the Imperium to rise, and the atrocities these cultists performed opened Warp rifts through which entire Chapters of Word Bearers were able to escape the Eye of Terror, bypassing the Cadian Gate entirely. With the Imperium already at war with itself, these hosts were able to conquer entire Sectors, establishing new kingdoms of the Dark Gods outside the Eye of Terror. Meanwhile, beyond the borders of the Imperium, xenos threats grew, with Ork Waaaagh ! engulfing planets as the greenskins multiplied unchecked, and other, less known breeds of xenos took advantage of the Imperium's weakness.

For a time, it seemed as if the Imperium was going to fall, not to the armed champions of Chaos or the numberless horde of the Orks, but to the subtle lies and manipulations of cults and deceivers turning it against itself. Then, suddenly, almost miraculously, the tide turned. The Chapter Master of the Dark Angels went to Terra with evidence of the conspiracy, buying the forgiveness of the High Lords for his Chapter's sin with proof of Chaos' involvement in the affairs of their rivals on Nova Terra. The conspiracy at the heart of the civil war was exposed, and Imperial forces came together around a core of Inquisitors and High Lords who set about restoring order to the galaxy.

No record was made of how the Chapter Master of the Dark Angels obtained the evidence he presented to the High Lords. Perhaps no one cared, so dire was the situation.

Sebastian Thor rose to power among the Ecclesiarchy, purging its ranks of corrupt Cardinals with the support of the newly founded Sisters of Battle and restoring the image of the Imperial Creed in the eyes of the other High Lords once he was named Ecclesiarch himself. Thor himself led the Crusade to Nova Terra, where the Ur-Council was destroyed. The rebellious Dark Angels who refused to lay down their weapons and submit to Terra's judgement were slaughtered, with their loyal brothers leading the onslaught, but Cypher himself escaped. The battle of Nova Terra resulted in a tight relationship between the Sisters of Battle and the surviving sons of Caliban, as the former regarded the later as the Angels of the God-Emperor, while the Space Marines saw the battle as the moment they had finally thrown off the weight of their own sin and no longer needed to hide the truth from the Imperium (though the Fallen themselves still needed to be hunted down). Many of the Sisters' orders would integrate the Dark Angels in their myths and beliefs, using their story to create powerful tales of atonement and devotion to the Master of Mankind.

The Sisters of Battle, now the only armed force that the Ecclesiarchy was allowed to keep, were instrumental in purging the Word Bearers dominions across the galaxy in the ensuing centuries, cementing their position within the Imperium as hundreds of worlds owed them their liberation (once all the heretics had been purged by fire, of course). When the mad Cardinal Bucharis, a shape-shifter of immense power, was put to the sword by Saint Alicia Dominica, founder of the Adepta Sororitas, the Age of Apostasy was finally decreed to be over. The Imperium had faced the greatest threat since the War of the Beast and survived, though untold billions had perished.

With the elite forces of the Sisters of Battle replacing the unwashed masses of the Armies of Faith, the Ecclesiarchy became a more reliable participant in the Imperium's many wars. During the reunification of the Imperium and the purge of the last Word Bearers hosts who didn't manage to escape back to the Eye of Terror or flee to the Maelstrom, the lords of the Imperium discovered another threat, one that had managed to remain hidden for thousands of years. In the aftermath of the Heresy, when the Traitor Legions had fled from the Scouring, the Iron Warriors had not all followed their Primarch into the Eye of Terror. Some had remained in their own personal fiefdoms, first conquered during the Great Crusade and fully claimed during the rebellion. Cut off from the rest of the galaxy by communication blackouts and the shift in Warp routes that had followed Horus' rise and fall, these domains (sometimes vast enough to include several systems) were ruled by the Iron Warriors, who were even harsher taskmasters that the Imperium.

The first of these domains was discovered by accident (though the Warsmith who ruled it blamed it on a plot of the Word Bearers whose blind flight ended up leading them and their pursuers into his territory). Only one ship of the Imperial fleet managed to escape, and its captain was soon executed for cowardice, but the intelligence it brought back was the foundation of a centuries-long, galaxy-spanning effort to purge the Fourth Legion enclaves. One by one, the dominions of the Iron Warriors fell, the survivors scattering to lead groups of pirates, cultists and renegades, or retreating to the Eye of Terror itself, where they knelt before the Lord of Iron and rejoined the Illuminated Empire itself. Such warbands were punished harshly for their defeat, for Perturabo had relied upon the sons he had left behind to provide support when the Illuminated Empire finally broke free of the Eye of Terror and began to wage its great war against the Imperium of Man.

