40K DARK ORIGINS [3] Perceptions of Time & The War in Heaven | WARHAMMER 40,000 History/Lore

it has been somehow roughly a year since i began the dark origins series where it was my knowingly vague and unlikely objective to come to some firm conclusions about the origin of the chaos gods and while i will apologize for the length of time to reach this third installment i did have my reasons in waiting one being anticipating some material to come out which actually proved to be a futile waste of time but that's how it goes however it has given me time to really explore things and that has meant that now this is expanded into what will at least be another fourth episode to follow this so starting off this series i thought it was going to be fairly straightforward but is now spiraled wildly out of control to the point where i'm trying to relate core ideas of overlapping philosophy and quantum mechanics comically for a fictional verse and this is fine and i want to say that although yes there is some heavy stuff in here there is law as well and what has been my experience is that each step down the road of trying to understand this is then branched into ever more tangents however i do feel i have further progressed than previously and i'm feeling pretty good about where i am right now with this and much of the thinking that i've had to explore has also helped explain other things that are happening within the 40k verse to do with time or just how things behave but really today we're going to be talking more about the warp and the time side of things really the framing of the picture before we then in the next episode get into the really dark origin stuff before we dive on in though i want to answer this question a little better and that being why are you trying to understand something that by its own definition is supposedly incomprehensible now i know many of you often tell me luton you have no need to address such questions and i say thank you and i hear you but it's very simple actually to answer and good to get out of the way immediately the answer i would have thought to be both very obvious and very simple that i personally and indeed many people do you just find it extremely enjoyable running through mental exercises to explain things even fictional things and yes jumping through all the rambling hoops necessary to try and understand just what inhale it all means trying to collect the breadcrumbs left for us in the labyrinthine world of 40k law for some this might be irritating pointless even for me i love it to a point but you needn't just take my word for it we can hear the same sentiment spoken by a legendary figure within the 40k galaxy a man of both great wisdom and power who let's be real did not always make the perfect choices but who simply tried to do the best that they could for humanity a man who would continue to be involved with mankind across millennia and capable of wielding truly immense psychic power that's right i'm talking obviously about glorious magnus primark of the thousand sons he told us that and i quote the art and science of questioning everything is the source of all knowledge and to abandon that will doom us to slow decay an imperium of darkness and ignorance where those who dare to pursue knowledge whatever the cost to themselves are regarded with suspicion that is not the imperium i believe in that is not the imperium i wish to be a part of knowledge is the food of the soul and no knowledge can be thought of as wrong so long as each seeker after truth is master of what he learns nothing worth knowing can be taught it must be learned with the blood and sweat of experience there are no greater scholars of that ilk than the thousand sons even as we fight in the forefront of the emperor's crusade we study the things others ignore questing for knowledge in the places others fear to tread there are no truths unknown no secrets to hidden and no paths to labyrinthine for us to follow for they lead us upwards to enlightenment for magnus and his thousand sons they had all sought to try and fathom the impossible within the galaxy and of course we saw the result even when the emperor had forbidden them to study such things as the warp but they believed that all things could be eventually understood does this mean that i will at some point be consumed by chaos i sometimes feel this has already happened to be honest the verse of 40k and all of its continually contradictory information and yes unreliable narrators is entirely the fun of what it is all about and quite honestly this aspect of it is really something that should be just known from the outset and maybe i need to talk about that separately because it's part of what 40k is plus this all gave me an opportunity to start off mainly with a quote from magnus which seemed highly appropriate and in the end isn't that what's important here the answer is no so before the inquisitors enter the hive city of the luton necropolis and i have to order them assassinated let's begin now i shall apologize right from the start because i realized that i need to begin this by discussing some of physics and i am sorry for that we will eventually get to the chaos gods and the warp and the immaterium and i'll even speak to the war in heaven what i came to realize was that one of the most fundamental issues we have to think about when dealing with the warp and even how the imperium operates as well is about time and how time works within the imperium and the galaxy the relationship between our material space the material and the warp the immaterium even looking to how some factions like the necron and eldar interact and view their entire history it all comes back to time it would be all too easy to just ignore this to write it off and say hey it's 40k everything is crazy so why bother thinking about it further than that and i wouldn't presume to suggest that that way of approaching 40k is any less valid than me wanting to dive into things more deeply but for me 40k or not this stuff is still greatly interesting and once i finish this video series i would doubt that i'm going to return to talking about all this kind of thing so i feel it's just as well to get it out of the way as we're already on video three in this series and i feel quite committed to finishing it so things will get a little heavy as we wade into discussing some elements that touch on classical and quantum mechanics the philosophical nature of time and exploring both the different opinions of physicists and philosophers as to how we perceive time and you know just a reminder i'm not a physicist but i do my best in trying to understand this stuff but i hope you'll see how this does tie into many things and is not just a waste of time but is something that's quite critical to thinking about the 40k verse if you care about it at all more than just haha big emperor memes chainsaws and aux bashing heads the fact that you're watching this makes me already hopeful you're after something a little deeper than that overall consider that one thing becomes very important to understand and i perhaps already hinted at this while discussing robert goleman's frustration on returning to the imperium i need to find that its chronology was in disarray the so-called chrono strife now this thing i think is suggested that within dark imperium plague war that gulemon begins to realize regarding the imperium's chronological aberrations that resolving this is a nearly hopeless endeavor in the current state that many systems will ultimately end up having to rely on local observations of time this in actuality is likely the most sensible way for the imperium to operate in fact as i will hope to explain it is really the only way for it to be able to truly make any real sense at all the concept of an established dating system used by the imperium widely to determine a chronology of specific events is actually so flawed as to be near enough meaningless in fact this idea of having a galactic human empire that can react somehow in real time to things happening around the galaxy is also extremely flawed however in fairness to the 40k verse this is actually demonstrated because unlike most science fiction who choose to just ignore or macguffin their way around it at least with the imperium we're sometimes told that say fleets of imperial ships that arrive to defend the world only to discover the planet is dead and has actually been for some time and this illustrates one of the core and fundamental problems facing the imperium that they have to use the warp for both communication and to travel around the galaxy the effects of the warp in terms of space-time which are then compounded by normal time dilation and special relativity means that ships could arrive earlier than expected or as seems to be more often noted to be the case actually arrive far later so does this mean then that the imperium cannot operate in any kind of centralized way sort of but not necessarily but it does mean that we need to realize things are just not as simplistic compared to how we see things within our time bubble of the so-called present here on earth it also means that for the imperium having strong localized defenses within systems is critically important this is why planets of value within the imperium are usually heavily fortified with tons of imperial guard and vast bunk installations because they have to be because if an enemy attacks you help may not be arriving any time soon you see this happen all the time in the imperium you may have to then bunker down and hold the line this is why within the imperium space moons are not located at one central hub or even at core logistical points within systems to be then assigned out to deal with problems they're scattered in relatively small numbers all across the galaxy some do not even have stationary home planet but patrol the galaxy looking for imperial systems and worlds requiring assistance on the face of it this may seem obvious you might think well the galaxy is huge so of course we know this is why imperial forces are spread across the entire galaxy of course that is not inaccurate to say however it's much more