"Master Parker Pan..." Osuwiss rose, wanting to say more, but in the end she said nothing. She knew her words were rather naive and would struggle to sway the master.
Any discussion of the Aeldari, that ancient and powerful race, inevitably led to the War in Heaven: an apocalyptic war that had begun tens of millions of years ago and lasted for millions of years.
On one side stood the Necrons and the C'tan; on the other, the Old Ones and the psychic races they had nurtured, including the Orks and the Aeldari.
The Orks needed no introduction. The Aeldari possessed formidable psychic gifts, great physical strength, and neural responses as fast as light.
Compared with the Orks, the Aeldari fell short only in numbers. An ordinary Aeldari warrior could easily crush an ordinary Ork Boy.
Even in an era when every race's fighting strength had declined drastically, an ordinary Aeldari warrior was a match for an elite human Astartes warrior.
After the War in Heaven ended, the Old Ones vanished. Perhaps they had gone extinct; perhaps they had fled and gone into hiding. In any case, the once mightiest race in the universe never appeared before the myriad peoples of the galaxy again.
The Aeldari inherited much of the Old Ones' legacy, including the Webway that spanned the galaxy.
The Webway-a simple name for something even the Emperor of Mankind coveted-was one of the greatest masterpieces of Old One technology. Though called a network of passages, it was essentially a higher-dimensional world. Vast and intricate, the Webway housed Aeldari and harbored secrets.
Faster-than-light travel through the Webway was far more efficient and safer than travel through the Warp. With it, the Aeldari could appear in any corner of the galaxy at any time, and so, after the Old Ones