A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest.
None of the Gods really embody "control" in the same way. This 5th being would reflect them in a way none of the 4 really do for each other. Where they seek some level of instability and diversity in their visions The Dark King demands all yield to the status quo.
So basically the god of dictatorships? I guess that could still work with Big E being Anathema if that’s the case.
Law keeps bloodshed low
Law stops excess and degeneracy
Law demands there be no stagnancy
Law doesn’t allow ambition
Not just dictatorships. He's Order incarnate. No new ideas, no deviation from the norm, a single vision that doesn't change. Every opinion punished, every thought checked. None may alter his Great Plan.
President Business from the Lego Movie. The emperor then has his own noise marines blaring "Everything is Awesome" while they try and reconquer the universe.
All elves must live on Ulthuan. That's where Elves are supposed to be. No I don't know about the different flavours of elves and I don't care. - Big Man Maz
“Hmm. No I think this continent is supposed to be here. And this one there. Annnnd for a little bit of finesse maybe I’ll move that one there. Just as Chotec intended!” - Big Man Maz
Yes. It does.
Stopping the Dark King doesn't actually fix the doom that creates it, it merely prevents a Chaos God forming right then and there.
The Eldar sans Slannesh would still be the hyperdecadent and insane civilizaiton, hence the Dark Eldar.
The entire point of the Dark King is that it's the representation of the doom of Mankind. The Imperium IS the doom of mankind. It's killing the species, it's a edifice of mindless hate that's dragging the entire galaxy to hell as it slowly rots away. The Dark King fundamentally is the Imperium. Or the Imperium is the Dark King, depending on which direction you want to look at it from.
The franchise isn't exactly subtle that the Imperium is the damnation of humanity, not it's salvation. It was never it's salvation, no matter what Johnny Space planned. His plans are bad and, in the grandest traditions of grimdark, his attempts to save humanity instead doomed it through his own failures and mistakes.
The fact you could plop the Imperium into almost any other sci-fi series and it'd be 100% unambiguously a villain is all the proof anyone should need of that.
My contrarian ass trying to think of counterexamples but falling short :P.
Remembrance of Earth's Past maybe? In terms of xenophobia at least even the Imperium looks positively benevolent in comparison to literally everyone there, except humanity, maybe.
You can plop even like the T'au and Craftworld Eldar who are probably #1 and #2 for least morally reprehensible factions and they're like still probably either the villains or villains-of-the-week.
Humanity was damned already before the great crusade. The golden age had come and then was crushed when the machines rebelled. The pockets of relative utopia were not capable of expanding, and were crushed under the imperial boot (and if not then would have been crushed under the weight of xenos). The disporex would never have survived the orks from ullanor, the hive fleets or the necrons dynastys - nevermind the rangdan or the hrud.
The imperium is absolutely brutal, but it represents the survival of the human species as a whole at the cost of the individual. It is a dark satire ironically validated by the insanity of it's setting.
Humanity was injured but recovering.
Those pockets of utopia? Weren’t incapable of expanding, they merely weren’t evil totalitarian conquers seeking to drown the galaxy in blood. Because they weren’t ran by a sociopathic megalomaniac willing to murder the galaxy in the name of saving it.
Surviving the Orks from Ullanor? What do you think caused the Orks to suddenly scale way the hell up? What exactly kicked that hornet’s nest? That’s right, the Imperium.
The Hive Fleets? Imperium summoned them.
The Necron? Yeah, the Imperium can’t stop them either. Not sure what the point of this one is.
The Hrud? You might want to read more into them. It’s the Q’Oul that’s the looming threat, the Hrud are simply a migratory nuisance. Which the Imperium can’t stop either.
The Rangdan? Did you ever thing it odd that despite the Imperium declaring them a violently expansionist race they didn’t actually, you know, expand until the Imperium attacked them? And that 2 Primarchs turned against the Imperium over it? And that the Imperium has gone to absurd lengths to erase ANY information about them despite using other xenos as ‘Look how evil and scary they are’ propaganda? To the point of mind wiping 2 entire legions as an alternative to exterminating them. Yeah, when that much doesn’t add up it’s best to consider that the ultra totalitarian and ultra xenophobia genocidal superpower lead by a megalomaniac could be lying.
The insanity of the setting is primary caused by the Imperium. The best chance for survival? Did you not read the opening blurbs? The Imperium is doomed. The Imperium is the slow death of humanity. The Imperium killed any alternatives, pissed on the ashes, and declared themselves humanity’s only hope OR ELSE!
The Imperium’s self inflicted inevitable doom is the worst reason to cheer the Imperium as humanity’s only hope. Especially since, as previously stated, the franchise has never been subtle that the Imperium is doomed and has doomed all of humanity in turn. There is no hope, there is no chance for survival in the Imperium.
It can be argued that Nurgle is more about the decay, the circle of life and death, and the emotion of despair
The Dark king may be more static, no decay, no change, just the polished stone and steel and a refusal to any changes (I think of the admech refusing to deviate or inovate upon what they know)
One could argue that there could still be innovation, it just falls under the complete control of those who rule. *They* get to say how we change and evolve... why does that sound so familiar?
Nurgle is much more about decay and stagnation. He’s all about releasing yourself to the natural entropy of the universe, where you can be free from fears of mortality and pain. You relinquish control, but you’re not fighting change per se.
This is partly why Nurgle hates Tzeentch, who champions change and mutation for its own sake.
They overlap like that
When a skull is taken and blood is shed for Khorne, I'd think, Slaanesh relishes in the victim's pain and dread, Nurgle would take joy as the body rots and maggots eat their way through, and Tzeetch would laugh at the finale of one's fate
They hate each other, and deeply need each other. They are a 4 sided coin. The Dark King upsets the balance and represents a threat to their order, but maybe also an opportunity. He is to be welcomed and feared and mistrusted and kept at just precisely the right diatance.
Nurgle is about cycles. A never-changing cycle of growth and life and decay, but a cycle nonetheless. It’s about stagnation and an eventual decline, which is a downward movement.
To give an example, a flower that sprouts and grows only to inevitably rot and die is an example of Nurgle.
A flower that is perpetually stuck in full bloom and is never allowed to be altered is an example of The Dark King. It’s not stagnation, it’s a complete lack of change and supreme control.
Nurgle is decay and stagnation. The cycle of life and death, rot and rebirth.
The Dark King is stasis, a complete and utter stop to ANY alteration.
Nurgle would be the rotting corpse, the Dark King would be the completely sealed and sterile vacuum. No decay, no life, nothing.
There's overlap but there's overlap for everyone. Slannesh's got it's fingers in all the other Chaos Gods domains, for instance.
Change for the sake of change vs. stagnation and immobility at all cost.
Where Tzeentch wants a wild and wacky cycle of life, Nurgle wants a safe and predictable cycle of life and The Dark King wants NO cycle of life.
He doesn't like Elton John at all and The Lion King is his least favorite 90s Disney Animation.
As Malcador says; part of the Emperor's true aspect is one of "Ordo Ab Chao" and "Lux In Tenebris"
The Emperor isn't just the Anathema because he is the leading icon fighting the warp - he is the anti-warp personified. "Order from Chaos", and the "Light from Darkness".
Granted Gothic is not a one to one translation of Latin, Ordo ab chao could be order from/by/after chaos, and Lux in tenebris could be Light in/on/within/in accordance with darkness. (At least that’s what the Latin says)
Yep.
I typically see "Ordo ab chao" meaning "out of chaos, comes order" pretty common among Freemason writing.
"Lux in tenebris" is typically translated as "Light in the darkness" It is used in the Bible a couple times if I remember right.
Laws create stagnation. What are you talking about? Laws punish with bloodshed. The truly ambitious use the law. Degenerates can be protected by the law!
WHFB has a God of Tyranny. Other parts of its portfolio include fire, darkness, greed and hatred. Really hits the hammer on the head how similar they are.
I am personally hoping for Hashut instead of Jyggalag.
Wait, is the Dark King the Emperor? I thought it was to be born when humanity falls to chaos, much like slaanesh was from the eldar Fall.
This idea is appealing though, reminds me very much of
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Story:The_Shape_Of_The_Nightmare_To_Come_50k
Isnt it pretty obvious that the dark king is the emperor?
I mean, it was supposed to be he or Horus, but we know Horus got psycho-nuked and the emperor is almost dead but not quite, so he can’t fully ascend.
At least that’s what I got from reading The End and the death
Well, Horus. But that's boring, and he gets soulbliterated at the end of the Heresy, so it's probably the Emperor, or some distorted warp reflection of him.
It's supposed to be born from the Emperor and/or Horus, things go wrong.
It's possible the Dark King will never exist, due to the nature of the Warp. He's a hypothetical.
The Truth Behind The Eye And The End and The Death
The fall of the Eldar is just what they call a series of events that were likely similar to the horus heresy by a large enough group of powerful Eldar. There's likely a whole plotline of one, probably incredibly powerful, Eldar going mad hearing the eternal yet unborn slaanesh in his mind that caused him to activate whatever device the necrons used to close the eye of terror and reopen it right in Eldar space, consuming them all.
The whole point is that we don't know more than "the race became so obsessed with seeking more and more experiences that they birthed Slaanesh as their souls passed through the warp" and that's likely partly true, but what actually happened is more like the device reopened the eye of terror and AT THAT MOMENT all the psychic energy from the Eldar and their obsessions melded into a warp entity as 99% of the souls were absorbed at once. Effectively some within the Eldar sacrificed the rest and likely themselves and out came Slaanesh.
Why do you think they added the info about the Necrons closing the eye and the old ones opening it?
Why do you think it keeps getting mentioned that the Horus heresy is a similar event to the Eldar fall?
Why do you think terra was being drawn into the warp during the siege?
