 First, given my unprecedented access to information considered too hazardous for mortal minds such as mine, I am privy to sequestered knowledges of that which threatens our very existence, which certainly imperils my own sanity. This being said, the danger inherent in these records is in and of itself their actual importance, for how can our blessed Imperium endure what may come, what lurks out there in the darkening void? Without what scraps of learning and wisdom we may yet piece together after these many millennia of grinding decay, puritanical redactionism and wanton ignorance. The blessed regent, our god-emperor's avenging son himself, has tasked my order and thus I, your humblest servant, with the compilation of chronicle stacks and macro-archives on all that we can recover, all that which was once learned, then forgotten, but what may now yet be turned upon our foes as the blade may be? War by the throne, they are sorely in need of every weapon that may be wielded in these most perilous of times. But while my duty is clear and my resolve as inviolate as ever, my hand trembles as I pen this particular record. To even simply unseal the records from whence my study is drawn, I required the aid of memetics operatives from the Holy Ordos to ward against potentially corruptive cognitophages that may have lurked within them. The cell from whence I did my work was nine times sanctified by the blessed sisters of the adeptus minestorum, and the scripts themselves penned upon consecrated vellum. Though my retinas burned as the blasphemous texts swirled before me, the words thundering through the passages of my mind long after they had been read, the work is mercifully complete and can be imparted here. May hap audio will prove a less infectious medium, but the secrets I have borne witness to I would wish upon no soul. And should you find their study a requirement or worse a necessity, I implore you not to expose yourself to such unthinkable blasphemy for long, lest you find yourself drawn into its depth, never to surface. I truly wish for the first time to be free of such a burden, though it goes against my every instinct as a historian I pray for nothing more than to have what I have read scourged from my memory, regardless of pain, regardless of damage. This is the curse of knowledge. The damnation that comes from peering too deep and too greedily beyond the veil. My duty is clear, my path perhaps less so, yet I walk it still, or increasingly I dread its conclusion. Know then that this is a record of the nature of the arch enemy, the primordial annihilator, the never born powers from the depths of the material. A record of chaos, chaos rendered as simply as it is possible to without rupturing one's mind is a universal force, and at the same instance a force anathema to the universe as we know it. It, by the humblest name it can be granted, is the antithesis of order, of physics, of the pan concepts that form the foundations of reality. It is a force of nature, an energy that is the negative image of the real world, opposed in almost every way and yet at the same time part of that broader universal structure. This energy comes from outside our reality plane, from the extra dimensional space of the warp. The imiterium, the imperium. This no space has gone by many names throughout human history, remaining ever both unchanged and in a constant state of flux, all at the same time. Imagine it akin to, as the 15th legion, thousand sons once turbid, a great ocean. In much the same manner as a sea, this realm has tides, storms and squalls, but all formed from an incomprehensibly vast, indeed infinite well of pure psychic power. It is a sea whose water is unfathomable, emotional and spiritual energy. The warp, chaos, they are one and the same, for the warp is pure chaos and chaos itself springs from the warp. But these words I am forced to employ ring ephemeral, it is because chaos is just that, ephemera. It is by its nature impossible to render properly into the crude mundanity of Imperial Gothic, but one must nevertheless endeavour to try, given its absolute importance and sheer existential threat. It has been theorized, amongst those privy to the knowledges arcane and oft heretical, that the warp is a direct result of the universal plane we inhabit possessing sentient life, and is in fact far more acutely tied to humanity in this regard. The tides of the immaterial plane respond to the emotions and passions of creatures possessing sentient thought, effectively being a dimensional psychic mirror, a realm where one's hopes and dreams and fears and rage become actualized as roiling phantasmagoric energy. What is to be borne in mind however is that the plane appears to react far more viscerally to negative emotions. Pain, rage, sorrow, hatred, jealousy, disgust, vanity, obsession, all our vices, our sins are magnified within the warp's cacophony. Every petty thought, every fleeting violent fantasy, every serial indulgence all resonate and add fuel to the conflagration. Sentient life feeds the ocean's tides and oh, do we feed it well. Since the dawn of time and the later dawn of intelligent life, our dimension has nourished the warp, thundering waves of our thoughts clashing together, churning, combining, and dividing until out of life's very psychic essences were formed that plane's own entities. In much the same way as the combining gases of nebulae form the natal cores of the stars themselves, so too did the emotions of the material flow like eddies