Consider the horror of a weapon that turns your own guardians against you. Not conquered, not slain — possessed. The archives of the Ordo Xenos preserve fragments of a catastrophe so ancient that even the deathless Necrons speak of it only as a wound in their reckoning of time. More than sixty million Terran years before the coming of the God-Emperor, the galaxy convulsed beneath a plague born not of bacterium nor virus, but of the Warp itself.
The sagas call it the Enslaver Plague. It ended the greatest war the galaxy has ever known, unmade an empire of god-like reptilian architects, and set in motion a rebellion that would strip the Star Gods of their dominion. What follows is drawn from the fragmentary lore that survives — and where the record falls silent, we say so plainly.
The War in Heaven and the Seeds of Ruin
To understand the plague, one must first understand the war that birthed it. In the deep antiquity of the galaxy, the Old Ones — an ancient, cold-blooded and psychically gifted people, said to be the first to attain true self-awareness and the first to cross the sea of stars — waged a titanic conflict against the C’tan, the Star Gods, and their tireless Necron servants.
This was the War in Heaven, fought across sixty million years and more. The Old Ones, masters of the Warp and craftsmen of the Webway, could not match the Necrons in raw industry. And so, the archives tell, they turned to creation. They engineered warrior species bound tightly to the Immaterium — psychic soldier-races raised to fight a psychic war. It was a desperate stratagem, and it would prove their undoing.
The Doors That Should Never Have Opened
The wiki-lore records a grim irony. The very tactics of the War in Heaven — the wholesale unleashing of psychic energies — destabilised the Immaterium beyond healing. The coalesced souls of the war-slain, raw with pain and terror, drew predatory elder entities to the cracks in reality. What the peaceful Empyrean had once been, the war made into a hellish sea of deadly Warp predators.
Of all these horrors, none proved more proficient than the Enslavers — called Psyrens, Krell, Dominators or Puppeteers in later ages. Barrel-shaped, leathery entities of some two metres, they drifted with the currents of the Warp, drawn to the psychic emanations of minds in realspace. When one found a suitable psyker, it did not merely kill. It bonded. Over the course of a few days the host was transmuted into a living gateway — a wound in reality through which more of their kin poured forth.
The Old Ones had raised their psychic servant-races as a shield. Those races became the very doors through which annihilation entered.
The Fall of the Old Ones
The epidemic spread with a geometry no defender could match. As the archives whisper, one enthralled world would seed a dozen more, and each Enslaver host could in turn enslave nearby non-psykers, so that populations toppled into drooling servitude. The galactic civilisation of the Old Ones collapsed. Their strongholds were invaded, their psychic guardians and servitor races psychically enthralled or destroyed outright.
In their desperation, the lore holds, the Old Ones birthed newer weapons — the green-skinned Krork, forebears of the modern Orks, and the technologically gifted Jokaero. Yet these bioweapons arose too late to stem the flood. Where once the Old Ones had commanded the galaxy, now they were hunted. The forces of the Necrontyr fell upon the defeated and scattered survivors and, so the Necron chronicles claim, finally destroyed them. Whether the last of the Old Ones perished or simply fled the galaxy, no certain record survives.
When the Star Gods Grew Afraid
Here the tale turns upon its architects. The C’tan had schemed to feast upon the living energies of the galaxy’s sentient beings — that was the whole purpose of their war. But the Enslaver Plague threatened to consume that very sustenance. The Star Gods realised that a galaxy made wasteland would starve them as surely as it starved everyone else.
The archives record their calculus. The C’tan resolved to let the Enslavers scour the galaxy to a barren husk while they themselves waited out the storm in stasis, guarded by their obedient Necron legions. It was a plan of monstrous patience — and it would prove their ruin.
The Silent King’s Betrayal
The Necrons were no longer the Necrontyr who had first knelt before the Star Gods. Biotransference had stripped them of flesh and made them undying, yet even in their metal servitude a spark of resentment endured. Watching their masters plot to hollow out the galaxy, the Silent King Szarekh, last of his line, chose rebellion.
The lore tells that the Necrons turned upon the C’tan and shattered them, imprisoning the fragments — the C’tan Shards — within the confines of the Tesseract Labyrinths. The Chronicle of Szarekh preserves his curse against them: ‘Mephet’ran the Deceiver, Aza’gorod the Nightbringer, Iash’uddra the Endless Swarm; I curse their names, and the names of all their malevolent brethren.’ Thus did the god-slaves slay their gods.
Aftermath and the Great Sleep
It is unknown, the archives confess, precisely what ended the plague itself. Some accounts hold that the psyker swarm simply died off once its hosts were exhausted, allowing the galaxy to emerge, in time, with new life. Certain it is that the plague ended the War in Heaven.
In its wake the Aeldari Empire would rise from the ashes. And the Necrons, gravely weakened by their rebellion and fearful of conflict with the fledgling powers of a reborn galaxy, followed Szarekh’s command into the Great Sleep — sixty million years of tomb-slumber beneath the earth of a thousand worlds.
The Plague That Never Truly Died
Do not imagine the Enslavers a thing of dead antiquity. They persist still, drifting the Immaterium, waiting for an unguarded mind. Inquisitor Mallen of the Ordo Xenos records how a single unsanctioned witch doomed Hive Skorpios: within three days its population were drooling mindslaves, within three weeks a continent burned — all because a governor thought his daughter exempt from the psyker cull.
The Storm Wardens fought a great infestation across several worlds in late M36, remembered as the Nemesis Incident. Inquisition forces destroyed Enslavers in the Scintilla System in 993.M41. And in early M42 the creatures assailed even the Black Legion’s Arks of Omen. The husk of one such entity, the archives note, rests among the relics of Trazyn the Infinite — a trophy of the horror that once brought a galaxy to its knees. This, then, is why the Black Ships come, and why no soul is exempt from the cull. The alternative is written in sixty-million-year-old ash.