Age of Strife, M25-M30

The Age of Strife, also sometimes remembered as "Old Night," was a 5,000-year-long
period of anarchy, war, and destructive technological regression from the 25th to
the 30th Millennia that brought Mankind to the brink of extinction -- and reversed
the highly advanced scientific and technological discoveries made by the
interstellar Human civilisation of the Age of Technology that had preceded it.

The Age of Strife was caused by the negative psychic and physical effects of the
vicious Warp Storms that ravaged large portions of the galaxy beginning in the 23rd
or 25th Millennium, depending on the source, which were the "ripples" in realspace
of the psychic gestation of the new Chaos God Slaanesh in the Immaterium.

If the previous age had been one of prosperity and enlightenment, the Age of Strife
was its dark mirror.

It is hard for historitors of the 41st Millennium to separate fact from insane
ramblings or prophecies of doom, but it appears that terrible wars taged across the
length and breadth of Humanity's galactic domain. Many worlds were consumed
entirely, while even those whose populations endured were cut off from one another
by the Warp Storms ravaging realspace.

During this era of isolation and hardship, many Human colonies underwent drastic
and widespread mutation. Some were destroyed by it, for those mutations were the
result-of Warp energies saturating their flesh and engulfing their worlds.

Others underwent more natural processes of adaptation and evolution, transforming

into into Abhumans such as Ogryns, Ratlings, Stiltlimbs or Beastmen. Many wondrous
advancements were lost or fell into disrepair, most of the STC technologies amongst
them.

During the Age of Strife, Slaanesh was forming within the Warp as a result of the
growing hedonism and utter excess of the ancient Aeldari Empire in the millennia
before its Fall.

One result of the Warp Storms produced by this long gestation was the impossibility
of faster-than-light travel or astro-telepathic interstellar communication through
the ravaged currents of the Warp, which led to the subsequent isolation of Human
colony worlds and star systems separated by multi-light-year distances.

Human civilisation in the colonised portions of the galaxy fragmented, and where it
survived, it took on wildly different forms. On Old Earth, the planetary economy
collapsed with the loss of interstellar trade and communication with the rest of
Humanity even as the social order broke down.

Subjected to Terran millennia of isolation, hardship, invasion and horror,

countless worlds plunged into post-apocalyptic barbarism. Amongst them was Old
Earth itself.

Wars, rebellion, and the diseases that inevitably followed in their wake were
rampant. Vast swathes of the advanced scientific and technical knowledge
accumulated in the previous millennia was lost or forgotten, and a slow descent
into pre-industrial barbarism seemed inevitable for Earth and many of its colonies.

On the Human homeworld, brutal warlords emerged from amidst the strife and disorder
who carved out new kingdoms to serve as their fiefdoms. The emergence of these
often brutal neo-feudal kingdoms, the new nation-states of the people later termed
"techno-barbarians" by Imperial historitors, imposed an uneasy peace on the Earth
that was frequently interrupted by feudal conflicts.
The Human species seemed on the brink of extinction by the end of the 29th
Millennium. And then, in Humanity's darkest hour, came the man who would become
known as the Emperor of Mankind.
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Great Crusade, M30-M31
Raptor Imperialis Icon

The Raptor Imperialis, early iconography of the Imperium of Man, utilised by the
Thunder Warriors and newly-raised Space Marine Legions during the Unification Wars
as well as veteran Solar Auxilia units.

Legend tells how at the end of the Age of Strife the Human homeworld writhed in the
grip of terrible wars beyond count before the Emperor came. Techno-barbarians
battled collectives of gene-soldiers through the blazing ruins of once-great
arcologies. Cannibal savages unleashed unholy psychic powers upon legions of cyborg
zealots.

Grand warlords, demagogues and psyker proto-deities rose and fell, each one
threatening to finally take the planet and its people with them into damnation.

Yet the man who would become known as the Emperor sensed that the Warp Storms that
had marked the Age of Strife were starting to subside, and that this offered an
opportunity for Humanity to reunite in pursuit of a new Golden Age. The Emperor
first emerged from His secret fortress beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains
in the late 29th Millennium.

He sought to unify all the techno-barbarian states of ancient Terra under His rule
through either diplomacy or the waging of the brutal military campaigns later
called the Unification Wars against the techno-barbarians tribes that ruled vast
swathes of the Earth's blighted surface.

These wars were waged with superhuman soldiers later known as the Thunder Warriors
who had been genetically-engineered by the Emperor's genius from his early
followers to be faster and stronger than base-line Humans. Such warriors would
provide the early foundation from which He would later decide to create the Space
Marines.

After conquering the last of the independent techno-barbarian states of Old Earth,
the Emperor began to lay the foundations of His burgeoning Imperium. At last, the
Age of Strife was over. Hope was restored. Yet hope has ever been Humanity's
addiction and curse both...