into vast psychic whirlpools to give birth to the unspeakable intelligences of chaos. See then how it is impossible to separate the immaterium from the concept of chaos. They are inextricably bound, they are one and the same. To separate them is essentially banal semantics, for the energies of the warp have been maligned for as long as it has mattered. It is possible that before the development of sentient life in large quantities it may have been a calm sea, but that was so long ago as to be effectively pointless to discuss. Indeed time itself has no say within the depths of the warp, linear chronology does not exist. What exists within has always existed, will always exist, and yet has never existed or not existed yet. It is best not to consider time where possible when discussing such things. Down that road only the fronds of creeping lunacy lie. Suffice it to say as the entities within the warp unfolded their incomprehensible minds into impossible space and discovered their new realm, they no doubt realized their connection to the material plane and the minds that were feeding their existences there. They were sentient nightmares effectively, intelligences born from a hideous amalgamation of storms of psychic energy that had simply become too deep, too concentrated, too dense, so that they were able to break free of their tethers to the physical realm and become independent of it. At first there were three blasphemous consciousnesses, one of blood and battle, one of change and transformation and one of rot and decay, while each embodied fundamentally inviolate and amoral universal concepts such as survival, evolution and entropy. The excesses of reality twisted and tainted them into wholly destructive forms of wanton bloodshed and twisting trickery and horrific corruption. These intelligences became unto gods, or so they wished to consider themselves, and their control over their formless realms within the depths of the warp's tides grew in tandem to the burgeoning sentient species of the galaxy. Seeing how the clamoring and brief lives of mortal men fed them, the dread entities of the immaterium invigiled their way into this material realm, for reality can be porous, and their reach and capabilities grew only stronger. They whispered and coaxed the minds of any who could be made listen, ensnaring with his promises those with urges and desires too strong to resist. Chaos promises power. The price? Well, that is never clear. But in exchange for what may initially seem like a paltry token, those within the warp bestow upon their mortal servants gifts of wealth, material power, or physical prowess. An adherent to the many changing god may see their life elevated by good fortune above their fellows, while a servant of the bloody-handed beast may see their body grow muscular and unnaturally strong under his patronage. But once the tendrils of these intelligences have sunk into one soul, they are impossible to excise. It only ever begins with one decision, one moment of perfectly human weakness, a whisper of surrender, and a soul is forever lost. When immortal has come under the thrall of the primordial annihilator, their thoughts and emotions resound and magnify in dread concord with chaos itself. Through a lens distorted they see the world, refracted by the power they are now beholden to, altering their perception and leading them further down and down the path of wicked damnation. Release can seemingly only be found by descending deeper and deeper into these depths, driven by the arrogant and misguided belief that this remains somehow their choice. And they are not ensnared by a consciousness greater and more terrible than they could possibly comprehend, that they now dance on invisible puppet strings pulled by an outer thing beyond understanding. It matters not to the gods, if their servants are aware of their path, nor even their patron. We of the Imperium like to consider the mortal devotees of these blasphemous nightmares to be demagogic fanatics, mouths foaming as they spit forth cursed dedications to the unliving warp. Maybe it is easier for us to cast them as so. But their gods care not. Chaos is not so overt. Immortal could accept the gifts of these sentient terror things as simply a good luck blessing. And in doing so tread their first steps of blinkered ignorance into the pits of deepest corruption. They do not need to chant the name of their patron. Only act in accordance to the emotions that sustain and grow them. Chaos has no vanity. It is an elemental power fueled by all negative thought, all malevolent passion, regardless from whence these feelings were even formed. The god things of the warp are intelligent, yes, but not in the manner we of the material plane could possibly grasp. They are more akin, the writers of many millennia have postulated to their end, to the disasters of nature. Imagine a self-aware hurricane, or a perceptive earthquake. One made entirely of psychana, emotion and wicked intent. A hurricane feels no remorse for the devastation or loss of life it causes, nor even the manner in which it does. It simply is. It knows no other way of existing. Thus it is so with these so-called gods. They are how they are, because that is all they have ever been. They act in accordance with their natures as self-aware concepts, ideas and metaphors brought into existence by the simple vagaries of universal systems. Why then ascribe malice to their acts? Because chaos, the gods, the warp, they are the antithesis to reality. The