The Time of Ending

The Time of Ending was the great gathering darkness at the close of the forty-first millennium, when it seemed that every doom long prophesied had come at last to devour the galaxy. The signs multiplied without mercy: the stars themselves grew strange, the astropaths screamed of a coming night, and the enemies of mankind rose as one from every corner of the void.

From beyond the galactic rim came the Tyranids, vast hive fleets descending like a tide of teeth and hunger to strip whole worlds of all life. The Necrons stirred at last from their aeons-long slumber, dynasties awakening across the galaxy to reclaim the empire they had ruled before mankind was born. Ork Waaaghs swelled to apocalyptic scale, and the forces of Chaos surged from the Eye of Terror in ever-bolder incursions.

The Imperium, ancient and ossified, could barely hold against so many blades at its throat. Whole segmentums teetered on the edge of collapse, reinforcements arrived too late or not at all, and the faithful whispered that the end times foretold in a thousand grim prophecies were surely at hand.

Then came the deepest wound of all. Upon the world of Cadia, bastion-gate against the Eye of Terror, the armies of Chaos launched their greatest assault, and the fortress-world that had held the line for ten thousand years was broken and destroyed. From the ruin of Cadia there spread a vast rent in reality, and the galaxy was plunged into a darkness deeper than any that had come before.