Somewhere in the labyrinth beneath reality there is a door that reads the soul of whoever approaches it. If you have not mastered the Chaos within yourself, you cannot pass, however powerful you are, however hard you try. Behind it lies everything one of the oldest races in the galaxy has learned about the warp and the dark gods: some of the most dangerous knowledge in existence, kept by the people who learned it at the cost of their empire. Reader, the Eldar call it the Black Library. Very few humans have ever seen it, and one of the greatest sorcerers of the Thousand Sons has spent ten thousand years trying to get in. Why?
What Is the Black Library?
The Eldar know more of Chaos than mankind ever will, one account says, and still more was lost in the Fall, the catastrophe in which their decadence gave birth to the Chaos god Slaanesh and destroyed their empire. A single source of Eldar knowledge has remained untouched and inviolate since that Fall. In it rest the tomes, books, scrolls and codices that record the Eldar’s knowledge of the warp.
Its subject is Chaos itself. The forbidden lore of the Black Library describes the blandishments, influences, forms, creatures, perils, promises and horrors of the dark powers. One novel adds that artefacts of Chaos are brought there for study and destruction, and that thousands of grimoires and treatises have been gathered into an unprecedented literature of the enemy. A note for newcomers: this Black Library is a place in the setting, and is not to be confused with the publisher of Warhammer novels that took its name.
The Library is not a museum. One account names its keepers the Black Council and says they study the Fall continually, as a cautionary tale. Their hope is to find some path back towards the Eldar’s lost ascendancy, or at least a way to escape the doom that has hung over their race ever since. A novel of the Horus Heresy captures that doom in a single image: the Eldar falling, damned by their own vices, weeping the name of the new god their excess had made.
Where Is It? Accounts Differ
The records do not agree, and the Archive will not pretend otherwise. The earliest account, in the 1989 Compendium, places the Library aboard a dark craftworld far beyond the boundaries of the Imperium. Later sources move it into the webway, the Eldar’s network of hidden paths through the warp: one says in a hidden location, some say at the centre of the webway; another, deep within it, in shrouded and nearly inaccessible vaults.
The two pictures can be reconciled. Gav Thorpe’s novel Path of the Outcast describes a craftworld unlike any other, deep in the weft and folds of the webway, and Rob Sanders’ inquisitor Czevak, who has been there, calls it ‘the dark craftworld’. Ian Watson’s Inquisition War novels say its location is known only to the Great Harlequins. The webway itself, one account notes, is so vast that no one save the guardians of the Black Library know its true extent.
Even the Eldar do not all know the way. The craftworld of Kaelor, one novel’s glossary records, tells of its first Ranger, Vhruar the Hidden, who swore never to return home until he had found the Library and spent a thousand years searching the webway. Some versions of the tale say he is searching still. The same glossary suggests Kaelor’s idiosyncratic idea of the Library may come from its long lack of reliable contact with the Harlequins, the Library’s messengers, for several eons.
The Laughing God’s Archive
How did it begin? The Eldar tell it as myth. In the version recorded in Path of the Outcast, the Laughing God Cegorach, the trickster, escaped the clutches of She Who Thirsts, the Eldar name for Slaanesh, and fled to this hidden craftworld. He told its startled scholars his tale and what had befallen the other gods of the Eldar, then vanished, instructing them never to forget what he had told them. Thus, the tale says, the Black Library was founded and the first Harlequins created.
From that day, the followers of Cegorach have travelled far and wide in search of knowledge of Chaos and the dark gods. The Harlequins are, in another account, the Eldar faction to whom remembrance falls, carrying their race’s legends from craftworld to craftworld in dance and drama. The Library is the archive behind the performance: what the Harlequins learn, the Library keeps.
A Door That Judges
The Library defends itself. Its ‘mind’, as the 1989 account calls it, refuses entry to the weak and to those who would misuse its knowledge, admitting only those who have acknowledged and tempered the Chaos within themselves. The immature, still vulnerable to the promises and seductions of Chaos, find that they simply cannot pass through its gateway. As a result, few have ever seen inside or read any of its books.
The barrier is not only at the door. The Compendium describes the Library enclosed within a nearly impenetrable psychic barrier, and Czevak, imprisoned and tortured by sorcerers after his visit, wonders whether the Library’s protection extends even to the knowledge of it carried in a visitor’s mind. He was aware, his novel says, of its seeming psychic ability to bar the weak and corruptible from its thresholds, one of the dark craftworld’s many defences.
The Keepers
Inside, the Library is tended by its Guardian-Scribes. They collate and transcribe its knowledge, a task they have carried out since the Fall, and keep a hawk-like watch over the books themselves, which are dreadful repositories of secret power that must be monitored at all times. Once the Guardian-Scribes enter, the 1989 account says, they rarely leave.
