+ Gaze into the warp +
Since the dawn of time, every man and woman has heard a deep, unnameable and urgent yearning. It is those who first heeded the urge that were driven to band together, to grow, to build, to resist the vicissitudes of an uncaring cosmos – and to fight. The urge spurs us to excess, to conflict; fills us with an addiction to knowledge and the will to resist subsumption or dominance by other wills.
The urge has a metaphysical root – and a physical dimension, a location deep in the heart of the galaxy, a region where the material universe and the true reality intermingle. More than our adopted homes, more than the Cradle-world; it is this region, this Eye of Terror, that is humanity’s natural domain.
Here, time and space become one with metaphor and thought. Here, a man’s worth become written into physicality; as his very mind and soul become woven with his corporeal flesh. It is here that humanity will achieve its Apotheosis.
+ Apostle Uralak Hein +
The warp
The warp is an alternate dimension that coexists with the material universe. Some know it as the Sea of Souls, and these perhaps understand it best of all, for every creature in the material universe also has an existence in the warp: a spirit-self or soul. The emotions and thoughts of the creature stir the stuff of the immaterium just as its physical self affects the material world around its body.
Such ripples as mortals make are tiny; but across populations and aeons, great waves and currents build up, shifting and rewriting the unreal landscape of the warp. Wars, conflict and intrigue – and the emotional highs and lows they effect – cause the warp to churn and curdle, throwing up deadly storms of energy that wax and wane in power.
All such storms represents an aspect of emotion, such as desire, anger, ambition, or hope; and the more powerful the emotion, the more urgently the energy is drawn into confluence with similar energies. Most such storms dissipate, dissolving back into the indifferent and limitless substance of metaphor and dreams that is the stuff of the warp. Others, however, grow to become self-sustaining, attracting more and more analogous energies to themselves, and thus building into colossal tempests.
These confluences of energy can attain a form of self-consciousness; alien to our understanding, but nevertheless present. These inhabitants of the warp are
daemons, voracious beings who would consume the material universe to feed their hunger. Such is the paradoxical nature of the warp that such independent daemons are simultaneously created and destroyed in an endless cycle, while remaining ever-present and immortal.
Independent daemons
Daemons are simultaneously formless and recognisable. Should a choir of psykers have the strength of will to gaze into the warp without going mad, each member would see a daemon differently; uniquely. Some might see shifting bands of colour, or a great lightning-wracked clouds of emotion. Others might see a shapes similar to his or her own species, albeit with spindle limbs, wings or great claws, as the daemon’s whim – and intrinsic nature – shape it.
Such independent daemons can engage in metaphysical battle with their kin; the victor absorbing the loser just as a weather system engulfs another, or as a predator swallows its prey. Such death is meaningless, for daemons are immortal; and – being composed of emotional energy – they simply live on in another form, as part of a yet more powerful daemon.
Such minor powers can grow to great influence as emotions in the material world rise. Wars and famines and plagues feed the daemons – and, as the war is won, or disaster relieved – the warp grows calmer once again; and the daemon’s influence is reduced. Some even dissipate into nothingness, swallowed back into the sea of souls itself.
Daemons thus crave the power that the actions of mortal souls gives them. Just as the material world affects the warp, so the actions of daemons can have a mirror in the real world; stirring vague thoughts of injustice into a sudden urge to murder, or inspiring a politician to take a grave risk in search of a great reward. Attracted to passions like those that make them up, daemons can be drawn into the real world through the expenditure of such emotion – usually focussed through ritualised actions. Here, they exchange their energy for physicality, burning swiftly through their reserves. A daemon that materialises must feed – in the only way it knows how: by inspiring the heightened emotions that make it up.
To daemons, the material universe is a dry, suffocating place lacking in the life-giving psychic energy of the warp. Daemons seldom enter the material world save at one of the handful or places in the galaxy where reality is fractured and the warp vomits psychic power into the void. The biggest of these places is the Eye of Terror, a region of the galaxy where entire worlds are overrun with daemons capering in the energy flow.
Psykers and possession
All mortals stirs currents and waves in the energies of the warp. A few, known as psykers, can – intentionally or not – draw energy from the warp and into the material universe. With experience they can give form and purpose to the raw power of the warp, reading minds, sending mental images or messages, locating people or objects, or perhaps seeing into the future or the past – as time is as meaningless as any other dimension in the warp.
Even the strongest psyker is at risk from the daemonic entities in the warp. Just as a psyker can draw energy from the warp into the material universe, so his actions will inevitably draw daemons, too. Sometimes the power of Chaos corrupts the psyker gradually, tainting his mind with alien ideas and motivations. Sometimes a daemon is strong enough to overwhelm the mortal’s soul entirely, displacing it from the physical shell and launching itself screaming with triumph into the material universe. Such events are known as possession; the soul of the previous occupant either devoured, dispersed across the warp or horrifyingly entrapped as an impotent spectator in whatever atrocities the daemon wreaks.