sinister hunger of the ruinous powers seeks to usurp reality itself and drag it forever down into the no space of the imiterium until all existence is at their whim, all matter clay to be sculpted by their vile desires. They cannot become manifest in our planes, so they must usurp it, knowing upon the foundations of reality like a canker, and usurping the minds of mortals with poisonous promises and honeyed words. Domination over us is their goal, in as much as it is possible to ascribe motive, ergo it is malign. I have heard it questioned, spat from the mouths of madmen, that such an end is ultimately self-defeating, that if the primordial annihilator fuels itself and waxes strong upon the back of human emotions, that should the warp break all barriers and subsume our petty reality into its tides, chaos would effectively destroy its only means of substance. To such thoughts I say, do you really attempt to determine logic from the actions of these entities? Do you genuinely wish to stand before a living storm formed of all humanity's darkest and most terrible passions, and put questions to its reason, rank, idiocy, base, vanity? The ruinous powers care not for your vaunted logic, they owe you no reason to debate, no emotionless discourse. We know what it is they seek. Tis a rampant fool who believes that as the last of our material plane is swallowed into the imperian, as uncounted billions of sentient lives are snuffed out, their souls torn asunder by gluttonous extra-dimensional horrors, that they may stand back, smile, and take stupid comfort in some damned thought exercise. The difficulty inherent in recording the nature of the ruinous powers should by now be obvious. Even being aware of their existence is corrosive. For human curiosity, a facet of our being that has seen us shuck the bonds of our birth world and conquer the galaxy itself, is usurped and turned upon us as a tool of our own damnation. Blissful, sweet, ignorant, appears to be the only answer, and certainly has ever been the policy of our imperium, grasped with such fanatical certainty that the vilest atrocities of the arch-enemy rival that which we have inflicted upon ourselves, the name of maintaining that universal secret too terrible for the masses to even glimpse. But is this macro-redactionism even possible when attempting to combat self-aware ideas themselves? We speak of these outer things in such a way because that is what they are. Sentient concepts, metaphors come alive if alive can even be used in this context. How does one fight allegory? How does one resist a malignant story? The presence of the arch-enemy is endemic in the galaxy, the stain of these darkest gods, polluting myths and legends and religions across the gulfs of time and space. Through means subtle, they have inveigled their way into human consciousness to such a level as to usurp us on a scale of mythic concepts. Monsters, fiends, demons, hell, cathonic underworlds, universal evil. All may replicate themselves in the hindbrain of base human superstition. But can it really be called superstition when there are eldritch claws piercing the veil from beyond our universe itself to pluck at its strings? Ancient stories of such evils, fables once thought the primitive gruntings of the less evolved. Are they, are they in fact the gods? Archetypes that dwell within us? Concepts rendered eternal in the untimely of their hellscape dimension? How else could the recitation of tales of horror, stories of predatory, demonic things and evil witches, of that which we know by our truest senses to be patently false? How could that come to unman us at all? Why is the terror of the unknown, of the dark of the night so universal and primal, an instinctive fear of predators, but perchance not predators of the mundane? May have these terrors be of much older standing? They date beyond embodiment, they have never been truly in fleshed, they stalk our minds, our myths, our ideas, hunter things of foulest intent. Is our ingrained human fear a truly spiritual thing, a genetic racial terror that this terracuous realm we inhabit is ever perched upon the precipice of a thirsting maw of incoherent madness that would devour us in an instant? I must cease these musings, for I feel even now myself being pulled ever closer to that void. Curses, curses upon this knowledge, damn the gods, damn them to their darkest pits. I feel the itch, the scratching at the corners of my vision, the cacophony of hideous amorphousness alien beyond words, the corrupted angles of cryptic poisonous idea forms, boiling, questing, bubbling, straining humanity, our petty species, we are cast adrift upon a rock of blinkered ignorance in a formless sea of purest evil. I hear the chorus of blasphemous intent moaning the hymns of purest malignancy from the chambers beyond time, I see the hordes of never born cast out of the pit, teeth and claws and blades and spines and eyes, so many eyes, all that is may sink deep into the rot and decay that devours the foundations of us all, this plain of ours is brittle and beyond lie the temples of the nightmare hosts, nameless nothings cavorting against the tides of sin and fury and rot and vice, the corpses of dead worlds blown only by the carnal pits of blackest damnation, creation rots, reality splinters, the emperor protects, the emperor protects, he must, he must oath throne, the emperor protects. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Oculus imperia. 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