Then there are the Solitaires, the loneliest of the Harlequins. Little is known about them even among the Eldar. They have passed the sacred Ritual, yet live apart from other Harlequins, wandering the webway in search of Eldar who might survive it. In the Harlequins’ sacred performances, the Death Jesters take the part of Death; on the extremely rare occasions when a Solitaire performs, he or she takes the part of Slaanesh, the very god whose nature the Library exists to record. And it is said, one codex records, that the oldest and most powerful Solitaires become the dreaded guardians of the Black Library.
Who May Enter
Only two groups, the 1989 account says, come and go at will: the Solitaires of the Harlequins, and the human Illuminati, a body of the earliest 40K lore. A later source keeps the Solitaires and replaces the Illuminati with a rumour: some say that a human, perhaps an inquisitor, has also been allowed to do so. That human has a name in the novels. An Imperial file on Ahriman calls Inquisitor Czevak one of the few humans to have entered the Black Library and lived.
Another human found his way in without leave. In Ian Watson’s Inquisition War, the farseer Eldrad Ulthran is appalled that Inquisitor Jaq Draco entered the sacred Black Library at all, since no one should have found it without a guide, and worse, that he robbed it. What he took, the third novel names: the Book of Rhana Dandra, the mutable Book of Fate, named for the Rhana Dandra, the final battle between Chaos and the material universe that the Eldar foresee. If it comes, a Harlequin in the same series declares, both Chaos and the universe will be destroyed, since mutual annihilation is preferable to the triumph of Chaos. Draco’s own name, the farseer notes uneasily, was already written in it. The Archive notes that this belongs to the oldest strand of the lore, and that the later telling differs in detail.
The Dome of the Crystal Seers
Czevak’s story gives the rare glimpse of the Library’s heart. At the core of the craftworld he was shown a sacred chamber: a biodome holding a forest of wraithbone trees, a place of spiritual calm where the spirits of dead Eldar pass from their spirit stones into the craftworld’s infinity circuit, and where farseers make their most ambitious divinations. There, the oldest farseers come to stand, remain and take root among the trees, slowly becoming one with the circuit. Czevak came to know it as the Dome of the Crystal Seers. Those farseers, he realised, slowly transmute into psychically sensitive crystal, ancient minds still keeping watch among the wraithbone trees.
Ahriman at the Gate
For the Library’s enemies, Czevak is a key. Ahriman, once Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons, believes Chaos can be mastered with knowledge, and an old Imperial file says he hopes to find the final pieces of that puzzle in the hidden dimensions of the Black Library; the Eldar, it adds, live in terror of him finding his way into the webway. In Atlas Infernal, Ahriman and his apprentice torture Czevak until he yields the webway’s runecodes. ‘Then the webway is ours,’ the apprentice says.
An audio drama of the Ynnari era, Hand of Darkness, shows where that road leads: a host of daemons and Thousand Sons besieging the dead city of Ain Rash, around the Black Library itself, against Harlequins and the warriors of four craftworlds, until Yvraine’s Ynnari break the siege. The siege was broken, and the Library endured.
Why does the Black Library matter? Because it is the one place in the galaxy where the knowledge that could defeat Chaos and the knowledge that could unleash it are the same books. The Eldar did not lock it away out of greed, but because they know exactly what such knowledge did to them. The door that judges every visitor is the lesson of the Fall made into architecture: you may read about the abyss only if you have already stopped wanting to jump.
Questions from the Archive
What is the Black Library in Warhammer 40k?
In the lore, the Black Library, also called the Black Library of Chaos, is the Eldar’s hidden archive of everything they know about the warp and Chaos: tomes, scrolls and artefacts describing its powers, creatures and temptations. It is said to have remained untouched since the Fall of the Eldar, and its existence is known to very few. It is not to be confused with the real-world publisher of Warhammer fiction.
Where is the Black Library located?
Accounts differ. The 1989 Compendium places it aboard a dark craftworld far beyond the Imperium’s borders. Later sources place it deep within the webway, some say at its centre, and one novel calls it a craftworld unlike any other, hidden in the folds of the webway. One account says its location is known only to the Great Harlequins.
Who can enter the Black Library?
Very few. Its ‘mind’ refuses entry to anyone who has not acknowledged and tempered the Chaos within themselves. Harlequin Solitaires may come and go freely, and the 1989 account adds the human Illuminati. A later source says some claim a human, perhaps an inquisitor, has also been allowed in. Inquisitor Czevak is recorded as one of the few humans to have entered and lived.
Who founded the Black Library?
In the Eldar mythic tradition retold in Gav Thorpe’s Path of the Outcast, the Laughing God Cegorach fled to a hidden craftworld in the webway after escaping She Who Thirsts. He told its scholars what had befallen the other gods and charged them never to forget. Thus, the tale says, the Black Library was founded and the first Harlequins created.
Why does Ahriman want the Black Library?
Ahriman of the Thousand Sons believes Chaos can be mastered through knowledge, and an Imperial file says he hopes to find the final pieces of his puzzle in the Black Library. The Eldar fear him greatly. In Rob Sanders’ Atlas Infernal he tortures Inquisitor Czevak for the runecodes of the webway, and an audio drama shows his Thousand Sons besieging the Library itself.