From humanity's ancient past, from the benighted age before people had even begun to gaze up at the stars, accounts of Chaos and Daemons had already appeared in the scriptures and records of various human religions—and those of certain alien civilizations across the galaxy.
Anyone who gathered and studied those accounts would find it easy to arrive at the truth: Chaos—the great enemy of all orderly life—had existed long before the Old Ones created the universe.
Chaos was the energy realm of the Aethyr, the domain of Chaos. It was what humans and Psykers had, to this day, both loved and loathed, and what they widely used to travel or draw upon for energy to wield all manner of wondrous psychic powers: the so-called Warp!
Nearly all psychic Navigators knew that the Warp had no area, height, or volume—in fact, none of the physical concepts that existed in the real world applied there. The only thing that existed in that realm was energy, and energy was everything!
It was like a mirror reflecting Realspace, yet nearly all the laws of physics failed to apply within its wondrous domain. That was the true reason human ships could use the Warp to travel, crossing hundreds or even thousands of light-years in an extremely short time.
Of course, the energy in the Warp wasn't sealed away in that boundless expanse, motionless and cut off from everything else. The material universe and the Warp interfered with, mingled with, and even influenced each other.
The Warp drew its energy from the material universe, while the mysterious forces of the material universe had their roots in the Warp. The two were closely connected; that bond had existed since the distant, savage ages, since life first arose, and they had influenced each other ever since.
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