Cegorach

The Laughing God

Cegorach is the Aeldari god of mischief, story, and survival-through-trick. In the pantheon's long mythic record he is the youngest and the smallest, the god the others underestimated and the one who, by every measure, played the longest game. He survived where the rest of his family did not, and the price of that survival was the impossible silence of every other god's absence.

He lives still, somewhere in the Webway, and he laughs. The Aeldari are uneasy about the laughter and uneasy about the alternative.

The Black Library

Cegorach's sanctuary is the Black Library — a hidden Craftworld within the Webway containing every record the Aeldari have ever kept of Chaos and the Ruinous Powers. The Library's location is concealed by Cegorach's personal magic. Outsiders who attempt to find it are diverted to other webway exits, often hostile ones.

Occasionally an Imperial Inquisitor with the right relics and the right desperation has glimpsed it. The reports are guarded, fragmentary, and not believed by the wider Inquisition.

The other gods burned. I told a joke. We see how the story has gone.

— Attributed to Cegorach

The Harlequin Troupes

Cegorach's mortal servants are the Harlequin masques — itinerant Aeldari companies who travel the Webway performing the Dance Without End: the cyclic ritual retelling of the Fall and Cegorach's escape. Each troupe is part theatre company, part raid party. They wield shuriken weapons and Harlequin's Kisses (one-shot monomolecular needles), and they fight as a kind of ballet that has, in the long story, very few actual casualties on their own side.

Solitaires are the most disturbing of the Harlequins. Each Solitaire is condemned to play the role of Slaanesh in the Dance. The role is fatal. Each Solitaire knows this and accepts it.

M42 & The Ynnari

Cegorach approves of the Ynnari movement — or at least is alleged to approve of it, in fragmentary Harlequin accounts. Yvraine has been seen consulting Solitaires before major operations. The Laughing God's long game, whatever it is, appears to be approaching some kind of climax.

No Aeldari will confirm what that climax is. Some say even Cegorach is not yet sure.

The Trick

Cegorach's escape from Slaanesh is preserved in Aeldari oral tradition as the Great Joke — the single trick that worked against the new god. The canonical account: Cegorach approached Slaanesh's birth-throne wearing the face of one of the gods Slaanesh had already consumed, and asked Slaanesh to play a game with him.

Slaanesh accepted. Cegorach proposed they hide from each other across the warp; Slaanesh would seek; Cegorach would hide. Slaanesh, newborn and arrogant, agreed without negotiating the time-limit. Cegorach hid. Slaanesh has been seeking for ten thousand years. Cegorach remains hidden in the Black Library Webway, the location of which is the single best-guarded secret in the warp. The game is, by Aeldari interpretation, still ongoing.

Hide. I will find you.

— Slaanesh, attributed acceptance of Cegorach's wager

The Solitaire

The Aeldari Harlequin troupes, Cegorach's permanent mortal servants, perform an annual masque that re-enacts the Fall of the Aeldari and the birth of Slaanesh. In the masque, every god and every named Aeldari from the founding mythology is played by a Harlequin; Slaanesh is played by a single Aeldari called the Solitaire.

The Solitaire role is a life-sentence: the Aeldari who plays Slaanesh in the masque is permanently exiled from Aeldari society between performances, condemned to wander alone and considered already dead by their Craftworld kin. The Solitaire's exile is part of Cegorach's joke — the masque cannot proceed unless an Aeldari willingly plays Slaanesh, and Slaanesh's eternal pursuit is therefore mirrored in the Solitaire's permanent solitude. The masque continues.

The Library's Contents

The Black Library — Cegorach's primary realm, hidden inside the Webway — contains every piece of writing the Aeldari produced before the Fall plus selected post-Fall additions that Cegorach has personally archived. The archive includes the only surviving copies of the original Aeldari Codex of Slaanesh-Resistance, the lost ending of the Hundred and One Swords saga, the technical manuals for the Aeldari ancient Empire's warp-travel infrastructure, and what the Aeldari archive's footnotes describe simply as "the unreleased final chapter."

The last is unread by any Aeldari currently alive. Cegorach is the only entity who has read it. He has not commented on its contents. The Aeldari Farseer council have made three formal requests to Cegorach to release the document. Each request has been answered with a different joke.