Understanding that no one man, even one such as He, could rule alone, the Emperor
formed His War Council, comprised of His most able generals and a number of high-
ranking administrators, the most formidable of whom was Malcador the Sigillite.

Malcador was not a warrior, but a man of learning with the bearing of a priest. His
origins were unknown to all save perhaps the Emperor Himself, to whom some believed
Malcador was distantly related.

Malcador was appointed to administer the newly-constructed Imperial Palace and

Court in the Himalazian Mountains, and through this appointment also governed newly
conquered Terra as his master's left hand. Where Terra had been a place of unending
war it now became a place of unceasing activity, production and planning.

Just as the conquest of Old Earth was complete a mighty and unforeseen cosmic event
occurred. A massive shock wave blasted across the Immaterium, clearing the Warp
Storms that had plunged the galaxy into tumult and raged for more than five
thousand standard years.

It seemed to some to be divine providence, fuelling the beliefs of those that

considered the Emperor to be Himself divine (no matter how much He decried this
claim). The way to the galaxy was now open and the Emperor's armies would be able
to take to the stars, with the other planets of Terra's solar system the first step
upon that road.

After conquering the last of the independent techno-barbarian states of the renamed
world of Terra, the Emperor secured the allegiance of the techno-mystic Cult
Mechanicus of Mars who controlled the most advanced remaining industrial
fabrication and scientific research facilities in the Human-settled galaxy.

The Emperor promised in the Treaty of Mars to protect the Tech-priests' religion
and respect the sovereignty of the Mechanicum and the autonomy of their Forge
Worlds across the galaxy, affording them a level of independence unequalled within
the Imperium. Furthermore the Emperor gave to the service of the Mechanicum six of
the Houses of Navigators, so that their ships might once again travel safely
through the Warp after the loss of their own thrall-Navigators centuries before.

The powerful Fabricator-General of Mars was given a seat on the War Council of the
Great Crusade. With access to the giant manufactoria of Mars, this enabled the
Emperor to vastly increase the power of his Legions with improved wargear and
supply.

In addition, the Tech-priests of Mars lent their arts to the construction of the
massive Warp-capable Battleships that could transport the Emperor's Legions across
the galaxy, and provided the mighty city-crushing war machines known as the Titans
to the ever-expanding Imperial military.

The Treaty of Mars married the Terran military might of the Emperor with the
industrial strength of Mars and the Mechanicum. Now possessed of the needed
manpower and materiel to make His dream a reality, the Emperor mobilised the
resources of Terra and Mars to launch a vast new military campaign intended to
reunite the whole of Mankind, dispersed across the galaxy, under His rule.

This campaign, the Great Crusade, marked the founding era of the period that would
later be known as the Age of the Imperium. A vast fleet of starships was built in
orbit of Mars, with which the Emperor's armies set out to reconquer the galaxy for
Mankind.

But even before He had begun His campaign to reunite Old Earth, the Emperor had
used His highly advanced knowledge of genetic engineering and the psychic arts to
create the primarchs, 20 superhuman military commanders possessed of preternatural
physical, mental and social attributes who had been created through the fusion of
variations of His own genetic material with the power of the Warp.

The Emperor had known that the greatest foe of His plans to reunite Humanity and
bring order to the galaxy would be the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and their daemonic
servants. He had sought to protect His gestating primarchs from the Dark Gods while
they grew in their gestation capsules in the Emperor's secret laboratories deep
beneath the Himalazian Mountains, but the Chaos Gods saw through all His wards and
protections.

They opened a Warp portal in the Emperor's own laboratory and stole the infant
primarchs away from Terra, scattering them across the galaxy and tainting many of
them with the power of Chaos.
Undeterred by this tragedy, the Emperor utilised what remained of the primarchs'
genetic material. He had first crafted the Thunder Warriors to unite Old Earth. He
then proceeded in the last days of the Unification Wars to transform ordinary
Terran men into a new corps of transhuman warriors who would lead Mankind back out
into the stellar void.

These men were the Emperor's Space Marines, the Legiones Astartes, superhuman
warriors who knew no fear. Thanks to influxes of technology and resources from
around the Sol System the Space Marine Legions were soon growing in numbers and
capability at an exponential rate. The Space Marine Legions were to be the
spearhead of the Emperor's attempt to reunite Mankind -- the Great Crusade's
killing edge against which the strength of a foe would be broken and which would
topple empires, Human or alien, by ripping out their hearts.

With Mars now part of the Imperium, the Great Crusade began in earnest and the rest
of the Sol System was the first region of space to be conquered by the Emperor and
His newly rearmed and re-equipped Space Marine Legions. The Legiones Astartes
secured the scientific research installations and spacedocks of Luna which had once
been controlled by the Selenar gene-wrights.