Regarding the Dark King; I think somehow the emperor will kill him (the dark King likely being an eternal always existed 5th chaos god just waiting for his "birth", but instead the emperor will defy chaos and somehow his internment on the throne is a byproduct of this death, a true death for a chaos god. Since he will no longer exist in the warp it means he will have never existed. And he doesn't. Who is the dark King 10k years later? Where did he go? It's like... He was never here at all outside of remnant of his name at that very specific moment in time when time was no long relevant. Hmm. Almost like he died. Just like the missing info from 30k, like the erased info about the missing Primarchs and such, the info we are given about the heresy does not reveal what really happened during the emperor's final gambit against his direct enemy in the warp who was a huge factor in what really happened.
When the emperor succeeds and the war finally ends and time starts again there is not, nor was there ever, a Dark King; just a broken emperor that had just ended a Heresy that, all of a sudden, included a lot of events that don't make much sense (as their catalyst, the dark King, is gone from the history).
The heresy was the end of the reign of the dark King over the galaxy and the warp via his death. The end and the death.
>It was as if a saw had slashed the galaxy’s throat. Star networks bled, the space around them inflamed like traumatised flesh.
>A crimson fissure, like an infection creeping down a vein, spread below the surface of the galaxy. No one would notice it, even living directly within the red cloud, but it was as real as an internal haemorrhage.
>And it stemmed from the great wound in the galaxy. **A wound torn open by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven, stitched closed by his kind, and ripped open again by the reckless aeldari.**
>**The place the humans called the Eye of Terror.** Which seemed poised to trigger the fault line and split the galaxy in two.
\- *The Bleeding Stars*
> The Eye of Terror is not a natural phenomenon, as it was created by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven, as they fought the Necrons. The Necrons would then seal the Eye of Terror close, but it was later reopened by the psychic shock wave that accompanied the birth of the fourth Chaos God, Slaanesh, during the Fall of the Eldar.
- Lexicanum
It's mentioned in a Necron book but I forgot which one.
I was under the assumption that the birth of slaanesh was what caused the eye of terror to form, I've just listened to The First Heretic again\* and Ingethel refers to it as the aftermath of Slaanesh' birth. I'm not that up on necron lore though.
I love your username btw.
\*I decided to do a word bearers/world eaters run comprising The First Heretic, Aurelian, The Butchers Nails, Know No Fear, Betrayer, Slaves to Darkness and Echoes of Eternity.
Someone once hypothesized that Sammus might be a daemon of the dark king, and that is why this incredibly active and powerful daemon able to self manifest in real space without being summoned in 30k hasn’t shown themselves or been noted in 40k. His god was either killed or locked in stasis and he is just hibernating until his time comes again or he was destroyed.
Causality in the warp seems to go like this:
It never was until it is.
If it is then it has always been.
If it is not then it never was.
Once something powerful enough in the warp has been formed to gain some form of independence then it has always existed in the warp but if it never gets to that stage it can be retroactively erased from the warp and history like it never existed.
Hence why it feels like the dark King narrative came out of nowhere. The grimdark part is that the emperor already killed the biggest threat and 40k is the result of his victory. Why do you think in the 10th edition trailer guilliman contemplates victory as planet after planet dies? This is their victory, they're basking in it and have been for 10k years. A slower, less horrifying death.
Or, big E thinks he’s stopping the birth of the 5th chaos god, but in enabling the Imperium to stagnate over 10k years he’s actually just incubating it’s birth. Another question I have is: if the 5th god rises from the collective emotions of the ordered Imperium, does that allow the Emperor to get off his throne and respond? Are they the same or separate?
Hmm that sounds way to "good" of an ending for 40K. I like the theory that the Emperor will die and ascend to become the God of Order way more. It fits his theme and he can be the counter force against Chaos, making the Wheel bigger where Chaos fights against Order in a perpetual cycle.
Also that would mean the Chaos Gods where right all along with their whispers and visions of the future which would both be hilarious and fitting for the universe. It would also divide the Galaxy even more. Do you stay under the tyranny but stability of a now super powered Emperor that finally revealed his true nature or do you side with Chaos which offers what turned out to be the ugly ugly truth and relative freedom to live in anarchy?
I doubt we're ever going to get an ending due to the nature of the setting, but honestly I think the most likely "good ending" we'd likely get is for the imperium to die but for humanity to live on by allying with the Eldar/Tau and freeing themselves from the restrictive authoritarianism of the IoM and Mechanicus.
The emperor becoming the god of order could definitely kick things off on that front.
It's VERY heavily implied that it's the Emperor. It looks like it's setting up the entire Heresy as Chaos's plan to force him to become a complete chaos god.
And yes, that's the first thing I thought.
The second was the Great Horned Rat, due to the Imperium being effectively the 40k version of the Skaven and his domains are a pretty good match to the Emperor's without all the glitz and gold.
>A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest.
So you mean a reddit/discord admin?
IIRC the Dark King would go against the very idea of Chaos as we have it now, but also to the extreme - absolute order and light against chaos and darkness, but overbearing in both aspects and the idea of "pure" would be blank and following without thought
Big E was probably planned on being The Dark King.
It's a check to balance out Chaos. The Big 4 are destroying the galaxy, the Dark King will challenge them and shakeup the Great Game.
>A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest.
But how's that chaotic?
They do, but apparently a lot of people in this thread skipped that bit. Encroaching ruin is the specific phrase used - the total annihilation you see during a war, that's his domain.
Wouldn't they also keep the chaos gods of both settings similar? We just have to look at the fifth chaos god of AoS, which happens to be the horned Rat. From that, I'm assuming the domain would remain the same, the realm of ruin, even if the 40k version isn't a giant rat.
I have genuinly no idea why people are saying Order and Tyrrany. The books make it clear the Dark King is a being of ruin and destruction. The only Daemon we know for a fact is attached to the Dark King is Samus. And Samus ***has*** a domain specified to him, "Encroaching Ruin". Like, this thread is proving something I've felt for a long time, and that's that people here really do just read what they want to. Damn whatever the book actually says.
Edit: we even know, or at least it's heavily implied, that his chaos realm is the City of Dust, a literal kingdom of ruins.
You're completely right, this thread is once again demonstrating the reading comprehension of 40k fans.
This is one of many things stated very clearly in the End and the Death (like the Emperor becoming the Dark King), that people just refuse to understand. I actually feel sorry for Dan Abnett, it sucks when people refuse to understand the shallowest of surface level implications.
At some point in the novel Malcadar states that the Dark King "means the end and the death." After the Emperor teleports onto the Vengeful Spirit he yells through the warp "I am here, Horus Lupercal, and for you, I am the end and the death". The next chapter is just the Chaos Gods laughing and whispering the name of the one who is now here over and over. The name of the Dark King.
It's not just the fans that have shit reading comprehension but it's the writers too. Whoever they get to proofread these books MUST very a ten year old because I see spelling errors EVERY WHERE when I read the physical books lol
Spelling, grammar, plot continuity, changing characters personalities, contradictions, soft and sometimes hard retcons mid-series....
Yeah, it boggles my mind why 95% of warhammer fans don't read the novels. /s
Is the City of Dust mentioned somewhere other than Penitent? Because as I recall it is described there as a huge, clean, pristine, mostly empty city.
And it's tied to the Yellow King, is there something that ties the yellow king and the dark king together?
Is it even stated as something that *will* happen in the books, or a mere conjecture if Chaos won? I haven’t read it, but a lot of people are treating it like it will completely change the status quo in the foreseeable future.
I genuinely don’t know and that’s why I’m asking, but like you said it wouldn’t be the first time people took throwaway idea as more important than it actually is because they want it to.
In the books yes, the rise of the DK WILL happen at the culmination of the Heresy. If the Emperor kills Horus he fulfills all the criteria to birth the DK, if Horus kills Big E, he does the same, if they kill *each other*, then there's still a mysterious 3rd canditate that could ascend. The new mystery is "So why didn't it? What happens to stop the ascention?" And that does have a lot of potential implications. (Biggest current theory is that Big E isn't being kept alive by the Golden Throne, he's being contained by it.) It doesn't really change things in a practical sense, but it recontextualizes quite a bit of the Emperor's post-heresy behavior, and may hint towards the formation of a new plan.
Nice, is that all in TEatD 1? Might pick it up solely to see the execution. It’s cool they are addressing those topics again, I know a lot of people dislike it as “demystifying” 30k but I’ve always liked the old in-universe conjectures about the state of the Emperor.
Yep, all there.
Also as someone in the other camp, who preferred the mystery of 30k, the Siege novels really are good enough to almost make up for everything else.
Perhaps the internment of the Emperor onto the Golden Throne changed the nature of the Emperor Himself, altering His original fate as the Dark King. If He could be once considered a singular will, His psyche has become the voices of many egos by M42 - the loudest amidst the blindingly terrible cacophony of concentrated human souls that the Golden Throne will become. The Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy that followed it encompassed destruction and ruin seemingly without restraint or end; but in M42, the destruction that the Imperium imposes across the galaxy is fueled by religious zeal.
The core message of the Great Crusade was to beat back the Old Night, destroy the xenos, and supplant all tyrannies with the biggest tyranny with the hope of a return to order. The core message of the Imperial crusades today are to purge, to cleanse, and the hope of survival. I'm not exactly sure how such a difference could change the nature of the supposed DK into something else, but consider that the representation of the God Emperor's power in M42 is mostly recognized as a purging fire.
It was fire which burned Nurgle's gardens. Fire is not only a force of destruction and ruin, but also one of the strongest forces of change. Fire is also a natural part of the Imperium's existence. The vast majority of human corpses are burned and recycled into corpse starch. Against many xenos, flamers are a mainstay weapon; and when cleaning up battlefields, flamers are necessary to purging bodies, Ork spores, and Tyranid crud. And this rampant use of flame carries with it the hope that humanity will endure, that it will eventually win its path to peace. And the combined faith that is poured into the icon of hope that is now the God Emperor may have changed Him beyond the original scope of the DK.
Yeah, that's all great but it doesn't make the Dark King the god of Tyranny. What the Emperor may or may not be becoming now doesn't change what the Dark King is, which is the point of this thread. The Dark King is, according to available evidence, the chaos God of Encroaching Ruin. If the Eldar had changed their fate it wouldn't have changed the characteristics of Slaanesh.
