M38.997
The False Cults Rise
It began, as most heresies do, with whispers.
In the shadowed margins of Segmentum Tempestus, far from the golden light of Terra, forgotten shrine-worlds and dust-choked agri-colonies birthed something strange. They did not scream for blood or summon daemons — not at first. Instead, they laughed.
What appeared to be harmless traveling troupes and rogue performers soon mutated into something monstrous. In the beginning, they staged "lost Imperial plays" in crumbling amphitheaters, oddly twisted parables full of inverted virtues and tragic comedy. Astartes were clowns. The Emperor was a blind fool. Horus was played by a weeping mime.
By the time the Inquisition turned its attention to them, they were already empires of absurdity.
The Choir of Laughter was the first to sing.
Clad in patchwork harlequin robes soaked in sacred oils and blood, they danced through settlements with blades and euphoric incense. Their sermons were delivered through paradox and pun. Laughter was a weapon sharper than any chainsword. A child's ritual suicide was the crescendo of a hymn. A planetary governor's heart, torn out mid-conference and squeezed like a wineskin onto a cheering crowd, was an encore.
Then came The Crimson Stage.
Where the Choir sang, the Stage performed. Led by masked tragedians and flay-scribes, they declared reality itself a play — and the Imperium, its tired script. Their sacred texts were literal scripts, written in the skin of dissenters. They performed executions as performance art. Theaters rose from the earth like tumors, their seats filled with weeping penitents who laughed until their spines snapped.
One performance on Bellacane V would echo for centuries. The Crimson Stage aired a live "opera" wherein the ruling ecclesiarch was rewritten into a tragic protagonist. As he was slowly disemboweled before a crowd of billions, his daughter performed a ballet of mourning, her bones fracturing in perfect rhythm to the accompanying music. The galaxy watched. And many did not look away.
The Ordo Hereticus responded with righteous fire.
Whole systems were declared Exterminatus. Worlds were cleansed, voices silenced, laughter drowned in flame. Administratum scribes were executed for failing to document it properly. Purity seals were burned into orbiting debris. For a time, silence returned.
But it was a silence filled with breathless anticipation.
The cults returned. Louder. Stranger. Stronger.
The Choir of Laughter reemerged with new hymns — some capable of driving entire populations into convulsive joy that ruptured internal organs. The Crimson Stage's scripts began to infect data-slates remotely, rewriting reports and military orders into tragicomedy.
But worse than the cults was what followed them: the corruption of narrative itself.
Segmentum Tempestus began to break not just physically or socially — but metaphysically. History itself became warped by a laughing infection. Archived battles transformed into satire. Statues of Saint Drusus transfigured into bronze jesters overnight. Canonical texts now read like self-aware parodies. Astropaths screamed in rhyme. Confessors burst into monologue before self-immolating. Every purge gave birth to new stories, more virulent than the last.
A metaphysical virus had taken root.
Administratum adepts tore out their own eyes after discovering contradictions in their records that hadn't existed a moment before. Reports filed in triplicate mutated in transit into three completely different documents, each mocking the others. Even cogitators fell victim — their machine minds dreaming up tragicomedies, refusing to execute standard protocol without a standing ovation.
The Inquisition found no daemons.
Only laughter.
Then, at the height of the chaos, as reality itself bent under the pressure of parody, a signal pierced the stars. It was a broadcast that did not travel by astropathic relay, vox-caster, or warp beacon — but through story.
From the dead reaches of the Ghoul Stars, where even nightmares feared to tread, a rift bloomed.
But unlike the violent Warp tears of Chaos invasions, this one opened gently — like a stage curtain parting. Gold and violet light shimmered across the stars. Vox-units laughed. Machine-spirits wept. The Warp anomaly pulsed in time with an invisible orchestra.
And from the heart of that impossible curtain, he stepped forth.
He wore no armor, only a tattered coat covered in stitched mouths that whispered verses. His smile was wrong. Not mad — amused. Deeply, terribly amused. His eyes sparkled with layered infinities — endless Tzeentchian riddles behind Slaaneshi sensuality, perception fracturing as one tried to look too long.
The Joker had returned.
Or perhaps, he had always been here.
His first act was his greatest.
Across the galaxy, every vox-system, every servo-skull, every dreaming psyker heard his voice. Not in words, but performance. A single, grand, synchronized broadcast — a tragicomic opera titled "The Emperor's New Flesh".
Billions laughed until their lungs collapsed. Civilizations choked on their own delight. Administratum personnel danced into the vacuum of space. The Adeptus Arbites executed themselves in synchronized duets. Entire Forge Worlds began sculpting weapons that fired irony instead of bullets.
Over nine billion souls perished.
But oh, how they enjoyed it.
The Imperium fell into silence once more, unsure whether the horror had passed — or whether this was merely intermission.
What returned was no longer the Joker of old.
His mind was now a labyrinth of Tzeentchian enigmas, riddles within riddles laced with prophetic punchlines. Slaaneshi excess twisted his humor into performance that shattered sanity. He walked among cults not as a leader — but as their muse. His presence alone restructured entire faiths.
Some whispered he had become a Living Meme, a semiotic god-thing, a Warp-born archetype who defied containment.
Others believed him a prophet, or worse — a playwright who had seized the script of reality and begun to rewrite it for laughs.
One thing was certain.
The curtain had risen.
And the galaxy, whether it wanted to or not, was now part of the show.