Even on Sortiarius, not everything went well for the Illuminated Empire. Like in the rest of the Eye, there were many who no longer cared for the prosecution of the Long War. They were content to rule in Hell, and forget about the Imperium except as a source of fresh souls. That sentiment was most represented in Nakra'Leth, the daughter-city of Al'Kyreh. The Ascended had never known anything outside the Eye, and their vaunted destiny as Mankind's replacements sounded hollow after so many generations without progress. On Sortiarius, they were masters of their own reality : why would they seek to conquer a galaxy where their psychic powers would be much less useful ?

The greatest blow to the Illuminated Empire on the Planet of the Sorcerers, however, came from a most unexpected source. A group of Night Lords, who had once been members of the Exalted's own company, turned against the Secondborn Chaos Lord. With the help of others, they broke into the Stellar Spire of the Seekers and released the seer Talos Valcoran, known as the Soul Hunter. Talos had been offered as a tribute to the Corvidae when the Exalted had arrived on Sortiarius : his unique prophetic gift had made him very interesting to the seers, who had spent decades trying to understand where his visions came from. By the time his old squadmates broke him free of the Spire, the Soul Hunter had been driven to madness and back to sanity a hundred times over. His eyes burning with vengeance, Talos went to Ul'menelar, and confronted the thing that had once been his superior officer. The resulting battle reduced the Keep of Endless Night to rubble, as the great beasts dwelling in the deeps below the city rose, destroying everything in their path. Talos killed the Exalted himself before departing Sortiarius with a sizeable following of Night Lords, and had been a plague upon the Illuminated Empire ever since. The lords of Sortiarius tried to capture or kill him many times, but he always evaded their ambushes, aided by his second sight, which had been forced permanently open during his time as a prisoner of the Stellar Spire.

There were several attacks on the Cadian Gate over the ages. A bizarre code of honor started to appear in the Eye : when an army marched upon the Gate, even its most bitter foes would not oppose it, in the hope that one day, such an army would succeed and free all those trapped within Eyespace. The road leading to Cadia became something akin to holy ground, and priests of the Ruinous Powers claimed the daemon worlds on that path, establishing neutral territories where the hosts en route to Cadia could drop their anchors and resupply.

From elite strike teams to hordes of billions of cultists, from daemon legions to individual killers bursting with the gifts of Chaos, all tried to slay the Necromancer and break the Gate, and all failed. With the military genius of Ezekyle Abaddon (for though his mind was trapped in a dream-like state like that of all of the Necromancer's undead Legionaries, the First Captain's wits were still intact) combined with the sheer power of Khayon the Black, no assault upon the Gate could succeed. A graveyard of ships surrounded the ruins of Cadia, infested with scavenging teams that harvested the metal and brought the bodies to their lord for reanimation. Fear of ending up serving the Necromancer instead of killing him was enough to make even the bravest Chaos Lord think twice before challenging the Cadian Gate – especially after what happened to Thagus Daravek's attempt.

The self-proclaimed Lord of Hosts, Thagus Daravek of the Death Guard, sought to kill Khayon using sorcery to gain the upper hand. The blackened husk of his flagship was found in orbit of the Plague Planet, scoured clean of Nurglite corruption by psychic fire, with the Chaos Lord's charred skull waiting on the bridge, with the word "failure" engraved in old Tizcan upon its forehead. When an enraged Mortarion tried to summon Thagus' shade to punish him, nothing answered the rituals of the Death Lord, for the Necromancer had done more than just kill the Lord of Hosts. In the next years, the seers and oracles of the Eye spoke of the new addition to the Black Legion's ranks : thousands of Astartes from the warbands that had been fighting under Thagus' banner.

In addition, despite the best efforts of the Inquisition, Khayon's message to the High Lords had spread across the Imperium. When Chaos Cults rose and the Imperium seemed powerless to help them, desperate souls remembered the Necromancer who stood against Ruin, and they called upon him for assistance. Death Priests and resurrectionist cults formed within the Imperium every so often, inspired by the legends of the Necromancer. Such groups inevitably met one of two fates : they were either purged by the Inquisition for their betrayal of the God-Emperor, or they escaped and joined the Black Legion on Cadia, helping hold the Gate against the hordes of Chaos.

During the 41st Millennium, the Imperium had to face threats both old and new. From beyond the galactic borders came the Tyranid Swarm, a tide of chitinous flesh driven by an unspeakable hunger to devour all life. The Imperium paid a heavy price to defeat the first Tyranid incursion, only to later learn that what they had thought to be the main Tyranid force had been but the vanguard of a greater invasion coming from the deep void. At the same time, the antediluvian xenos known as the Necrons began to awake within their tomb-worlds, rising from the aeon-long slumber to find the galaxy a very different place than they had left it. The divided Dynasties, led by Phaerons whose minds had rarely gone through the Long Sleep unscathed, set about restoring their lost dominions. To them, the Eye of Terror was an aberration, something to destroy with the full might of the Necron Empire – as soon as the Empire came under their sole and uncontested rule, of course.

