 Hubris is not, despite our own stellar work in the area, a uniquely human emotion. Neither is ego, again, despite how many times unshakable confidence has seemed to be the sole purview of our species. There are, it may perplex this record's examiner to learn, those who consider themselves in their own hubris are superiors, and whose egos even do not permit them to learn from their mistakes, or admit to the true depth of their failures. These Xenoforms squatting in the husks of their once great domain, huddling together in their filthy world ships, attempting to avoid the gaze of our mighty Imperium. They deny the true, crushing reality of their existence, that their existence is a thing of borrowed time, that they are already dead, living eye-dolons haunting the aftermath of the greatest sin a species has perpetrated upon the galaxy. Know then, that this is a record of the great Catatlysm, the Hell Knight, the fall of the Aildari. The galactic dominance of the Aildari was once unquestionable. Over a million standard years ago, the species ruled the stars as none had since the dominion of an ancient progenitor race this chronicler still endeavors to uncover the secrets of. The Aildari appeared the true successors of the legacy of those who came before. The webway, a network of channels and tunnels removed from real space, allowing for travel through the fabric of reality itself, enabled them to spread to every corner of the stars, exploring, colonizing, and breeding at a rate unseen amongst the sentience of the galaxy. Other species existed, yes, and many prospered, but none could, or dared, challenge the Aildari ascendancy. Their scholarship uncovered secrets of technology, of psychic manipulation, of the universe itself that had thought to exist only in the midst of the ancient progenitors. The fabled war in heaven, the seemingly unprecedented conflict now consigned to ancient mythic cycles, had seemingly left the galaxy rulerless, and the Aildari expanded to fill that void as none had ever done before. They seeded millions of worlds, shaping them with their technology to become paradises of civilization to fill their burgeoning empire. The speed of their technological advancement was said to have been simply stunning, with new technologies constantly allowing the species to explore further, and more importantly, make life easier. Entropy is a common facet of empire. Any chronicler worth their salt can examine for themselves the almost inevitable downward spiral experienced by any regime that spends a period of time in unquestioned descendancy. Slowly they turn inwards, becoming selfish, uncaring, in pursuit of some folly or other. For all their arrogance, their self-assurance, their monstrous ego of a seemingly unshakable conviction of their own species' uniqueness, the Aildari are no different in this regard from any other. It was not rapid, their destruction. It was slow, insidious, a long, festering canker rotting the core of their domain from the inside over the course of thousands of years. Once the Aildari star empire had reached its peak, and technology had rendered the common pursuits of daily life, such as the need to cultivate food, maintain power systems, or such like entirely irrelevant, more and more Aildari found themselves at liberty to pursue their heart's desires. An insatiably curious species had become essentially bored of what life itself had to offer. And having glutted themselves on the exploration of the galaxy, they turned to the exploration of the flesh. Society provided them with every necessity without any individual effort, and, lacking the briefness of the human lifespan, and in possession of minds incalculably more attuned to sensation, the Aildari began to trod their damned path. Cults of hedonism, small at first, grew in size and power until the pursuit of sensations dominated cities, then planets, then systems, then whole sectors. The nobler pursuits of the past, of scholarship, exploration, research, even battle, were discarded in a heedless rush of pure physical sensation, inevitably expanding beyond simple base pursuits into deptless sensual and violent depravity. The Empire was not without division during this period of rot. Many Aildari decried the direction their species was taking, but were unable to affect meaningful change amongst their drug and sensation-addled brethren. Disgusted with the violence and degeneracy, with the pain and suffering, many fled the core systems of the Empire to terraform worlds on the far fringes of Aildari space, becoming known as the insular exodites. Yet more, fearing that they would find no escape from the luring power of the sensation-cults, fashioned great world-chips called craft worlds, effectively artificial planetoids, and took these craft into the webway or to the void to escape their own deranged species and live hermetically isolated lives. The vast, vast majority of the species, however, remained planet-bound, glutting themselves on all that their hedonism could afford. Both within the webway and without, Aildari realms became blood-soaked monuments to avarice and perversion. No excess was too great, no act of violence too depraved, no sin too debauched. The species existed in pursuit only of limitless sensation. As a race, they turned inwards, losing interest in maintaining a grand Empire, abandoning worlds for the webway or their centralized systems. Humanity, rising to fill this void, had been making its own outward expansions during this period, known by our race as our own dark age of technology, unaware of these greater goings-on as we forged our own stellar domain. Amongst any other race, the downward spiral of the Aildari would lead to simple political or societal collapse, as the mechanisms of a functioning society would be assumed into base barbarity. But for the Aildari, their faith would be as hideous, if not more so, than the people they had become. The crux of their addiction to sensation came from the aforementioned structure of their neurological makeup. So finely attuned were they to their own physical, to their own psychic potential, and so ingrained in the fabric of their technology was this