Prologue - Origins
Myuu
Baffled by existence
25TH MILLENNIUM, SEGMENTUM PACIFICUS, HALO ZONE
Outer rim of the galaxy, planet ID: Limbo
Outer rim of the galaxy, planet ID: Limbo
The Halo Zone had always been a challenge to the Federation of Man. Warp travel became unstable and rumors persisted of inexplicable events. The machine children of humanity couldn't even dismiss those occurances as their advanced senses returned what could only be qualified as gibberish. So far out, the laws of physics just weren't right.
This made this area an ideal ground for testing the limits of reality's tolerances for tinkering. Far from the currents, the uncooperative nature of the Warp became relatively calm; it left the ancients with many opportunities for science of the worst kind. Humanity was not alone in those endeavors either. Some of the ancient Eldar, seeking new sources of entertainment in a different manner than the insane fools of the core worlds, made contact with those who would shatter the fabric of time and space out of curiosity.
The true composition of the society of this planet was unknown. The icons of their religion was an unknown one, unrelated to any of the pantheons real or imagined of any participants. Faceless, tentacled figures presiding over a darkness so profound even the souls of the Warp could not survive within; the temples, deep and labyrinthine complexes spiraling endlessly into depths into which not even the spark of the soul could shine.
An abominable machine, a Mechanivore, had drilled this great abyss into being. Upgraded with heretical technologies and horrifying modifications reviled even in ages before the terms 'tech heresy' gained meaning, the great machine tore into the earth. It absorbed the very fragments of the world itself, decoding them, and then immediately discarded them. None of the data related to the world was retained. It dug and dug and dug, to the planet's very core and then even beyond that.
Soon, the machine dug into the abstract itself, crossing the divide between the physical world and the Immaterium. And that was then that things changed.
In almost every possible timeline, the machine opened a portal to the Realms of Chaos. The foul energies of the Warp erupted into realspace, consuming sanity and causality, turning what had once been a quiet planet into a fearsome Daemon World, one of the first. Instead of the deliverance from physical existence that its insane population hoped to achieve, the portal chained them into eternal torment.
But something changed here. A small trajectory modification to the Mechanivore's ceaseless descent. Supposedly unable of making such a decision or such an error, an impossible event forced it into being. The machine changed the direction of its endless dig through the caverns of the physical world and into the Warp. Instead of a straight abyss, it begun to carve out a complex series of deep caves into the core. The pattern became complex and without sense.
In this timeline, when it crossed the line into the Immaterium, the great machine fell from the skies and into the ever changing wastes, far from the domain of the Three. Into the endless emptiness, it smashed into the fabric of reality itself. Its great drills, saws, and jaws tore at the very fabric of the Warp, churning the abstract data and concepts of space-time, consuming them.
And at long last, the fools that were the ancients of Limbo got their wish granted.
The Warp buckled, shook, twisted, and convulsed in pain. A numbing cold and soul-vaporizing agony surged in great waves from the Mechanivore's works. The chaotic natural denizens of the Immaterium scuttled away in instinctive fear, not knowing what was happening and yet driven by an irrational need to get away.
And then, it finally did it. With one last push, the fabric of the Warp gave away. As the fabric of the Warp itself was punctured, the wound instantly tore itself open wide. The primordial nothing revealed itself and the pressure was tremendous. Pure nothing burst out, like a geyser, surging into a column. All that was real became unreal on contact with this non-substance, the very concept of not being now present into the world in an active form. The Mechanivore was completely removed from the world. Its technologies, its pattern, all that made it were erased to the point that not even dust remained.
Blackness so pure that it would register as pitch black beyond one's ability to sense, even to the impossible senses of the Warp's denizens, poured out. The bleeding wound erupted violently and the pure emptiness created followed the path of least resistance, heading straight for the portal the blasphemous machine had used to reach this point.
On the planet of Limbo, the caverns filled with a fluid that could not be. The void itself entered the Materium and its wrath changed it forever. As the black liquid washed against existing matter and energy, it was instantly and forever turned back to pure nothing, all existing things being returned to the state they had been before they were. The dissolution of reality caused a great light from the annihilation, golden and immaculate. This light, the very concept of ending itself, shone with such strength that it covered the entire planet.
At this moment, reality and causality broke down on Limbo.
Every form of life instantly died. They were not turned to dust, they did not become blood or bone. The very concept of life was snuffed out and the unholy light of the void erased them so completely that their faces became blank masks, their forms vague figures. Even if time travel was used, one would never be able to identify what species each individual was or what name it bore for the light of the void ejected them completely and utterly from the world.
Worse yet, the light spread and washed over every continent, every forest, every sea. Every animal died, every form of plant life stilled into being brittle corpses. Even the very bacteria vanished, the entire biosphere burnt. The corpses of the living piled up in endless mountains that would take millions of years to decay away, only the wind slowly peeling the flesh from the bone, the bacteria responsible for the natural decay of corpses no longer existing.
As this apocalyptic event occurred, all machines were also drained of data, all electrical signals that gave them a likeness to life vanishing. The world became a dead husk, so completely dead that not even the harshest of Exterminatus would be able to purify it cleaner.
Yet, the void is just as much the ending of all things as it is the beginning.
Deep within the tunnels of the hardiest structures, some of the self-operated machines were spared from the golden light. Most of them were utilitarian machines and would continue their old functions until they ran out of power, joining everything else in death. But among them were small nanobot-composed adaptative drones. Designed for maintenance and engineering tasks, those small machines found themselves without a directive but for their own built-in orders to build and adapt.
One by one, small drones emerged into the husk of a dead world. Those machines would be the first of a new biosphere of sorts, the machines trying to adapt to a world where the line between life and death had been fundamentally damaged and the Warp was now little more than a distant echo. On this planet beyond time and space, where echoes of half-existing abominations stalked the land, those machines would slowly evolve.
Against all odds and all logic, the dead husk of Limbo birthed a new species.
