[Warp]
Crack-crack-crack—!!
"From Colchis—Lorgar Aurelian."
"The source of corruption, the original sin... then let it begin with him. The Master of Mankind?"
Darkness. Within this magnificent, directionless realm—no up or down, no near or far—there stretched a crimson firmament, sometimes dim, sometimes radiant, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. It shimmered and twisted, the madness of its golden light rippling across the vast canvas like a living dream, perfect yet utterly alien.
They were eyes.
Within them reflected a giant clad in golden armor.
He seemed to be asking a question.
On Sicarus, Lorgar's heart trembled as he spread his five fingers—stained with violet-red corruption—and peered through the gaps at the phantom rising layer by layer from the void.
Those eyes were looking directly at him.
Finality. The True Name of this Chaos God echoed within Lorgar's mind alongside endless overlapping whispers. What that name represented—beneath its radiant façade—was the power to strip all life bare, to annihilate all things.
The Great Preacher felt himself fall into an unspeakable emptiness. His vision went dark for a moment—and then he found himself in another world.
It was like the highest heaven: a boundless, radiant curtain. In the void above, false stars dimmed one by one, falling like meteors. Waves of pure annihilation rolled outward—tidal surges of destructive energy that drowned everything in their path.
A blood-red, muscular figure roared in fury.
A violet-pink, graceful form wept.
Every sound that rang out was divine might—power capable of shattering essence, law, will, soul, and courage alike.
Dazzling beauty, terrifying to behold.
"Lorgar, offer me everything you have."
The voice—cold and haughty—cut through the chaos like the echo of gods clashing. Its presence carried the same sacred authority.
Lorgar recognized the tone—it was the tone used for tools.
Before he could even feel despair or rage, the soul-piercing gaze vanished. From within the phantasmal labyrinth appeared a golden figure.
It was the Emperor.
His father. And He was nodding—as though deciding his fate.
"F... father..."
The once-proud Daemon Primarch now trembled like a child caught in wrongdoing, voice shaking as he spoke.
But the next instant, the violet-red cosmic god that obscured his father moved. It stretched forth claws of impossible geometry, its Imaginary claws vast beyond measure. From them spilled countless threads of solidified, warped light—tendrils weaving in from every direction. The dark reached toward all his senses, invading everything.
"Return to your origin."
"Return to your essence."
"You were never meant to..."
...
Within his mind, countless corpses whispered through rotten teeth, muttering about the ancient fire.
Boom—!
Lorgar's thoughts exploded. Like a shattered whole, like a sea evaporated to its depths—his consciousness dissolved completely.
Before the Eye of Terror, the Great Preacher fell into true unconsciousness. He lay imprisoned within the massive crater of a wasteland spanning over a hundred kilometers.
At its center, blood gathered into oceans, blood-clouds blotted out the sun. Gore and brain matter splattered wide, white bone towers piled high. Nearly two hundred thousand fallen Word Bearers' heads and corpses had been thrown into the pit by the blue-armored warriors of the Midnight Legion.
And more still—the countless cultists and traitors.
Whether they screamed in zealotry or wept in madness, the Night Lords executed them all, one by one, casting their bodies into the sacrificial sea. The site was ready long before—this was the Word Bearers' homeworld, where sacrifices were never in short supply.
Crates upon crates of Honkai Cubes were hurled in, tossed into the ritual site by the Night Lords.
Visible streams of violet and crimson energy particles surged together, the aura of collapse growing thicker...
"That's enough. Withdraw." Ignoring the looks from the other two Primarchs—eyes that called him heretic and mad—Konrad Curze gave his order calmly at the scene.
When the last of the Night Lords' massive orbital assault gunships lifted off from the surface, Curze clapped both Russ and Corax on the shoulder before vanishing within the beam of teleportation.
In that instant—Rumble-rumble-rumble—!!
Visible eruptions of superenergy detonated across the ruined cities, and like a chain reaction, the entire planet of Colchis began to quake.