Isolated from the rest of the galaxy, the aliens called the Tau began their rise. Their lack of psychic ability forced them to develop alternate means of galactic travel. Unbound by the constraints of the Adeptus Mechanicus' prohibitions and without the constant shadow of annihilation looming overhead, the Tau were able to make great strides in technological advancement, equalling and even surpassing in some areas what Mankind had been capable of during the Dark Age of Technology. The aliens began to spread, slowly due to the limitations of their Warp-travelling technology. Several other species were integrated to the Tau Empire, all under the banner of the Greater Good. It was inevitable that the Tau would eventually encounter the darker aspects of the galaxy, and such an encounter would doubtlessly have been a great shock to their entire civilization.

But from his throne in the Court of Change, the Daemon Prince Ahriman foresaw that the Tau had the potential to become one of Chaos' great adversaries. Under his guidance, a group of Ahrimanites made contact with the Tau Empire, coming to the aid of a Tau exploratory fleet that had disturbed an ancient temple of Khorne and awakened its bloody guardians. This first contact helped the Ahrimanites establish a relation of trust with the aliens, and they taught the Tau what they needed to know about the wider galaxy – specifically, they taught them about the Imperium and its true size, as well as the threat of Chaos and its corruption. Framing their lessons in terms that the scientifically-minded Tau could understand (they didn't use the terms "daemons" and "sorcery", but "other-dimensionnal empathic entities" and "evolutionary adaptations to transdimensional exposure"), the Ahrimanites were able to convince the Tau of the danger they faced if they continued their blind expansion outward. After the Ethereal Council called the Ahrimanite envoys for a face-to-face audience, the direction of the Tau changed.

Ahrimanite agents within the Imperium would endeavour to keep the existence of the Tau a secret, and the aliens would remain within their current borders, focusing their efforts on increasing their population and, more importantly, their technological level. With the true nature of the Warp revealed to them, the Tau had decided that the Greater Good demanded that this madness be opposed in all its forms. The Tau were ill-suited to battle against the Dark Gods and their daemonic hordes, but their advanced weaponry would be very useful in battling their mortal armies. Specimens of Chaos Marines and warmachines used by the forces of Chaos were smuggled into Tau territory, where they were studied in isolated laboratories by heavily monitored Earth Caste researchers. New and improved suits of armor and weaponry was designed and field-tested, as companies of Tau warriors were taken across the galaxy by the Ahrimanites, fighting alongside their human allies both to help them in their own battle against Chaos and to collect battlefield data on their equipment's performance. To the rest of the Imperium, the Tau seemed to be just another mercenary race employed by some within the Inquisition, and the Ahrimanites kept it that way.

Then, at last, the Dark Gods grew bored of their games. Schemes thousands of years in the making were reaching their final phases, and the portents were aligning to show that the time had come once more for the Traitor Legions to rise from the depths of their prison. They turned their gaze to Cadia once more, and desired its destruction, that their servants within the Eye may unleash the evil they had spent a timeless eternity forging upon the rest of the galaxy. Perturabo crushed the last threat to the Illuminated Empire within the Eye of Terror, and the Exalted Sorcerers focused their attention upon the Cadian Gate once more. Within the Tower of the Cyclops, Magnus was finally allowed by Tzeentch to recover from the great injuries he had suffered at Khayon's hands.

All across Sortiarius, preparations were made for the final war, and there were many signs that the Gods were indeed in favor of this course of action. The gates of Al'Kyreh's and Nakra'Leth's vaults were opened, and terrifying monstrosities were dragged out in enchanted chains, locked away once more within special transport ships until they were unleashed upon the foe. In the Tombs of Unborn Empires, an exploration team sent by the Exalted Sorcerer Azhtar Manutec came back from the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth level transformed by what they had found down there. No longer human in the slightest, the nine survivors of the expedition had transcended into something akin to but different from Daemon Princes : they were of the Warp, but unaligned with any of the Powers as the Illuminated Empire understood them. Azhtar brought them to his Silver Tower, along with hundreds of the Tombs' scholars, who had been changed by the power of the nine beings upon their emergence, shedding their human forms to assume new aspects as their servants.