Broken and humbled, the enslaved gene-wrights of Luna would help forge the next
generation of Space Marines who would carry out Mankind's conquest of the stars.
Alien invaders were flushed from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and their wretched
enslaved Human inhabitants repatriated to Earth, the once-Human creatures of the
Neptunian Deeps were exterminated without mercy, and the baleful false-world of
Sedna at Sol's edge-light was boiled away to vapour under the guns of the new-
forged Imperial war fleet. The next step was beyond.

The Great Crusade was a mammoth operation on an inconceivable scale and complexity
that involved billions of troops and tens of thousands of voidships, and it is
perhaps true that only a mind such as the Emperor's could have had a hope of
successfully comprehending and executing it.

In order to manifest this conquest the Imperium's forces were divided up into an
expanding and frequently reconfigured series of Imperial expeditionary fleets --
semi-autonomous battle groups assigned to voyage the stars and make war in the
Emperor's name.

They were composed in chief of a bewildering array of voidships great and small.
The paths of these fleets were dictated both in general by the Emperor and His War
Council, but also by the will of their commanders who were entrusted to seek out
the enslaved and destroy the alien under their own sway.
Imperium Dominatus Ancient Map3

Ancient Departmento Cartigraphicae Map of the Imperium Dominatus which displays the
extent of the Imperial demesne in the final year of the Great Crusade, ca.
892.005.M31.

During the 200 standard years that the Great Crusade spread the Imperium across the
galaxy, the Emperor slowly made contact once more with all of His scattered gene-
sons, the primarchs, and to each He gave command of the Space Marine Legion that
had been created from that primarch's genome.

Horus was the first of the primarchs to be rediscovered, on the barren Mining World
of Cthonia only a few light years from Terra itself. Horus campaigned with the
Emperor for 30 Terran years before the next of the primarchs was recovered, and
during that time the two developed a special bond, the deep affection between a
father and His favoured son.
The Astartes Legions, combined with the might of the Imperial Army (which was later
separated into the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy after the Horus Heresy),
reunited thousands upon thousands of Human-settled worlds into one interstellar
civilisation, in the name, and under the rule of, the Emperor and the Imperium of
Man.

But the Great Crusade was ended abruptly by the corruption and treachery of the
Imperial Warmaster Horus, who was both the primarch of the Sons of Horus Legion and
the overall military commander of the Great Crusade in its last days. This was an
honour that had been granted to him by the Emperor, who had sought to leave the
campaign so that He might return to Terra and oversee a highly-secret project
intended to open up the Aeldari Webway to Human use.

But Horus and many of the other primarchs deeply resented the Emperor's absence
from the Great Crusade and were even more disturbed by His attempts to replace the
direct rule of the Imperium by the Emperor and His Primarchs with a bureaucracy of
normal Humans.

Having established the Council of Terra, the new governing body of the Imperium to
carry out the day-to-day work of ruling tens of thousands of worlds and trillions
of Human beings, the Emperor took refuge in His vast laboratories and workshops
beneath the Imperial Palace.

He began work in earnest on his new project to secretly extend the Webway to Terra,
an enterprise that the Emperor hoped would be His greatest gift to Humanity. While
the Emperor was locked away in His subterranean factories, trouble was brewing.

The formation of the Council of Terra proved to be a contentious decision with the
distant primarchs, who were appalled when news of the formation of the council
finally reached them on the frontiers of the Great Crusade. Some of the primarchs
took great exception to being ruled by those mortals that they deemed less worthy
and capable of such an honour than themselves.

The less stable primarchs felt that this was a betrayal of all they had fought and
won in the Emperor's name and that their victories now counted for nothing. They,
and many of their Astartes, felt that it was they who had suffered and sacrificed
the most to build the Imperium and thus it was they who should have the greatest
say in how it was ruled, not a council composed of effete Terran nobles and
faceless mortal bureaucrats. This was one of many growing resentments that allowed
the Ruinous Powers to infect and corrupt several of the Primarchs.

Riven by jealousy and ambition, Horus proved to be easy prey for the temptations of
the Chaos Gods and the machinations of his own brother Lorgar, the primarch of the
Word Bearers Legion, who had come into the secret service of Chaos during the
course of the Great Crusade.

Given the opportunity, the Dark Gods falsely convinced the arrogant Warmaster that
the Emperor had intended all along to simply use the primarchs and the rest of
Humanity to transform Himself into a god. Enraged and offended at this notion, the
Ruinous Powers then promised Horus their support in his bid to seize the Imperium
for himself.

Horus ultimately convinced 9 other primarchs and their Space Marine Legions to join
his cause and serve the designs of Chaos. He instigated the terrible Horus Heresy
-- a galaxy-wide rebellion against the Emperor -- and eventually one-half of the
Imperium's vast military forces, as well as elements of the Mechanicum, rallied to
the Traitors' cause, unleashing the greatest conflict Mankind had ever known upon
an unsuspecting galaxy.