The Wild Hunt

The End of days. The Wolf time. The Rhana Dandra. It had many names. It was the final tipping point beyond which the Galaxy would succumb forever. It was full of a billion heroes and countless sacrifices, of unspeakable treachery and peerless valour. It was a time of defiance, as the bastions of Man were lost one by one. Cadia had fallen millennia ago and the Creed memorandum was not enough to stem the tide any more. Ultramar was but an island in a sea of greenskins, assaulting it in a centuries old siege. Hive fleet Magog was hammering at Battlefleet Solar, having reached almost to the heart of the Imperium. Hope became a scarce commodity in the 53rd Millennium.

As these events slowly unveiled, all of the Imperium's eyes were turned towards it - towards Terra. For the past twenty thousand years it was the seat of the God Emperor and a symbol of Mankind's endurance in the face of the Angry Night. The one the denizens of the Warp called The Anathema. Humanity believed him to be their God and why wouldn't they? The Eldar birthed She Who Thirsts. Yet where each of them had a soul that echoed in the Warp, humans were but flickering candles. They could not lift the Emperor into true Godhood. But now now when the Galaxy finally burned, now when the Great Devourer was closing his maw, now when the faceless legions of the Necrontyr were scouring all in their path, now when the Eye and the Maelstrom were open and weeping corruption like puss from a rotten wound...

Now would be the culmination of a plan that was laid seventy thousand years ago by the Anathema. He always had but one purpose and this was His final act. His legacy... no Their legacy, for he was but a mere servant to the greater cause of human kind. As the armies of the Imperium died in their trillions, with His name on their lips, the huddled masses of Mankind cried out to Him, with a single voice, united across the Galaxy. From the tallest of Hives to the caves of feral savages, from the countless battlefields to the Imperial Palace itself, there were many words, many chants, many prayers but only one meaning, only one emotion.

"Save us."

Faith is a powerful weapon, True faith even more so. It was the currency of the Gods and so much of it was channelled to the one that the Immaterium feared most. There was a reason they called him Anathema. He was their ultimate enemy, no not just an enemy but antithesis and he was prepared. Uncounted millennia ago the Anathema had reached a conclusion- his Enemy could not be fought. It could only be stalled for some time, but it was a battle that could not be won. No matter what He did, all his victories would be hollow. He needed an alternative, which eventually presented itself. A pact was struck and the Anathema set to work. He would bring all of mankind under one banner and forge a single mighty Imperium that will ensure human kind will survive until the final hour. He would willingly build the pyre upon which it shall then be sacrificed - The Golden Throne. And then... light it up.

In those final hours, humanity's death cry gave the Anathema the power He so desperately needed. What He lacked though, was focus. Now the one he bargained with so long ago fulfilled his obligation.

Ynnead. God of the dead. The final sum of the Eldar race, awakened as the last of them finally were laid to rest in the Infinity Circuit or died on the battlefields of the Rhana Dandra. The Anathema was meant to be a saviour, and so was Ynnead but where one wanted to save mankind in life, the other one wanted to save the souls of the Eldar race in death, and there was only one way to achieve both. With his aid the God Emperor of Man unleashed His final gambit. The Galaxy did burn, but it was not with the fires of destruction. The Light of the Emperor reached all its corners and completely annihilated everything. Nothing was spared from it: humans, orks, tyranids, tau remnant, necrons... Few things escaped His Wrath. The Tyranid Hive mind reeled and recoiled, turning away the rest of numberless hordes before they were caught in. Necron nodal networks collapsed and countless immortal warriors ceased to be, turned into mere statues - the necrodermis immobile. The metal was dead. The C'tan shards shattered again and again until there was barely a flicker of the conscience that once resided within. Humanity was used up to fuel the fires of its own salvation.

What was left after that was nothing. Nothing, but the silence of empty battle grounds and the howls of starved gods. The Dark Eldar were ravenously swallowed by the Prince of Excess - with no fresh source of slaves they had no way to avoid the Thirst of Slaanesh, short of drinking each other's souls. Even though many Haemonculi lasted longer by using their vast cloning vats as a way to cultivate fresh souls, most of Commoragh died in a vast cannibalistic orgy. Centuries turned into millennia as the Eye slowly closed, following the weaker rifts. The damage done to the Warp ever since the War in Heavens in ages immemorial was finally being undone. The gods reeled and trashed, powerless for the first time since their birth as they slowly faded away. Only Tzeench the all knowing, the master of all Change was unfazed. Was it because he had foreseen the Anathema's gambit, aided it perhaps or for some other reason, none could tell. He said only one thing as his voice became mere whisper.

"All this will be again ..."

Thousands of years turned into hundreds of thousands then to millions. How many had passed only the stars themselves could tell. The ruins left by the Age of the Imperium were nay but dust. The warmth of life was once more coming to existence but the walls of reality had healed and there was no malice left behind them. Without the Old Ones to engineer new psychic races they remained so. It was then that the Emperor's last ploy came to be. Deep beneath Terra no, Earth's crust, in a thrice sealed chamber protected by the most powerful wards and stasis fields he could conceive, was His last great project. Mankind would not be mere food for thirsting gods, or a plaything for an elder race. It will rise again. The experiment was a contingency, one so secret that no one, not the Magus biologus, not his closest aides, not even His sons were aware of it.

It was called Adam.

Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.