Webway

The Webway is a vast, labyrinthine dimension of interlocking passages constructed by the Aeldari to permit near-instantaneous travel between worlds. It occupies a folded non-space adjacent to both real space and the immaterium, largely sealed against the predations of Chaos, and is entered through webway gates scattered across the galaxy, including one attested beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra within Segmentum Solar. Its true extent dwarfs any single world: whole reaches are inhabited, others abandoned, and others still given over to things better left undisturbed.

The network was raised before the Fall, at the height of the old Aeldari empire, its passages shaped from psychically responsive wraithbone rather than dug or built in any conventional sense. The birth of Slaanesh and the ensuing Fall shattered much of this achievement: countless sections collapsed, were deliberately severed by surviving Aeldari, or became haunted by daemonic incursion, forcing entire reaches to be sealed and abandoned. Commorragh, the dark city of the Drukhari, occupies a stable pocket within the webway itself, sustained by the suffering its inhabitants inflict and export through the same passages. Craftworld Aeldari maintain their own gates as both lifeline and cautionary ruin, with rangers and the Harlequins of the Masque keeping select paths open while guarding against what still dwells in the collapsed dark.

The Emperor is recorded as having pursued mastery of the webway for humanity’s benefit before the Horus Heresy, an ambition left unfinished after his wounding at the climax of that war, leaving the Terran gate sealed. In the present era, following the opening of the Great Rift, the Ynnari and the remaining Craftworlds contest access to key junctions of the network, while Drukhari raiders use its passages to strike across the Imperium and withdraw before pursuit can follow. The webway endures as refuge, battlefield, and the clearest surviving testament to the empire the Aeldari lost.