Thursday 17 August 2017

All hail Slaanesh! Eldar God of Peacetime



We…we thought She would be our saviour. A glorious God of Peace and Prosperity, forever ridding us of Khaine the Murderer of Eldar. We were gravely mistaken.




Heg the Crone could have spied the truth, had we not blinded her from it. It was our only option. She would not have taken kindly to our plot to murder her consort.


This...disfigurement. This eternity in servitude to the Goddess we spawned. This is the punishment for our hubris...

...it is not enough for what we have done.

And here are the last two of the Croneworlders, bringing the warband to the sacred number 6.

Apologies, but a rambling essay ahead!

I wanted to use the Croneworlders to offer a little hint that there might be more to the Fall than the simplified myths and legends we know today. The official story is that the eldar descended into decadence and birthed a Chaos God that tore their civilisation apart. You mean to say that a supremely psychic race with a penchant for scrying the future, and an entire pantheon of warp-gods including a prophetess and a seer...didn't see that coming?

Nah. There's got to be more to the story than that.

So I thought a little more about it. There's no chance that the eldar, even in their most decadent self-absorption, didn't see that they were birthing a warp-entity. So, why would they have let it happen?

We know that some dour fanatics tried to prevent the fall into decadence and the birth of this God, but why did their protestations fall on deaf ears? Especially as there was no way a profoundly psychic race would miss the birthing pains of a warp-god.

What if...what if they wanted Slaanesh to be born? Think about it. Your race is experiencing an unprecedented golden age. You're undisputed masters of your galaxy. Your citizens are able to explore nothing but the pursuit of pleasure. Why would you expect any God birthed in that time be anything other than benevolent?

So, I came up with a little story based on that. The first eldar to notice that they were birthing a new god would probably be the followers of Morai-Heg the seer, deciphering Lileath's prophesy. Perhaps they made the connection that the God of Peace they were birthing would finally kill Khaine, God of War (and murderer of eldar). Perhaps they made the connection that Morai-Heg might not be so pleased about her consort being murdered, so set out to blind her to it.

And so the Fall of the Eldar was eased into motion. A group of eldar prophets forseeing a glorious God for a glorious golden age. In their arrogance they did not forsee that this God may not be all it promised to be and so blinded their leaders to the dangers presented, and led on the masses to greater deeds of decadence (becoming the Dark Muses referenced in the Dark Eldar codex).

Only when Slaanesh tore herself into wakefulness did they realise what they had done. Those who could fled, seeking refuge in the webway. Those who couldn't were kept as playthings, disfigured into crones (a terrible affliction for slaaneshi and eldar alike) and forced to watch for eternity as their kind are steadily hunted down by She Who Thirsts.

What you get at the end of that is the Croneweaver in the first pic. Downtrodden and ostracised by Her other playthings. Kept as living proof of the folly of trying to control the Gods.

No comments:

Post a Comment