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The Great Powers
Beyond independent daemons are the Powers, the very greatest warp-tempests of all; primal and eternal aspects of the immaterium. Khorne, the Blood God, draws those whose lives have been drenched in slaughter and who thrive in battle. Nurgle is the god of physical corruption and disease and gathers all those who died in its grip. Tzeentch is the Lord of Change, the great conspirator, who constantly feeds the ambition and intrigues of mortals before he consumes them in the greatest betrayal of all. Slaanesh the Lord of Pleasure, the purveyor of secret excess and secret vices, collects those whose deepest desires remain unquenched.
Each of the great powers can be pictured as fell and terrible deities, monstrous personalities akin to the gods of myth. Constantly at war with each other, they stride over landscapes of dream and metaphor, directing their armies of subservient daemons to harry and raid and claim new lands from the contested regions between their dominions and those of their rivals. Equally, they can be envisioned as immense and timeless tempests; mindlessly buffeting one another, continually swallowing up and regurgitating smaller storms whipped up in the narrow regions between their realms. Neither interpretation is true, for in the maddening nature of the warp, ambiguity is all. Khorne is at once a cyclopean dog-faced giant, enthroned on an ever-growing throne of skulls; an abstract and recondite clash of swords on bone; and a cyclopean and unknowable storm of spirit.
The Realms of the Powers
At the heart of their realms, each Great Power holds their court and exercises their absolute, unbridled power over their innumerable subjects as the whim takes them. Here they are truly godlike, the nature of the place and their will as one. The Great Powers are simultaneously the monarchs of a region of the warp, and their dominions themselves. At the centre of the realm of Tzeentch, for example, is no mere personality (though indeed at the heart of the Infinite Maze stands the Tower of the Great Sorcerer) for Tzeentch is also the very crystal-laced ground and numinous aether that makes up his kingdom.
Within the spaceless infinite extension of the warp, like attracts like. Thus, with the death of its physical body, the soul of a mortal creature is cast adrift in the limitless sea of energy. Eventually the souls of all but the strongest are drawn to the most powerful influence – and into the realms of the Chaos gods themselves, there to feed their lusts.
Between the Powers
Further out from, and between, the cores of the four Great Gods of Chaos – if such a concept can be grasped for an inherently dimensionless space – the Power’s direct influence wanes, and eventually breaks down into the broader, infinite sea of chaos; just as a raging stormfront fades imperceptibly into the ocean. Here, beyond the reaches of the broad collections of strong emotions that make up the Great Powers, there is the potential for smaller squalls and minor powers to exist – composed of subtler, more complex, or less universal emanations of spirit-stuff. Here dwelt, and in some sense, still dwell, the Gods of the Eldar.
Between the storms of pleasure and rage, for example, lies the potential of Khaine – a dead god currently swallowed up by the swollen strength of Slaanesh and Khorne, whose waxing influences have subsumed all between them into a fatally tempestuous region of countervailing anger and fervour. Within the border country of fertility and hope, meanwhile, lies the dormancy of Isha; a powerful tempest long-swallowed up by a burgeoning and cancerous growth of Nurgle’s realm.
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Legionaries and the Warp
Renegade Space Marine Legionaries often lead brutal, fearless – and emotionally stunted – lives, in which decisions are instant. Stripped of the full spectrum of human emotion, an Astartes’ metahuman mind draws what remains into hyper-focus, simultaneously offering some measure of protection against some forms of daemonic temptation, and opening them more fully to others.
Imperial Space Marines follow a strict regimen of ordered prayer, devotion and duty. This is a spiritual shield against the darkness, for without such obsession, their minds could wander in dark places.
The Legions of the Eye, meanwhile, have cast aside such restrictions and duties in favour of pursuing their own ambitions. Far from a danger to be flatly rejected or avoided, most see the Warp as a source of power. The focussed, single-minded and disciplined nature of the Legionary, together with their raw physical prowess, makes them inherently attractive to the powers of the warp. Where the Astartes go, war, desire, unrest and despair follow, as surely as night follows day.
So it is that the Great Powers have become patrons to the Legions – not in any understandable sense, for how would mortals, however powerful, treat with forces of nature? – but through the living message of each Legion’s mysterious, warp-touched Primarch. These extraordinary beings, who straddled the material and spiritual realms, all crossed over into the warp itself, ascending to become a serried pantheon of Daemon Primarchs.
Such symbols have power in the Eye of Terror, and whether their sons accepted the pacts or not, the Primarch’s Legions intrinsically came to belong to the Gods of Chaos. Some, like the Emperor’s Children, were claimed whole-heartedly by a particular patron, and enthusiastically accepted the role; others, like the Word Bearers, came to honour and serve the Gods as a pantheon. Even those who resisted – in part or in full – like the World Eaters, found their very resistance itself a form of twisted devotion.
The Sons of Horus, in their hubris, attempted to claim all the gods, seeking to play one off against another – but in so doing, they winnowed away the favour and attention of all...
