Event · M41–M42
Gathering Storm
Gathering Storm is a three-part campaign chronicling the fall of Cadia and the opening of the Great Rift late in the 41st millennium. Released as a sequence of narrative supplements, it draws together the closing stages of Abaddon the Despoiler’s Thirteenth Black Crusade against the fortress world of Cadia with a wider galactic upheaval involving the Aeldari and the long-dormant Adeptus Astartes primarchs. Its scope reaches from the eastern Segmentum Obscurus, where Cadia stood sentinel over the Cadian Gate, to Ultramar and Terra, making it one of the few narrative events to bind several major factions into a single dated turning point. The first volume, Fracture of Biel-Tan, follows the Aeldari seeress Yvraine and the blade-adept known as the Visarch as they begin gathering the scattered worshippers of the slain god Ynnead into the Ynnari, a faction drawn from among the Aeldari and their kin who reject the old paths of Craftworld, Drukhari, and Harlequin alike. The second, Fall of Cadia, recounts Abaddon’s final assault on the fortress world, in which the Cadian defenders under Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed are overwhelmed and Cadia itself is destroyed, an act of destruction that tears open the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift, across the width of the galaxy. The third, Rise of the Primarch, follows the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl as he completes his long labour to revive the primarch Roboute Guilliman from millennia of stasis, restoring him to lead the Imperium in its hour of division. Cadia’s fall and the Rift’s opening split the Imperium of Man into the Imperium Sanctus and the Imperium Nihilus, isolating entire sectors in warp-choked darkness and ending the long, static equilibrium the setting had maintained since the Horus Heresy. Guilliman’s revival at the close of the campaign led directly to his assumption of the title Lord Commander of the Imperium and the launch of the Indomitus Crusade to relieve besieged worlds and rebuild shattered defences. Gathering Storm is accordingly treated as the hinge between the long-unchanging 41st millennium and the more volatile era that follows it, its consequences still shaping the fate of Cadia’s ruins and the Imperium Nihilus beyond the Rift.
See where Gathering Storm occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.