Introduction It is the 51st Millennium, and the war continues. There was no great conflagration or calamitous final battle. Across the vastness of the galaxy, the Imperium died. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. The galactic empire of humanity crumbled, its enemies too many, too great and too terrible to imagine. The great conflict of Octavius had no victory, a war without end. In the fiery chasm of strife, the locust and the green holocaust fused, as beast looked upon barbarian and both saw the other as kin. The new entity spread with a speed undreamt of by ork or tyranid. War and hunger melded into a singular desire to ravage, rape and remake all in the image of the new devourer. The Devourer’s hybrid nightmares were regenerative, and spore-born, combining into a grand horror, which murdered the galaxy, leaving naught but fragments as it left. Metallic sentinels of unflinching dread rose up on some worlds, leaving them safe from the new devourer waaagh, but instead made them slaves to the silver sentinels, and fodder for their glowing metal gods. The Eldar who had held on to life for so long, slowly winked out of existence one craftworld at a time. Eventually, even the rumbling hearts of the avatars fell silent. For a time... In the dead craftworlds, something slithers through the infinity circuit to this day. Unfortunately, the great god of the dead, Ynnead, is trapped within this infinity circuit, howling its mournful song into the darkness, eternally hungry in its desire to wreak vengeance on She Who Thirsts. The Tau, naïve in their hope of unity, expanded into a realm of corpses and ash. Every world they came across was dead. The hard and unpleasant task of terraforming each world turned the Tau into bitter, self-righteous beings. They were disgusted at the actions of their predecessors, and vowed not understand their fellow races, but to purge them. Only the Tau could be trusted with worlds. They decided that all others must be cast out. Watching, their patron laughed his sardonic laugh as his puppets twisted into terrors. The Golden Throne finally failed. No-one knew for certain what happened to the Emperor. For once the throne fell, no vox or astropathic transmissions ever came from Terra again as warp storms engulfed the planet. The shattered remains of humanity had neither the power nor the will to return. All that is known is that the astronomicon died with the death of Terra, spluttering to nothing over the course of five hundred years. Eventually, the Imperium, coherency lost by the splitting of its forces against the new devourer, and the sudden surge in warp storms, was shattered like glass. Chaotic cults stampeded through humanity, like electrical surges in an ancient power grid. The Inquisition with the death of the Emperor, finally lost its façade of unity, and most died, killed by the more powerful within its once hallowed ranks. The greatest Inquisitor Lords seized whole systems, becoming feudal Kings and Regents. Uniting scattered mobs of their deadly follows around them in order to wrestle power from Local Governors. The church also shattered, becoming nothing more than a series of minor sectarian cults. All save Ophelia. The Sororitas withdrew from as many worlds as they could, and gathered around Ophelia and nearby systems. Ophelia became a vile charnel house for the eccliesiarch, who had been driven insane by all he had seen. He gathered his canonesses, abbesses and witchhunters together and put billions to the torch. Any system within range of short warp jumps (as navigators could no long take long jumps, due to the warp storms) of Ophelia were terrorized by the Imperial Church, who searched desperately for someone to blame for this nightmare. It was said that in those days, a hundred thousand Petty Imperiums were created from the carved up corpse of the Imperium of Man. Each claimed legitimacy and claiming to be led by a leader chosen by the Emperor as he finally died. Some even claimed to be the Emperor reborn. Humanity, so scared in their huddled masses, believed this heresy without question, too afraid to imagine a universe without their father and protector. The space marines fared little better most chapters utterly disintegrated as their forces fighting individual missions across the galaxy, found they could not return to their Chapter Masters. In the darkness, alone, many marines chose the only path they knew: War. They became rogues and near bandits, pillaging Imperial world ‘for the war effort’ as they would say in justification for their actions. It was said White Scar war bands and Raven Guard war bands were the worst, as they were so swift and ruthless in their pillaging. The Black Templars retained the most of their original fervor, and merely continued their crusades. They became full worshippers of