link, that sooner or later, the sheer power of their collective excesses began to ripple throughout time and space. It was not a sudden thing, this mirroring, rather instead a process akin to the shaping of a rock by water. As the tides of Aildari's sensations buffeted and raged in the mirror-unreality of the warp, the imperian ocean began to be shaped by it. Waves of intense experiences began to coalesce, for every sensation felt by any race with psychic potential is mirrored in the great seas of the warp. The tides grew ever more and more violent over the millennia. Eventually, the depravity of the race grew so base, so horrific, that the warp erupted into an era of titanic storms and squalls, known amongst humanity as the Age of Strife. In their heedless pursuit of the fowl, the Aildari had unwittingly caused our own species to be cast down, as all human faster than light travel through the warp was rendered impossible by their sins. In their colossal arrogance they cared not, for what were we to them but upstart apes laid low. They needed not the warp, for they had their web way. Indeed, they heeded the warp not one bit, considering it inconsequential, oh, the folly of such repulsive alien ego. The storms, more violent and more widespread than any the galaxy had ever seen, were but the seaside breakers compared to the calamity that would occur. Many within the Imperium, who possess the scant knowledge of history that remain, believe it was our magnificent Emperor, beloved by all, who heralded the end of the Age of Strife. While he indeed was active on Terra during its closing years, building the foundations of his glorious Imperium, he is in actuality not responsible for banishing the storms. Rather, the knowledge one must impart upon you is altogether more terrible, for despite the satisfaction it brings any good Imperial citizen to see the alien laid low for the crime of their existence, the folly of the Aildari wrought an altogether greater evil. In the depths of the warp, the malign intelligences of the greater chaos entities dwell. To their followers they are gods, hideous, formless, sentient blasphemies formed from the very emotions of the material world, primal things embodying the facets of bloodshed decay and change. Before the Aildari, there were three. Now there are four. The wickedness of these Xenos had coalesced over millennia, heaving masses of psychic energy combining much the way roiling stellar gas clouds do, but not to form a star, no. Instead, a blasphemous sentience was to shatter into existence in the deepest reaches of the warp, known to the galaxy by as many titles as it wears faces. The Dark Prince, the Lord of Excess, she who thirsts, or in the languages of the arch-enemy, Slaanesh. It was a singular event unlike anything the galaxy had ever witnessed. In a single instance, the birth-scream of the fourth member of the Pantheon tore across all reality. Every mind of every Aildari felt their great enemy come into appalling existence. For those upon the maiden exodite worlds, or within the wraith-bone shells of the craft worlds, or deep in the webway's many paths, the entity's birth was akin to the worst pain imaginable, but to the countless billions across the Aildari's empire it was death. They died in a single moment of unparalleled agony, but this was no mere ordinary death as their psychic selves, their very souls, were torn from their mortal husks and dragged screaming into the warp to be consumed by she who thirsts. The thing in the warp had feasted upon the soul of almost an entire race, and, drunk on this excess, consumed the very gods of the Aildari themselves. It is unknown to Imperial scholarship if this is Aildari fantasy or allegory or not, as the major academic records upon the subject of the race are held under the rate of the Ordo Xenos. It is possible, given what we in such circles know of the warp and the intelligences that dwell within, that these gods were in fact a similar fashion, entities of the Imperian or at the very least subject to its similar whims, given their ultimate fate. This and further speculation must tower wait until another occasion. Suffice it to say, the gods of the Aildari met with the same fate as their devotees, who, at the very core of their empire, saw real space itself tear in twain, with the Imperian spilling into our reality to encompass a staggering stellar volume, and forming what would later become known to humanity as the Oculus Terribles, or the Eye of Terror. The planets of the Aildari, consumed by this cancerous lesion, became the Crone worlds. Haunted dead spheres were not but the corpses of a shattered empire remained to become the playground for cavorting warp predators. In a single heartbeat, reality had been irrecovably changed. Billions upon billions of Xenos were dead, and their souls found not respite, only the eternal pain of being consumed by she who thirsts in a place where time has no meaning. The birth of the Oculus Terribles, however, heralded a paradigm shift in the galaxy. The afterbirth of the Lord of Excess had drawn the roiling warp energy of its birth pangs into one massive volume, ridding the galaxy of the storms that had plagued it from millennia and led to the downfall of humanity as a space-faring people. With the warped storms gone, and terror becoming unified under the rule of the emperor of mankind, humanity was able to leave the rat-soaked wastes of the birth world. And once again, reclaim the stars that are ours by manifest destiny. The Aeldari, in their folly, had not simply wrought the downfall of their species, but enshrined humanity into a rightful place in the void. It would almost be worth thanking them for, or it not for the blasphemous abomination they had given birth to in their wickedness. The Aeldari provide a tale that all other Xenos must learn from, that to consider themselves rulers of the galaxy is to ignore the inevitable fall their own degeneracy will bring out, and that to believe it is somehow proper to deny humanity its rightful place in the order of all things is to invite ruin and catastrophe on parallel. 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.