 The past is a many splendid and horrific thing. Keen examiners of one's records, if there are any, note that I, your humble servant, tend to cast my gaze into the deepest recesses of our past. Such is my role, yes, such is my calling. But some within my order have tended to question why it is an era so far gone upon which I bend my efforts. You're snooping around back there. Why is that? The answer is a simple one. I look for hope, even in the death of hope itself. I look for the guttering flames, in the encroaching forever dark. For heroism, in the deepest pits of villainy, for the nearest hint that we, our humanity, may deserve to survive whatever apocalypse is barreling towards us, intent on swallowing us whole and casting our everything into the void of the forgotten and the damned. It is not easy, as any of you, should you remain out there in the night, can attest to. Ours is not a pleasant tale, quite the opposite. The epochs of humanity are spans ridden with pain, strife, kin murder, torrents of blood, mountains of heartbreak, and oceans of woe. We are a race inculcated in misery, suffering and hardship. Ours is a cruel existence, for we exist in a cruel universe, ever clinging to the precipice. Our mighty Imperium, the greatest empire our galaxy has ever known, is beset, more so now than at any time since its inception. And in the darkest days of the Horus heresy, I have, here too for, concerned myself with almost exclusively. It is this very danger, this omnipresent sword perched above our necks, that is the reason I scry the distant past. May have I fool myself into thinking that in doing so, I may recover something, anything, that may aid my species in its hour of most desperate need. Hope, in a word, it is not one that one hears often these days. Many, rightly, place no stock in it at all. They call me an idealist. I would have, had it not been for the actions of the Blessed Regent, being in an inquisitor sell a long, long time ago. My time, such as it is, is borrowed. Let me use it, however I may, in service to my species, in service to him upon the throne. I have, perhaps, concerned myself too much in the then, at the expense of the now. Seeking to avoid the horror of the galaxy as it is, I concern myself with a safer, muted horror of the times gone past. No longer. My efforts to those hallowed days will not cease, but I can no longer ignore what is happening beyond the bounds of the throne world, out there, in the dark. So then, that this is a record of the Imperium, of the 42nd Millennium, the advent of the Great Rift, the Imperium cleft in twain, the Dark Imperium. It began, as was perhaps inevitable, at Cadia. Cadia, lost, mourned Cadia, the planet that for ten thousand years held the forces of deepest insanity and treachery at bay, is no more. Let that simple fact alone sink into thy bones. In this magnificent Imperium of ours there was but one planet better defended, better manned and better equipped, and it is the one your humble servant works from the depth of. Cadia was the key to the gate, and now that key is lost, and the gate itself smashed into wretched ruin, spilling its damnable contents out into the galaxy to cavort and rampage and murder. The fortress planet, once guarded the only stable warp route out of the Oculus Terriblis, or Eye of Terror. The vast and hideous volume of space where the warp, the Imperium itself, spills into our own reality. It is a sea of incarnate madness, where the impossible is rendered possible, where time itself has no meaning, where the laws of the universe are playthings to the will of emotion and insanity. It is the home of the traitor legions, those astarties that sided with the arch traitor Horace Lupacal those ten thousand years ago, and countless other renegades of our galaxy. The lost and the damned, astromilitarum regiments, taizen legios, the dark mechanical, heretic astarties chapters, mutants, pirates, rebels, traitors, all, thrice-curse blasphemers who have sold their very souls to the entities of the warp in exchange for the gifts and power only damnation can afford them. At their head, forming in his wake a coalition of the worst entities in the galaxy, is the Dispoiler, Abaddon, former first captain of the Sons of Horace, the progeny of the Warmaster, determined to do what his wretched gene-father could not. The Dispoiler's eyes have ever been fixed on Cadia, for the millennia have seen him throw his hordes against it to no avail. Cadia stands, or rather, stood, though a full account of the campaign must wait for its own record, let it be known that the hated Dispoiler got his wish. The planet is no more, it is simply gone, a volume of space now only inhabited by rocks and dust and the broken hopes of humanity. Abaddon, in his blind rage, bereft of options after the Imperial defenders resisted invasion after invasion. Through impurest spite, the remains of his corrupted Blackstone Fortress, a prehistoric void behemoth at the surface of the world, rending its very crust and mantle asunder, and enact, no doubt, the purest embodiment of his titanic rage and hate. There was nothing our defenders could do save evacuate. Get off world, get out system, live to fight another day. Existence continued, was the only revenge they could have upon the Dispoiler's machinations. Cadia split apart, spilling its molten core into the void, the lifeblood of a planet cooling in the freezing dark under the multifarious eyes of the hosts of the damned. Cadia was more than a fortress world, more than the guardian of the