Timeline: M31.005 | Location: Immaterium, Blackstone Apex of the Eye of Terror
The Warp trembled—not with fury, but with confusion.
Where once the essence of laughter had reverberated across immaterial planes, there was now a hollowness. Not silence—no, the Warp never knew silence—but absence. An echo unreturned. A question without punchline. A trick without a jester.
The Joker was gone.
Not dead. Death was far too crude. Too permanent. No, the Joker had been banished—cast out of the Warp itself by the Emperor of Mankind in a moment of clarity, wrath, and desperation.
During the siege of Terra, the Joker had danced through the madness of war like a gleeful poltergeist. He whispered riddles to the dying, rewrote orders mid-transmission, and corrupted entire gene-batches of Astartes with weaponized laughter. But when he slithered too close to the Golden Throne—when he reached into the psychic machinery with fingers not of flesh but of metaphor—the Emperor acted.
It was not a strike of lightning. It was not a bolt of psychic fire. It was something quieter, deeper. The Emperor reached into the layers of the Warp and reality itself and removed the Joker as one might erase a blemish from a mirror—through sheer will.
The laughter ceased.
And the Warp recoiled.
---
The Daemonic Realms Stir
In the very heart of the Eye of Terror, four thrones of unimaginable scale trembled beneath their eternal masters.
Khorne, the Lord of Skulls, snarled.
He stood at the center of his brass citadel, rivers of boiling blood churning around him. The Joker had always been a thorn in his side—a creature of jest and mockery, not war and valor. And yet... the removal of such a powerful, maddening presence was not victory. It was theft. The Joker had been his enemy. It was his right to rip the jester apart.
"This is cowardice." Khorne's voice shattered continents in the Warp. "He was mine to slay. My axe longed for his painted skull."
He turned his fury upon a thousand Bloodletters, decapitating them in a blink, the brass floor slick with steaming ichor.
---
Tzeentch, the Architect of Fate, chuckled.
From his crystal towers of shifting logic and impossible color, he observed the void left behind. The Joker had been... an anomaly. Not his creature, not fully. And yet, the jester's very existence had stirred the skeins of fate into new patterns. A wildcard in the deck. A disruption in every scheme.
"A variable removed," he mused. "Yet chaos is not about control. The punchline was his alone. And now, the narrative lacks tension."
He summoned new threads of probability, weaving possibilities: The Joker's return, his rebirth, his rebuke.
"Interesting. So very... interesting."
---
Nurgle, Grandfather of Decay, wept.
Not tears, of course. The Plague God knew only rot and love. But as the flies slowed their dance and the garden withered ever so slightly, it was clear: he mourned.
The Joker had been a kindred soul, in his own way. A bringer of joy through entropy. His laughter had festered in souls and turned into rot. His toxins, gifts. His chaos, beautiful.
"He was joy in corrosion. The grin beneath the mask of suffering..." Nurgle sighed, and a hundred new plagues were born from the rot of remembrance. "...and he is gone."
The garden trembled, vines reaching for a laugh that no longer echoed.
---
Slaanesh, the Prince of Excess, was delighted.
Where others mourned or raged, Slaanesh savored. The banishment of the Joker was a crescendo of sensation. The sorrow of Nurgle, the rage of Khorne, the scheming frustration of Tzeentch—each was a flavor.
"Oh, the taste of his absence!" Slaanesh cooed, lounging on a throne of sensation incarnate. "So much sweeter than presence. That chaotic fool—he made reality a stage. Now the stage is empty, and the audience weeps. Delicious."
They licked their lips, drawing the final moments of the Joker's exile into their psychic palate.
But even Slaanesh knew—deep down, beneath silk and scream—that the Joker would not stay gone forever.
---
The Eldar Whisper
In the Webway, some among the Harlequins froze mid-performance. Their masked faces turned toward a corner of reality they could not reach. Cegorach, the Laughing God, paused in his dance. Though the Joker was not of him—not his shard nor his spawn—he had mocked in similar tones.
And now he was gone.
"A thief of laughter silenced," Cegorach mused. "Or merely hiding?"
---
The Warp Cracks… Just Slightly
A rift. A hairline fracture in unreality. Somewhere beyond the Materium, in a place not quite the Warp but not quite real, something pulsed.
Not the Joker himself—not yet—but an imprint, a metaphysical scar. A cosmic joke left unfinished. A punchline deferred.
The Immaterium pulsed in unease.
Then, just for a moment, across the screaming tides of Chaos, an echo of laughter.
Faint. But rising.
---
Tzeentch Moves First
On his ever-shifting throne, Tzeentch leaned forward. "The narrative is not over. Only paused. And now… a new act begins."
He turned toward the empty space the Joker once occupied in his vast game board. He placed a single piece—white on one side, black on the other—on the edge.
"Let the universe try to forget him. It will fail."
---
Slaanesh Smiles Last
Slaanesh rose from their throne and began composing an opera—of pain, pleasure, and lost madness.
The Joker's absence was a symphony. And when he returned?
It would be the encore.