The Great War Against Chaos

There is a name the Empire teaches its children before they can properly read a map, and that name is Magnus. For two centuries the greatest nation of men had been broken into squabbling factions, its imperial throne left empty, its provinces glaring at one another across drawn swords. It was in that hour of weakness that the north chose to empty itself southward. The Great War Against Chaos was the invasion that should have ended everything: a tide of daemons, mutants, and reavers that devoured whole kingdoms and battered at the very gates of the civilised world. That the world survived at all is the work of one unlikely prophet, and the reason his name is still spoken like a prayer.

The Everchosen of the North[edit]

The doom began, as every great doom does, beyond the edge of the maps. In the frozen lands past the last human border, a warlord named Asavar Kul won the favour of all four Dark Gods at once and was raised to the rank of Everchosen: the single champion anointed to gather every servant of ruin beneath one black banner. The scattered tribes of the north answered his call as one: the reavers of the fjords, the horse-clans of the eastern steppe, the mutant and the marauder alike. Behind them marched the Warriors of Chaos, armoured champions who had traded their souls for strength, and behind them came things with no names at all. The winds of magic blew wilder that year than any living mage could remember, and every sorcerer worth the title knew what a rising gale of magic always heralds. The storm was coming south.

Kislev Bleeds First[edit]

The first land to feel the blow was Kislev, the bleak northern realm that stands as the Old World's frozen shield. Its horse-lords and its stubborn peasant-soldiers fought with the desperate courage of a people who know they are the wall and that nothing waits behind them, but courage is a poor defence against a horde that does not tire and cannot be numbered. Village after village was overrun, and the snows turned black beneath the marching host. Refugees streamed south with tales too terrible to be believed, until the great fortress-city of Praag braced itself for a siege that would become the most infamous horror of the whole war.

The Nightmare of Praag[edit]

Praag did not simply fall; it was changed. The siege dragged on so long, and the raw stuff of Chaos grew so thick within its walls, that reality itself began to rot. When the city was at last relieved, those who entered found something that broke the mind to behold: stone fused with screaming flesh, faces pressed weeping from the masonry, defenders and attackers melted together into the very fabric of the walls. Praag was rebuilt in time, but its old quarter was left exactly as it had been found: a monument to what Chaos does when it is given hours enough, and a rebuke to every comfortable soul who had doubted the north was real.

An Empire With No Emperor[edit]

The Empire of Man should have marched to Kislev's aid as one nation. Instead it was scarcely a nation at all. Rival claimants each styled himself Emperor; the Elector Counts hoarded their armies along with their grievances; and while the provinces bickered over precedence and old insults, the horde drew ever nearer. It seemed the mightiest realm of men would meet its end not on any battlefield but in the slow paralysis of its own pride.

The Prophet of Nuln[edit]

Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. Magnus, a devout and humble man of Nuln who held no crown and commanded no army, began to preach. He spoke of unity, and of faith in Sigmar, the god-hero who had forged the Empire in ages past, and something in his plain words cut clean through two centuries of division. Men began to call him Magnus the Pious, and where the great lords had failed, the prophet succeeded. Province by province, the Empire remembered that it was one people. The dwarfs of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds set aside their ancient grudges to stand at his side, and from across the western ocean came aid stranger still: Teclis, the greatest mage of the High Elf Realms, who saw in this human prophet a slender chance to save the world he too called home.

The Gates of Kislev[edit]

Magnus led the reunited host north through fire and ruin to the relief of Kislev, and there, before the battered gates of the Tsar's capital, the war reached its reckoning. The armies of men, dwarfs, and elves broke upon the Chaos horde and the horde broke upon them, in a battle whose scale beggars every chronicle that records it. At its blood-soaked heart, so the faithful still tell, Magnus faced the Everchosen himself. Asavar Kul was slain, his black banner cast down into the mud, and without their anointed champion the tribes of the north lost the terrible unity that had made them unstoppable. The horde shattered and fled back into the Wastes from which it had crawled.

The Age That Followed[edit]

Victory remade the world. Magnus the Pious was elected Emperor by acclamation, ending two centuries of division and opening a golden age of faith and reconstruction. His most enduring gift, though, came from his elven ally. Teclis remained in Altdorf to found the Colleges of Magic, teaching the men of the Empire to wield sorcery safely for the first time in their history, a story we tell in full in our account of the winds of magic and the Colleges. The Great War Against Chaos passed into legend as the darkest hour the Old World had ever endured and outlived. But survival, in a world forever watched by the Dark Gods, is never the same thing as safety. The north is patient, and it always breeds more. As our study of the forces of Chaos makes plain, Magnus won a reprieve, not a peace. The storm would gather again.