gate. That should not be taken as a dismissal of its immense mundane strategic worth, far from it. It is no understatement to say that there is, my apologies, was, no planet in the Imperium beyond Terra save perhaps, Red Mars, that was of greater military value, for it had stood as our bastion against the hosts of the arch enemy for ten millennia. Guarding the passage to a place one could call hell if one lacked the imagination to conceive of its true horror. With nothing to check their advance, the only stable warp corridor out of the eye lay open to the hordes of the darkest gods who are now able to flood real space with their cancerous presence. This alone would be a tragedy unspeakable, yet it is in point of fact far, far worse than that. Cadia has been a fulcrum world, for longer than humanity has known of its existence, and has borne the signs of this very visibly. Across its surface, as other worlds in proximity to major warp anomalies, there once lay thousands upon thousands of monumental structures, dubbed pylons, by the adeptus mechanicus teams responsible for investigating them. These structures are narrow edifices of black stone, piercing upwards from the ground, each a kilometer tall and embedded into the crust a further half kilometer. They are made up of intricate tunnels and passageways that are utterly unmappable, even for the smallest and most advanced devices of the mechanicus, which are simply lost, vanishing into the pylons internal labyrinth with each exploration attempt. Their role, it has been discerned, is and was to disrupt the presence of the warp, through means unknown, pushing back the heaving tides of the imiterium and reasserting the stability of reality in regions where it is beset by the warp. At Cadia, the sheer number of pylons was offered as a hypothesis for the presence of the Cadian gate and the stability, relatively speaking, of eye space surrounding the fortress world. That is no more. The gate is broken, the world is gone, the pylons lie smashed, overloaded by warp energy and rent asunder. What remains now is the rift. There are many theories pertaining to the creation of the Great Rift, the Sycotrix Maladictum. It is widely known, amongst those with access to the higher knowledges, that the warp is a reflection of the material universe and is subject to its excesses. It is much more widely known that the close of the 41st millennium was one of the bloodiest epochs in all of history. Their imperium was beset from all corners, fending off the tendrils of the high fleets of the Great Devourer, holding the Damocles gulf from the partitions of the Upstart Tau, enduring the birth of the Eildari Death Entity, or the saucer's fury, the demon Primarch Magnus the Red, unleashed upon the homeworld of the Vilca Fenrica, the space wolves. This, coupled with the advent of the despoiler's black crusade upon Cadia, brought the emotional resonance of the galaxy to a thundering crescendo, the heaving tides of the warp reflecting the sheer chaos these conflicts wrought upon real space. The shattering of Cadia and the loss of the pylons were perhaps the final stroke to an already turbulent looming catastrophe. Perhaps the other elements were orchestrated. Perhaps they were simply coincidental precursors. I leave the answer to that, to more learned, or perhaps insane, men than myself. The facts stand as they are. When Cadia lay in ruins, when the pylons fell, the Noctis Eternia came. To those parsing this record, the experience may be fresh, or at least so traumatic enough that it will forever scar the minds of those who lived through it. Never, in our Imperium's history, has there been a night like it. Even the name itself does not do it justice. For a night it was not. It lasted. It lasted so long. On Terra it would last for 33 days and nights. In other places in the Imperium it was said to last even longer. And yet others experienced mere days of the blackness. We, our species, were blind. The light of our Emperor, the Astronomican itself, the celestial torch by which a billion ships steer themselves through the Imitarium, appeared to gutter out. Obscured by a darkness so complete it cast its blinding pal over the entire galaxy. We were cut off from one another, blinded, mulling things groping around our nearspace in panicked anguish. The Imperium, as it was, ceased to be. All were cut off from each other. Isolated drops of sanity in a roiling sea of pure madness. It was, and one feels a license to say this with some authority, the age of strife, old night, come again, returned to us 10,000 years later. And out of that night came the rift. We stand now in a galaxy cleft in twain by the events of that period. Our Imperium is divided. The close of the 41st millennium was the death of an era and the birth of something truly horrendous. The Great Rift, the Sycotrix Maladictum. You have seen it, Examiner. You have seen the long line of bruised void in the sky, tracing its path across our heavens as if in defiance of all that is good and holy. It is the vomit of the eye, the preutrified anguish of the Imitarium that has torn our galaxy asunder. The rift is a warpspace anomaly of simply staggering breath and scope. It extends from the eye of terror, now bloated and swollen further in the aftermath of the despoilers Black Crusade, reaching the length and breadth of the galactic northeast by Terran Reckoning. Quite simply, it has severed almost a third of our Imperium from us. No ships have breached its surface. No voice comes from behind the Great Storm. There