The Khan in the Webway

The Hunt

After the Scouring concluded and the Imperium settled into administration, Jaghatai Khan grew restless. The White Scars' way had always been the open ride, the chase, the war fought at speed. The new Imperium's long bureaucratic pacification did not suit him.

In early M32 he led a personal pursuit of a Drukhari raider band that had abducted civilians from a White Scars protectorate. The trail led him to a Webway portal. He went through it. The portal closed behind him. He has not been verified to emerge.

I will be back when the chase is done.

— Jaghatai Khan, attributed M32 departure

What the Webway Permits

The Webway is the Aeldari's extra-dimensional travel network — a labyrinth of stable warp-tunnels that bypass the dangers of the Sea of Souls. Time inside the Webway does not flow at the same rate as realspace. Direction inside the Webway is not exactly direction. The structure has been mapped only in fragments.

A primarch could, in principle, survive within it for ten thousand years. He could, in principle, be hunting still. He could, in principle, be lost. The Webway does not return all travellers, and does not always return the ones it returns to where they entered.

The Khan's Sons Believe

The White Scars chapter holds, by formal saga doctrine, that the Khan is hunting and will return. The sagas are sung, the chapter's standards are maintained as if the primarch's return is imminent. Senior Stormseers report flashes of what they describe as the Khan's tactical thinking, as if a long-distance correspondence is in some way active.

No Imperial Inquisitor has been allowed to formally test this. The chapter regards the question as cultural rather than empirical.

The Hunt Itself

Jaghatai Khan's pursuit of his quarry into the Webway in 014.M31 is recorded by Custodian witness only — the only Imperial individuals close enough to observe the event. The Khan had been pursuing a daemonic-traitor target through the closing days of the Siege of Terra. The target — variously identified in Custodian records as a Slaaneshi Greater Daemon, a Tzeentchian Lord of Change, or an undifferentiated daemon-prince entity — fled through a Webway gate at the Eternity Wall sector. The Khan followed without authorisation.

The Webway gate closed behind him. By Custodian witness, he had not paused to consider; he had not consulted his senior officers; he had not informed Dorn or the Emperor's senior staff. He had pursued. The closure of the gate behind him was, by Mechanicus analysis of the gate's residual energies, not the gate's standard closure pattern. Something had specifically sealed it. The seal has held for ten thousand years.

What the Webway Permits

The Aeldari Farseer council's standing position on the Webway is that it is a multi-temporal structure — that time inside the Webway does not flow uniformly with realspace time, and that a mortal entering the Webway may emerge to find more or less time has passed in realspace than the entrant's own subjective experience would suggest. The Khan, having entered the Webway during the Siege of Terra, has therefore not necessarily experienced ten thousand years subjectively. He may have experienced any duration from a few months to several centuries, depending on which Webway sub-regions he has traversed.

The Aeldari council has, in two separate communications with senior White Scars representatives, indicated that the Khan is — by their Farseer scrying — still alive within the Webway. The communications have not been formally Imperially-acknowledged, but the White Scars have treated them as evidentiary. The Aeldari position is that the Khan's continued presence inside the Webway is itself a matter the Aeldari have an interest in: he is, by Farseer reckoning, the single mortal of post-Heresy Imperial significance whose location they can confirm without being able to communicate with directly.

The Modern Webway Question

The Cicatrix Maledictum's opening in 999.M41 disrupted the warp in ways that the Aeldari Farseer council has assessed as having corresponding consequences inside the Webway. The Farseers' classified communications to the White Scars in 002.M42 included a specific observation: the Khan's location within the Webway, which the Farseers had been tracking for ten thousand years, is now imperfectly known. He has moved — by the Farseers' estimation — in a direction that the Aeldari interpret as toward an exit gate, but the specific exit gate cannot be determined.

The White Scars' interpretation of the Farseer communication is that the Khan's return is now imminent — within decades, possibly within years. The chapter has, in the post-Rift years, increased its rate of Khan-Return ceremonial preparation. Multiple Wolf Lord-equivalent commanders have undertaken pilgrimages to known Webway access points in chapter territory. None of the pilgrimages have produced a Khan-return. The chapter continues them regardless. Kor'sarro Khan personally undertook one such pilgrimage in 040.M42 and returned without comment.

He has moved. Toward an exit gate. The gate cannot be identified from our side.

— Eldrad Ulthran, classified communication to White Scars, 002.M42