During the time Cadia tore the universe apart.
The storms of the Warp never ceased.
Even the Emperor's Astronomican had gone dark. The cause of its extinction was unknown, but Malcador ordered Archmagos Cawl to repair it. The devastation caused by the Astronomican's darkness was catastrophic.
On a galactic scale, nearly all Imperial vessels lost their ability to navigate. Vast numbers of ships vanished into the sea of stars, never to be heard from again. Countless vessels lost the ability to travel faster than light through the Warp and were stranded in the cold starry void of realspace.
Not until Malcador returned and the Astronomican was relit.
Only then did those ships find their way home again.
Yet many warships had traveled beyond the Astronomican's reach. A great many had completely lost all sense of time and space within the Warp, drifting far from holy Terra.
The crisis caused by the Great Rift was far too severe.
Warp storms cut off all communication, while the Astronomican's darkness left every fleet unable to travel. The Warp turbulence spawned by the Great Rift caused time to flow differently in every region, making both rescue and being rescued extraordinarily difficult.
Even after the Astronomican regained its light, many humans still believed themselves to be the last surviving remnants of humanity after the Great Rift.
Every corner of the Imperium's frontier suffered savage attacks from the daemons of Chaos.
And the Imperium.
At this moment, holy Terra, the administrative center of the human Imperium, was preparing for Malcador's arrival, hoping he could change Terra's current state.
Before this, Terra had fallen into an incomprehensibly difficult situation.
Terra possessed an unimaginably vast population and countless critical institutions, but it had long since lost the ability to grow or produce food. It needed a constant influx