The silence that fell upon Terra after the final, shattering psychic scream was not peaceable. It was the silence of a wound that refused to close, a void where a sound should have been. The Siege was over—the greatest battle the nascent Imperium had ever known—concluded not with the clarion call of victory, but with the dull thud of irreparable loss and the chilling echo of a vanished enemy.
M31.006. The very fabric of reality around the Sol System seemed to hold its breath. Warmaster Horus, the architect of apocalypse, the son turned betrayer, was gone. Not slain, but erased, torn from existence in a manner witnessed by few, understood by none save the broken entity upon the Golden Throne. His fate remained a cosmic unanswered question, a raw nerve in the galaxy's collective psyche. The final, shattering psychic scream that echoed through the Warp had not been the Emperor's cry of death—but Horus' severing. A presence so profound was torn free of time and substance, leaving even gods in momentary silence.
And the Champions of Chaos—Erebus, Lorgar, Angron, Mortarion, Magnus, Fulgrim, Perturabo, Curze, Alpharius Omegon—the demigods who had knelt before the Warmaster, lay scattered. Not slain, for the gifts of their patrons, however twisted, were not so easily undone. But broken. Shattered in form, their physical bodies blasted into fragments or warped into immobile agony. Their minds, once sharp instruments of rebellion and ambition, were scarred landscapes of defeat, trapped between madness and inert despair.
Each remained a monument to failure. Angron, a screaming, shattered titan, was bound to a world of perpetual slaughter—his rage now a localized storm in the Warp, unable to break free. Mortarion clung to life amidst the fumes of his own decay, a prisoner of Nurgle's 'gifts', never quite able to manifest, never permitted to die. Perturabo, embittered and paranoid, retreated to his fortress worlds, surrounded by rusting legacies of cold logic and ancient bitterness. Fulgrim, consumed by the seductions of Slaanesh, became a grotesque parody of beauty, his mind fractured into a thousand warring impulses of ecstatic torment.
Magnus wandered the mirrored halls of the Crystal Labyrinth, a sorcerer unbound yet imprisoned by the very knowledge he once craved. His influence leaked into the Warp like uncontrolled radiation—dangerous, scattered, directionless. Curze... the ghost king's fate was uncertain. He became a story told in whispered terror among Commissars and night terrors. Alpharius Omegon, twins or one, remained unseen—perhaps the only ones who retained agency, if not unity.
As for Erebus and Lorgar, their fall was doubly cursed. First as architects of the rebellion, and second as tools displaced by something far more dangerous. Once exalted, they now found themselves eclipsed. Their power, fractured by divine judgment and failure, forced them into shadowed silence. Joker's ascension—chaos incarnate in irreverent form—had made them relics, their rituals quaint compared to his unpredictable, laughing corruption. They watched from the dark corners of the Warp, bitter and cold, waiting for a moment that may never come.
The Chaos Gods seethed. Their boundless power frustrated by mortal resilience, by the disappearance of their most favored instrument, and by the fact that their greatest mortal agents were now little more than inert idols of ruin. The Warp reeled. Victory had been within their grasp. Instead, they had been denied. The great rebellion was scattered. The blade had dulled.
Yet, across the burnt cinders of Terra and the scarred worlds of the Imperium, a kind of peace settled. Uneasy. Brittle. Haunted.
The reconstruction began—a Sisyphean task against the backdrop of utter devastation. Legions, once the unbreakable spearhead of human ambition, were shattered. Their numbers decimated. Their loyalties fractured. Their Primarchs either corrupted, mourned, or gone. The Administratum, the Mechanicum, and the nascent Ecclesiarchy scrambled to preserve order through ritual, bureaucracy, and the ossified memory of the past.
And upon the Golden Throne, at the heart of the Imperial Palace, sat the Emperor. Alive—but no longer a vibrant beacon of imperial will. His body was a ruin, sustained only by ancient technologies and a torrent of sacrificial psyker deaths. He was a suffering king upon a throne of pain—watching, always watching. His psychic presence, once a radiant sun, had become a thunderhead of agony and warning, a threnody that echoed across the stars.
The first century after the Siege was an era of ashes. The physical destruction immense. The psychological trauma deeper still. The Imperium was not rebuilt whole, but patched together with salvaged belief and scar tissue. Every policy, every decree, every prayer was forged in the memory of betrayal.
Millennia bled into new millenia. M32. . The uneasy peace endured. Not the absence of conflict, for xenos threats persisted and civil wars continued. But the fundamental threat—the unified, god-supported rebellion that had nearly ended the Imperium—remained silent. That was its own horror. Waiting.
The broken Primarchs of Chaos remained scattered. Ruined. Watching. Still present.
But the Chaos Gods had not been idle.
Denied the hammer-blow of the Heresy, they turned to subtler weapons. Dagger and whisper. Seduction and shadow. Corruption from within. Cultivation of fanaticism. Subversion of faith. The slow, meticulous spreading of insanity and despair.
New champions began to rise—not sons of the Emperor, but monsters and messiahs of another sort.
Across the stars, they emerged like malignant comets.
Joker, laughing in impossible places, his voice curling into the minds of rogue psykers and despairing generals. He was the echo of madness, the riddle no one could solve, the smile beneath the mask of sanity.
Darth Vader, clad in black iron, drifted alone in the deep void. His senses reached toward the tomb worlds of the Necrons. There, he felt power older than Chaos—emotionless, logical, unshackled by daemons. He watched, and waited, plotting ways to bend the undying kings to his will.
Griffith, beautiful and terrifying, moved among the noble houses of humanity. He was a dream made flesh, a messiah of lies who promised salvation with one hand while gutting truth with the other. Entire planetary systems fell in love with him before realizing too late the price of their devotion.
Hisoka, a daemon-hearted wanderer, played games with Tyranid synapse creatures, capturing one, reshaping it with Slaanesh's delight and Khorne's violence. Somewhere in the void, a new splinter of the Hive Mind formed—stranger, hungrier, playful.
Dr. Henry Wu, forgotten by history, toiled in secret places with specimens harvested from daemon worlds and xenos flesh. He sought to understand Chaos not through worship, but experimentation, and in so doing, drew the notice of Tzeentch.
The original Champions, though absent from Imperial records, were whispered of in dreams. Ghosts behind the veils of realspace. They were not done. They had only begun.
Meanwhile, the Emperor's will remained the final barrier. His consciousness spanned the stars—a suffering mind bound in golden agony. He no longer governed; he endured. The Astronomican became the Imperium's only constant—its guiding light and warning flare. He was a presence in the warp—a psychic dam against a flood that never ceased to rise.
As centuries passed, the Imperium ossified. Bureaucracy metastasized. Faith calcified. The Ecclesiarchy rose, and the Emperor was no longer seen as the pinnacle of human potential, but as a wounded god martyred for humanity's sins.
The galaxy had changed.
The silence after the storm was not peace.
It was a lull. A breath.
And somewhere in the Warp... they laughed.