Imperial Webway

The **Imperial Webway Project**, also known as the **Great Work** to keep its true nature a secret, was a plan by the Emperor of Mankind to remove humanities reliance on the other realm known as the Warp. If it had been completed correctly, the Mankind and the Imperium would no longer need to use the warp for travel or communication, able to cross the distances of the galaxy in a fraction of the time they could now, with no risk of unleashing the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, who would soon starve without the fuel of humanity they fed upon.

## History

### The Imperial Webway

In the late 30th Millennium, during the Unification Wars on Terra, buried deep under a huge and inhospitable desert on the Terran continent of Asia, the Emperor of Mankind discovered a portal that led to the Webway's vast network of tunnels that had been constructed eons ago by a xenos race more ancient than the Terran sun. This was in the time before the building of the Imperial Palace, although the exact date is also currently unknown.

   The Emperor discovered there the core of the psychic amplification device that the Golden Throne would later be constructed around to serve as a portal into the Webway based on Terra. Prior to the outbreak of the Antarus Apostasy, and over a period of several standard centuries including right through the Great Crusade, the Emperor directed tens of thousands of Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-priests to modify the Golden Throne so that it could be put into use as the nexus of his secret Imperial Webway Project.

This greatest of the Emperor's many works was intended to open up the Aeldari Webway to Mankind by establishing a portal into its network from Terra. This would provide a means of instantaneous interstellar travel between the worlds of the newborn Imperium of Man, making navigation through the dangers of the Warp unnecessary and remove the necessity for reliance upon astrotelepathy as the only form of interstellar communication, literally connecting all the branches of Mankind instantaneously. This would create a truly unified human race as never before in history, similar to the advantages once possessed by the lost Aeldari civilisation before its Fall. The Emperor believed that this level of unity would be necessary if humanity was truly to thrive and prosper in such a dangerous universe.

The Golden Throne's gateway, the Imperial conduit and the alien-built Webway-tunnels were all both physical and psychic in nature. Wrapped around the physical component was a psychic sheath or shield. The very substance of the alien tunnels appeared to generate this shielding naturally. For the human-built gateway and conduit, the Emperor Himself had to continuously generate the protective psychic sheath. This psy-shield sealed the Webway from the Warp and its daemonic denizens in some inexplicably arcane fashion.

### The Sunken Realm Revealed

During the early 31st Millenium however, the Dragon Lords, unknowingly empowered beyond their ability to properly control their powers by experimental technology belonging to the Consuls Exemplar, let out a pulse of psychic power so great in its magnitude, it seeped through the material and immaterial, into the webway itself.

This manifested almost imperceptivly at first, weakening a single wall which drew the attention of the Mechanicum adepts working on the project. Focussing their efforts on the weakened part, they broke through, unwittingly stumbling into an area of the webway long abandoned by even the ancient Aeldari; the Suken Realm of the Forgotten God.

   Malal.

The daemons within poured forth, slaughtering countless Imperial personnel before the *Legio Custodes* managed to force them back, sealing shut the breach they had now forced. It was a victory, but in the victory, the Emperor saw a grave threat to His Great Work, Psykers. Long had the Emperor known about the risks of their kind, being one himself he understood the temptations and risks of lesser beings wielding such power.

To stem this threat to His Great Work, the Emperor conveened a great council on the world of Nikaea, using the recent failure of the Dragon Lords and the great and senseless loss of life as a justification for its neccessity, keeping his true intention a veiled secret from all who looked upon it. This Council, known to history as the Council of Nikaea or informally as the Trial of the Dragon Lords, would see the Librarius disbanded, Psykers banned from use within the Imperium for all but the most necessary of tasks such as the navigators and astropaths.

With the Psyker threat mitigated, though the Emperor knew that some of His sons would never truely follow it, and as such the threat remained, the Great Work continued, new Mechanicum Adepts brought up to replace those lost to the daemons. Slowly, with even more care than before, the Imperial Webway pushed ever deeper.