Event · M30

Fall of the Aeldari

The Fall of the Aeldari, also recalled as the Fall of the Eldar or the Cataclysm, ended the Aeldari empire’s dominion over the galaxy. Accounts place the cataclysm around the close of the thirtieth millennium, when the birth-cry of the Chaos god Slaanesh tore open the warp wound known as the Eye of Terror at the heart of Aeldari space, ending an age in which the Aeldari empire had held sway over most of the galaxy for millions of years. The empire’s decline is recorded as a slow one. The Old Ones had warned the Aeldari of their eventual undoing, but the warning was forgotten as Aeldari technology removed almost every need for labour or struggle, leaving the species to the pursuit of its own desires. Pleasure cults spread across Aeldari worlds, and as ever more extreme sensation was sought, indulgence gave way to torture and murder practised as a form of art. Government collapsed on many worlds, the old Aeldari pantheon was abandoned in favour of personal excess, and some among the Aeldari, later remembered as the Exodites, fled to distant worlds in disgust rather than share in the corruption. The accumulated psychic residue of this excess coalesced in the warp into a new and hungry power. When it woke, its birth swept the spirits of billions of Aeldari into the immaterium to be consumed. The gods Asuryan, Lileath and Morai-Heg are recorded as slain in this onslaught, and Khaine, mightiest of the pantheon, was cast down and shattered into the many Avatars that craftworld hosts still carry to war. The psychic implosion tore open realspace at the empire’s heart, forming the Eye of Terror, and the Aeldari worlds nearest it were left to Chaos and ruin as Crone Worlds. Survivors scattered rather than vanished. Craftworlds such as Iyanden, Ulthwé and Saim-Hann escaped with their wraithbone hulls intact, becoming home to the Asuryani; the Exodites endured on their maiden worlds beyond the empire’s core; and the pleasure-cults of Commorragh, sheltered within the webway, persisted as the Drukhari. The Harlequins, who had long tried to warn their kin through ritual and the mythic cycles, preserved the memory of the Fall in performance and warning to other peoples. The same eruption dispersed the warp storms that had sealed off the galaxy for ages, an isolation later remembered as the Age of Strife, clearing the way for the Emperor to launch the Great Crusade and found the Imperium. The Eye of Terror born of the Fall endures as a stronghold of Chaos, later sheltering the Traitor Legions after the Horus Heresy, while the scattered Aeldari factions — Asuryani, Drukhari, Exodites and Harlequins — continue to reckon with the consequences of their ancestors’ excess.

See where Fall of the Aeldari occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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