Fighter Pilot
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What follows is an idea for a campaign that I dreamt up. I am now being asked to run a Dark Heresy campaign, and this is the idea behind one I am considering. Please read, and then answer this question. Who is the Hiding Man? If any of you can figure it out just from this write-up, then it is too simplistic, and I'll try something else. If none of you can, it might be worth running.
Thanks
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The Powers of the Everdark
Many, many ages and long, long ago as men count time, but the mere blink of an eye to the immortal powers beyond the world, three lesser powers of chaos were imprisoned by the great powers within the infinitely narrow confines of a black star.
These powers were imprisoned for their crimes. What crimes these were do not concern us, for what man can know the calendar of the gods, or deign to sit in judgment upon them? For our purposes it is sufficient to know that they were so judged and confined. They had troubled the greater gods, and their punishment was terrible indeed.
So it was that the greater gods locked these troublesome lesser powers within the collapsar, and sealed it with a mighty magical seal. Upon this the greater gods cast mighty spells of confusion and misdirection, that no power nor daemon nor mortal creature might determine its location, and so they left matters, and the three lesser gods remained imprisoned for an aeon of aeons.
But the gods of chaos, both greater and lesser, are mercurial creatures, and apt to forget their doings and purposes. And so it was that, over the aeon of aeons, the spells that secured the invisibility of the seal began to erode. And, gradually, ever so slowly as the suns lived and died throughout the cosmos, it began to shine as a bright beacon within the warp.
And so the seal of the Collapsar of Everdark came into the hands of Gaius Korinius Volnixar.
Volnixar was a great rogue trader in the service of the Imperium. He was a powerful warrior, a mighty psyker, and a man of unbelievable ambition. He detected the warp signature of the seal whilst scouting the vicinity of an enormous black star within the Everdark subsector. He retrieved the seal, and a few psychic tests quickly confirmed it to be a psionically charged artifact of enormous energy. Volnixar took the artifact for his own, and left the icinity of the collapsar under warp drive, thus unwittingly freeing the powers trapped within.
Almost immediately huge storms of chaos rose up in Everdark subsector, virtually isolating it from the rest of the galaxy, as the three terrible warp powers within screamed with unholy joy at their release. Many, including Volnixar himself and his entire fleet, were slain by the soul-shattering force of that mighty scream. Long had they planned their revenge, and now they would see it come to fruition.
For without the seal to lock the collapsar, what the greater gods had given them as a prison became instead a mighty source of power. For the collapsar was a conduit between real world and warp, through which an infinity of warp energy might be drawn. The three rebel powers, now safe behind their warpstorms, drank greedily from this wellspring of chaos. They planned to drink until they were swollen to monstrous size, and then to combine their essences into a single new greater power, perhaps even one mightier than any that presently existed.
As the new and unknown warp powers began to grow, slowly the corrupt and the weak of real space were –all unwittingly- drawn to their nascent banner. Aliens and pirates, mutants and mercenaries, renegade elder and even a chapter of the fearsome Adeptus Astartes were drawn to their service. The powers of the Everdark grew great indeed, and things might have ended badly then and there, were it not for the Hiding Man.
Who he was or is, is unknown. That he was or is a remarkable person cannot be denied.
Somehow, the Hiding Man discovered the location of Gaius Volnixar’s long dead rogue trader fleet, and, after fighting many terrible battles and braving many terrible dangers, he retrieved the Seal of Everdark. With this, he returned to the Everdark subsector.
Instantly, the collapsar sealed again, and the flow of warp energy shut off like a dammed river.
The three criminal powers raged at this interruption of their plans. They knew what must have happened, and used their warp sight to search for the seal. They determined to destroy it, that it might not again interfere with their plans for conquest and revenge. But the Hiding Man was not called by that name for no reason. He was possessed of many strange powers, and the eyes of the three lesser chaos gods perceived nothing of the location of the seal.
And so things remain to this day. The servants of the powers of the Everdark search endlessly for the seal of the Everdark, that their master’s purpose may be fulfilled, and, for now, the Hiding Man eludes them, but is unable to return the powers to their prison or to leave the Everdark, for if he took the seal away, the collapsar would open again, and if he left it behind its location would be revealed.
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