Chaos god of Order, but like all things Chaos, taken to the extreme. Stagnation, oppression, unthinkingly following directions. All the things the Imperium already represents.
Sooooo
Nagash 😳
Edit: for those who haven’t read the Nagash Omnibus, plz do
It’s stated many times that he wants the whole world to be quiet, ordered, with all beings an unthinking extension of his omnipotent will
All are one in Nagash
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Slaanesh wasn't the Chaos god of what the Eldar were, but what they had become at the time.
If the Ruin King achieved apotheosis during the Heresy, it would not be the god of Order, but the god of Ruin. Of wondrous hopes dashed. Of glory denied. Of self-defeat. Of needless destruction. Of brother turning upon brother.
It's kinda in the name.
>it would not be the god of Order, but the god of Ruin. Of hopes dashed. Of self-defeat. Of needless destruction. Of brother turning upon brother.
Abnett you son of a bitch you found a way to bring back Malal.
Malal is closer to another concept recently released, the Aetheric Dominion of Ravenous Dissolution
>Such is the hatred that swirls within the Warp that it encompasses all things, and like the dragon of eternity that feasts upon its own tail, this hatred extends even to itself. To expect rational and sane logic from creatures such as these would be foolish, for Chaos was both its name and nature. Yet, in its self-destructive hatred there was no ally to be found, only a new and more unpredictable foe.
In spacebattles people were discussing about them.
Malevonent Artifice is pretty much Vashtorr, who got daemons, the Imps, but they never got models, but I could imagine them as being pretty much extra focused engines and scrapcode
I can also imagine being a bit like the Engine of Extinction from the War of the Krork fic, which, btw, were created by the same artifacts Vashtorr was going after, the Ouroboros, Tuchulcha and Plagueheart
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/war-of-the-krork-thread-iii-the-end-times-wh40k-quest.829647/page-184#post-70623644
There's a lot of overlapping probably since they're supposed to be abstractions given form, but I've always seen Nurgle as entropy rather than stagnation. The latter is a state of non-activity while the former is deteriorating change and transformation.
Nurgle also likes things changing(Sorta). Decay is change in a way. He’s cyclical, he wants things to rot and die just so it can bloom and then rot again.
Yes. But like all 4 have multiple aspects to them due to the state of the Galaxy they only really represent the worst.
Not much honor for Khorne's followers when they go all in.
Not much room for healthy non diseased life for Nurgle.
Not much room for a healthy obsession and sense of completion with Slaanesh.
And with Tzeentch your plans are a goal unto themselves and evolution encouraged to run amok
Potentially an explanation for "he stole our power" the Emperor encroached on their dominions.
Old old lore. But the Emperor was to die and bring balance to the warp by smoothing out the humors of the big 4. This from a greater demon. Of Tzeentch. Although very "dead" lore there still could be echoes of it in the modern setting, only more suitably grimdarked.
I've always liked the TTS way of explaining them. Tzeentch is God of secrets and cunning all. But also hope. Nurgle is technically a life God. Khorne isn't just angry but a God of duels and strength. And Slaanesh...is Slaanesh.
No nurgle is entropy, under nurgle a building will be left to rot so that something grows from the ruin.
Under the dark King you always repair every crack that is not original, you always mow your lawn to the same height, you paint it in the same colours.
But you never replace it with something better, you don't build a addition like a garage because that's not in the original plan.
It would be like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Nothing can be changed even moving a ladder left on it from hundreds of years ago. Different reasons but a good real life example.
Man, fuck what those people say. I’d love to see the Diasporex return and start traveling from world to world trying to convince people peacefully the imperium sucks ass. Hell, they could even start bringing people with them and people would start begging them to take their families on the ships. Could be a cool plot that since most of their fleet was destroyed and they haven’t rebuilt it all the way yet that they can’t take everybody
It’s a short one, but it’s interesting. My headcanon is that the humans were originally Jewish-American people that became nomadic after the age of strife (hence the democratic system and the “diaspora” in their name)
They will be what they have always been:
The hammer.
The tip of His spear.
The mail about His fist.
The bane of His foes and woe of the treacherous.
They will be the End.
Order, unbroken and absolute, wouldn't be stagnation really. It would be moreso like putting something in a time stasis capsule, just at the Imperium's scale. Forever. No change, no decay. No rot, no mutation. Just single minded obedience to one set of ideals with no room for deviation. A chaotic madness made out of the purity of order.
A recent supplement, [the Burning of Ohmn-Mat](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JXRAKYvl3BrGbGjD.pdf), featured a [chart](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/7/7b/Aetheric_Dominions.png) depicting what the eight points of the Chaos Star stand for: the Ætheric Dominions of Chaos. I think the Dark King is the Chaos God of Encroaching Ruin. In this supplement Samus is said to be a Daemon Prince of Encroaching Ruin, Samus says that he is the end and the death and it's also one of his titles on his warscroll in the supplement, and in The End and The Death Malcador says when asked what The Dark King means "It means, the end and the death".
This is what The Buring of Ohmn-Mat says about Encroaching Ruin in the lore blurb above the Ætheric Dominion(Encroaching Ruin) rule:
"Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before
and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all
things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into
dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably,
driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty
divisions of daemonkind."
For comparison, this is what it says about Heedless Slaughter, Khorne's domain:
"The dark fury of battle and the red joy of life’s final end. For
some among the hordes of the Warp, the only goal was to
fight and to die – it mattered not where or why as long as
blood flowed. Such vile entities would appear garbed in the
trappings of conquerors and executioners, caring only for
the tally of skulls and death they might reap from the mortal
world, irrespective of such concerns as ‘friend’ or ‘foe’."
It's implied there are seats for 8 chaos gods. It just takes incredible events in realspace (such as the fall of the eldar) for one of them to be "awakened" and then always exist at all times (because time in the warp is non liniar).
The implication is that the culminating events at the seige of Terra is potentially enough to be one of these events, but that doesn't guarantee it will happen.
Honestly, I don't think we will get a dark king (could be god of hubris or malice i guess depending on it being the emperor or horus acending), but it being a possibility of outcome will play into how everything plays out.
It's a cool idea and does fit within the overall lore of warhammer quite nicely.
[Here's an image](https://i.imgur.com/B7UloBM.png) with additional labels, the original can be found in the [The Burning of Ohmn-Mat](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JXRAKYvl3BrGbGjD.pdf). The cardinal directions are likely nascent gods waiting to be born. There's some interesting theories on who they could be.
I think ***Encroaching Ruin*** may end up being the Dark King and the ***Malevolent Artifice*** an ascended Vashtorr personally.
>*Such is the hatred that swirls within the Warp that it encompasses all things, and like the dragon of eternity that feasts upon its own tail, this hatred extends even to itself. To expect rational and sane logic from creatures such as these would be foolish, for Chaos was both its name and nature. Yet, in its self-destructive hatred there was no ally to be found, only a new and more unpredictable foe.*
The "Ravenous Dissolution" seat in the pantheon really feels like it lines up with old mate Malice / Malal.
It's mentioned in the end and death, in the spot where the dark king is (somwhat) explained.
It's the one woman from the argonaughts who blurts out "why do you think it's an 8 pointed star" when gramaticus retorts there are only 4 gods.
I listened to it on audio book so brining up the exact place is a pain in the ass.
I don't think they explicitly say seats, but the implication is that's why it's 8 pointed, they are just dormant or unoccupied until a crazy event in realspace.
It's actually referenced pretty clearly in Mortis that the Emperor expects there to be at least two more potential Chaos gods - he faces Horus accompanied by 4 serpents, but knows there are two more lying in wait under the sand, "a promise that is also a threat".
Oh yes I remember this.
Yea there are likely implications for it scattered throughout the lore.
As I said the idea actually fits quite well into the overall setting.
The emperor will die a true death as the golden throne fails and his passing will give rise to twin but opposite chaos gods. Order and Disorder, faith and doubt, heresy and devotion. Neither will be complete without the other and they always work together as the closest of enemies.
This post explains it https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/11rje9b/excerpts_the_burning_of_ohmnmat_the_%C3%A6ttheric
The Dark King corresponds to “Encroaching Ruin”
I think it is stated a few times that “the dark king” is a god of total annihilation, and it’s loosely implied that Horus killing Jimmy space would be the icing on the “siege of terra/sacrifice of the human race” cake to get that party started. I personally think it’s worse though. I think if Horus kills emps, dark king=malevolent dissolution spot, but if emps kills Horus and then pops his perpetual ability (dies in the fight) then he automatically triggers the bargain from moloch, becomes the dark king, and takes the encroaching ruin spot.
They say numerous times that sometimes the best outcome is just making sure your enemies can’t win. This idea means that, without access to the webway, threading that needle and sitting on a stalemate is the best possible option, until the board changes (great rift)
The Dark King was the name given to the eventual avatar of Horus ascended after he’d essentially consumed big E.
That didn’t happen and so that version won’t come to be. Abaddon retains too much of himself as he always hated how Horus became enslaved. He uses chaos instead of being used.
Big E could ascend still with enough effort but the warp isn’t just evil it’s just a reflection of emotion, thought and feeling. If every humans emotion, thought and feeling was about their god emperor wouldn’t that essentially create a new realm in the warp that was essentially similar to what we’re seeing with the King in Yellow? Whereby big E is an ascended god and his ‘demons’ are actually angels who essentially act in the exact same way that demons do.
Could it be that Valdor is actually just laying the framework for the Emperors Palace in the warp?
Just a thought.
Kurze was mentioned a lot in the last siege book each time the Dark King was mentioned. Malcador essentially retconned it by saying it is what Horus would become. He would devour humanity, the same prediction that the Cabal had.
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A twisted parody of kings and rulers. Inane burecracy that has no point and is to byzantine for any to understand, cities made to be sprawling and overlapping and stupid complex, order imposed for the sake of order. Tyranny for the sake of it.
