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The Arrested Fall.
For a million years, the eldar reined as the supreme empire of the galaxy; the ultimate winners of the War in heaven. As they grew in power, they also grew in decadence, and became obsessed with excess and the attainment of perfection in all endeavours. They wished to sample and dominate every sensation imaginable, and their imaginations were near-limitless.
The serpent of she who thirsts rose in their decaying souls. A dark shadow of the pleasure god flowed beneath the surface of their civilisation. For millennia, it seemed as if the eldar race were rushing headlong into a great, calamitous fall from grace. The eldar, if they didn’t realise what was about to happen, might very well have collapsed and been devoured by their own god.
Alas, this did not occur. Some force, some vile demagogue Witchling Prince of the eldar, calling himself Vileth the Beatific, and his blessed muses, wormed their way into control of the Great Eldar Empire. Through some foul means, they illuminated the eldar race as to the nature of the god they were creating. The eldar race was deluded into believing that this being was a perfect reflection of their true nature. With guile and malice, a series of civil wars were fought between the servants of the old gods and the followers of this new, dreadful ‘Slannesh’. But, though the empire was embroiled in centuries of war, they managed to stave off the far worse fate of the Fall.
The eldar survived. The children of Morai-Heg, Khaine and Asuryan, were defeated and the scant remnants of those eldar loyal to the old gods were exiled. They fled into the protection of Cegorach's labyrinth. Using their powerful wraith-tech, the Farseers and their harlequin allies sealed off their new home, the port Commorragh, from the rest of the galaxy.
The Eldar Empire, now unified under Vileth, looked to the galaxy in disgust. For too long, the mewling parasites of the younger races had been allowed too much freedom. The Imperial Eldar declared that they were divine, for they were each part of Slannesh. As gods, they demanded tribute, and the smaller alien empires were forced to comply.
Resistance to their reign came from an unexpected source. The mon keigh was a race long thought tame; their ‘Golden Age’ of technology had been curbed by the eldar empire a millennium previously, by creating kin-strife between the mon keigh and their Iron men servants, which sparked a war that shattered the mon keigh empire in twain and allowed the primordial annihilator to subvert and ruin many human strongholds.
However, in secret, the mon keigh were uniting under a new leader. Eldar spies long sought out this powerful being, known only as the Emperor, but they could never find him. He was a shifter of shapes, with a network of spies and mysterious collaborators. The Imperial eldar, in their arrogance, did not realise the power of this man. They assumed he was some petty warlord squabbling over the scraps of the extinct human empires. But the Emperor was powerful; at least a match for the most lethal eldar ancients.
Covertly however, the Emperor was gathering together an alliance, a new empire to challenge the false gods. To lead his insurgency, he began to experiment with creating the perfect genetic soldiers; soldiers who could not be subverted by the warrior robots of the eldar. These soldiers would be led by generals even more powerful, with bodies infused with warp energy siphoned from the raw warp itself.
The Emperor though, had enemies even in his own ranks. They were spies for the eldar, and they told them that the Emperor was building unspecified, warp-based superweapons. But before the eldar could investigate further, or destroy the Emperor’s foetal Primarchs, the Emperor destroyed his own labs. It looked like his experiment was a failure, and the eldar simply laughed off the mon keigh as mere deluded simpletons. What they did not realise was that the Emperor had scattered his Primarchs to the eight winds. They grew up strong on diverse worlds far across the galaxy.
When the time was right, and when the Emperor had at last completed his Adeptus Astartes, he set out on The Secret Crusade; a crusade to reunite the disparate human strongholds, and to locate his twenty lost sons. Alas, two of them were destroyed by the eldar before he could reach them, but the others were found, one by one, over the course of 200 years of campaigning. Some had built their own fiefdoms and empires, while others were slaves or raiding warlords, but they all recognised the Emperor when he covertly met with them.
They fought at the forefront of every battle, subduing or subsuming every lesser xenos empires and human colonies they could into their own congregation of races. This reached its peak at Ullanor.
Upon the plains of Ullanor, the great Black Ork of Ullanor met with Horus of the Luna Wolves, and there they forged the pivotal alliance that would shape the nature of the ensuing war. The great ork empire was the largest enclave of orks in the galaxy, and could bully lesser ork empires into fighting for them if they needed to. The orks had no particular friendship with the humans; indeed, for thousands of years previously, the orks and men had made war upon each other without hesitation. But Horus, ever the consummate diplomat, knew just what to say. The greenskins didn’t like humanity, but they at least respected them more than the eldar. In the end, the prospect of taking the fight to the heart of the eldar empire was irresistible to the great Black Ork. If the humans got in the orks' way, the orks would not hesitate to crump them, but otherwise something approaching a concordance was reached between the two.
Horus was named Warmaster by the Emperor, who returned to Terra to work on the next phase of the coming conflict.
The humans declared their defiance for the Imperial eldar in characteristically dramatic fashion. At Istavaan III, an eldar war fleet was lured into a masterful ambush by Horus, who destroyed the machine army, and its eldar directors, almost to a man. The Emperor and the primarchs had just declared open war on the Eldar Empire. Furthermore, Horus denounced the eldar as phony deities. The eldar were not gods; there were no gods. To the vainglorious madman Vileth, this was sacrilege. This was madness.
This was heresy.
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The Black Ork has managed to unite the largest number of his odious brethren for centuries, and as they attack the eldar’s property, it becomes clear than the orks are taking advantage of the situation, to attack the eldar while they are distracted with the mon keigh.
The greenskin scum and the mon keigh infest the galaxy like vermin. They outnumber the eldar, but not by much. And the Eldar Empire is no crumbling weakling realm; under Vileth the Beatific, they are almost as strong as the original unified empire. World-sized warships of devastating power are theirs to command, alongside technology and magic the likes of which most races could only dream off. Armies of terrifying, relentless 'Maton', unfeeling entities built to conquer and destroy, are amongst the forces loyal to Vileth’s regime. Vileth himself wields Anaris, and has vowed to exterminate the human race in its entirety, to the last infant; a fitting punishment for their disloyalty.
But there is hope for the rebels. The Primarchs of humanity are mighty, and they lead the Space Marine Legions into battle. Humanity must either win, or face extinction. But is their faith and trust in the Primarchs misplaced? And what role might the diasporadic forces of the Great and Terrible Maelstrom play in the Heresy to come?
I cannot say.
EDIT: Slightly edited the italic part of this.