fundamental than that because it's not just about distance it's not about three dimensional space and how fast you can travel from a to b we exist in a four dimensional verse so it's also about time specifically space time this is one of the imperium's biggest problems not just in reliably recording it but also dealing with effects caused by it this is only made worse by having to traverse and communicate through the warp constantly it's a necessity to having any kind of functioning empire for the imperium unfortunately it creates massive unavoidable problems that are not as explicitly mentioned as they probably should be but at least they are mentioned at all and not just ignored this kind of detail is one of the things that i do love about 40k that even when something undermines the smooth running of the narrative they still leave this in it's not smoothed over well not too often anyway this is why i say that for 40k we can only partially consider real physics being relative to it because in the imperium they do not or i should say one does not simply travel through warp space within the imperium of man generally when we think of advanced space travel we imagine a vessel traveling at a very high velocity for the imperium though they also travel through the warp a realm that is extremely difficult to give any kind of strictly definitive description of in fact we cannot even say the clarity how the warp functions to allow space travel other than it appears to be vaguely reminiscent of theories about how a wormhole functions this is probably the best analogy we might make and even then not particularly good or accurately applicable the more interesting thing is that we tend to apply our sense of observing time to the imperium's world that's likely because it's what makes sense to us in the first place except of course for one small problem that our concept of the present is near meaningless on a galactic scale why because it only really works within the small bubble that we have imagined for ourselves around our planet and beyond that trying to determine what the present is no longer works in any truly definitive sense and let me describe this another way for you so our concept of the present is based around our observable world we see actions and events occur and this is what we consider to be the present but how would you define more specifically what the present is is it a vague period of time how long would that be do we define it as the speed by which our brains are able to process a conscious thought is it smaller or is it a greater thing than that well one might then well ask what would you consider to be a benchmark for perception is it merely the time for a thought to appear and be verbalized in response to a question does it require a mechanical action does it require external stimulus how do i define this if my opinion of what determines a conscious thought is slightly different than yours whose idea of present is more correct how would you choose to try and quantify that some of us may process thoughts at a slightly different speed than others ranging in milliseconds either way is one person's present more than correct than another this might sound absurd and kind of pointless but if you think about it the idea of present moment in time is actually extremely vague and in fact very difficult to define because as soon as you've thought about it it's already the past studies have been done that explore this idea of present time where participants were asked to carry out a simple mechanical task like a key press and then relate this to the position of a clock time they were observing at the same time now strangely most people believed their physical mechanical actions were occurring somewhere like 75 to 100 milliseconds before they felt that actual movement begin now our brains appeared to be distorting our perception of reality and time albeit at a very small scale the first thing people want to say is well obviously surely that difference can then be explained by the time it takes the message to travel from your brain to the muscle unfortunately not because those messages are said to occur within a range of 15 to 25 milliseconds so there was something else happening there which is not accounting for that the overall conclusion was that people were basing their judgment of movement on the decision to act itself what amounted to a prediction of upcoming movement so instead of purely observing the mechanical action itself they were perceiving that that was going to happen so this raises interesting questions about how we perceive the present within our own time a bubble of the world we live in even if we ourselves perceive something to be instantaneous it actually may not be which raises the question of if we're even truly capable of being aware of what you might consider to be the present to a very highly accurate degree how would we choose to measure the present as well nanoseconds milliseconds seconds the more we try to consider what the present is it can become ever more philosophical but this idea of present being some constant that exists throughout the world if we're thinking about theories of time it's really anything but it's very vague it's not entirely undefined one might obviously argue does it even matter do we really need to define the present so specifically because it's just moments in our day it's arguable if we ever really even think about it because we're just living our lives so absolutely it's not something that's a big problem certainly not within our limited planetary bubble that we live every day but once we travel beyond our planet into the galaxy across all of that space we're trying to answer questions about then the nature of time and humanity and the imperium's ability to accurately observe time and just what inhabits the void of warp space and then things like the observable present actually do become far more important to define and so this is where we come to the whole point of why thinking about time in 40k for me is so important because instead of thinking of the present as being the front of say if you can imagine a time wave that is ever moving forward with everything behind it being the past and all ahead being the invisible future we may be better off to try and think about the present as not being a thing at all but instead every moment is more like a coordinate in the space-time block of our universe we only feel this idea of the present because of how we observe things how we function how we see things like entropy causality raises the question if the present is actually a thing at all or is it just an illusion of our conscious mind do those who exist in the warp then rise above this are they beyond our comprehension in terms of their awareness of such things perhaps they do see reality in a broadly comprehensive sense that is far far beyond our capability and previous discussions about chronology within the imperium even more broadly within the 41st millennium i've seen people say well surely they should be able to set a standardized time to by means of some you know hyper accurate centralized galactic terror clock which the imperium would use then as a point of reference but this was actually said to be the case previously to a degree until gullman realized that it was all a sham and things were way off the mark by centuries if not even longer so this idea of a central galactic clock feels once again to be the same school of thought by those who feel that the imperium should be able to just reverse engineer any technology they come across because that's easy right surely well i've talked about reverse engineering before so i won't drag over that again but the answer is basically no the idea though of a stable chronology has been long present in past descriptions of the imperium we have all these records and accounts unfortunately this does make little sense now beyond serving as a means to administratively comfort our inability to readily understand how time behaves in the galaxy in the universe so as some have suggested using an atomic clock and just in air quotes being extremely precise doesn't actually fix anything and as i will explain shortly so the idea of a known present date is again something we project in the bubble of our own and only works within this limited space of our planet because it is observable we see the length of a day and a year people might say well yes lutein but surely if they have a clock about their ship and when they return they can then see how much time has passed they can calculate the dates and the events that have occurred to enable a true history of the imperium within those dates and times the simple answer is that this wouldn't work in fact the accuracy of an atomic clock was the very reason as to why physicists were able to demonstrate the recording time and defining present is incredibly problematic not least while you travel in space and for our purposes of a galactic empire it heavily undermines the idea of recording in fact anything with accuracy this is nothing new in fact this has been definitively proven and accepted in physics since the early 1970s i explained this fully but not just yet so this gets us into some pretty heavy concepts like we considered in part one like the eternalist view of time and others like the growing or the evolving block view and certainly not all agree on how things are perceived in regard to this some would say that physics needs to take everyday reality into account and that what we consider the present is necessary to separate us from the past which we presume is set and already exists distinctly from the unknown future but as i've noted even our concept of present is highly constructed we use clocks as a means to order our world artificially constructed devices to bring synchronicity to our lives and this became a necessary thing within the modernization of human society of course in our ancient past this was not always the case it only became a necessity when industrialization required us to know time with accuracy or as accurately as possible anyway but this doesn't mean we always needed clocks to define a specific