the God-Emperor and High Marshall Dorstros declared a new and great crusade: to destroy every human that did not submit to them, and purging everything and everyone else. Their fervor blinded them to their own heresies, as more and leaderless marines desperate for orders tagged alongside the Black Templars’ crusade. Millions of rag tag former guard and massive mobs of flagellating Imperial Cultists quickly joined the crusades' march across the stars. Soon, their depleted numbers (depleted during the wars with the new devourer) had nearly reached two thousand, representing the second largest single group of Imperial marines still in existence (second only to Grand Sicarium). Yet, no matter how large their crusade got, the Templars were naught but a band of raving fanatics Ultramar was renamed Grand Sicarium, under their new ruler, Cato Sicarius. His realm became a holy site for the other Ultramarine successors. Their fractured remnants gathering around Ultramar like a swarm of flies. Sicarius declared himself High Spess Murheen king, decreeing that those under his protection should worship him as the god he was. Sicarius became the ruler of his own little empire, his angelic marines and ordinary humans under his decree became his worshippers. Upon Macragge itself, the fortress of obsidian was crafted; the heads of Agemman and Calgar were stuck upon great steel pikes. A grim demonstration of Sicarius’ desire to rule all. Ultramar became a darker place in those centuries. Those forgeworlds still intact either fell to chaotic or Dragon-cult invasions. Some were ransacked by rival warbands desperate for tech priest slaves to help them work their stolen technologies. These slaves became bartered like currency amongst the various larger ‘Petty Imperiums’ as they became known now. Some forge worlds simply sealed themselves off from reality entirely, their Fabricators for once preferring ignorance over knowledge of what lay beyond. Chaos became a raging torrent in these dark millennia, rising to Strife-Era levels of corruption. Worlds were dragged into the warp as whole planets were over-run by psykers, madmen, and monstrous space marines. The chaos Legions became virtually indistinguishable from rabid bands of former loyalists. Some groups slaughtered in the name of dark gods, others just slaughtered. Abaddon seized massive swathes of space around the eye, being careful to avoid the new devourer, as it blundered around him. Dodging like a skilled swimmer giving a swarm of predatory fish a wide berth, he avoided them. Abaddon and his 78th Crusade, plunged into the solar system. It is there that legend tells of the war of two spheres. Here, Abaddon faced the army of the Dragon transcendent, a vast army of fallen Mechanicus and those same silver sentinels that already plagued thousands of worlds. The confrontation was epic in scale. Warped spawned magic, and daemonic machinery and weaponry, battled weapons of unimaginable power, and the vast serried ranks of necrons and pariah, which covered nearly every solid Solar world like a silver carpet. In the end, Abaddon was forced to merely surround the ort cloud. The Dragon had ensured the solar system was his. His, save for a single orb of diamond hard stubbornness: Titan. It stood, a stony fortress, its doors sealed from the necrons by admantium and heavy cannons, its soul sealed from Abaddon by the cold steel cage of faith encaging the hearts of the Grey Knights and Custodian Guard still trapped upon the world. All other humans on the world had perished a thousand years previously, yet the ancient warriors stood firm, a shadow of the Imperium’s previous glory. In the turbulent energies of the warp, the Chaos gods also suffered. For upon the end of the Emperor, something else stirred. Birthed upon the death of Him on Terra, the Starchild suckled upon the raged religious lunacy of the dying Imperium, consuming every soul remaining upon terra in its birth pangs. This is what killed the astronomicon. Ophelia became a focus for this dark zeal. At the dawn of the 50th millennium, the Starchild became the Star Father, and the warp became a battleground. For a brief instance (or perhaps an eternity in the warp, none can tell for sure) the Star Father became dominant over the chaos foes. Then, with the sickening inevitability of the great game of chaos, the Star Father became one amongst the five, an order god amongst chaos gods. Where they spread chaos, He spread oppression. Where their daemons were feral nightmares that rended souls, His daemons were faceless automata, enslaving the souls of humans into servitude. Star Father daemon worlds sprung up in the eye and across the galaxy in the closing thousand years of this dark age. They were balls of featureless gold, with golden faceless daemons and billions of mindless, empty humans.