Event · M30–M31
Age of Strife
The Age of Strife, also called Old Night, is the dark age that followed the collapse of the Dark Age of Technology. Its onset is attributed to a confluence of catastrophes: the Men of Iron rebellion shattered humanity’s dependence on artificial intelligence, warp storms of unprecedented scale severed Terra from its scattered colonies, and a sudden efflorescence of untrained psychic ability tore open the minds of countless humans across the galaxy. Interstellar civilisation fragmented as a result, leaving isolated worlds to face famine, plague, and the predations of raiders without hope of relief from the wider human diaspora. On Terra itself the age is recorded as a time of collapsing order, in which the great nations and city-states of the Dark Age gave way to warring tribes, feudal despots, and technologically debased societies squabbling over the ruins of a lost civilisation. Beyond Terra, colony worlds cut off by the storm-wracked warp regressed at uneven rates, some sliding into savagery while others preserved fragments of lost knowledge behind superstition and priesthood. The disorder was compounded by the growing intrusion of the warp into real space, as daemonic incursions, mutation, and the unchecked powers of untrained psykers made the era as spiritually perilous as it was materially impoverished. The Age of Strife is recorded as ending only with the Unification Wars, when the Emperor of Mankind subdued Terra’s warring factions and began drawing the fractured human worlds back into a single order, a process that culminated in the launch of the Great Crusade. Later Imperial tradition treats the period chiefly as the dark backdrop against which the Emperor’s unification is measured, its horrors serving to justify the order imposed afterwards. Much of what befell individual worlds during Old Night remains unrecorded, and accounts differ as to how widely the darkness fell before Terra itself began to rise from it.
See where Age of Strife occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.