That was before the coming of the Beast.
Early indications of the calamity to come were lost in the devotions and industry of teeming billions. Across hundreds of worlds Imperial citizens went about the drudgery of their existence and servitude, ignorant of the fact that they were being addressed across the void. At first, the noise bursts were swallowed by the vox-static of stars and background radiation. They struggled to make themselves known above the sub-light rumble of charter shipping and the aetherial boom of merchant fleets translating in and out of system. They were lost in the cannon fire of Imperial Navy frigates, engaging pirate fleets on the fringes of frontier space. They were drowned in the industrial undertakings of planetary forges and hive-worlds, in the hymnals echoing about mighty cathedrals and the riotous misery of swarming humanity.
As the noise bursts grew louder and more intense in their infrasonic insistence, the Imperium came to hearken to the herald of their doom. The listeners heard it first: those whose minds and ears were already open. A Navy listening post in the Ourobian Belt. The vox-operators of the 41st Thranxian Rifles on the jungle moon of Bossk. The Izul-11 Telepathica chorale beacon at Cantillus. The rogue trader Austregal, operating under a lineal letter of marque in the Wraith Stars. The Austregal was authorised to prey on the ghostships of the Zahr-Tann craftworld, but had discovered that the xenos had mysteriously moved out of the segmentum.
Credit for official recognition of the phenomenon on the Inner Rim was shared, however. At the same time that Divisio Linguistica adept Mobian Ortrex isolated the content of the noise bursts on the Ark Mechanicus vessel Singularitii, Sister-Emeritus Astrid of the Schola-Lexicon translated a vox-capture of the anomaly at the Mount Nisei Seminarium. They swiftly and separately came to the same conclusion and communicated their findings to Imperial authorities across the rimward sectors with equal urgency.
What sounded like the kind of belly-thunder that might erupt from a carnivorous death world predator was in fact a savage xenos vernacular. A barbaric decree from a tyrant species, hollered impossibly across the void. The words were raw and delivered like a barrage of artillery, but they were unmistakably greenskin. The broadcast assumed myriad forms, although certain linguistic patterns were the most repeated. The translation was crude but compelling.
Amongst the barbaric abandon of mindless monstrosity, the being announced itself as ‘the Slaughter to come’ and ‘the Beast’. It was beside itself with brutality and promised ‘blood for blood’, ‘an end to weakling empires’ and ‘the stench of oblivion’.
As the rimward sectors of the Segmentum Solar would come to understand, the Beast made good on its promises. The noise bursts spread. Within a few Terran standard weeks, the six outlying systems reporting the phenomenon became sixty. In mere days it became six hundred. The Beast spoke. The people listened. What had previously been distant thunder, unacknowledged and ignored, broke above the heads of the Emperor’s subjects. Across the worlds of the rimward sectors, the mind-splitting roar of the Beast became everything. Humanity could not function. People could not work; they could not sleep; they could not think. Schedules were disrupted. Tithes went unmet. Order began to slip from the Imperium’s gauntleted grasp.
Millions descended into madness. The grim rigidity of humanity’s tyrannised existence — harsh and imbalanced as it was — actually served to protect the masses from the threat of the outsider. Most Imperial citizens had never set foot outside their habsteads or districts, let alone left their home worlds. Apart from a small number of surviving veterans from the Astra Militarum, very few people had actually seen a member of a xenos race. So when the unbridled rage of an alien monstrosity unfolded in their minds, many simply didn’t have the mental fortitude to hold onto their sanity.
Amid the collapse of structures and the riotous descent of planets into chaos, there were some who heard the Beast reach out to them — and they reached back. Something repressed and downtrodden found expression in the alien rancour. Unlike the God-Emperor, who — apart from in the chapel and catechism — seemed strangely absent from the life of the average Imperial, the Beast was there. Its fury was present between their temples. It echoed about their streets. It rumbled through the void above their home worlds. It didn’t take long for shrines to be defaced and missions to be torched, as the faithless found their way to a nihilistic comfort in the doom to come.
There is power in words, but more so in deeds. The Beast made a shocking impression on the billions of the rimward sectors with its roaring menace, but then came the gravity storms. If the Beast’s emerging acolytes desired more evidence of the being’s almighty power, they needed to look no further than its unseen mastery of destructive force.
While the augur banks of sprint traders, research stations and fabricator moons detected and monitored the gravitic anomalies afflicting the segmentum margins, many only came to know of their presence through the cataclysmic events unfolding about them. The Angelini Hub dockyards — a modern wonder of the Imperium, orbiting the great mercantile world of Korsicus IV like a belt — simply shattered. An endeavour that had taken more than a thousand years to engineer and accrete drifted off into the void in splintered fragments, along with the bodies of the million or so merchant traders and their families that called the Angelini Hub home. For the common Imperial citizen, there was no explanation for such a tragedy. Mechanicus adepts and the Hub’s Naval security had next to no idea what had caused the gravity storm. For most, it was simply a demonstration of the Beast’s power and potential.
On the low-gravity world of Virgilia, where the lofty towers of schola and universitae reached for the heavens and pierced the clouds, the anomaly wreaked havoc. The collegia world passed through an erupting gravity well, causing the planet to violently wobble. Like a slow-motion holo-pict, the forest of hightowers, spires and belfries came crashing down on the ancient colleges and institutes below. Within minutes, the cloud-piercing skyline had become a dust-cloaked silhouette of finely crafted rubble.
World after decimated world fell before the might of the gravity storms. Fenimore had the misfortune of orbiting the gas giant 88-Clavia. Usually the inhabitants of the moon enjoyed the sight of the giant’s beautiful ring system in their sky. After the anomaly tore through the delicate arrangement, however, death rained down on Fenimore from above. Shards of ice and long-shattered shepherd moons sliced down through the thin skies and cut the screaming population to bloody ribbons. As the world turned, night became day and the dawn ushered in the razor-storm.
On the fortress-world of Brigantia III, General Milus Montague of the 47th Heavy Columnus had two million Imperial Guardsmen amassing for a push on the Zodiox Rift — including honoured regiments of the Phaxatine-of-Foot and Droonian Longshanks. The sparse systems of the Rift had become a petri dish of alien infestations: the Hrud, the Noulia and the Chromes. The xenos filth lived to spread their contagion another day, however. As something colossal attempted to break through into the reality of the Brigantia System, the fortress-world trembled and then succumbed to unseen and unimaginable gravitic pressures. Despite its bastions, armour formations and millions of Guardsmen, Brigantia III had no defence against the intrusion of another world.
The planet exploded. As gargantuan chunks of fortress-world rocketed away, demolishing the flotillas of super-heavy troop transports and Navy escorts waiting to receive General Montague’s Zodiox crusade force in orbit, another planet had taken its place. A small, black moon: one of many appearing throughout the sectors of the Inner Rim like bad omens.