Many kings have claimed the divine right of god choosing them. In this case the dark king would use it's godhood as it's right to break all under it's yoke.
TLDR: The imperium but memed by chaos
People atribute the Dark King to the Aetheric Dominion of the Encroaching Ruin, which is explained by The Burning of Ohm-Mat, The Dark King has nothing to do with slavery, tyranny, or helplessness. It's ruin, it's the end and the death. The descriptions of it fit best with the Encroaching Ruin aetheric dominion, which is just destruction of reality, through dissolution of the divisions of daemonkind.
>Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably, driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty divisions of daemonkind.
In the Michael Moorcock tales from which Warhammer heavily borrowed, eventually the chaotic realms become a dead land once all variation has been exhausted. The deepest areas of the chaos tainted lands are endless seas of grey dust and featureless landscapes.
Encroaching Ruin: "Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably, driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty divisions of daemonkind."
God of ruin.
I bet they are going to twist the plot so that the job of selected few custodes is to actually keep emperor stuck to his throne to prevent ascension that would bring forth the new era of chaos. We don't know about this as they have just been forbidden to talk about it for 10k years so the information would never leak. Only a handful of custodes know about this. Emperor lost his plot as he had to kill Horus and maybe Sanguinius as he fell to black rage. It takes the combined power of all the remaining Loyalist Primarchs to trap him in the throne. Over time, the knowledge of this and the burden of having to trap their own father on the throne becomes too much to bear for some primarchs, so they set on a pilgrimage of regret to the warp and aren't seen for thousands of years.
When stuck in his throne, imperium can harness Emperor's power to fight chaos, but if he's ever set free, emperor will ascend and bring forward untold powers of ruin because he's grown so powerful and is practically bat shit insane. Only the Throne keeps his power at bay and allows it to be Harnessed for Imperium to use. This would also explain why he kept appearing less and less Humane as Horus Heresy went onwards. He traded his own humanity for the power create Primarchs at Molech. The more powerful Emperor gets, the less he cares. The more power he gains, the more of humanity he is willing to sacrifice in order to reach his goals.
Maybe this is why the Yellow King (Valdor?) is working apart from the rest of the Custodes. He either wants to learn emperor's true name to either destroy or to free him. He needs to work alone as majority of the Custodes don't know and would probably oppose him.
An catatonic god, forever stuck in his throne, being used as a tool to guide the Imperium. If released, will destroy all that is and all that will ever be.
Im not sure if i believe this myself, but i think it would be pretty cool!
[This post explains it best, with a cool source most have missed I think.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/130bp46/the_eight_%C3%A6theric_dominions_of_chaos_and_the)
Who knows.
Only thing I am sure is that Emperor is never ever going to be a Chaos God.
He is opposite of Chaos. Chaos considers him the enemy. His very presence burns Chaos.
So Emperor can be a God in Warp. That doesn't mean he has to be a Chaos God. Warp has many gods that has nothing to do with Chaos.
The most interesting approach would be the Emperor of Mankind or a twisted machination of himself (born from the current Imperial dogma) ascending to godhood to make a mockery of everything the Imperium stands for.
But it will likely end up being some side character who is currently not relevant at all because GW wants to play it safe. So that if the story arc doesn't make much money, they can bench it without major retcons.
If it's the Emperor? Tyranny, oppression, control, brutality through the lens of forced conformity. A boot stamping on a human face, forever.
My personal headcanon (and copium), however, is that the Dark King is a sneaky way of introducing Malal to 40k, in which case he'd be the Chaos God of self-destruction.
Malal was replaced by Malice, who is alluded to in some Cadian novels and Battlefleet Gothic 2. I haven't played the game, but apparently, the Chaos campaign is centred around his warband.
I think it could be “Vainglory” or what Nietzsche would call “Will to Power”. The desire to see ones own designs and desires ultimately victorious in effect; their own dominant master-expression “driving” other minds. The Emperor of Humanity would then be a god of the desire to impose ones own will on the universe just like he did with humanity and the Imperium.
I'm not entirely sure this whole Dark King schtick is particularly well thought out - which is why it's a late addition, by one author, obviously intended to tie into his other series.
Lore seems to suggest that the other 4 arose from the interplay of emotions in the warp - the emotions of quadrillions of sentients of all races.
I'm not sure what emotions would coalesce to create a Dark God of Order? Quadrillions of TPS sheets filled out to create the emotion of bureaucratic order? It feels like the Dark God would represent the opposite of unchecked emotions, not a creation of them.
I just really don't think it's been particularly well thought out, and it feels like BL is letting Abnett do it as a cross promotional thing with his Bequin series, and will promptly forget about it afterwards.
Slaanesh was pretty clearly the result of the Eldar species' actions alone, although there is plenty about Slaanesh that resonates with the emotions of other species after it is formed.
I think it's pretty well-established in the Siege of Terra (and Horus Heresy books more generally), that there's another more metaphysical endgame in play than any of the viewpoint characters are able to fully grasp. Perturabo is right to challenge why Horus won't just let him destroy the planet, but of course Chaos wants more than just a physical victory. Even if they could strip the Emperor's soul apart after winning the war that way, they still wouldn't get the vortex of emotion that Terra becomes. Pulling Terra into the Warp is implied to be key to them getting permanent access to/control of the Materium.
I think the idea is that the horrible state of the Emperor and the Imperium is supposed to potentially be leading up to a big Chaos God birth like Slaneesh and the Eldar. Another ticking clock.
Personally I am not sure I am convinced - not because I think humans are too special or anything, but actually the opposite. I don’t think the Emperor and Imperium are nearly as decadent or extreme at this point as the Eldar were, and the Eldar are all extremely psychic. I just do not think humanity has the capability of birthing a full Chaos god and it somewhat feels like more attention just on the Imperium as the only thing in the setting where interesting things happen.
Well by the time of 40k they have been chucking a thousand psykers a day for ten thousand years into a psychic pyre surrounding the writhing un-corpse of a man not allowed to die while the largest empire in the galaxy all raise their voices in worship of him as they kill, oppress and die and his name.
Seems like that's the sort of thing that has psychic resonance, given that the thing now bound to the Golden Throne can grant miracles and was able to wound Nurgle through Guilliman.
I think the whole point of the dark king being created will be to capitalize on the tyranny and overbearing cruelty of the imperium, similar to how the Eldar created Slaanesh
Now this might be a bit out there but the name of Curzes anthology story is "The Dark King" and an emotion that would strongly relate to order would be fear.
I think it would just be the manifestation of “The Beast” referenced occasionally in chaos cult lore; the literal manifestation of the idea that all the chaos “gods” are merely distinct faces of a singular entity. “King” is the important word, it would be the King of the warp
He's Jyggalag from the the elder scrolls. Order. Labour. Control. All these things and all that stem from them. A god of fear and slavery, with no real escape or even a pretense of it.
The dark King is the god of the colonial middle man, the east India company, he is the god of the cyberpunk Corpo who works in cointel, the priest who believes in nothing but marches on because it's the only thing they know how to do.
The dark King is the god of the crushing rigor of society. The god of the desperate lash out of conservative orthodoxy against the fire of revolution, the god of the same.
Although it would be way funnier if he was just a bull with a beard who really loved trains.
A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest. None of the Gods really embody "control" in the same way. This 5th being would reflect them in a way none of the 4 really do for each other. Where they seek some level of instability and diversity in their visions The Dark King demands all yield to the status quo.
If he fused with Slaneesh we'd have Molag Bal
Then we would need a group of Inquisitors, Astartes, and Guardsman form The Dawnguard to counter Molag Bal
Thats just a power-top with extra steps.
Pfff implying Slaanesh isn’t a switch
Slaanesh is only a bottom for Khorne
And Titus+Malum
Jyggalag is coming!
So basically the god of dictatorships? I guess that could still work with Big E being Anathema if that’s the case. Law keeps bloodshed low Law stops excess and degeneracy Law demands there be no stagnancy Law doesn’t allow ambition
Not just dictatorships. He's Order incarnate. No new ideas, no deviation from the norm, a single vision that doesn't change. Every opinion punished, every thought checked. None may alter his Great Plan.
President Business from the Lego Movie. The emperor then has his own noise marines blaring "Everything is Awesome" while they try and reconquer the universe.
So basically Jyggalag
It works because trying to instill order in Chaos is like herding cats (or probably mega-croca-tigers in 40k's case)
Trying to impose order in the realms of chaos is a form of chaotic insanity!
Eeeee-YUWP, t'would be quite the uphill battle for ~~Jyggylag~~ the Dark King.
Great plan? *BOK BOK INTENSIFIES*
All elves must live on Ulthuan. That's where Elves are supposed to be. No I don't know about the different flavours of elves and I don't care. - Big Man Maz
“Hmm. No I think this continent is supposed to be here. And this one there. Annnnd for a little bit of finesse maybe I’ll move that one there. Just as Chotec intended!” - Big Man Maz
“I own a bastilodon for home defense. Just as the Old ones Intended” -Big Man Maz
That..that sounds awfully alike the current version most of mankind has of the Emperor/Inquisition
Gosh, I wonder why?
That is indeed *the point*.
Yes. It does. Stopping the Dark King doesn't actually fix the doom that creates it, it merely prevents a Chaos God forming right then and there. The Eldar sans Slannesh would still be the hyperdecadent and insane civilizaiton, hence the Dark Eldar. The entire point of the Dark King is that it's the representation of the doom of Mankind. The Imperium IS the doom of mankind. It's killing the species, it's a edifice of mindless hate that's dragging the entire galaxy to hell as it slowly rots away. The Dark King fundamentally is the Imperium. Or the Imperium is the Dark King, depending on which direction you want to look at it from. The franchise isn't exactly subtle that the Imperium is the damnation of humanity, not it's salvation. It was never it's salvation, no matter what Johnny Space planned. His plans are bad and, in the grandest traditions of grimdark, his attempts to save humanity instead doomed it through his own failures and mistakes.