present or proper time before we began to synchronize time we managed well enough but it was far more localized often it was as simple as just knowing the length of an average day from dawn then came midday and then sunset and this is what you based your day on there was no need for clocks but calendars probably certainly however as soon as we expanded to a world which required logistical coordination this was no longer practical which is why we now have region specific time zones around the world because when people with different local times need to communicate they can express time by the zone or in universal time so there's no confusion about when things should happen yet even this is not fully agreed upon some countries add daylight savings to enable them to have more light at different times of the year because of the earth's axis so they adjust their clocks to enable this usually by one hour then different points in our calendar year they move the hour back again and it even becomes more stupid when we consider that other countries do not do this but for those that do they do not necessarily even agree when the clock should be moved so hopefully my point you're beginning to see how our perception of time and this illusion of having some kind of universal synchronized time is really something quite manufactured them being a naturally occurring thing we should always be able to determine there are those who would advocate we should remove time zones altogether and the world should just exist as one singular universal time but that would require a whole other explanation it's too much of a tangent so i guess google that if you're interested but the short version is it would probably never happen because it would really screw up people's heads at this point except that even that in itself highlights our limitations when it comes to thinking about time so let's try and bring this back to 40k a bit imagine if you will that i'm standing on holy terror itself i have an associate who's traveled to another planet within the vast glory of the imperium of mankind specific location is unimportant let's just say necromunda how far away is necromunda relative to terror how many light years not important but once you knew you might wish to ask your associate what are they doing now in the present the answer to this the question itself is completely meaningless because if they were here on terror right now well then you'll be able to observe them and so you could answer that question of what they were doing now in what you consider to be the present because they're near to you now if they were several miles away you'd still be able to see them in what you would define as the present because you both appear to be sharing that same point in time if i wave it to you even from several miles away you can see me waving and then you can wave back again because we appear to be sharing that same present time but the key word is appear it's in fact an illusion we only feel this concept of present because the time with which it takes light to reach you it's near enough instantaneous that's why i'm able to wave at someone and even if they're several miles away they're looking maybe through binoculars or whatever they can see you and they can wave back and it feels instantaneous but it's not we're unable to perceive it but even at this small distance you're still seeing your friend waving basically in the past because from the moment they've waved at you will have taken a minuscule amount of time to then reach your perception and then be processed in your brain this happens to us all the time it's so imperceptible we don't even consider it and this is why i should make the highly known statement as well about time passing differently at sea level as opposed to somebody in the mountains that's a real thing so returning to our friends standing on necromunda we can't look at them and see what's happening instantaneously we can't have a video feed which hooks up and see what's happening instantly it'll take many years for the light to travel to us on terror so even were you to have an extremely powerful telescope and be able to observe them you'd always be looking into the past you could never look at or receive information what we would consider to be the present sphere of time our limited sense of present is restricted to things close to us in our planetary time bubble this is not particularly clear well defined as i've said but these ill-defined parameters create problems with regards to our perception of time and how we choose to think about it now world-renowned physicist carla rivalli explains that the flow of time is something which emerges from physics not from the context of an exact description of things as they are it emerges instead within the context of statistics and thermodynamics what he means what i believe he's saying here is that although time does not necessarily follow a straight line for us as an observable flow because of the unavoidable constraints of entropy and caudality it's these principles which are our basis for both memories and our consciousness to be built upon so to pull things back again to the 40k verse if you have something such as a demon existing within the warp it may not see things in this flowing directional way that we do it could see things in more like a single block verse formation that is to say it would not clearly be able to differentiate between the past the present and future but rather they would see them somehow as being all together this is a very difficult concept for us to try and imagine maybe there is no clear way to outline or really visualize this other than to say we simply know it to not be the realm that we live in we're limited right now existing within a four-dimensional space and our limitations prohibit us from seeing time in another way so even if you travel to that place it is incomprehensible in fact most of us would even struggle to think of time beyond it being a specifically linear thing that we observe with clocks and calendars if we remove those planned tracking systems one might suggest were we then able to consider time as being a thing at all because of our mortality perhaps but if you were an immortal creature of the warp with no rising nor setting sun no sleep no dreams no true concept of life and death no any sense of things ending or beginning how would you consider time as being a factor that affected your reality at all we may presume that an immortal might see a chain of events as being suggestive of there being a direction of things but how can we even presume to know that's how things work within the immaterium for all we know a demon might encounter events occurring completely out of our perception of linear time that even this most basic building block of our reality is not something that exists within the framework of the warp and the demon's reality let us return now to our own recording and documenting of time and imperial chronology we knew the time on terror with high accuracy via some advanced clock and then we carried with us to travel another clock which was also extremely accurate well then we'll always know the time on terror right just have every ship in the system in the galaxy do the same easy problem solved unfortunately not and that's not my guesstimation either it's established science at this point there are two examples to note the first being a theoretical one known as the twin paradox worth noting not really a paradox in our general understanding of that term the twin paradox is where you have twins at the same starting point say terror one stays at the starting point of a and the other travels off in a rocket into the space and then returns when the travelling twin returns less time has passed for them than the person who remained there are endless examples explaining this on youtube what i will say is that from my understanding it would not be correct to say that this result is singularly due to that person's traveling in their velocity that is to say the acceleration that causes it what is important is the space time distance traveled and this will probably become a bit clearer later but simply put the person on terror may have aged 20 years but the person returning on the ship may only age 15 years so if you had a clock with you it would be seriously off of the mark this principle could be applied to the imperium but made considerably worse by all the warp shenanigans than if you imagine over a millennia it's no wonder that the dates for things like the ultimate crusade are so off the mark and that's kind of what gulemon realized and the second example was an actual physical experiment carried out as i said 1971 its concept is akin to these suggestions of having super accurate clocks on terror to enable everybody to keep track of what was objectively the present time the right time essentially a means for the imperium to keep its chronology straight and everything in sync unfortunately this concept is considerably flawed as the experiment illustrated it's a very simplistic example and it doesn't work so what did they do well firstly they didn't just use one atomic clock they put four atomic clocks on a plane four on another plane and four remained here on the earth itself and what they did was they took into account its relative position and rotational speed of the planet they took the first plane and they flew it to the east flying with the rotation of the earth and this would make its total speed that of the earth plus the plane's speed the other plane flying west would subtract the speed of the earth so basically one plane is flying faster than the other relative to space with an atomic clock we can measure time very very accurately and as some of you guys pointed out however accuracy is not the issue when you're traveling away from the planet at extremely high speed or taking into account these other things in the experiment even though the planes are not moving extremely fast as would be the case in something like the twin paradox where the idea is somebody taking a journey in space with a vessel moving at very high velocity even with the planes