Today, the first salvoes of this year’s Grand Narrative begin at Warhammer World, as the Lords of War prepare their forces for a conflict like no other. Strange things are afoot in the skies over Mordian, leaving all who gaze upon its dimidiate surface to wonder: what will happen when the galaxy descends on this benighted world?
Precipice
Solemnity’s Might, Mordian Void Station, Deck Gamma, Maintenance Concourse
Lieutenant Cassa passed her daily shift under humming drive coils as though walking through a dream of metal and void. Solemnity’s Might stretched a kilometre tip to tip, an iron cathedral drifting in perpetual dark, held in geostationary orbit over Mordian night. She tapped a coolant vent, watching steam curl into the corridor lumens. On her feed: nothing beyond routine diagnostics. Boredom ground more of her short life away, dutybound to spend the rest of it in service to a world she’d never leave.
The deck suddenly … flexed under her feet? The sensation passed as soon as it arrived. A soft ping drew her gaze to the viewport. A violet shimmer danced on the void’s edge, like heat‑haze in the industrial tiers of Mordian’s hive cities. She frowned. Unsure whether monotony was playing with her mind, she keyed a report to enginaria and strode on.
The Streets of Mordian
Far below the orbital sprawl, Mordian’s hive cities lay in near‑black gloom. The Great Harlequin Rillietann’s motley shimmered in the half‑dead glow of belt-fed lumens. They stood in a plaza where suppression shields had been stacked for the morning’s drills, mask tilted up so only their eyes caught the dull starlight.
A single star blinked, then fractured into a spidery web of pale green. Rillietann inclined their head, fingertips tracing the air as if reading invisible runes. “Tonight,” they whispered, voice a soft metronome, “the dance begins.”
With a flourish of silken sleeves, they drifted between shuttered shops, drawing a small circle in the dust – a ward, a promise, a prophecy.
The Bridge of the Ebon Herald, Twenty-Thousand Kilometres from Mordian
A Watch Captain of the Deathwatch stared out at Mordian through the hardened armaglas of his starship’s bridge. Azkarion’s helm display flickered: Solemnity’s Might registering a 0.5 percent spike in warp entropy. He stood, gauntlet clenched. “Clarify that augury,” he ordered. The tactical officer’s voice was tight. “Unidentified energy bloom, Captain. Spectral arcs appearing at random loci on the void station’s hull.”
Azkarion’s jaw tightened. “Kill teams at alert – prepare for immediate boarding action.” He turned from the holo‑table, mind already racing through tactical vectors. The Watch Captain appeared calm to the mortals and Astartes gathered around him in the bridge. Beneath his ceramite and transhuman flesh, however, an unfamiliar sensation crept into his being, alongside a suddenly intensifying warmth from the Aeldari way-sextant hung at his side.
Beneath the Tetrarchal Palace
Surrounded by vaulted stone lit by cerulean runes, Magister Khethos Vorsch traced a final glyph in mid‑air. The Vessel hovered at his side, chains tinkling like distant bells. Vorsch shivered beneath his armour and robes with a mixture of feelings. His greatest work neared completion; the Ahriman-tainted aura of the Vessel chilled his soul. Around them, wraithbone shards pulsed with cold light – remnants of the fallen Aeldari city of Shaa-Dom, smuggled here to fuel the rite.
Vorsch bargained much for the opportunity to be here. He stood at a nexus-point of empyreal energies and the failed machinations of a civilisation that once reached too far in its ambitions. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Success here promised an impossible future, however, one free of dark bargains and tainted brushes with the perils of his chosen passion.
Vorsch spoke once, voice low: “By broken paths and hidden gates…” Its chains chimed in a noise of gossamer-thin rust as the Vessel answered in its haunted whisper – a harmony both seductive and corrosive. Echoing their voices, the sonorous tones of Ahzek Ahriman reverberated from the walls. The pillars’ glow deepened. Reality trembled.
Catastrophe
Cassa stumbled into the wall. The deck wasn’t merely flexing; it convulsed like a wounded animal under her feet. The station’s bulkheads groaned and fractured as violet filaments lanced through plating. A maintenance servitor mere feet away was torn in two – one half consumed utterly by light of a colour her mind couldn’t name. The sound of shearing metal heralded the arrival of a similar fate for Solemnity’s Might.