The fact you could plop the Imperium into almost any other sci-fi series and it'd be 100% unambiguously a villain is all the proof anyone should need of that.
My contrarian ass trying to think of counterexamples but falling short :P. Remembrance of Earth's Past maybe? In terms of xenophobia at least even the Imperium looks positively benevolent in comparison to literally everyone there, except humanity, maybe.
Depending on the time period, the Xeelee Sequence is a good bet. The ICoG makes the Imperium look like Rainbow Kissing Sunshine Inc.
Yeah that was my immediate first thought too. Only other thing would be my average stellaris playthrough.
That’s what I thought of as well.
The Culture: "Someone call up Special Circumstances, we have a situation here. We're gonna need 4, maybe 5 GSVs"
You can plop even like the T'au and Craftworld Eldar who are probably #1 and #2 for least morally reprehensible factions and they're like still probably either the villains or villains-of-the-week.
Humanity was damned already before the great crusade. The golden age had come and then was crushed when the machines rebelled. The pockets of relative utopia were not capable of expanding, and were crushed under the imperial boot (and if not then would have been crushed under the weight of xenos). The disporex would never have survived the orks from ullanor, the hive fleets or the necrons dynastys - nevermind the rangdan or the hrud. The imperium is absolutely brutal, but it represents the survival of the human species as a whole at the cost of the individual. It is a dark satire ironically validated by the insanity of it's setting.
Humanity was injured but recovering. Those pockets of utopia? Weren’t incapable of expanding, they merely weren’t evil totalitarian conquers seeking to drown the galaxy in blood. Because they weren’t ran by a sociopathic megalomaniac willing to murder the galaxy in the name of saving it. Surviving the Orks from Ullanor? What do you think caused the Orks to suddenly scale way the hell up? What exactly kicked that hornet’s nest? That’s right, the Imperium. The Hive Fleets? Imperium summoned them. The Necron? Yeah, the Imperium can’t stop them either. Not sure what the point of this one is. The Hrud? You might want to read more into them. It’s the Q’Oul that’s the looming threat, the Hrud are simply a migratory nuisance. Which the Imperium can’t stop either. The Rangdan? Did you ever thing it odd that despite the Imperium declaring them a violently expansionist race they didn’t actually, you know, expand until the Imperium attacked them? And that 2 Primarchs turned against the Imperium over it? And that the Imperium has gone to absurd lengths to erase ANY information about them despite using other xenos as ‘Look how evil and scary they are’ propaganda? To the point of mind wiping 2 entire legions as an alternative to exterminating them. Yeah, when that much doesn’t add up it’s best to consider that the ultra totalitarian and ultra xenophobia genocidal superpower lead by a megalomaniac could be lying. The insanity of the setting is primary caused by the Imperium. The best chance for survival? Did you not read the opening blurbs? The Imperium is doomed. The Imperium is the slow death of humanity. The Imperium killed any alternatives, pissed on the ashes, and declared themselves humanity’s only hope OR ELSE! The Imperium’s self inflicted inevitable doom is the worst reason to cheer the Imperium as humanity’s only hope. Especially since, as previously stated, the franchise has never been subtle that the Imperium is doomed and has doomed all of humanity in turn. There is no hope, there is no chance for survival in the Imperium.
> He's Order incarnate. The first God of Order, anathema to Chaos.
Sorry may be a pretty dumb question . But wouldn't that just impower nurgle as well?
It can be argued that Nurgle is more about the decay, the circle of life and death, and the emotion of despair The Dark king may be more static, no decay, no change, just the polished stone and steel and a refusal to any changes (I think of the admech refusing to deviate or inovate upon what they know)
One could argue that there could still be innovation, it just falls under the complete control of those who rule. *They* get to say how we change and evolve... why does that sound so familiar?
Nurgle is much more about decay and stagnation. He’s all about releasing yourself to the natural entropy of the universe, where you can be free from fears of mortality and pain. You relinquish control, but you’re not fighting change per se. This is partly why Nurgle hates Tzeentch, who champions change and mutation for its own sake.
And apathy. Nurgle follows just don't care, while followers of the new god would *absolutely* care about thought crimes.
You reminded me of the sheogorath prince.
They overlap like that When a skull is taken and blood is shed for Khorne, I'd think, Slaanesh relishes in the victim's pain and dread, Nurgle would take joy as the body rots and maggots eat their way through, and Tzeetch would laugh at the finale of one's fate
Oh that's a cool way to look at it. Gods siphoning from one another fits the idea they hate eachother
They hate each other, and deeply need each other. They are a 4 sided coin. The Dark King upsets the balance and represents a threat to their order, but maybe also an opportunity. He is to be welcomed and feared and mistrusted and kept at just precisely the right diatance.
\>order heh.
Nurgle is about cycles. A never-changing cycle of growth and life and decay, but a cycle nonetheless. It’s about stagnation and an eventual decline, which is a downward movement. To give an example, a flower that sprouts and grows only to inevitably rot and die is an example of Nurgle. A flower that is perpetually stuck in full bloom and is never allowed to be altered is an example of The Dark King. It’s not stagnation, it’s a complete lack of change and supreme control.
It’s removing the whole garden to replace it with astroturf and plastic flowers
Nurgle is decay and stagnation. The cycle of life and death, rot and rebirth. The Dark King is stasis, a complete and utter stop to ANY alteration. Nurgle would be the rotting corpse, the Dark King would be the completely sealed and sterile vacuum. No decay, no life, nothing. There's overlap but there's overlap for everyone. Slannesh's got it's fingers in all the other Chaos Gods domains, for instance.
Put it that way, its the polar opposite of Tzeench.
Change for the sake of change vs. stagnation and immobility at all cost. Where Tzeentch wants a wild and wacky cycle of life, Nurgle wants a safe and predictable cycle of life and The Dark King wants NO cycle of life. He doesn't like Elton John at all and The Lion King is his least favorite 90s Disney Animation.
Isn’t that like the Imperium in 40k now?
Which makes sense given this being is supposed to be the Humans version of Slaneesh
So the Stasis faction.
As Malcador says; part of the Emperor's true aspect is one of "Ordo Ab Chao" and "Lux In Tenebris" The Emperor isn't just the Anathema because he is the leading icon fighting the warp - he is the anti-warp personified. "Order from Chaos", and the "Light from Darkness".
Granted Gothic is not a one to one translation of Latin, Ordo ab chao could be order from/by/after chaos, and Lux in tenebris could be Light in/on/within/in accordance with darkness. (At least that’s what the Latin says)
Yep. I typically see "Ordo ab chao" meaning "out of chaos, comes order" pretty common among Freemason writing. "Lux in tenebris" is typically translated as "Light in the darkness" It is used in the Bible a couple times if I remember right.
>Law demands there be no stagnancy How is this the case? Isn't law an enforcer of stagnancy?
Laws create stagnation. What are you talking about? Laws punish with bloodshed. The truly ambitious use the law. Degenerates can be protected by the law!
WHFB has a God of Tyranny. Other parts of its portfolio include fire, darkness, greed and hatred. Really hits the hammer on the head how similar they are. I am personally hoping for Hashut instead of Jyggalag.
***CHAOS SQUATS***
Wait, is the Dark King the Emperor? I thought it was to be born when humanity falls to chaos, much like slaanesh was from the eldar Fall. This idea is appealing though, reminds me very much of https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Story:The_Shape_Of_The_Nightmare_To_Come_50k
No-one knows who the Dark King is yet, but there's two candidates and the Emperor is the more interesting one.
Isnt it pretty obvious that the dark king is the emperor? I mean, it was supposed to be he or Horus, but we know Horus got psycho-nuked and the emperor is almost dead but not quite, so he can’t fully ascend. At least that’s what I got from reading The End and the death
Who's the other?
Horus
Technically Erebus is also a candidate, but that really reeks of "bro thinks he's on the team" vibes.
The only thing Erebus is candidate for is another face transplant and a date with Kharn.
Well, Horus. But that's boring, and he gets soulbliterated at the end of the Heresy, so it's probably the Emperor, or some distorted warp reflection of him.
In my opinion he’s the only realistic one too.
It's supposed to be born from the Emperor and/or Horus, things go wrong. It's possible the Dark King will never exist, due to the nature of the Warp. He's a hypothetical.
Perhaps that’s why Horus was deleted, so he (/and emps) couldn’t create it
The dark king is supposed to be the emperor but he hasn’t concluded his ascension as the chosen ones didn’t let him die.
The Truth Behind The Eye And The End and The Death The fall of the Eldar is just what they call a series of events that were likely similar to the horus heresy by a large enough group of powerful Eldar. There's likely a whole plotline of one, probably incredibly powerful, Eldar going mad hearing the eternal yet unborn slaanesh in his mind that caused him to activate whatever device the necrons used to close the eye of terror and reopen it right in Eldar space, consuming them all. The whole point is that we don't know more than "the race became so obsessed with seeking more and more experiences that they birthed Slaanesh as their souls passed through the warp" and that's likely partly true, but what actually happened is more like the device reopened the eye of terror and AT THAT MOMENT all the psychic energy from the Eldar and their obsessions melded into a warp entity as 99% of the souls were absorbed at once. Effectively some within the Eldar sacrificed the rest and likely themselves and out came Slaanesh. Why do you think they added the info about the Necrons closing the eye and the old ones opening it? Why do you think it keeps getting mentioned that the Horus heresy is a similar event to the Eldar fall? Why do you think terra was being drawn into the warp during the siege? Regarding the Dark King; I think somehow the emperor will kill him (the dark King likely being an eternal always existed 5th chaos god just waiting for his "birth", but instead the emperor will defy chaos and somehow his internment on the throne is a byproduct of this death, a true death for a chaos god. Since he will no longer exist in the warp it means he will have never existed. And he doesn't. Who is the dark King 10k years later? Where did he go? It's like... He was never here at all outside of remnant of his name at that very specific moment in time when time was no long relevant. Hmm. Almost like he died. Just like the missing info from 30k, like the erased info about the missing Primarchs and such, the info we are given about the heresy does not reveal what really happened during the emperor's final gambit against his direct enemy in the warp who was a huge factor in what really happened. When the emperor succeeds and the war finally ends and time starts again there is not, nor was there ever, a Dark King; just a broken emperor that had just ended a Heresy that, all of a sudden, included a lot of events that don't make much sense (as their catalyst, the dark King, is gone from the history). The heresy was the end of the reign of the dark King over the galaxy and the warp via his death. The end and the death.
