Across the roiling, polychromatic hellscape of the Eye of Terror—where time is a fractured joke and reality a malleable canvas for madness—M34 dawned like a poisoned sunrise. Whispers stirred the airless void between screaming stars, not in chorus but in warning. Even the Great Powers, enthroned upon oceans of blood, mountains of skulls, gardens of decay, and libraries of paradox, felt a tremor.
A distant ripple, irritating yet undeniable, pressed upon the Warp like a splinter in a god's mind. The Anathema—the Corpse-God of Terra—was moving. A subtle disturbance radiated outward from the Throneworld, a counter-tempo to the Eye's eternal dissonance. The Four felt it but could not decipher it. Not yet.
And so they turned inward, searching for their weapons—their champions.
They found only fragments.
---
Hisoka
In one forgotten fold of Slaanesh's dominion, where sensation itself was sacred, Hisoka suffered.
Not bound by chains of iron, but by threads spun from the laughter of daemonic larvae—impossible silk that pulsed with perverse pleasure and exquisite agony. A cocoon of contradiction held him, anchored not by force but by fascination.
Psychic lances pierced through his soul-stuff—not to kill, but to understand. To dissect the paths of his twisted hunger. He was a butterfly pinned by warp-flies, not for death, but for eternity's amusement. His body writhed in elegant futility, each spasm an artwork of torment, each sigh a symphony of sensation.
He had gone too far, perhaps even for Slaanesh. Or perhaps, he had not gone far enough.
---
Griffith
Elsewhere, beneath the collapsed husk of a daemon world, Griffith lay unmoving.
He was not slain—death was a kindness denied to those who had once been marked by Khorne and Tzeentch. No, he was entombed, buried beneath what remained of a once-grand monument to Nurgle's rot. The world had imploded not from battle, but from entropy—corruption turned inward, collapse born of unseen change.
Griffith had danced too finely along the razor's edge of rage and cunning, Khorne's fury and Tzeentch's ambition. The gods admired him, used him, then cast him into a paradox where both violence and prophecy meant nothing.
Now he was a statue beneath fungal stone and fossilized screams. He simply was, an unchanging monolith in an ever-changing realm. His eyes, though buried, still dreamed.
---
Shao Kahn
Farther still, adrift between dimensional echoes, Shao Kahn wandered.
Once the unbreakable warlord whose conquests had shaken star systems, he now stalked through ghost-realms. His mighty Legions—formed in the crucibles of war and sealed in blood-oaths—had torn themselves apart in the Eye's paradoxical storms. Not by defeat, but by chaos itself.
Now, he roamed between shattered WAAAGH! echoes—phantom migrations of Orks, warped memories of battles that never occurred. He heard the roars, felt the ground shake with phantom krumpin', but there was no enemy to crush. No empire to seize. Only war that wasn't.
Even Khorne had turned His gaze, as though the endless bloodletting Kahn once offered had become white noise.
---
Dr. Wu
In a sealed reality-bubble, folded and sutured into the Warp's hide, Dr. Henry Wu endured.
His laboratory—a cathedral of biologic heresy—had become its own ecosystem of madness. He sought perfection: life eternal, evolving, unchecked. He succeeded.
Now, within the time-twisted fold, his creations warred in cycles of endless mutation. They devoured each other, then the lab, then him, again and again. Eaten, reborn, consumed, reassembled—his form was no longer one thing. He was part of the experiment now, a data point, a mutation, a scream muffled by the skin of reality.
Tzeentch and Nurgle, both once patrons of his genius, had abandoned interest. There was nothing more to prove—only the unceasing churn of potential unfulfilled.
---
Darth Vader
In the void between thoughts, where light itself feared to tread, Darth Vader drifted.
His armor, that black icon of tyranny, was shattered—melted slag by a force the Warp itself barely understood. Perhaps a burst of null-energy, perhaps the wrath of something even darker. His body, mangled. His cybernetics, twisted and fused.
But worse than his wounds, the Force—his eternal chain—was silent.
Disconnected, Vader was no longer Sith, nor machine, nor man. He was a hollow presence, a flickering ember in a place where souls screamed forever without reply. The Warp had no use for silence, and so it ignored him.
He did not die. He lingered.
---
The Witch-king
And finally, in the deepest crevice of un-being, where the Warp frayed into nothingness, the Witch-king of Angmar hid.
Not from fear, but from defeat.
His power—wraithlike and ancient—had been challenged not by fire or blade, but by song. The psychic harmony of Eldar wraiths and farseers had cut through his spectral essence, unraveling him note by note. Their music had known his name, and that had been enough.
Wounded in ways that reality could not comprehend, he retreated. Not to fortress or tower, but to the very edge of unreality, where thought unraveled into void. His form flickered—neither shadow nor scream—anchored only by hate, too deep to forget, too weak to act.
---
The Gods Respond
Only whispers of these once-mighty champions remained. Echoes of torment. Ghosts of glory.
The Eye of Terror stirred uneasily. The champions had been their voice, their will, their blades—and now, those voices were mute. Their pieces, once dominant upon the board of fate, were scattered, consumed, or sealed.
And still, the ripple from Terra grew stronger.
A mortal plan. A movement. A challenge.
The Chaos Gods did not know what the Corpse-God was doing, only that it mattered. Enough to tilt the game.
But Chaos is patient. Millennia are passing dreams to entities unchained by time. There will be new choosen, new wars, new betrayals but their are the only champion they summon.
The Eye never closes.
The game is far from over.