From the Pit of the Last Angel, dug by the fall of Argel Tal from the Tower of the Cyclops, came a figure of the Fifteenth Legion's distant past. The Greater Daemon Shai-Tan, whom Magnus the Red had once fought on the world of Morningstar before the Heresy, emerged, its great wings beating with the sound of a million screaming souls. It had been this creature that had dwelled at the bottom of the Pit for thousands of years, feeding on the torment inflicted upon the galaxy by the shades of the Word Bearers and World Eaters, just as it had been Shai-Tan that had destroyed Argel Tal's soul at last, the Crimson Lord meeting his end beneath the shadow of the abomination's wings. Behind Shai-Tan came the monsters of the Pit, given flesh once more by the power of Chaos. Shai-Tan flew across Sortiarius, landing before the Sword in the Stone. It drew the weapon, and the cults that had worshipped it for ages knelt and killed themselves, offering their souls to the Daemon Lord. With that power, Shai-Tan called the hosts of the Neverborn, battling the daemons of the Four before uniting a true infernal horde under its leadership, which it added to the Black Crusade marshalling around Sortiarius. Magnus confronted Shai-Tan once more atop the Tower of the Cyclops, and the beast knelt before the Crimson King, ready to fight for Chaos Undivided once more, its grudge against Magnus made irrelevant by the Cyclops' acceptance of his own place in the universe.

Tens of thousands of Chaos Marines, millions of trained Chaos soldiers, and an uncountable horde of the Lost and the Damned were gathered for this Black Crusade. Both Magnus and Perturabo took joint command, leaving Sortiarius in Amon's hands. While Perturabo was on board the Iron Blood, Magnus took command of a brand new vessel, forged on the Gift of Thot to the Crimson King's exacting specifications. The ship's true name was impossible to pronounce for mere mortals, but the Dark Mechanicum who had worked on its construction had named it the Planet Killer. It was an immense ship, designed for one purpose and one purpose only : the destruction of the Black Legion fortresses and the breaking open of the Cadian Gate.

At the Cadian Gate, the Black Legion fought against the Illuminated Empire one more time. Hundreds of ships were destroyed, until finally, the Planet Killer fired. That blast was a combination of the Dark Mechanicum's heretical technology and the Crimson King's own psychic power, and it burned through the wards and walls of the Cadian blockade, shattering the pieces of the world upon which the Black Legion had built its strongholds.

At the heart of the Cadian fortresses, the Necromancer, who had once been called Iskandar Khayon but who had forgotten everything save his duty to hold the Gate, died in the fire of the Eye of Terror's ultimate weapon. His soul fell, untethered to the Rubric, and slipped between the claws of the Neverborn, turning to dust between their waiting maws. The lord of the Black Legion vanished in the flames, and neither the living nor the dead ever saw him again.

The Black Legion perished in that battle, though there were a few Death Priests who managed to escape, fleeing back to the galaxy or deeper into the Eye of Terror. In time, the Ahrimanites would find those who survived the Illuminated Empire's hunt, and add their skills to the Radicals' arsenal.

With Khayon dead, nothing remained to stop the Illuminated Empire from returning to the galaxy. Aboard the Planet Killer, Magnus the Red called the mightiest of his Exalted Sorcerers to his side, as well as all the Daemon Princes who had risen from the ranks of his Legion during the last ten thousand years – save for Ahriman himself, who remained trapped within the Court of Change, his betrayal kept from his gene-sire by the will of Tzeentch himself. Together, they undid what the Necromancer had done, and tore open the Cadian Gate. From outside the Eye of Terror, it seemed that the great stain of the Ocularis Terribilis was shifting in the heavens, as the madness of the Warp receded where Cadia had once been, opening a portal large enough to be visible from a cosmic distance. Had the Eye been a natural phenomenon, it would have taken years for its light to reach these worlds and the image of the change to appear, but the Eye of Terror was a psychic nightmare, not bound by the laws of the Materium, and so the effects of Magnus' great ritual were instantly visible all across the galaxy. From distant Holy Terra to the Craftworlds of the Eldar, all psychically sensitive souls felt what the Crimson King was doing, and knew dread in their heart.

The fleet of the Illuminated Empire sailed through the rift opened by the Thousand Sons. In numbers so great that it seemed the Eye of Terror was emptying of all the damned souls within, they poured back into the Materium, emerging into realspace within the neighbouring systems of Cadia.

And there, they found the might of the Imperium arrayed against them, waiting and ready. Hundreds of Space Marine Chapters, from the sons of Caliban to the Vlka Fenryka, side-by-side with billions of Imperial Guardsmen and fleets of the Imperial Navy. The Adeptus Mechanicus' great forge-ships sailed alongside the frigates of the Sisters of Battle, and the black ships of the Inquisition were there too, their hulls filled with weapons forbidden to the rest of the Imperium.