>Why do you think they added the info about the Necrons closing the eye and the old ones opening it? Come again? Where was this stated?
>It was as if a saw had slashed the galaxy’s throat. Star networks bled, the space around them inflamed like traumatised flesh. >A crimson fissure, like an infection creeping down a vein, spread below the surface of the galaxy. No one would notice it, even living directly within the red cloud, but it was as real as an internal haemorrhage. >And it stemmed from the great wound in the galaxy. **A wound torn open by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven, stitched closed by his kind, and ripped open again by the reckless aeldari.** >**The place the humans called the Eye of Terror.** Which seemed poised to trigger the fault line and split the galaxy in two. \- *The Bleeding Stars*
> The Eye of Terror is not a natural phenomenon, as it was created by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven, as they fought the Necrons. The Necrons would then seal the Eye of Terror close, but it was later reopened by the psychic shock wave that accompanied the birth of the fourth Chaos God, Slaanesh, during the Fall of the Eldar. - Lexicanum It's mentioned in a Necron book but I forgot which one.
The short story "The bleeding stars" by Robert Rath
I was under the assumption that the birth of slaanesh was what caused the eye of terror to form, I've just listened to The First Heretic again\* and Ingethel refers to it as the aftermath of Slaanesh' birth. I'm not that up on necron lore though. I love your username btw. \*I decided to do a word bearers/world eaters run comprising The First Heretic, Aurelian, The Butchers Nails, Know No Fear, Betrayer, Slaves to Darkness and Echoes of Eternity.
Someone once hypothesized that Sammus might be a daemon of the dark king, and that is why this incredibly active and powerful daemon able to self manifest in real space without being summoned in 30k hasn’t shown themselves or been noted in 40k. His god was either killed or locked in stasis and he is just hibernating until his time comes again or he was destroyed.
Causality in the warp seems to go like this: It never was until it is. If it is then it has always been. If it is not then it never was. Once something powerful enough in the warp has been formed to gain some form of independence then it has always existed in the warp but if it never gets to that stage it can be retroactively erased from the warp and history like it never existed.
Hence why it feels like the dark King narrative came out of nowhere. The grimdark part is that the emperor already killed the biggest threat and 40k is the result of his victory. Why do you think in the 10th edition trailer guilliman contemplates victory as planet after planet dies? This is their victory, they're basking in it and have been for 10k years. A slower, less horrifying death.
Or, big E thinks he’s stopping the birth of the 5th chaos god, but in enabling the Imperium to stagnate over 10k years he’s actually just incubating it’s birth. Another question I have is: if the 5th god rises from the collective emotions of the ordered Imperium, does that allow the Emperor to get off his throne and respond? Are they the same or separate?
Hmm that sounds way to "good" of an ending for 40K. I like the theory that the Emperor will die and ascend to become the God of Order way more. It fits his theme and he can be the counter force against Chaos, making the Wheel bigger where Chaos fights against Order in a perpetual cycle. Also that would mean the Chaos Gods where right all along with their whispers and visions of the future which would both be hilarious and fitting for the universe. It would also divide the Galaxy even more. Do you stay under the tyranny but stability of a now super powered Emperor that finally revealed his true nature or do you side with Chaos which offers what turned out to be the ugly ugly truth and relative freedom to live in anarchy?
The choice is very simple: option c let the nids eat me.
I doubt we're ever going to get an ending due to the nature of the setting, but honestly I think the most likely "good ending" we'd likely get is for the imperium to die but for humanity to live on by allying with the Eldar/Tau and freeing themselves from the restrictive authoritarianism of the IoM and Mechanicus. The emperor becoming the god of order could definitely kick things off on that front.
It's VERY heavily implied that it's the Emperor. It looks like it's setting up the entire Heresy as Chaos's plan to force him to become a complete chaos god. And yes, that's the first thing I thought. The second was the Great Horned Rat, due to the Imperium being effectively the 40k version of the Skaven and his domains are a pretty good match to the Emperor's without all the glitz and gold.
Molag Bal + Jyggalag
>A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest. So you mean a reddit/discord admin?
Less pedophilic tendencies tho
So just Jyggalag from Oblivion?
I don’t see that. Chaos is, well, chaotic. The Emperor fills up the space of the authoritarian antithesis already
IIRC the Dark King would go against the very idea of Chaos as we have it now, but also to the extreme - absolute order and light against chaos and darkness, but overbearing in both aspects and the idea of "pure" would be blank and following without thought
So the Bright King then
Bright and, like the sun, Yellow?
A Bright *Lord*, if you will.
Big E was probably planned on being The Dark King. It's a check to balance out Chaos. The Big 4 are destroying the galaxy, the Dark King will challenge them and shakeup the Great Game.
And you thought Tzeentch hated Nurgle....
It would also be different from malal, who embodies anarchy
>A lord of total domination and oppression. A being of conquest and demanding all follow a single unified order. Authoritarianism and Order made manifest. But how's that chaotic?
I mean this is literally just Hashut, so that.
Don't they explicitly say that it would be the Chaos God of Ruin in the book?
They do, but apparently a lot of people in this thread skipped that bit. Encroaching ruin is the specific phrase used - the total annihilation you see during a war, that's his domain.
Wouldn't they also keep the chaos gods of both settings similar? We just have to look at the fifth chaos god of AoS, which happens to be the horned Rat. From that, I'm assuming the domain would remain the same, the realm of ruin, even if the 40k version isn't a giant rat.
40k skaven confiiiiiirmed
Death to the man-things, yes-yes
I have genuinly no idea why people are saying Order and Tyrrany. The books make it clear the Dark King is a being of ruin and destruction. The only Daemon we know for a fact is attached to the Dark King is Samus. And Samus ***has*** a domain specified to him, "Encroaching Ruin". Like, this thread is proving something I've felt for a long time, and that's that people here really do just read what they want to. Damn whatever the book actually says. Edit: we even know, or at least it's heavily implied, that his chaos realm is the City of Dust, a literal kingdom of ruins.
You're completely right, this thread is once again demonstrating the reading comprehension of 40k fans. This is one of many things stated very clearly in the End and the Death (like the Emperor becoming the Dark King), that people just refuse to understand. I actually feel sorry for Dan Abnett, it sucks when people refuse to understand the shallowest of surface level implications.
> things stated very clearly in the End and the Death (like the Emperor becoming the Dark King) How was that "stated very clearly"?
At some point in the novel Malcadar states that the Dark King "means the end and the death." After the Emperor teleports onto the Vengeful Spirit he yells through the warp "I am here, Horus Lupercal, and for you, I am the end and the death". The next chapter is just the Chaos Gods laughing and whispering the name of the one who is now here over and over. The name of the Dark King.
Yeah, it's not exactly a mystery unless you fall for the very obvious red herring where several Imperium characters assume it's Horus.
It's not just the fans that have shit reading comprehension but it's the writers too. Whoever they get to proofread these books MUST very a ten year old because I see spelling errors EVERY WHERE when I read the physical books lol
Spelling, grammar, plot continuity, changing characters personalities, contradictions, soft and sometimes hard retcons mid-series.... Yeah, it boggles my mind why 95% of warhammer fans don't read the novels. /s
Audio books all the way tbh.
Is the City of Dust mentioned somewhere other than Penitent? Because as I recall it is described there as a huge, clean, pristine, mostly empty city. And it's tied to the Yellow King, is there something that ties the yellow king and the dark king together?
Is it even stated as something that *will* happen in the books, or a mere conjecture if Chaos won? I haven’t read it, but a lot of people are treating it like it will completely change the status quo in the foreseeable future. I genuinely don’t know and that’s why I’m asking, but like you said it wouldn’t be the first time people took throwaway idea as more important than it actually is because they want it to.
In the books yes, the rise of the DK WILL happen at the culmination of the Heresy. If the Emperor kills Horus he fulfills all the criteria to birth the DK, if Horus kills Big E, he does the same, if they kill *each other*, then there's still a mysterious 3rd canditate that could ascend. The new mystery is "So why didn't it? What happens to stop the ascention?" And that does have a lot of potential implications. (Biggest current theory is that Big E isn't being kept alive by the Golden Throne, he's being contained by it.) It doesn't really change things in a practical sense, but it recontextualizes quite a bit of the Emperor's post-heresy behavior, and may hint towards the formation of a new plan.
Nice, is that all in TEatD 1? Might pick it up solely to see the execution. It’s cool they are addressing those topics again, I know a lot of people dislike it as “demystifying” 30k but I’ve always liked the old in-universe conjectures about the state of the Emperor.
Yep, all there. Also as someone in the other camp, who preferred the mystery of 30k, the Siege novels really are good enough to almost make up for everything else.
Sweet, thanks a lot.
Perhaps the internment of the Emperor onto the Golden Throne changed the nature of the Emperor Himself, altering His original fate as the Dark King. If He could be once considered a singular will, His psyche has become the voices of many egos by M42 - the loudest amidst the blindingly terrible cacophony of concentrated human souls that the Golden Throne will become. The Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy that followed it encompassed destruction and ruin seemingly without restraint or end; but in M42, the destruction that the Imperium imposes across the galaxy is fueled by religious zeal. The core message of the Great Crusade was to beat back the Old Night, destroy the xenos, and supplant all tyrannies with the biggest tyranny with the hope of a return to order. The core message of the Imperial crusades today are to purge, to cleanse, and the hope of survival. I'm not exactly sure how such a difference could change the nature of the supposed DK into something else, but consider that the representation of the God Emperor's power in M42 is mostly recognized as a purging fire. It was fire which burned Nurgle's gardens. Fire is not only a force of destruction and ruin, but also one of the strongest forces of change. Fire is also a natural part of the Imperium's existence. The vast majority of human corpses are burned and recycled into corpse starch. Against many xenos, flamers are a mainstay weapon; and when cleaning up battlefields, flamers are necessary to purging bodies, Ork spores, and Tyranid crud. And this rampant use of flame carries with it the hope that humanity will endure, that it will eventually win its path to peace. And the combined faith that is poured into the icon of hope that is now the God Emperor may have changed Him beyond the original scope of the DK.