Moments later, centered upon the wasteland, torrents of violet-red energy surged skyward. The planet's magnetic field collapsed into chaos, mountains shattered, the crust split apart in irregular convulsions—and finally, with a scream that warped the heavens themselves, the planet exploded.
A colossal silhouette appeared faintly within the chaos—humanoid, yet shifting, blurring. Between billions of twisted, wandering souls, the figure faded and reformed again, replaced by a vast, shifting flame of dull crimson and gold.
It pierced the fragile veil between realities, rising straight into the battlefield of the highest heavens.
"That belongs to me—ah... mmmh~"
Even as its body was shredded into fragments, the androgynous voice that followed was filled with insatiable desire and decadent allure. Layer upon layer of world-veils and alternate timelines folded together as an enormous subspace lance tore through everything—impaling that writhing, inhumanly beautiful form and casting it aside.
The lance's shaft, black and white intertwined, was etched with patterns and runes that no artist could dream of in a lifetime. Like shattering mirrored glass, it pierced through all the "voids," scattering fragments of pure concept in its wake.
After sending that shrieking pervert of the Warp flying with a single strike, Selene briefly broke free from the grasp of a roaring mad god and seized the flickering flame that had been chasing her.
"The primordial spark of balance between the Warp and realspace..." Selene murmured under her breath.
"I see now. No wonder your precious Daemon Primarchs hide from me."
What Selene saw was not the outer form or flesh of the Gene Primarchs, but something far deeper.
The Warp essence of the Gene Primarchs—their true nature—was a possibility born within the fragile balance between realspace and the Warp, a conceptual membrane where physical law and nonphysical spiritual energy intertwined.
A nascent, delicate spark.
As with all things, opposites coexist. Everything carries within it dual aspects—creation and destruction, light and shadow.
The world's growth and expansion have never ceased. From the moment of their origin, realspace and the Warp instinctively sought their own evolution, their own expansion.
They coexist—and conflict. In their opposition, they influence each other, maintaining a dynamic equilibrium.
The Warp's expansion causes the decay of realspace's physical laws, while realspace's prosperity forces the supernatural realms of the Warp to recede.
Through constant friction and collision, the two together form the foundation of this vast, boundless cosmos.
Though one waxes while the other wanes, the cycle remains—a spiraling evolution upward.
When the Human Imperium once ruled the galaxy, why was humanity's fate so tragic? Why did Chaos become so rampant, so dominant—as though about to reduce realspace into its vassal?
Selene coughed lightly, deliberately ignoring the inconvenient fact that her arrival—and her registration as a local deity within the Warp—had caused the Immaterium's hyperreality volume to expand geometrically, giving it absolute dominance over the material universe.
But setting aside that little accident... wasn't the Emperor at least partially responsible for this mess?
Oh, no. To be accurate—this wretched, pain-filled state of the universe? The Emperor bore most of the blame.
Across forty millennia of humanity's ventures into space—from the Human Federation, through the Age of Strife, to the Imperium itself—mankind had the misfortune of existing during the Warp's expansionary era.
From the galaxy-spanning heaven-wars that ravaged the stars for millions of years, to the Eldar Empire's six-million-year-long orgy of emotion that fed the Warp endlessly, to the sudden collapse of the Human Federation's Golden Age—betrayed by the Iron Men and torn apart by brutal wars, massacred by xeno species, fragmented by Warp storms isolating systems in endless civil wars...
And the countless interstellar genocides born from the conflicts of lesser intelligent races across the Milky Way.
It could be said that the very moment intelligent life arose in realspace and formed societies, the decline of the physical universe began. The difference has always been a matter of scale.
Even if it continued at a steady pace—occasional interstellar wars between collectives, factions, organizations, nations, governments, or species committing acts of violence, destruction, and slaughter—the balance between realspace and the Warp would not have shifted greatly. Time itself might have soothed the imbalance, maintaining a fragile equilibrium.
But the problem is that war never ends. It never stops.
Each generation of galactic conquerors passes the torch to the next.
The Old Ones fought the Star Gods. The Necrontyr became the Necrons and continued the war. The ancient Orks battled the ancient Eldar. The Federated Humans fought—and then the Imperium continued the endless conflict...