they're using these very extremely accurate clocks so you can still see an effect so what you'd expect to see in terms of space time and relativity is the aircraft with the fastest velocity would show a smaller passing of time comparative with this slower velocity plane traveling against that rotation of the earth and then you have the clock on earth which should finish somewhere in between was the experiment successful in showing this yes it was it showed this absolutely to be the case by using these extremely accurate atomic clocks the plane flying with the rotation the earth's clock had less time pass than that on the planet and the plane flying against the rotation respectively these are very small increments but this extremely important experiment illustrates most clearly what i wanted you guys to fundamentally understand right from the beginning i know it's a bit heavy to have started out with all of this kind of thing but it's really important to realize how our concept of what is the present and now is really kind of illusory as soon as we start to travel with velocity our concept of this idea falls apart because remembering that with the twin paradox it's not solely about acceleration but also the space-time distance traveled now i did think of one additional example here previously i used some examples from movies like the terminator and primer however if you're having a hard time getting your head around this stuff then consider that it's even featured in some family films in the 1986 film flight of the navigator classic movie i'm sure many of you have seen but if not then i guess spoilers but it has been out for 30 years the protagonist 12 year old boy david freeman searches for his brother falls into a ravine near his home falls unconscious when he awakens he rushes home only to find there's strangers living there he's very confused and panicked and he falls unconscious they soon reunite him with his parents except that they are disturbingly now much older david it appears has been actually missing for eight years yet somehow not aged it turns out that he's been abducted by a ship piloted by an ai designed by aliens and it also connects to an alien ship having crashed around the same time being now held by nasa and he ends up being called to the ship and they have a mini adventure but that's not before the guys at nasa figure out there's something very strange happening of course with his time difference and also what's going on in his head however what's relevant for us is the time difference and how the movie quite accurately portrays what physics suggests to us through special relativity and the twin paradox david was taken from earth when he fell unconscious and as the ship was traveling in the movie they say beyond the speed of light but physics believes that to be impossible but for the purposes of this situation even if it were just anywhere near the speed of light the effect would be much the same so when david returns everybody else has aged eight years but he has only experienced a few hours of time difference but it's a surprisingly heavy topic for a family film in the mid-80s and how it deals with some fairly heavy concepts to do with time dilation and the bizarre experiences that could occur as a result we've often seen a lot of movies to do with time travel and those are usually kind of more out there a little bit more wacky and crazy and you can give that more of a pass because it's time travel and we don't really know if that's even possible probably worth a watch even now and you could have been gone only 4.4 hours and the rest of us here on earth would have aged eight years what does that mean time slows down as you approach the speed of light and whilst this might seem a little bit off topic the point here is that what we see in the film would be very much what you would experience within the 40k verse you might leave a world travel and then come back only to find that whilst you are still aged say 50 everybody else has aged and maybe even died this is the curious thing about the 40k galaxy often this is when people talk about how can somebody be a certain age how can they see so many things again there could be some very curious issues to do with time dilation where people are moving around ages and what they are able to see at different times and planets progressions and all manner of different things like this in the 40k verse it's a very complicated thing as well to align in terms of timelines chronology whose characters are where at certain times interacting it's a very very complicated issue so with the atomic clocks and the planes you can't simply say well we observe the effect but one of these must be a more correct present time again that's a meaningless question a meaningless concept there is no more correct time there's no more truer present all we can really say is what was shown by the three planes times being out of sync is that they are relative to each other relativity it means that although different none of the times are more true than the other even if they became out of sync as a result of the effects of relativity so this obviously can be kind of a troubling concept and difficult to wrap your head around not least because i've barely gone into any detail but it's okay thinking about these heavy concepts it's not very easy i should know i've been looking at it for three weeks and i've got a massive headache from it but most of the reason for that is because we base our understanding of the world on things that are very simple very highly observable to us we see things and we think yeah i can see that happening makes sense this is why people were suggesting taking clocks with you in an imperial ship to keep track of time sounds like it would make sense but it just doesn't work an easy example of how we think of things wrongly on a near-daily basis and again this this is applicable to the imperium and the sort of general ignorance of the humanity in the society the imperium so an easy one would be you look at the sky and you see the sun moving across it except of course we know the sun isn't moving at all the sun doesn't move across the sky so phrases like the sun rises in the east and the sun sets in the west it doesn't help because it embeds this incorrect idea it makes it sound as if the sun is moving but we know that of course it's not we're just the earth is spinning and we do this all the time in human culture by doing things using commonalities that muddy reality in our brain none of these things are usually a big deal but it shows how we tend to twist reality just because it's easier for us it's what it suits us and often it's what we think of as like i say just being more correct more true it feels right to us but it's often wrong we do it even subconsciously all the time when we observe things that feel a certain way we observe and we discuss these things in our day-to-day lives all the time i'm sure we've all experienced different feelings of time as well so just this week i've heard many people exclaim they cannot believe it's december this year has been a blur has it why do people feel this comparative to another year now obviously we know that this year has been different but that's not the point the point is no more or less time has actually passed it's going to be exactly the same as before and spare me the explanations it's a rhetorical question the point is that although nothing has changed in terms of time past our lives and changes in them make us perceive things differently this happens equally when someone is just say very busy in your day you're having a hectic day suddenly bam it's over it feels as if it was over in an instant whereas if you were sitting there with absolutely nothing to do we all commonly would note this makes it feel like time drags on on moving extremely slowly but clearly nothing is actually happening there it's just this time of the universe it's not being slowed localized around us just because of what's happening our day but nonetheless we feel as if time is moving faster or slower based on these false perceptions that we have the point being we as humans are fundamentally quite bad just at measuring time with our consciousness by default so when we consider more deeply the nature of time using physics it's not simply describing how time works it's describing how things relate to one another but we'll come to that later remember as well that most examples of the physics we discuss are just thinking about things within the framework of our world and that is to say not a fictional world where spaceships are traveling around through hell and other things in this confusing nightmare so all the stuff that we think about it should be with a grain of salt but it's still beneficial to help define these speculative concepts for us because if you don't where are you in the imperium they live across all of the galaxy regions experiencing varying space-time dilation they have to regularly travel through the warp which is something akin to continually traveling through wormholes as a general method of transportation plus all manner of strange influences that humans say or just dismiss within the verse as being totally incomprehensible we also see xenos the tyranid creating devastating artificial gravity wells so they're able to traverse vast distances in space demons who would consume the soul of humans to rip through the walls of reality and penetrate our space with the immaterium and beings like the necron who have transcended time itself and who keep humans as trophies inside their pocket dimensions so i would suggest it's fair to say that any of the physics stuff when applied to the galaxy the imperium is likely not much more than a very loose guide something to tether ourselves to before we drift off into the void of confusion and lose our minds in the horrors of the warp completely probably too late for me but you all have a chance still to retain your sanity having said all that we also should not as i said in the beginning glibly dismiss it and just say oh it's magic well you never even understand so why even try look we shouldn't expect that we can