The War in Heaven

The Gardeners of a Lost Age

Sixty million years before the first human prayer rose toward Terra, the galaxy belonged to the Old Ones — a reptilian, near-divine creator-race whose hand the Imperium's own scholars can no longer fully trace. They seeded life across a hundred thousand worlds and threaded the void with the Webway, a labyrinth-dimension folded between realspace and the Warp that let a traveller cross light-years without ever touching the stars between. For an age beyond counting they were the gardeners of the galaxy. Then the dying came. From the irradiated cradle of the Necrontyr — a short-lived people consumed by envy of the Old Ones' near-immortality — rose a hunger that would unmake everything. What the Adeptus Mechanicus catalogues as the War in Heaven began not as a single battle but as the slow souring of a paradise into a charnel house.

They were old when the stars we name were unborn, and we are the weeds left growing in their garden.

— Magos-Historian Vethrael, Mechanicus xenoarchive, fragmentary

The Bargain With the Star-Gods

The Necrontyr could not win alone, so they made a bargain that damned them. Among the stars dwelt the C'tan — beings of living metal, vast and patient, who fed on the raw energy of stars and, later, on the souls of the living. The Nightbringer, who taught every younger species the meaning of death; the Deceiver, the trickster who lied even to its own kind; the Void Dragon, said by some to slumber still beneath the sands of Mars. The Necrontyr offered them flesh and worship; the C'tan offered immortality in exchange for the surrender of the body. The Necrontyr were poured into engines of living metal and became the Necrons — deathless, soulless, and bound. The star-gods had their armies, and the galaxy had its first true tyrants.

Living Weapons, Made to Be Spent

To fight gods, the Old Ones forged living weapons. This is the secret the modern galaxy is built upon: nearly every great power of the forty-first millennium is a tool from a war that ended sixty million years ago. The Old Ones engineered psychic warrior-races and loosed them against the Necrons. They made the Krork — towering, fungal, gleeful in slaughter — whose diminished descendants the Imperium now curses as the Orks. They made the Aeldari, an elegant and arrogant people of immense psychic gift, ancestors of today's eldar and their darker drukhari kin. They made the Slann, amphibian psykers who would survive into the present as the masters of the Tau's distant neighbours. Whole species, designed as ammunition, never told they were anything else.

We were not born. We were issued.

— Aeldari myth-fragment, rendered by Inquisitor Czevak

How the War Ended, As Far As Anyone Agrees

The cost broke the makers. Worn down by the Aeldari and the Krork, the Old Ones were driven from the galaxy or annihilated outright — and then, in the war's last days, the Necrons turned on their own gods. Led by Szarekh, the Silent King, they rose against the C'tan that had enslaved them and tore each star-god apart, sundering it into thousands of lesser shards bound forever inside Tesseract Labyrinths. Yet rather than fade, the spent Necrons sealed themselves into stasis-tombs across countless worlds and slept for sixty million years, a slumber from which they are only now waking. The Old Ones themselves vanished so completely that no Imperial record, no Aeldari saga, no Necron engram agrees on how the last of them died. The Webway, their masterwork, was breached in the fighting and never fully closed again — a wound in the architecture of reality that the eldar still patrol and the Imperium still fears.

The Grimmest Reading

Here the chroniclers lower their voices. The grimmest reading of the War in Heaven holds that the deaths were not merely physical. The Aeldari were psychic on a scale the Imperium can barely imagine, and when they died in their unnumbered billions, every death-scream poured into the Warp — the immaterial ocean of raw emotion that underlies reality. Some Inquisitorial heretics whisper that this tide of terror and agony is what first stirred the Warp from a passive sea into a realm of predators, the long gestation that would one day birth the Dark Gods of Chaos. By that account the daemon and the star-god are cousins, and every modern horror traces back to one war's overflow of grief.

A Rumour Sixty Million Years Deep

Almost nothing here can be proven, and the codex must say so plainly. The War in Heaven left no surviving witnesses willing to speak honestly. The Necrons remember it through the cold lens of beings who lost; the Aeldari sing of it in myth-cycles that flatter themselves; the Old Ones left only the Webway and a scatter of seeded life as their epitaph. Magos-historians of the Adeptus Mechanicus reconstruct fragments from xenos archaeology and from the engrams of captured Necron lords. What remains is less a history than a rumour sixty million years deep — the buried first cause behind the Emperor, the eldar, the orks, and the Warp alike. Every war since has been an echo of that first one, and no one alive remembers the sound of the original voice.