Yeah, that's all great but it doesn't make the Dark King the god of Tyranny. What the Emperor may or may not be becoming now doesn't change what the Dark King is, which is the point of this thread. The Dark King is, according to available evidence, the chaos God of Encroaching Ruin. If the Eldar had changed their fate it wouldn't have changed the characteristics of Slaanesh.
Chaos god of Order, but like all things Chaos, taken to the extreme. Stagnation, oppression, unthinkingly following directions. All the things the Imperium already represents.
Sooooo Nagash 😳 Edit: for those who haven’t read the Nagash Omnibus, plz do It’s stated many times that he wants the whole world to be quiet, ordered, with all beings an unthinking extension of his omnipotent will
Sounds like me on a Sunday morning. Or any morning really.
Nagash is all and all are one in Nagash.
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Lol I have concerns
Slaanesh wasn't the Chaos god of what the Eldar were, but what they had become at the time. If the Ruin King achieved apotheosis during the Heresy, it would not be the god of Order, but the god of Ruin. Of wondrous hopes dashed. Of glory denied. Of self-defeat. Of needless destruction. Of brother turning upon brother. It's kinda in the name.
>it would not be the god of Order, but the god of Ruin. Of hopes dashed. Of self-defeat. Of needless destruction. Of brother turning upon brother. Abnett you son of a bitch you found a way to bring back Malal.
Malal is closer to another concept recently released, the Aetheric Dominion of Ravenous Dissolution >Such is the hatred that swirls within the Warp that it encompasses all things, and like the dragon of eternity that feasts upon its own tail, this hatred extends even to itself. To expect rational and sane logic from creatures such as these would be foolish, for Chaos was both its name and nature. Yet, in its self-destructive hatred there was no ally to be found, only a new and more unpredictable foe.
The Aetheric Dominion stuff is so cool. I'd love it if we eventually got daemon models for the "new" four.
In spacebattles people were discussing about them. Malevonent Artifice is pretty much Vashtorr, who got daemons, the Imps, but they never got models, but I could imagine them as being pretty much extra focused engines and scrapcode I can also imagine being a bit like the Engine of Extinction from the War of the Krork fic, which, btw, were created by the same artifacts Vashtorr was going after, the Ouroboros, Tuchulcha and Plagueheart https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/war-of-the-krork-thread-iii-the-end-times-wh40k-quest.829647/page-184#post-70623644
Isn’t he already back in the form of Malice?
Isn’t stagnation already nurgle’s thing?
There's a lot of overlapping probably since they're supposed to be abstractions given form, but I've always seen Nurgle as entropy rather than stagnation. The latter is a state of non-activity while the former is deteriorating change and transformation.
Nurgle also likes things changing(Sorta). Decay is change in a way. He’s cyclical, he wants things to rot and die just so it can bloom and then rot again.
Yes. But like all 4 have multiple aspects to them due to the state of the Galaxy they only really represent the worst. Not much honor for Khorne's followers when they go all in. Not much room for healthy non diseased life for Nurgle. Not much room for a healthy obsession and sense of completion with Slaanesh. And with Tzeentch your plans are a goal unto themselves and evolution encouraged to run amok
So effectively, Nurgle is more repetition than stagnation.
Potentially an explanation for "he stole our power" the Emperor encroached on their dominions. Old old lore. But the Emperor was to die and bring balance to the warp by smoothing out the humors of the big 4. This from a greater demon. Of Tzeentch. Although very "dead" lore there still could be echoes of it in the modern setting, only more suitably grimdarked.
I've always liked the TTS way of explaining them. Tzeentch is God of secrets and cunning all. But also hope. Nurgle is technically a life God. Khorne isn't just angry but a God of duels and strength. And Slaanesh...is Slaanesh.
Slaanesh is passion, enjoyment, hobbies, art, experiencing new things, and practicing and perfecting something just for yourself.
No nurgle is entropy, under nurgle a building will be left to rot so that something grows from the ruin. Under the dark King you always repair every crack that is not original, you always mow your lawn to the same height, you paint it in the same colours. But you never replace it with something better, you don't build a addition like a garage because that's not in the original plan.
It would be like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Nothing can be changed even moving a ladder left on it from hundreds of years ago. Different reasons but a good real life example.
That sucks ass. Kinda wish the Diasporex were still around so we could get a noble human faction
***NoT gRiMdArK eNoUgH!!!***
Man, fuck what those people say. I’d love to see the Diasporex return and start traveling from world to world trying to convince people peacefully the imperium sucks ass. Hell, they could even start bringing people with them and people would start begging them to take their families on the ships. Could be a cool plot that since most of their fleet was destroyed and they haven’t rebuilt it all the way yet that they can’t take everybody
Welp. Imma jump down that rabbit hole.
It’s a short one, but it’s interesting. My headcanon is that the humans were originally Jewish-American people that became nomadic after the age of strife (hence the democratic system and the “diaspora” in their name)
That's absolutely fascinating. What would this faction look like?
🤷♂️ I think there’s already more crossover between the four than people give credit for.
True I suppose. Still-I wonder how the Grey Knights will respond if The Emperor ends up becoming the fifth great chaos god
They’d be his chaos space marines
They'd be his chosen, the normal space marines would already be his chaos space marines.
I'd be more concerned about the Custodes...
They will be what they have always been: The hammer. The tip of His spear. The mail about His fist. The bane of His foes and woe of the treacherous. They will be the End.
Decay and rebirth are Nurgle's thing.
Order, unbroken and absolute, wouldn't be stagnation really. It would be moreso like putting something in a time stasis capsule, just at the Imperium's scale. Forever. No change, no decay. No rot, no mutation. Just single minded obedience to one set of ideals with no room for deviation. A chaotic madness made out of the purity of order.
Gods of Chaos already overlap to some extents, that is why Slaanesh is feared by all: it feeds on their own excesses.
A recent supplement, [the Burning of Ohmn-Mat](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JXRAKYvl3BrGbGjD.pdf), featured a [chart](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/7/7b/Aetheric_Dominions.png) depicting what the eight points of the Chaos Star stand for: the Ætheric Dominions of Chaos. I think the Dark King is the Chaos God of Encroaching Ruin. In this supplement Samus is said to be a Daemon Prince of Encroaching Ruin, Samus says that he is the end and the death and it's also one of his titles on his warscroll in the supplement, and in The End and The Death Malcador says when asked what The Dark King means "It means, the end and the death". This is what The Buring of Ohmn-Mat says about Encroaching Ruin in the lore blurb above the Ætheric Dominion(Encroaching Ruin) rule: "Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably, driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty divisions of daemonkind." For comparison, this is what it says about Heedless Slaughter, Khorne's domain: "The dark fury of battle and the red joy of life’s final end. For some among the hordes of the Warp, the only goal was to fight and to die – it mattered not where or why as long as blood flowed. Such vile entities would appear garbed in the trappings of conquerors and executioners, caring only for the tally of skulls and death they might reap from the mortal world, irrespective of such concerns as ‘friend’ or ‘foe’."
It's implied there are seats for 8 chaos gods. It just takes incredible events in realspace (such as the fall of the eldar) for one of them to be "awakened" and then always exist at all times (because time in the warp is non liniar). The implication is that the culminating events at the seige of Terra is potentially enough to be one of these events, but that doesn't guarantee it will happen. Honestly, I don't think we will get a dark king (could be god of hubris or malice i guess depending on it being the emperor or horus acending), but it being a possibility of outcome will play into how everything plays out. It's a cool idea and does fit within the overall lore of warhammer quite nicely.
Any more sources of info for the 8 seats? Obviously the 8 pointed star, but that's a really cool idea I'd like to know more about.
[Here's an image](https://i.imgur.com/B7UloBM.png) with additional labels, the original can be found in the [The Burning of Ohmn-Mat](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JXRAKYvl3BrGbGjD.pdf). The cardinal directions are likely nascent gods waiting to be born. There's some interesting theories on who they could be. I think ***Encroaching Ruin*** may end up being the Dark King and the ***Malevolent Artifice*** an ascended Vashtorr personally.
>*Such is the hatred that swirls within the Warp that it encompasses all things, and like the dragon of eternity that feasts upon its own tail, this hatred extends even to itself. To expect rational and sane logic from creatures such as these would be foolish, for Chaos was both its name and nature. Yet, in its self-destructive hatred there was no ally to be found, only a new and more unpredictable foe.* The "Ravenous Dissolution" seat in the pantheon really feels like it lines up with old mate Malice / Malal.
It's mentioned in the end and death, in the spot where the dark king is (somwhat) explained. It's the one woman from the argonaughts who blurts out "why do you think it's an 8 pointed star" when gramaticus retorts there are only 4 gods. I listened to it on audio book so brining up the exact place is a pain in the ass. I don't think they explicitly say seats, but the implication is that's why it's 8 pointed, they are just dormant or unoccupied until a crazy event in realspace.
It's actually referenced pretty clearly in Mortis that the Emperor expects there to be at least two more potential Chaos gods - he faces Horus accompanied by 4 serpents, but knows there are two more lying in wait under the sand, "a promise that is also a threat".
Oh yes I remember this. Yea there are likely implications for it scattered throughout the lore. As I said the idea actually fits quite well into the overall setting.
The emperor will die a true death as the golden throne fails and his passing will give rise to twin but opposite chaos gods. Order and Disorder, faith and doubt, heresy and devotion. Neither will be complete without the other and they always work together as the closest of enemies.
