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Techno-barbarian warlords and their warrior hordes continuously fought over the planet, which had become little more than a massive battleground for their wars of attrition. Little remained of the once sophisticated civilisation of Old Earth's glorious past as the centre of a growing human interstellar commonwealth marked by advanced science, high culture and wondrous technologies. During this 5,000 standard-year-long period of anarchy, fear and violence, Old Earth's once unified planetary government had completely broken down and been divided into dozens of warring states of so-called techno-barbarians.Ĭontinuous warfare raged across the surface of Terra for 2,500 years, beginning in the late 27th Millennium. The different worlds found themselves constantly at war. This was due to the massive Warp Storms that swept the galaxy as the Immaterium was roiled by the millennia-long gestation of the Chaos God Slaanesh and the turbulence that marked the decay of the Aeldari Empire before the Fall.ĭuring this dark time, Terra sometimes held sway over the Sol System, while at other times the rulers of Mars or Luna were dominant. " And in that time the Great Beasts shall walk the earth,īeneath their tread shall cities become as dustīy their burning breath shall civilisations be as ash,ĭuring the turbulent era known as the Age of Strife or " Old Night," the Sol System and the nearby star systems that had been colonised by Humanity during the Age of Technology were effectively cut off from interstellar travel or communication with each other.
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The conflict was fought across the Milky Way Galaxy early in the first century of the 31st Millennium and resulted in more than 2.3 trillion dead, 4.6 trillion if one includes the planetary populations purged by the Imperium after the Heresy due to the taint of Chaos corruption. Over 9 Terran years the war raged, 7 of them consumed by Horus' drive on the Throneworld, until coming to a final cataclysm on Terra itself where Horus was slain and the Emperor mortally wounded, His dreams of creating a brighter future for Mankind forever broken. Horus convinced half of the other primarchs and Space Marine Legions, as well as large swathes of the Imperial Army and the forces of the ancient Mechanicum, to turn Traitor alongside him and unleash a cataclysmic attempt to conquer the galaxy in his name. The Chaos Gods fed Horus' innate ambition and sense of betrayal by the Emperor until he turned upon his father and sought to claim the Imperium of Man for his own. The civil war began following the corruption by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos of the Imperial Warmaster Horus Lupercal, the primarch of the Sons of Horus Legion and the most beloved genetic son of the Emperor. The Horus Heresy is in many ways the founding event of the Imperium of Man as it now exists. Its outbreak marked the end of the Emperor of Mankind's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered colony worlds of Humanity in the Milky Way Galaxy under a single government and the beginning of the current Age of the Imperium.
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The Horus Heresy, sometimes referred to poetically as the " Age of Darkness", was a galaxy-spanning civil war that consumed the worlds of Mankind for 9 Terran years. Emperor of Mankind mortally wounded and placed within the Golden Throne Horus slain by the Emperor Traitor Legions broken and flee towards the Eye of Terror true beginning of the Age of the Imperium