The year was marked M35 by the flawed reckoning of a galaxy steeped in unending war. A galaxy that, unbeknownst to its teeming trillions, was beginning to forget—not through the slow, natural erosion of time, but through something more insidious and deliberate. The heroic deeds of a bygone era, sacrifices etched in blood and fire across countless worlds, were fading, blurring into the grim tapestry of the Imperium's perpetual struggle.
New wars ignited like pyres across the void. Hive Worlds, those teeming engines of the Imperium, choked on the ashes of rebellion. Their underbellies teemed with dissent and the insidious tendrils of Chaos. Xenos hordes, driven by insatiable hunger and alien ideologies, pressed against the fragile boundaries of Imperial space, testing its resolve with unending brutality. From the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom, festering wounds in reality, Black Crusades surged forth—monstrous tides of Warp-fueled madness threatening to drown the galaxy. Each was met with fire and fury, each repelled—but always at a cost.
The Imperium bled. Its memory fractured. Its focus consumed by the immediate, it forgot the distant.
None remembered the Joker.
Not the mad herald of Chaos, not the laughing shadow who once danced between gods and Primarchs. His laughter had once echoed across daemon worlds and Imperial bastions alike. Now, it was a ghost—lost in the thunder of bolters and the howls of war. None remembered the Champions—those beings drawn from the fractured mirrors of other realities, elevated by the Ruinous Powers to challenge the fate of the galaxy. Their names, once whispered with dread or reverence, were now buried beneath layers of propaganda and paranoia, replaced by grim dogma and the doctrines of survival.
But memory is not so easily erased.
Deep beneath the Throneworld of Terra, in the hollowed and lightless catacombs beneath the Emperor's Palace, strange forces stirred. And high within the shimmering, impossible geometries of the Black Library, where the Webway whispered secrets in every tongue ever spoken, an ancient plan took shape.
The galaxy had begun to forget—but not everyone had.
The Emperor of Mankind, entombed within the Golden Throne, his form withered and bound, remained a beacon against the tides of Chaos. His mind, fractured yet eternal, reached across the Warp like the last flame in a world of darkness. He saw the forgetting. He felt the erosion of purpose, the corrosion of meaning in the souls of men. The lessons learned in fire were vanishing. And he knew—without those lessons, the Imperium would fall not in fire, but in silence.
And elsewhere, the Laughing God danced.
Cegorach, master of mirth and madness, darted between timelines and tangled skeins of fate. He pirouetted through the nightmares of mortals and gods alike, slipping between fractured realities where history had taken other paths. He watched. He observed. He laughed.
He sought not warriors, but those few who could carry the burden of memory. Individuals who defied easy classification. Not merely tools of battle, but catalysts—those capable of igniting transformation, of reminding the galaxy of choices beyond survival. Those who could hold contradiction and madness in their hands and wield them as weapons.
He saw a Joker that Chaos had claimed—but might one day slip his leash. He saw Darth Vader, still gathering shadows and secrets from the depths of Necron tombs. He saw Griffith, who courted godhood with a smile drenched in betrayal. He saw Hisoka, who danced through blood and pleasure as easily as the Harlequins themselves. He saw the Witch-king of Angmar, whose voice could sway Eldar from their doomed paths. He saw Henry Wu, whose intellect sought to graft flesh and madness into something never intended to exist.
Yet Cegorach also saw that, though each Champion now slumbered inside a chrysalis of warp-forged matter, that dormancy was no prison. The cocoons were catalysts, incubation chambers that let the raw currents of the Warp flow through their still forms. Within those gleaming husks, time stretched and folded; their bodies slept, but their essences ranged freely, siphoning power from distant devotees, whispering visions into dreaming psykers, and knitting cults that would await their rebirth. In the immaterium, influence needed no physical tongue or hand: a laugh, a nightmare, a half-remembered promise could ignite whole worlds.
Thus Joker's giggle echoed in the ventilation shafts of hive-cities; Vader's cold resolve haunted Legion seers; Griffith's silver words colored the ambitions of voidborn nobles; Hisoka's hunger poisoned gladiatorial arenas;Shao kahn'rage still affect some orcs; the Witch-king's lament tugged at wandering Eldar souls; and Dr. Wu's curiosity crept like a viral script through the dataslates of renegade Biologis. They grew more potent with every secret prayer and every drop of blood offered in their name.
These were the ones Chaos had chosen. But what if…
Cegorach returned to the Emperor—not physically, but in that shimmering psychic domain between reality and metaphor, where meaning shaped form and thought carried weight. The Laughing God manifested as a blur of motion and color, while the Emperor appeared as a blazing monolith of will and memory.
"You see it too," said the Emperor, his voice like tectonic plates grinding together. "The galaxy forgets. The pattern is repeating."
Cegorach tilted his head, his grin twisting into something mournful. "You built an Empire on the bones of demigods. You ruled with vision—but also with fire. Now only the fire remains,well not really cause they still alive, missing, rebelion phase you know what i mean—and don't forget you seal the half."
The Emperor said nothing.
"What you need is not just force," continued Cegorach, "but inspiration. Memory. Chaos has remembered its champions. Perhaps it is time we remembered ours."
He gestured, and images flickered through the ether: individuals not from this galaxy, not even from this universe, but bearing qualities lost to.