On and on it went.
And because of that, the undying Emperor resolved to end this vicious cycle.
Under the indifferent gaze of the Chaos Gods, He stole that faint, unborn spark—the primordial seed of balance.
Through the Primarch Project, He sought to forge demi-gods of flesh and soul alike, beings of dual nature—physical matter and psychic spirit. Through them, He would reunify the scattered human worlds, restore the rational and scientific order of the Golden Age, and spread that enlightenment once more across the galaxy.
His great Webway Project was meant to lead humanity into ascension—severing all ties with the Warp entirely, cutting off the source of Chaos' power forever, and freeing mankind from the influence of that illusory realm.
It was the Emperor's selfish love for mankind.
He privatized the primordial spark—the hope meant for all sentient life in the cosmos—and made it the sole property of humanity.
No wonder the other races of the galaxy loathe and fear him so deeply.
In the eyes of most, humanity has become indistinguishable from Chaos itself.
Even the Eldar—those arrogant masters of the stars, the Craftworld Seers, the Harlequin mad prophets—all grit their teeth with hatred whenever the Emperor's name is spoken, yet beneath that hatred lies fear and reverence. They dread the possibility that He might truly become a god.
But for every gift, there is a price.
Granting the Primarchs such immense psychic will and spiritual potential also made them uniquely vulnerable to the corruption of Chaos—perhaps even more fragile than mortals.
Why did the Chaos Gods ignore the Emperor's theft?
Because they, too, required an anchor—a bridge.
They needed the Emperor, a being born of the material universe yet embodying both its physical and Warp essences, to act as their vessel of interference—to allow them to influence and harvest the mortal realm.
The Chaos Gods and their daemonic legions could not directly touch the spark that symbolized the balance between the Warp and realspace. But the Emperor could.
That spark was both matter and spirit—a fusion of pure physical law and psychic hyperdimensional energy.
And that meant that the Emperor's so-called Gene Primarchs would become perfect vessels—ideal conduits for Chaos' power to reach into the material world. They were to be the incarnate gateways—the very keys for the Immaterium to knock upon the doors of reality.
A mutual gamble, both sides fully aware.
Without a doubt, the Emperor was gambling.
His intentions were not difficult to guess—he went all in.
Once humanity ascended, once the race transcended the stars, what did it matter if the galaxy drowned afterward?
He wagered the future of all intelligent life in the cosmos—and then privatized the stake.
A gambler indeed.
And one who lost everything.
Now, desperate, he grasped at every last straw—his Imperium, his sons, even himself—as chips upon the table, gambling once again... this time against Selene.
And Selene? She welcomed it.
The Emperor desired all that she was—but Selene, too, desired the Emperor's being.
Mutual temptation.
ROAR——!!!
The Blood God still howled without end, his swords and axes crashing down one after another, each strike an expression of his eternal rage.
"Do you think her mercy will grant your wish?! No! Her desire—Finality's desire—brings no salvation to this world! Her hunger will never be what you hope for!"
Under the cold radiance of the golden sun, a pale-blue figure screamed—the twisted visage of the avian god writhing with defiance and fury.
"Could it be any worse?"
The Master of Mankind smiled faintly.
Selene was pleased with his response.
Before the eyes of all the Chaos Gods, she swallowed the spark whole. The moment she did, the Warp and realspace trembled in all dimensions, across all planes.
The veil between them... opened.
But not inward.
Outward.
Beyond the domains of gods and mortals—toward the Outside.
A colossal, radiant shadow loomed beyond the infinite veils—an existence dwelling in the hyperdimensional meta-void beyond all creation.
"Not enough..."
Selene bared her crimson lips, from which sharp teeth now grew—marks of her struggle for dominion against Khorne. Her voice split into twin echoes, as though another great being had descended into the Chaos God Finality's vessel, whispering in a tone that mingled gentleness with suppressed cruelty.
"I require more keys to open the gate."
—
—
40 Advanced Chapters Available on Patreon:
Patreon.com/DaoOfHeaven