Event · M31

War in the Webway

The War in the Webway was a secret conflict fought by the Emperor of Mankind in the webway beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra during the Horus Heresy. It set the Emperor against Chaos and other hostile presences native to that ancient extra-dimensional network, and it ran alongside the civil war that divided the Imperium of Man. Its existence was known only to a few of the Emperor’s closest servants. Most of the primarchs and the wider Imperium did not suspect that their master was contending with two wars at once, and the struggle left no mark on the public record of the Heresy. The conflict arose from the Emperor’s long labour on the Webway Project, an undertaking to open a stable, permanent gateway into the webway beneath the Palace. Such a gateway would have given Mankind a route between the stars that avoided the perils of the warp, and so would have eased the dependence of the Imperium on warp-borne travel. The webway was not empty, however. Its fabric was infested with Chaos and with other predators drawn to any breach, and as the Emperor worked to complete and stabilise the gateway he was obliged to defend it in person, since only his power could contest the deeper reaches of the network. The stakes were therefore twofold: the success of the project itself, and the risk that an unguarded breach beneath the Palace would admit hostile forces into the heart of the Imperium. The defence was divided by role and by place. The Adeptus Custodes, the Emperor’s bodyguard under Constantin Valdor, and the Sisters of Silence, the psychically null order sworn to ward against sorcery, guarded the physical approaches to the project within the Palace. The Emperor alone ventured into the webway’s inner reaches to meet its threats directly. Malcador’s Warp Sanctuary addressed similar dangers elsewhere in the Palace complex but remained a separate undertaking from the Emperor’s own struggle. Later tradition holds that the war began in earnest around the destruction of the Thousand Sons Legion at Prospero. Magnus the Red’s forced psychic intrusion upon the Emperor’s workings is remembered as having torn open the wards that protected the project, and it is regarded as the turning point after which the breach could no longer be contained by ordinary means. The war continued for as long as the Emperor could sustain it. It was left unresolved when the opening of the Siege of Terra required him to turn his full attention to the defence of the Imperial Palace against the forces of the Warmaster Horus. The Webway Project was abandoned incomplete, and the Imperium never gained the permanent gateway it had been meant to provide. The toll of the Emperor’s long, unseen struggle is reckoned among the burdens he carried into his final confrontation with Horus.

See where War in the Webway occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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