apply our real world understandings with any precision to something like the 40k fictional galaxy nor could we say we'll be able to explain any definitive conclusions how things are going to behave there but to just ignore all the understandings we have about time the nature of the universe seems to be to me willfully quite asinine apathetic at best people so very often complain about how the imperium of man is so unrealistic because they actively ignore science and refuse to even attempt to expand their understanding of things things that some would argue are very easily observable scientific principles yet simultaneously we all see people who complain that applying real world sciences then also pointless to 40k so perhaps we could just say we're all opting for our delusion of choice and you can come aboard and enjoy the journey or not it's your prerogative my perspective is that our collective understanding of real world sciences core to how we map out and rationalize things even within a fictional verse because after all many of our fictional narratives be they fantasy science fiction fantasy science fiction have a foundation in reality there's absolutely nothing wrong in everything to gain from attempting to overlay these concepts and principles upon the darkly abstract ideas 40k when we're talking about disagreement as well it's worth noting that many physicists still do not agree on many things there's a continual debate raging for example regarding the theory of time in terms of those who consider an eternalist a growing evolving block view the more commonly dismissed presented view there are also some physicists who think that things like causal loops are possible but others who say absolutely not but we just simply don't yet understand the specifics of these things yet some would speculate that traveling back in time to kill your grandfather must be impossible because if it were then the stability of all things would collapse and that once an event had been altered what would stop others traveling to alter other things kind of like a looper we'd end up in a collapsing chaotic deteriorated state this is why some physicists suggest there's something known as chronology protection conditions must exist we just haven't been able to define them yet but the idea would be to prevent such untenable situations from even being possible this is fairly common as well that within science things are suggested as likely existing but that we just haven't reached the ability to fully define them yet you can imagine quite a few scenarios where that sounds applicable to 40k i'm sure so why can't we just take a clock with us from terror even one that is extremely accurate and that the whole galaxy runs on terror time or because of the four-dimensional world the four-dimensional galaxy we exist in our concept of the present is really an illusory concept that exists only to us within a small bubble and even then very poorly defined if definable at all so it seems apt that we should return to continue on with the most clouded and poorly understood period in the galactic history of 40k course it's the war in heaven so much time has passed that it seems hard to remember now but we pick up the story from the most ancient of times where the eldar was still in the earliest of days a burgeoning race the old ones returning back to anxiously check on their new developing weapons of war empowered from their gluttonous orgy of devouring what had been the necron tear coupled with their subsequently new army of necron the katan waged war upon the old ones and what was we presumed to be the second war in heaven the kitan were now at full power unleashing forces beyond anything that can be comprehended within the modern days of the imperium across the galaxy spread the ancestors of the living dead raging a war against the old ones that had been the creators and protectors of the infant eldari they dominated the galaxy and the old ones were totally besieged worse the qatar had discovered an ever plentiful source of sustenance in the many races that had been crafted and nurtured by the old ones across the many millennia since the beginning of time and these were now like cattle for the insatiable hunger of the katan it is even said that amid this orgy of destruction the katan turned and fought amongst themselves for their entertainment planets were raised suns extinguished and entire systems devoured by black holes via the reality warping powers of the star gods more radical speculations consider that as mortal races became more scarce the katan again turned on one another but this time in earnest until only a few of their kind remained how true is any of this unknown the katan seemingly preoccupied with their galactic war of destruction against everything and even themselves we're not paying attention to the old ones as was meant to have been their bargaining rationale to the silent king this enabled them to consume the entire race of necron tier which raises the question if this was simply a manipulation to ensure the necron tier provided them with the souls they hungered for so desperately despite the reprieve though the old ones were by now absolutely desperate the writing was on the wall and they needed a means by which to try and turn things to their favor yet time was not on their side and even as they placed their hopes with their creations that they might be their salvation the katan and necron continued to ravage the galaxy seemingly blissfully distracted considering the old ones now nothing more than a minor irritation it could be easily dealt with at their convenience before the old ones had ceded life for the sake of peaceful creation now they did so with an urgent and necessary purpose they ceded many new life forms but the most important of these would be the eldar or the adari it's believed they also created the orcs now known here as the crook and details of these are almost non-existent there's really no reference to their involvement within the period of the war in heaven however some references have pointed toward the so-called crook from this time being apparently more clear-minded it's debatable where the modern orcs when talking regarding their ancestors they speak of the brain boys were in fact the old ones themselves or were these more clear-minded iterations of themselves regardless despite the ongoing war in heaven the eldar would grow as a race over millennia and because of the continual threats and disruption occurring they did so now without the guidance of the old ones who had returned to continue fighting the war in heaven these early eldar were learning about the nature of the warp in this time and they would reach into the immaterium and very importantly it appears that the warping this time was far more accessible overlapping with reality not separated as it is today and also that the wharf appeared to be considerably more calm even safe for them to manipulate for the eldar their natural born psychic talents enabled them to play and experiment with the warp they used it in crafting their works and their culture all of which were glorious but these peaceful times would not last the old ones returned from the darkness beyond the sky their strange and vast vessels were scarred and worn their presence dimmed from what the eldar remembered the old ones had returned to inspect their creations and on discovering their warp experimentations they encouraged the eldar to reach further into the immaterium to discover newfound creativity creativity for weapons of war this period we refer to as the war in heaven and the role to which those within it such as the elder are unsurprisingly so ancient that descriptions are fractured contradictory and many of the records are basically cultural tales of eldar mythology and a little more so even with the best and most conscientious documenting and rationalization still leaves us far from any concrete conclusions although if you want to hear my extended thoughts revisit part 2 of this series where i dive deeper into the elder mythology and their gods and this is something we will revisit as well in upcoming episodes but it's important to remember that most of this takes place anything like 60 million years before the current age of the imperium that even for the eldar the truth of these times is very clouded what this means for us is that sometimes even when there appears to be a clear reference to something it cannot be trusted and very well may have meant to originally reference something else entirely so any and all references from this age should be viewed with high skepticism i'll restate for clarity that most of our descriptions from this time are again very clouded or deliberately allegorical and so should not be taken at face value that is to say taken literally most might presume that if you were to say take for example the eldar gods just going by their descriptions you might well assume that they were sentient walking entities who were more like powerful leaders akin to the primax or even the emperor on reflection this actually seems very unlikely and that they're more like a folktale or something of an allegory a story with an alternative or hidden meaning perhaps a moral political or simply an emotionally described history lesson for future generations the very simplistic literal interpretation of eldar gods is that there are these powerful semi-sentient psychic weapons created by or for the eldar because this is referenced it fits very well within the intentions of the old ones now again we shouldn't entirely dismiss it because part of it is still plausible especially remembering that when the old ones came to creating the newer races like the eldar the crook they were desperate they were backed into a corner the katana and the necron were decimating them and the old ones powerful as they were were apparently nowhere near as powerful with manipulating and using the warp as their soon to blossom creations the eldar it seems to me that the old ones gambled that the eldar would be their salvation and they had achieved either accidentally or deliberately in creating a race that had truly immense