has been no word. We do not know if there ever will be. We can infer that none beyond the rift are lit by the light of the Astronomicon. It could quite simply be that they are all lost, or it could be that those that lie beyond simply hold on grimly for reinforcements I do not know they will ever receive. The storm shows no signs of abating. It holds as many names now as there are languages. It is now the reality we must deal with. The storm is not isolated, however. It is the afterbirth of the Noctis Aeternum, a scar left by the passage of the Great Blinding. Much occurred as it sundered the galaxy, so much that one may only be able to give a scant few of one's remaining years to charting the horrors of that time. Fully half of all Adeptus Astartes chapters have fallen out of contact. Twelve chapter homeworlds have been confirmed destroyed. Demonic invasions tore through whole systems as the power of the damned entities of the warp waxed ascendant. The Igma monolith activated for the first time in recorded history. The latest pitiable expansion sphere of the Tau was lost in the ensuing storms. Thousands of space hulks were discouraged from the warp's depths, some predating the Imperium itself. The Noctis Aeternum would eventually retreat, pulling back into the depths of the rift, but its passage was no less torturous even in its waning. As light and sight returned to the galaxy, almost every astropath on Terra was killed instantly, as astro-telepathic communication from the entire galaxy flooded the throne world in a single instant of panicked inquiries desperate calls for aid or simply screams from the moment the madness tore the sky. As if this and all the damage that the Neverborn and their hated ilk had wrought upon the Imperium was not enough, the storm has wrought an even greater, more metaphysical chaos. Time itself, the natural and emperor-ordained flow of events in precise chronological sequence has been fundamentally broken by the passage of the Noctis Aeternum and the advent of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Temporal anomalies are not an unknown thing in our Imperium. They have all heard tales of ships traveling the warp, arriving at their destinations months, years, decades, even centuries past their predicted arrival times. The Imperium is a realm of formless madness where the laws that our reality is governed by matter not. Time slippage is a reality of warp travel that mankind has ever dealt with, as it simply cannot be helped try as we might. The great blinding, however, left in its wake a trail of anomalies almost uncountable. As already mentioned, the passage of the Noctis Aeternum was not marked coherently throughout the Imperium. Upon some worlds it was felt but for a few rotations, others months, some years. There are likely others that still remain within its grasp, sinking ever more into insanity as the eyes of their cycles are blinded to the Emperor's light. Thus it is that part of our Imperium, whole sectors, are now hundreds of years older than others, some decades younger than Terra itself. Time, precise, inviolate time, has been shaken to its core by the wretched hand of the arch enemy and all are feeling the effects of this erosion of fundamental universal laws at their hands. One's own order has been driven to the point of near insanity in our attempts to quantify and chronologize the broken mess that is the Imperial calendar. Even the Lord Regent himself has been unable to do so, for even without the damage of the Noctis Aeternum, the Imperial calendar has been subjected to so much pointless revisionism and heavy-handed inquisitorial redaction that we currently lie anywhere within the margin of error of a millennium. It is impossible, even for the Primarch himself, a literal son of the Emperor, to verify whether it is a beginning of the 41st millennium or the 42nd. People ask me why I scry the past, perhaps now you can see why. To spend too long considering the state of our Imperium and the precipice on which we stand is to invite utter ruin upon your sanity. Humanity is on the verge of total and utter collapse. The chronometer tolls for our species. Why dig up the bones of those that are dead, that which has passed? I do it because I must, because it is all I have ever done, all I know how to do, all that I can possibly do with the life that has been granted to me by he upon the throne and his avenging son. If anything I can find within these tomes, within these data stacks and info clades and macro archives, can do our species an ounce of good then it is worth my entire life's work. The Mechanicus of Mars have agreed that knowledge is power and thus it is indeed so, but knowledge without the humanity with which to utilize it is simply data, cold and grim. I risk by ignoring the present, losing that humanity, insulating myself in that which was to escape the clawing madness of that which is grasping at the fraying edges of my mind. None may ever know my name, for it matters not. I am not a name. I am barely a man. What I am, what I always have been and ever will be. He's a servant, a servant of him. I am his eye. I am his oculus. Let these records stand as a testament of what was and now what is Ave Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra. 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. And if you're looking to keep in touch with the channel, get regular updates. You can follow me on twitter at buttstuffkaiju or check us out on discord. A link will be in the description and on the channel page.