This was not all. The Eldar were there too, distant from the Imperials but still clearly on the same side. Ulthwé had come, and other Craftworlds had sent troops to take part in that great battle. The Tau were there too, a fleet carried through the Warp by Ahriman's will, their advanced weaponry ready to be unleashed upon the Lost and the Damned, to protect the galaxy from the madness of the Illuminated Empire. A great host of Order, ready to stand against the forces of Chaos and crush them once and for all. And at its head, was the Macragge's Honour, the great flagship of the Ultramarines – and aboard that ship, sitting upon the command throne, resurrected from his long slumber by the works of the Mechanicus, was none other than Roboute Guilliman.

Magnus saw his brother's soul from the Planet Killer, his sight no longer shrouded by his obsession to avenge himself on Khayon, and the Crimson King screamed. His rage birthed a thousand daemons, adding to the might of the Black Crusade's armada. Perturabo smiled coldly, rejoicing at this chance to humble his hidebound brother one last time, and gave the order to attack, his will spreading across several systems, propelling billions of damned souls forward.

And so the great war between the Illuminated Empire and the Imperium, that had been delayed for thousands of years by the Necromancer and his Black Legion, began at last.

AN : And here we are at last. This story is over. Yes, I know an ending like that sucks, since you would very much like to know what happens next. Listen, perhaps in the far future I will write a follow-up story, but I already have one set of Times of Endings to write with the Roboutian Heresy. I can't do two at the same time.

This is actually the first time I finish a story published on the Web. Hmm. It feels ... weird. Not bad, but definitively weird. I began that story as something of a joke, writing the first chapter in a single rush of inspiration during my lunch break nearly two years ago. I thought it would be fun to play with all the characters of the Eye of Terror without worrying about it ... and it was fun. I wrote galaxy-shaking events in just two or three pages, tried my hand at horror and Lovecraft-style stories with The Call of Ahriman and the other Annexes ... I even experimented with giving the audience a say into what direction the story would take next via the polls I set up on spacebattles. I don't remember all of them, just that the last one was about how Khayon would go about destroying the remnants of the Slaaneshi Host. If you had chosen something else than the Sons of Horus, this story may have ended very differently.

I hope all of you had as much fun reading this as I had writing it. Please tell me what you thought about this last chapter, and the story in general. And if you have ideas for other "what-if" scenarii, please tell me. No crossovers, though : just stuff that could possibly have happened in the WH40K universe. I feel that's still a pretty large range of possibilities.

On that matter, one of the readers asked me what's the status on the story I mentioned in an earlier chapter, about Horus being resurrected by the Dark Gods. Well, that story has evolved since then : now it's a "What if Horus had survived the Heresy". The goal of the story was to see how different things would be with the Warmaster in the Eye of Terror, and it made more sense to just have him survive.

Concerning the advancement of that story, it's going to be a one-shot, not a full fic like this one has been. I want to write a full timeline of events from the Heresy to the end of the Dark Millennium. Right now, I am at about 7k words written for it, but it's probably going to be much bigger before it's done. I will work on it in the background of my other projects, until I am satisfied with it.

There is another project in the works, one that has been waiting half-finished for over a year now, with me coming back to it every so often to add a few hundred words to it before leaving it alone for weeks again. That one is something akin to the RPG module books, like the series of "By Night" books published by White Wolf for Vampire : The Masquerade. It's a presentation of a setting (here, a daemon world within the Eye of Terror, ruled by a mortal instead of a Chaos Marine), with the profiles of a lot of characters and a list of interesting locations on the planet.

Work continues on the next chapter of the Roboutian Heresy. I am still in the phase of building the skeleton of the chapter : I know how it starts and where it must end, but that's not enough. Once I am done with that phase, I will be able to sit in front of my computer and just fill in the blanks with thousand upon thousand of words simply by letting the juices flow, but for now I need to actually work on that thing if I want it to be as good as it needs to be.

For now, I think I am going to focus on the next chapter of Warband of the Forsaken Sons. It may be shorter than what I initially planned : I am thinking of cutting the big chapter into several smaller ones, to make it more like an actual book instead of the episodic format I have used so far in that fic. Now that I have completed one of my stories, perhaps I can try to finish another one (though Warband of the Forsaken Sons still has an entire arc to go through before it's complete, so considering my rate of publication for it, it will probably still be ongoing this time next year).

... Alright, time to close the curtains on that one. Goodbye, The Fifteenth Ascendant. It was fun.

Zahariel out.