psychic power and sensitivity within the warp not to mention their souls had extremely unusual properties and they were able to be continually reborn from the warp itself this meant that the eldar were able to exist seemingly in a state of something like immortality but again just how specifically this was manifested not entirely clear but it didn't mean they were heading for another stage in the war in heaven that of an apocalyptic war of attrition against the necron and katan we have nowhere near enough knowledge to know just how competent the old ones were when it comes to creating life we can't know if they basically just got very lucky and we're seeding planets almost at random or did they possess the advanced knowledge to be able to craft specifically the life forms they wanted at the very least i would guess they had a level of competency in genetic manipulation the old ones in their desperation encouraged the eldar to develop their emergent warp skills and to do so as fast as possible and this is where things become even more unclear it's possible that by working closely with the elders some of the old ones who had more of an affinity with them came to be viewed as gods or that the eldar created entities that were beyond their comprehension during this time they were after all experimenting with raw material in the warped dimension were forging entities on experimental instinct rather than learned experience and knowledge with perhaps little if any guidance and so it's also a possibility that they perceived them not as their own creations but as gods who had sprung forth from the warp to aid them i think of the elder in this time being something akin to children in akira where they have learned to tap into their powers they were previously unaware of but for some of them this proved to be extraordinarily dangerous far beyond even their own comprehension or that of their creators and this seems to be similarly the case with the old ones and the elder alternatively maybe the elder collectively and unintentionally had created sentient beings with godlike qualities perhaps from their own dreams their mirrored reflective extensions of themselves a foreshadowing of what would be later to come from humanity i especially like this concept myself that rather than simply playing with the raw warp the eldar completely unintentionally created their own gods out of the immaterial perhaps waking up one day to find these figures among them and took them as being their pantheon we know that the warp reflects the thoughts and collective feelings of mortal and psychically sensitive creatures and remembering that question people are always asking the question about why are there no good or positive gods in the warp while the warping the current time of the 41st millennium the age of the imperium we see how the galaxy itself is such a hellscape that were if it were even possible for anything positive to be born into the warp it's such a literal nightmare dimension is presumed that any good creations would be immediately smothered consumed or worse before it really even knew what was what you may assume ending up being then tortured for eternity by slaanesh or experimented upon by nurgle the warp during the early times of the galaxy in the war in heaven was seemingly a very different place than now it was not a nightmarish hellscape but instead a peaceful and serene sea of neutrality a beautiful sea of psychic energy how do we know this well for one biological assumption the other being relative descriptions by both eldar and indeed also humans the eldar were essentially able to bathe in the warp during this time there were no descriptions in elder mythology during the beginning of their race of horrors consuming them nor did they fear for their souls as the modern eldar do for well-established reasons there's nothing to suggest otherwise that i've seen the only descriptions of any dangers or predators in the warp come much later toward the end of the war in heaven but not at all during this early period or even throughout the eldar's establishment during the war in heaven they're gods such as azurian isha and vaal who were all constructive entities but the eldar simultaneously brought forth those like kane god of war and destruction except cain was not a being constructed from the darkest of dark desires he was brought forth as a more positive still representation of the elders needs to express and feel the need for violence and war that's not necessarily as negative as it sounds like most mortal creatures it could be construed as something more akin to a need for self-preservation we know this well to be an extremely powerful base instinct one expressed by all mortal creatures when most needed so within the idea of them creating eldar gods perhaps unintentionally or a more subconscious level it seems feasible as i say there is of course plenty of room for overlapping speculation here if you want to know more of the mythology which is highly relevant then revisit part two ultimately it is possible that some of the entities referred to as eldar gods could have been or were at one time old ones yes it's possible or it may even be more confusing than that perhaps they were old ones initially but as the eldar shifted their perceptions these figureheads were simply amalgamated and reassigned they may have begun as old ones and their representations moved sideways as creations of the eldar or even simply tales told within eldar culture the only thing that does seem sure is that it feels unlikely we will ever know any of the true specifics of these matters although it has been hinted at in some of the newer material having by now suffered terrible devastation from the initial conflict against the katana necron the old ones were severely diminished it is said that consequently upon their return their influence with the burgeoning race of the eldar we know was dwindling it seems reasonable that the eldar's well-known arrogance was if not emerging and already demonstrating itself to be a defining trait even in these earliest of days the eldar having experienced little of the galaxy were perhaps overconfident in their abilities and would ignore pleas from their former mentors the old ones it's possible of course that the old ones themselves in a precarious position were willing to just allow the eldar to power on and use whatever means they thought necessary to turn the tide nyoda would begin to call forth their warp creations unimaginable sentient weapons which through their descriptions appear to have been powered by not just eldar's psychic ability but potentially even by a means of detaching their souls a strange trait of the eldar that we will discuss again further in the future perhaps they were invoking the forces of their spirits in the form of the god cain these elder entities material or otherwise were the first true gods of the immaterium not chaos gods to be clear but just god-like entities of immense power whose origins appear to have been the warp the eldar we may assume was still being somewhat guided by the last survivors of their ancient creators would in time rise to galactic dominance they would use the bright paths of the webway to strike far and wide unleashing without restraint the power of their psychic might against the physically trapped necron often still referred to the elder in their history as necron tear their psychic warped-fueled powers sent the catan and necron reeling these powers were an anathema to them these powerful psyches were something that they had never anticipated whether the old ones were directly in command or not at this point is seemingly irrelevant the katana necron were facing now a powerful force who were fighting back and dealing significant damage in the process no matter what destruction they attempted to unleash upon the galaxy the katana necron could not slow or contain the old ones and their eldar's relentless advance the tables had turned and is now forced that katan who had been disengaged for millions of years not fighting in a real collective sense to pay attention their dominance had led them to become complacent and turned again simply feeding off what fruits the galaxy had to offer the shocking emergence of the eldar forced them to once again unify push back against the old ones and fight these new magicking allies but yet again as we continue further down the rabbit hole this is where things do become considerably more vague according to the necron this led to the katan beginning what would be the eventual creation of their greatest work to permanently seal off the material realm from the immaterium thus trapping the eldar's warp creations and greatly diminishing their power this suggests to us as i've stated originally the warp and reality overlapped and bled together in a much more undefined way than now as if the sea of the warp was lapping against the shores of reality that the eldar's powerful warp creations their living weapons could walk in and out of it and generally use it to further their own needs at will essentially what we're considering here is the great rift which is now one of the greatest threats to the galaxy in the 41st millennium but this was already potentially a thing in the past and like a wound that had never truly healed has now once again been torn open this is my speculation i should say if we assume this then it seems logical that it was the purpose for the black pylons the necron had created in these ancient times to seal the eldar from the warp and simultaneously create gigantic null fields like the pariah nexus to prevent the eldar from using their immensely powerful weapons through the combined power of the necron and katan they would end this threat of the eldar god weapons and permanently separate the two realities now i prefer this version of events as it aligns more with what we know is happening now in the galaxy and it ties together many loose ends but we can never know for sure unless more information is revealed through first-hand accounts of necron and eldar or some device or some device or ancient ruins that helped to reveal more about these times it's