Rillietann halted mid-step as the starlight high above shredded into prismatic tendrils. Citizens in the hive city screamed as half the sky vanished, replaced by shifting corridors of translucent energy. Rillietann strode from the shadows into a nearby plaza, already crowded with panicked humans as they left their abodes. Those nearest immediately recognised Rillietann’s inhuman nature, their cries silenced and jaws agape in sudden shock. Looking once more to the sky, the Harlequin saw a flicker of cerulean runes of an all-too-familiar origin.
Metal splintered from the railing under Azkarion’s tightening grip as he watched the Ebon Herald’s auspex light up with the impossible. Nightmare rifts flickered in and out of existence around Solemnity’s Might as the void station’s superstructure was violated by the strain of otherworldly forces. From each rift came the flotsam of a universe, as if matter both living and dead were drawn from all corners of the Imperium in an instant. No, not just debris and ruin. Amidst the station’s fragmented demise, the hololith was rapidly identifying warships of impossible origin. The way-sextant’s heat at his side grew to an inferno.
The vault’s runes flared violently and stone shattered around Vorsch and the Vessel. Portals to places distant and suddenly near flared all around the pair. Through one, Vorsch saw the newly-rent skies of Mordian. Pride warped his grimaced features into a rictus grin. The Aeldari city of Shaa-Dom, lost to ruin in a time now forgotten, hovered impossibly over the planet’s night-side. Tendrils of light and madness spun away from it in endless directions and vanished against the sky. The Webway lay rent open, anchored in orbit above Mordian. Moving in unison, Vorsch and the Vessel stepped forward.
Aftermath. Beginning.
Rillietann wondered what the mon-keigh saw in the skies above. A void battle had begun, that much was clear to anyone. Even the Great Harlequin could barely believe its manifestation onto this plane. The ancient pathways of the Aeldari were a living thing, unknowable, ever-changing, and theoretically immune to the machinations of even the strongest mortal magicks. But here stood Rillietann, and there lay a spur of the Webway, rent impossibly into realspace over Mordian. Whatever the human sorcerers had done, whatever fate lay broken, the Harlequin had a role to play in its repair. Before the growing crowd of humans around them could recover, Rillietann vanished into the mist.
Watch Captain Azkarion barked orders relentlessly to the bridge crew, but his time amongst them grew short. Thousands of warships of every known provenance suddenly crowded the Mordian system, and they shared allegiance only to a state of confusion. Some burned realspace drives for the system edge in pure terror, whilst others reacted more directly under the influence of baser instincts and motivations. It hadn’t taken more than a moment, however, for Mordian’s significant orbital defences to roll into action; this world was no stranger to conflict. The Ebon Herald’s course of action became obvious a moment later – shelter under the guns of the hive world. Find time to coordinate with other Imperial forces and plan a response to the impossible. Their path set, Azkarion recessed to his quarters, activated the way-sextant, and sent a transmission to the other Imperial agent in-system. A plan began to form in the mind of the Knight of Caliban.
Magister Vorsch stepped onto the broken flagstones of an ancient tragedy. In his palm, a shard of living wraithbone pulsed. He bowed to the Vessel. “The ritual worked, the galaxy lies open.” The daemonhost convulsed, steam issuing from within its delicate garb. From alien mists all around them, the armies of the Thousand Sons materialised, as the laughter of Ahzek Ahriman filled the stale air of Shaa-dom.
Lieutenant Cassa drifted in zero gravity amidst a broken section of Solemnity’s Might. Near her, a flash-frozen servitor stared mindlessly into the void, witless to the sudden conflict around it. A stray macro-cannon shell slammed into a broken remnant of Solemnity’s Might, yet no damage materialised. Depending on perspective and observer, the void station had become a nexus to everywhere and nowhere at once; breached and shattered, it hummed with the song of infinity and every corridor led to both the cold vacuum of space and a pathway to other worlds. Four standard hours after Magister Vorsch’s ritual, Lieutenant Cassa’s lifeless form burned to ashes in the atmosphere of Holy Terra, half a galaxy distant from the shattered deckplates of Solemnity’s Might.
