M31.004
"The war was not the beginning of the end. It was the end of the beginning."
—Unknown sigillite record, redacted under Inquisitorial Seal Gamma-0
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The void coughed.
Not a polite clearing of a throat, but a deep, tearing spasm that ripped through the settled silence of the galaxy. For two centuries, the Great Crusade had pushed back the night—a relentless tide of bolter fire and righteous fury, guided by a single incandescent will. A new age had dawned, one built on reason, unity, and the perfect logic of the Emperor's dream.
But the ancient powers had merely been watching, seeding the ground, tending the rot. They had found their instruments not just in the howling Warp, but in the proud hearts of men, the ravenous hunger of xenos, and the insidious whispers festering in the forgotten corners of creation. And one entity, an architect of cosmic cruelty known in forgotten tongues as the Laughing God, the Great Joker, had finally set the dominoes falling.
The punchline was delivered not with a bang, but with a million simultaneous detonations across hundreds of light-years. It wasn't a single spark on a distant world like Isstvan III, but a galaxy-wide conflagration—perfectly timed, chillingly coordinated. Oaths, sworn in blood and iron, snapped like brittle glass. The galaxy began to burn.
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On the very edge of the Sol System, where the Mandeville points pulsed with the controlled fury of Warp travel, the alarm klaxons began their dying shriek. Fleet command on Luna watched in horror as the astropathic choir went silent—choked off by a wave of psychic static that felt less like disruption and more like deliberate, mocking laughter echoing in their minds.
Then the enemy arrived.
This was no ramshackle invasion fleet. It was a spear of obsidian and crimson, ships twisted into nightmare shapes, their hulls screaming with daemon-bound energies. At its head surged a command vessel that blotted out the stars, a jagged fortress radiating an aura of chilling, mechanical dread. And leading the assault was a figure known only as Vader.
Clad in sable ceramite, his form a living symbol of terror and crushing power, Vader was no biological son of the Emperor, nor even born of this galaxy. Torn from another reality by the designs of Tzeentch and tempered in Khorne's crucible of war, he was a being of unnatural focus and violent resolve. He wielded an ancient energy akin to sorcery, yet bound by discipline so brutal it could shatter minds. Once a fallen knight, now reborn as a juggernaut of relentless will, Vader served as a harbinger of boundless destruction.
His flagship tore through the outer picket, its macrocannons spitting not simple shells but screaming, soul-rending fire. Aboard frigates desperately trying to maintain formation, Space Marines of the Imperial Fists and Solar Auxilia watched in stunned silence as their void shields buckled and shattered under the sheer malice of the attack. Vader's forces—a grotesque mix of corrupted Legionaries, void-shriven tech-liches, and biomechanical horrors born of Dark Mechanicum blasphemy—poured into the breaches without mercy, without pause, without purpose beyond annihilation.
> "The audacity!" bellowed Fleet Admiral Valerius, his voice cracking with disbelief. "They bypassed the whole Segmentum defense net! How?"
The answer, though he could not comprehend it, lay in the meticulous long-game orchestration of the Joker. To him, the Imperium's strength was not an obstacle—it was the setup for the most exquisite joke. Order would be undone by its own arrogance, strength broken by its own rigidity.
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Miles away, deep within Segmentum Solar, another, more primal horror unfolded. Planets that had known peace for decades—vital supply lines and recruitment worlds—suddenly found themselves under siege by a Waaagh! unlike any in recorded history.
This was no ordinary green tide.
Guided not by the crude instinct of their kind, but by a chilling, focused malevolence, the Orks came in numbers that defied imperial imagination. And among them, shambling in unnatural rhythm with the horde, were creatures that defied both biology and reason—daemonic Ork hybrids, their flesh stitched with warp-stuff, their eyes alight with baleful cunning. These were not merely mutants. They were weapons.
At their head strode Shao Kahn, a warlord from another reality—once thought contained, now unleashed. Blessed by Khorne and Nurgle, he found in the Orks the perfect canvas for his insatiable hunger for conquest. Through him, the brutish xenos were elevated into something apocalyptic. Under his hand, their innate bloodlust was amplified into divine frenzy, their crude tactics honed into terrifyingly effective war doctrine.
Using warp rifts torn with horrifying precision, the Waaagh! bypassed planetary defenses and reappeared above target worlds in perfect synchrony. Civilized planets were engulfed in green and purple tides—warp-lit mobs carving through cities while daemonic lieutenants howled blasphemies. Populations were butchered or enslaved. Infrastructure was melted down and remade into crude, towering war machines under Shao Kahn's brutal direction.
The irony was thick enough to choke on: the Emperor's design, unraveled by the very xenos he had sought to contain—now infused with purpose, precision, and the ruinous blessings of the Warp. It was a brutal opera of destruction, directed with martial elegance, and its stage was the heart of the Imperium itself.
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But the deepest cut—the cruelest twist of the knife—was happening on Terra.
While the galaxy erupted in flame, the rot had already taken root beneath the golden towers of the Imperial Palace. The Palace cults, once tolerated as spiritual pressure valves for the masses, had become something else entirely. In the shadow of the Emperor's silence, whispers had become dogma, reverence had decayed into idolatry—and faith, once weaponized, now turned upon itself.
The architect of this betrayal was known as Griffith.
He brought no armies. He needed none. Possessing a beauty both radiant and unsettling, and a voice forged in betrayal and dreams, Griffith was a seducer of belief. Blessed by Tzeentch and Khorne, he corrupted not with fire, but with faith. His silver tongue twisted rituals, rewrote prayers, and transformed harmless devotion into poisoned fanaticism.
In forgotten chambers beneath Terra's surface—lit by flickering candles and the glow of unclean glyphs—his work reached its final phase. Acolytes, their eyes rolled back in ecstasy, chanted verses from books that should never have existed. The air thrummed with foul resonance. Reality thinned, cracked, and finally—broke.
And through the tears came daemons.
Not just monsters of flesh and claw, but nightmares incarnate—beings of concept and despair, born of madness and mockery. Their howls echoed through sacred halls. Their claws scraped against the golden walls of the Emperor's bastion. The breach was not physical—it was spiritual. Terra had been pierced not by blade or fleet, but by the corruption of its soul.
The Emperor's throne now sat atop a wound bleeding raw Chaos into the world.
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Across the stars, as the astropathic network frayed and failed, a singular message slipped through the static:
> Horus Lupercal has turned.
The Warmaster. The beloved son. The perfect general. He had declared open rebellion and plunged the XVI Legion into war against the Imperium.
And the Imperium, dazed and betrayed, focused its grief on that central tragedy. The Fall of Horus.
But the true horror—the Joker's punchline—was this: Horus was not the cause.
He was merely the opening act.
Vader, the dark outsider, shattered the Sol Gate.
Shao Kahn, the blood-god's warlord, twisted Orks into daemonic berserkers.
Griffith, the radiant betrayer, cracked open the Palace from within.
And the Joker, the architect of madness, watched it all unfold.
Somewhere—behind the veil of the Warp, or perhaps between the ticks of reality—a pale face grinned. Yellow teeth caught the light of dying stars. Green eyes shimmered with mirth as worlds fell. And then he laughed.
A long, endless, echoing laugh.
The Imperium had not fallen. It had never truly stood.
The Age of Imperium was over.
The Age of Iron, of horror, of endless, brutal war—had begun.
The oaths were broken. The galaxy was burning.
And the Joker was just getting started.