notable also that this is based on the necron version of events history as we know rarely has just one side to it so according to eldar legends it was azsurian inspired by isha who separated the materium from the immaterium permanently it is said that isha the eldar god of life healing fertility and growth who is seen as being the mother of the elder had wept at the destruction being caused by the war god cain he was reaping his lust for blood even upon his own kind believing them to be the source of his future destruction the zurian felt it was necessary to permanently separate the warp from mortal reality isha and kanos would go to vaul the smith god of artisans and psychic craft to fashion from the tears of isha what are now believed by the eldar to be their spirit stones isha wanted to gift these to her children the eldar to enable them to communicate with their gods in the warp across this barrier of separation erected by azurian azurian though had wanted to complete a separation from the mortal realm believing it to be fundamentally dangerous as born out by the wanton slaughter of cain it is said that in his rage he would throw isha and kernels to the blood god cain who would relish in torturing those of his kind who had prevented him from carrying out his relentless path of rage and slaughter upon the elder because he believed this would be the nature of his destruction vol was able to learn of their miserable fate and felt this was too disturbing a situation within the pantheon of eldar gods to be allowed to continue he would strike a bargain with cain to craft for him one hundred swords known as the blades of all in exchange for these powerful weapons kane should release isha and kernos from captivity vol works without rest upon the blades until he was left but won in order to complete his promise to kane and this is where things got very interesting in terms of the relationship between the gods and actually how things play out in terms of the actual history between the necron the eldar and the war in heaven now toward the end of dark origins part two i described a long excerpt that highlights this contradictory account to the elder mythology where it describes the god kane fighting the katan albeit by another name and their hordes of silver undead it also describes how the way of reincarnation was closed to the eldar here forever like much of the folklore and tales of these times it overlaps with other accounts and contradicts those which describe how it was with the necron themselves who were responsible for the destruction of the nightbringer katan this is the problem of the period known as the war in heaven because so much of it seems to be interpreted differently the eldar we assume lost their ability to be reborn during the fall and creation of slaanesh but if we trust this version of events it actually happened millions of years earlier a troubling but not unusual conflict of a significant detail and the detail here was that vol had deliberately made one of these blades weaker so that kane when he was fighting the katan eventually was able to be damaged and broken by them in trying to make sense of elder mythology we're left to largely infer and read between the lines and thankfully there are also more recent references to this time notably via ryze vinayad when we're thinking about time and the presence and the block of the universe and how this all fits together one quotation comes to mind where a modern eldar in the 41st millennium is having visions and feeling confused about past memories that they have he thought about the endless lives he'd lived lives he did not recall but could still feel in his immortal soul and of the great cycles of the universe how many wars in heaven have there been he asked struck by the sudden thought necron tyr and al-dari created these vaults together did all of this happen before there's often this sense that the war in heaven refers collectively to the whole period of these early times as it was a period of unending war perhaps so much time had passed and things became so unclear that it was just easier to refer to the whole period as one war the war in heaven i want to note again this is where perception of time is so relevant the war in heaven is often described as having taken place over not hundreds or thousands but millions of years involving destructions of entire races and planets and stars and systems themselves just to try and comprehend this is really beyond our experience so maybe no surprise then as to why these descriptions about the eldar and the necron the mythology are so vague and become interlinked and crisscrossed throughout the dense fog of time i often have seen people appearing confused as to why the war between the old ones and the necron tier the old ones katan necron elder are all referred to as the war in heaven and this is exactly why it seems that there were other equally disastrous conflicts in this time also which are less well remembered but still sit under the banner overall of the war in heaven the umbrella of the war in heaven i've long speculated that despite it not being explicitly stated there are many markers and red flags within the mythology of the elder that point to some form of huge factional civil war during this period defined as the war in heaven this could have been the result of any number of internal disagreements over the vast amount of time we're considering it could have happened many times even the speculative origins of this could be numerous perhaps some eldar felt they must honor and stand with the old ones while others felt this was not even their war to fight later such practical reasons could have been exaggerated into the grand mythological tales regardless it's doubtful if the truth will ever be known regarding elder mythology but it does seem that something significant occurred outside of the more prominent established war between the old ones eldar catan and necron at the end of all of this though things would finally come to something of a conclusion the old ones would seemingly disappear retreating back into their web way where it is said they knew they could be relatively safe from the ravaging forces of the katan and the necron thus leaving the eldar to fend for themselves against the cold metallic shells of emotionless drone soldiers and their godlike masters the eldar had become a power in their own right they wielded warp power and even created entities as weapons against the katan it is spoken to that end that the boundaries between their gods of the warp and the gods of the stars had blurred and the eldar could not tell one from another this is suggestive that initially again the eldar had full control over their warp creations but as the war continued and became ever more devastating this resonated as we know it to in the warp that entities which were originally obedient to the eldar's command became just as hostile as the enemy they were facing and again it's not explicitly stated that is my inference along with this we know some of their own gods like kane seemingly had at some point at least partially turned against them after having prophetic dreams potentially also suggests that it is to the surprise of no one the eldar who initially disturbed the warp we have no way to know for sure how much emotional energy had poured into the warp at this time especially remembering that katan themselves consumed a significant amount of souls from the worlds across the galaxy that this could account for the argument that perhaps despite the vast war in heaven that not enough spiritual energy was provided to create the true birth of what we know as the chaos gods so what i'm saying here is that people always refer to the war in heaven as being so apocalyptic that it must have been the cause of the chaos gods because surely something so destructive would have poured pain and suffering into the war upon an unimaginable scale and i wouldn't presume to dismiss that rationale out of hand but i would say that the relationship between what we define as a soul and our emotions and dreams and so on feeding and shaping the warp is hardly defined with scientific precision we don't know how those two things relate together we know of course that later the eldar would end up creating slaanesh but perhaps there were also a lot of other things going on there it could well be that although there was much emotional trauma at this time maybe that in and of itself was not enough to form the entities completely that we consider chaos gods perhaps it brought them into a very early unconscious state of being but they were not fully born into this time we know that when people die they were said to return to the warp ancient human shamans were aware of this and their ability to use the warp however consider if you will that there seems to be a definite relationship of creatures which are partly psychic and the warp and that those with psychic presences influence the warp more and certainly feed into it more this is one of the reasons why humanity has become so important for chaos gods in the 41st millennium you have a specific species that contains trillions of souls all easily twisted and manipulated and regenerating all the time with raging emotions and dreams pouring like an endless powerful cascade into the warp the elder were not like humanity they were far more controlling of their minds the necron had no emotion after their biotransference and the war in heaven began the katan consumed the souls and all those sentient beings that they had exterminated so it's questionable how much emotional and psychic material actually poured into the warp during this time despite the fact that it was a very apocalyptic period for example if we consider a race like the orc the tyranid the tower how much do they contribute to the war orcs have a very strange relationship with the immaterium already and the tower said to not contain any real cyclists their lives are highly disciplined as well they're not chaotic and emotionally consuming like humanity the tyranids instinctive killing machines but also have crazy powerful psychic powers but again very different