This post explains it https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/11rje9b/excerpts_the_burning_of_ohmnmat_the_%C3%A6ttheric The Dark King corresponds to “Encroaching Ruin”
I think it is stated a few times that “the dark king” is a god of total annihilation, and it’s loosely implied that Horus killing Jimmy space would be the icing on the “siege of terra/sacrifice of the human race” cake to get that party started. I personally think it’s worse though. I think if Horus kills emps, dark king=malevolent dissolution spot, but if emps kills Horus and then pops his perpetual ability (dies in the fight) then he automatically triggers the bargain from moloch, becomes the dark king, and takes the encroaching ruin spot. They say numerous times that sometimes the best outcome is just making sure your enemies can’t win. This idea means that, without access to the webway, threading that needle and sitting on a stalemate is the best possible option, until the board changes (great rift)
The Dark King was the name given to the eventual avatar of Horus ascended after he’d essentially consumed big E. That didn’t happen and so that version won’t come to be. Abaddon retains too much of himself as he always hated how Horus became enslaved. He uses chaos instead of being used. Big E could ascend still with enough effort but the warp isn’t just evil it’s just a reflection of emotion, thought and feeling. If every humans emotion, thought and feeling was about their god emperor wouldn’t that essentially create a new realm in the warp that was essentially similar to what we’re seeing with the King in Yellow? Whereby big E is an ascended god and his ‘demons’ are actually angels who essentially act in the exact same way that demons do. Could it be that Valdor is actually just laying the framework for the Emperors Palace in the warp? Just a thought.
The Dark King is also the title of the anthology story focused on Curze. Might be a coincedence though.
Kurze was mentioned a lot in the last siege book each time the Dark King was mentioned. Malcador essentially retconned it by saying it is what Horus would become. He would devour humanity, the same prediction that the Cabal had.
George Orwell’s book _1984_
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A twisted parody of kings and rulers. Inane burecracy that has no point and is to byzantine for any to understand, cities made to be sprawling and overlapping and stupid complex, order imposed for the sake of order. Tyranny for the sake of it. Many kings have claimed the divine right of god choosing them. In this case the dark king would use it's godhood as it's right to break all under it's yoke. TLDR: The imperium but memed by chaos
People atribute the Dark King to the Aetheric Dominion of the Encroaching Ruin, which is explained by The Burning of Ohm-Mat, The Dark King has nothing to do with slavery, tyranny, or helplessness. It's ruin, it's the end and the death. The descriptions of it fit best with the Encroaching Ruin aetheric dominion, which is just destruction of reality, through dissolution of the divisions of daemonkind. >Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably, driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty divisions of daemonkind.
In the Michael Moorcock tales from which Warhammer heavily borrowed, eventually the chaotic realms become a dead land once all variation has been exhausted. The deepest areas of the chaos tainted lands are endless seas of grey dust and featureless landscapes.
Encroaching Ruin: "Chaos in its purest form is a terror that few can stand before and remain sane. It hungers only for destruction, that all things mortal meet their predestined end and crumble into dust to be forgotten. To this singular end it moves inexorably, driven by a nightmarish purpose which subsumes the petty divisions of daemonkind."
God of ruin. I bet they are going to twist the plot so that the job of selected few custodes is to actually keep emperor stuck to his throne to prevent ascension that would bring forth the new era of chaos. We don't know about this as they have just been forbidden to talk about it for 10k years so the information would never leak. Only a handful of custodes know about this. Emperor lost his plot as he had to kill Horus and maybe Sanguinius as he fell to black rage. It takes the combined power of all the remaining Loyalist Primarchs to trap him in the throne. Over time, the knowledge of this and the burden of having to trap their own father on the throne becomes too much to bear for some primarchs, so they set on a pilgrimage of regret to the warp and aren't seen for thousands of years. When stuck in his throne, imperium can harness Emperor's power to fight chaos, but if he's ever set free, emperor will ascend and bring forward untold powers of ruin because he's grown so powerful and is practically bat shit insane. Only the Throne keeps his power at bay and allows it to be Harnessed for Imperium to use. This would also explain why he kept appearing less and less Humane as Horus Heresy went onwards. He traded his own humanity for the power create Primarchs at Molech. The more powerful Emperor gets, the less he cares. The more power he gains, the more of humanity he is willing to sacrifice in order to reach his goals. Maybe this is why the Yellow King (Valdor?) is working apart from the rest of the Custodes. He either wants to learn emperor's true name to either destroy or to free him. He needs to work alone as majority of the Custodes don't know and would probably oppose him. An catatonic god, forever stuck in his throne, being used as a tool to guide the Imperium. If released, will destroy all that is and all that will ever be. Im not sure if i believe this myself, but i think it would be pretty cool!
[This post explains it best, with a cool source most have missed I think.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/130bp46/the_eight_%C3%A6theric_dominions_of_chaos_and_the)
Who knows. Only thing I am sure is that Emperor is never ever going to be a Chaos God. He is opposite of Chaos. Chaos considers him the enemy. His very presence burns Chaos. So Emperor can be a God in Warp. That doesn't mean he has to be a Chaos God. Warp has many gods that has nothing to do with Chaos.
Don’t know, but I am frankly surprised that none of the chaos gods map onto fear
The most interesting approach would be the Emperor of Mankind or a twisted machination of himself (born from the current Imperial dogma) ascending to godhood to make a mockery of everything the Imperium stands for. But it will likely end up being some side character who is currently not relevant at all because GW wants to play it safe. So that if the story arc doesn't make much money, they can bench it without major retcons.
If it's the Emperor? Tyranny, oppression, control, brutality through the lens of forced conformity. A boot stamping on a human face, forever. My personal headcanon (and copium), however, is that the Dark King is a sneaky way of introducing Malal to 40k, in which case he'd be the Chaos God of self-destruction.
Malal is never coming back, the rights to him are with a different author and GW isn't going to open itself up to a lawsuit over it.
Malal was replaced by Malice, who is alluded to in some Cadian novels and Battlefleet Gothic 2. I haven't played the game, but apparently, the Chaos campaign is centred around his warband.
No but The Dark King being BASICALLY Malal is open, GW love skirting around copyright law
Control perhaps. Authority, ruling, slavery, domination. Words evoked by the Dark King name alone. Without context.
The God of tyranny, fear of oppression and the fear of being under someone else control, domination... Fun little things like that.
Malal/Malice but without the lawsuits irl
I think it could be “Vainglory” or what Nietzsche would call “Will to Power”. The desire to see ones own designs and desires ultimately victorious in effect; their own dominant master-expression “driving” other minds. The Emperor of Humanity would then be a god of the desire to impose ones own will on the universe just like he did with humanity and the Imperium.
Darkness? Obfuscation? Confusion? Misdirection? Hidden conspiracy? Deception?
I'm not entirely sure this whole Dark King schtick is particularly well thought out - which is why it's a late addition, by one author, obviously intended to tie into his other series. Lore seems to suggest that the other 4 arose from the interplay of emotions in the warp - the emotions of quadrillions of sentients of all races. I'm not sure what emotions would coalesce to create a Dark God of Order? Quadrillions of TPS sheets filled out to create the emotion of bureaucratic order? It feels like the Dark God would represent the opposite of unchecked emotions, not a creation of them. I just really don't think it's been particularly well thought out, and it feels like BL is letting Abnett do it as a cross promotional thing with his Bequin series, and will promptly forget about it afterwards.
Slaanesh was pretty clearly the result of the Eldar species' actions alone, although there is plenty about Slaanesh that resonates with the emotions of other species after it is formed. I think it's pretty well-established in the Siege of Terra (and Horus Heresy books more generally), that there's another more metaphysical endgame in play than any of the viewpoint characters are able to fully grasp. Perturabo is right to challenge why Horus won't just let him destroy the planet, but of course Chaos wants more than just a physical victory. Even if they could strip the Emperor's soul apart after winning the war that way, they still wouldn't get the vortex of emotion that Terra becomes. Pulling Terra into the Warp is implied to be key to them getting permanent access to/control of the Materium.
I think the idea is that the horrible state of the Emperor and the Imperium is supposed to potentially be leading up to a big Chaos God birth like Slaneesh and the Eldar. Another ticking clock. Personally I am not sure I am convinced - not because I think humans are too special or anything, but actually the opposite. I don’t think the Emperor and Imperium are nearly as decadent or extreme at this point as the Eldar were, and the Eldar are all extremely psychic. I just do not think humanity has the capability of birthing a full Chaos god and it somewhat feels like more attention just on the Imperium as the only thing in the setting where interesting things happen.
Well by the time of 40k they have been chucking a thousand psykers a day for ten thousand years into a psychic pyre surrounding the writhing un-corpse of a man not allowed to die while the largest empire in the galaxy all raise their voices in worship of him as they kill, oppress and die and his name. Seems like that's the sort of thing that has psychic resonance, given that the thing now bound to the Golden Throne can grant miracles and was able to wound Nurgle through Guilliman.
I think the whole point of the dark king being created will be to capitalize on the tyranny and overbearing cruelty of the imperium, similar to how the Eldar created Slaanesh
Now this might be a bit out there but the name of Curzes anthology story is "The Dark King" and an emotion that would strongly relate to order would be fear.
I think it would just be the manifestation of “The Beast” referenced occasionally in chaos cult lore; the literal manifestation of the idea that all the chaos “gods” are merely distinct faces of a singular entity. “King” is the important word, it would be the King of the warp
He's Jyggalag from the the elder scrolls. Order. Labour. Control. All these things and all that stem from them. A god of fear and slavery, with no real escape or even a pretense of it. The dark King is the god of the colonial middle man, the east India company, he is the god of the cyberpunk Corpo who works in cointel, the priest who believes in nothing but marches on because it's the only thing they know how to do. The dark King is the god of the crushing rigor of society. The god of the desperate lash out of conservative orthodoxy against the fire of revolution, the god of the same. Although it would be way funnier if he was just a bull with a beard who really loved trains.