than humanity my point is that it's not as simple as just saying big war equals must be source of chaos gods but again we'll get into this later what i feel confident to say though is that the eldar's actions absolutely caused an initial disturbance within the warp and so if you wanted to say anything specific i feel that you could say that this period does set off a chain of causal events which point to the fact they likely begin a process which would unbeknownst to them eventually lead to their near total destruction in the fall of their race far in the future from this point in time much of this is described by the liber chaotica as well which is considered by many to be an irrelevant unreliable and overly imaginative text especially given it's an account derived from one mad person relaying insane dreams and visions however consider this as a source we must because information from these times is so scarce and the libra does describe with details specific events and depictions that appear nowhere else in the dark unspecified final period of the war in heaven the necrons were apparently able to finally gain access to the old ones webway and it was here they would meet out their vengeance of having been denied their secrets of immortality so long ago by the old ones they achieved this through a series of living stone portals known as the dolmen gates the necrons were able to turn the old one's greatest weapon against them vastly accelerating the ultimate end of the war in heaven curiously the portals offered by the dolmen gates are neither stable nor so controllable as those used by the aldari and the jakari it's even said that by some unknown methodology the webway can detect when its space has been breached by a dolmen gate and its arcane mechanisms will attempt to seal off the infected spur from the rest of the dimension until the danger to its integrity has passed this unknown technology seems certainly by design of the old ones to prevent lesser races breaching their webway dimension and so necrons entering the webway must reach their intended destination through its shifting extra-dimensional corridors quickly lest the network itself bring about their destruction of course in the present age eons have passed since the necrons used the dolmen gates to assault their enemies the old ones are gone and the webway itself has now become a tangled and broken labyrinth most dolmen gates were lost or abandoned during the time of the necrons great sleep which came at the end of the war in heaven and many more were deliberately destroyed by the eldar those that remain grant access to but a small portion of the webway and of that much has been sealed by the eldar yet the webway is vast and even these limited sections enable the necron a mode of travel that far outpaces other younger races for the necron without access to the webway they'll be forced to rely once again on slow voyaging stasis ships dooming them to effectively galactic isolation the highly questionable liber chaotica speaks of how the necrons suffered by means of demonic incursions from the warp and then it was the eldar who had the knowledge of how to seal the rift between the warp and material space their gods would remain there also this is connected to elder mythology again speaking of their pantheon of gods being separated from walking among them however as noted before the necrons had equal reason for wanting to seal the warp and limit the eldar from using potentially their world-ending psychic weapons and engines of war but there is also talk of later an enslaver plague from the warp we know the enslavers we know that strange entities are said to have appeared and two have affected this early period for the galaxy and this could additionally also connect with the reason as to why the necrons built again those black stone pylons however perhaps in actuality it was not a case of one faction or another sealing the warp there is in fact a third possibility of these strange warp entities beginning to appear and that perhaps they were so aggressive and so unusual this created a situation where both sides had fair reason for not just wanting to seal the warp but to work together to this end the necron silent king had long realized the error he made in allowing the katan to twist his race into the emotionless living metal zombies that they now were all that remained for the necron tier the katan had devoured their souls and all that they were and so in the final ending times of the war in heaven it is said that the kotan having gorged on whatever remained of the old ones were not expecting a vicious rebellion from the necron information to this end is again scarce but it said how the necron turned their unimaginably powerful weapons against the katan and then that they shattered them the katan being made of the actuality of the universe itself there's no way for them to be completely destroyed but they were shattered and many locked away in the tesserai extra dimensional vault of the necrom and these are said to be one of the sources of their great power even now and they could provide the necron with enough energy to allow them to outside eternity in fact by some accounts this was one of their original reasons for entering their great slumber at the end of the war in heaven why bother fighting our enemy if you can simply wait for all mortal creatures to just die by means of entropy one necron spoke to this saying through eyes far superior to any organic equivalent she marvelled the interplay of molecules distorted and rent apart by the released energy of the god fragment the thought that she harnessed the energy of this galactic predator brought a glimmer of satisfaction it was but a small piece of the hole yet it would burn for eternity giving off its life force to sustain as it had once sought to feed of the lives of her people it would be mistaken to think of the caging of the exostellar manifestation as a punishment for the betrayal of its whole the far greater reason was pragmatic when the stars themselves would gutter and die when entropy had all but quenched life from the galaxy this being and the others like it would sustain the necrontier civilization truly they had mastered their destiny retribution was fleeting dominance was forever now as a side note this also points me to believe that the eldar had already lost their immortality as their mythology suggests by the end of the war in heaven not during the creation of slaanesh as i feel this aligns better with the necrons planned slumber before this though and having shattered their star gods the katan it seems probable that after this vast galactic war both the necron and the eldar were not at their most powerful they likely had both suffered very heavy losses and i believe this is another reason as to why they backed off from one another this had been a truly apocalyptic galactic war the elder were fighting after all as well at the behest of the old ones not for themselves the necron were fighting against the old ones but with the katan now ruling them so again not for themselves although of course we should remember still the history of the necron tier but it's said that the katan also wanted to fight the old ones so you could imagine after that gold was completed the necrons had no real issue necessarily with the eldar the point being one might suggest that as strange as it might seem it could have been that the necron and elder ended up with some kind of near-like truce situation at the end of the war in heaven both realizing that continue on with fighting served to benefit neither of them also that because of this weakened period after so much war the emergence of a new threat out of the warp and not necessarily chaos gods or anything even like that but there are like i say many bizarre entities in the warp and not just in slavers but all manner of strange things who are near enough all known to be viciously aggressive it could have been and again my pure speculation that these were early experiments by the eldar perhaps intentional perhaps not and yes they were the earliest forms of malevolent sentient things becoming self-aware in the warp as a result of this horrific war in heaven but either way there are several references to the emergence of these kind of entities around this time and so it is my guesstimation that the eldar and necron had decided to somehow work together in actuality to perhaps seal the warp or close off any remaining portals to it now that sounds like just my wild speculation doesn't it except there is a reference which points to this in fairly current material a group of eldar encounter a world where a necron tomb is discovered they find a strange gateway except that this was no eldar webway portal nor a dolmen gate this was an ancient gateway marked with what was said to be the very most ancient eldar ruins suggestive by the descriptions of being as old as perhaps the war in heaven but most troubling is that the gateway also appeared to be marked by eldar and necron ruins together the eldar are highly confused by this suggesting this is some event not even recorded or remembered within their current cultural knowledge how and why would any kind of gateway into the warp or the web way be carved with both eldar and necron runes together it seemed to defy all their cultural history taught unless of course you consider the highly likely scenario that to the surprise of nobody both the elder and necron ancient history is incredibly biased and perhaps in this time they realized it was actually for the betterment of all that they seal off this stirring darkness within the warp and for a brief time bizarrely they entered into some pact to combine efforts to close the greater threat which was now the disturbed sea of the immaterium for within its ever-more turbulent waters lurked dark dark horrors and to that end far worse of course was still to come for the eldar you

Channel: Luetin09

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Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition

Id: gDHAdyuOns0

Length: 83min 10sec (4990 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020