Screaming Vortex - History: The Screaming Vortex has existed in its present form for at least ten thousand standard years, though the use of that standard Terran measurement of the passage of time is of little relevance to such a region. Some places within its borders appear to have existed in their eternal torment since the very beginning of time, while others have endured aeons of pain in what to an outside witness might appear only the blink of an eye.Despite the difficulty in quantifying such a phenomena, some accounts of its beginnings do, in fact, exist. No single, definitive record describes the entire truth, and such accounts range from the jealously guarded heirloom data-dumps of the very oldest Navigator houses of the Navis Nobilite to the mad gibberings of Warp-touched hellseers.Given the nature of these scattered sources, there is scant chance of any one scholar ever collating them into something resembling even a portion of the truth, unless some very highly placed agent of the Inquisition were to turn to the path to glory in service of the Chaos Gods. What follows then is but one possible account, of one possible truth. Those who believe such accounts are to be pitied, for their souls are already lost to the dread powers of Chaos.The zone of space now known as the "Screaming Vortex" was once, so one tale recounts, a bountiful region strewn with paradise worlds. These realms were so perfect in form and placement that they could only have been created by the deliberate will of beings as powerful as gods, perhaps as havens for the Aeldari and the other beatific child-species that dwelled there.For aeons, the Aeldari and others existed in a state of perfection and glory, at one with their creators, the species now known only as the Old Ones, and all of the dimensions of this universe and others. Then came what some called a plague and others a war, but may have been both at once. The perfect worlds were scoured and, while the creator-beings that had wrought them battled valiantly to protect them, all were lost. Those few that survived the war that had destroyed their heaven knew misery and deprivation.It is said that most of the survivors left in a great exodus, each of the starfaring species dispersing to a different corner of the galaxy. In time, they would forget the place of their birth and war upon one another until barely one one-hundredth of their number remained, all others slain by the hands of those with whom they had once shared heaven. But some Aeldari stayed behind, resolved to rebuild their paradise by their own hands, though their creators had long ago disappeared from the galaxy.How long the survivors toiled to rebuild their heaven-worlds cannot be measured by any constant of the physical universe. Generation after generation gave their all in their labours, that children they would never know might one day dwell in heaven. Eventually, so it is told, these ancients stood ready to place the last stone, resplendent on the very brink of eternity.Then the universe descended into a new hell in the early 30th Millennium A.D. as Humanity reckons time, one that was an order of magnitude worse than the plague that had cast down the heaven-worlds. The galaxy-spanning civilisation of the Aeldari fell and, in a single moment, Slaanesh, the Dark Prince of Chaos, was born. The new Chaos God's birthing-cries resounded throughout eternity, and civilisations the universe over were cast down.The Warp erupted as it never had before and the homeworlds of the Aeldari were consumed by the terrible catastrophe they call the Fall. The epicentre of this cataclysm was the Eye of Terror, a seething Warp storm of immense proportions some twenty thousand light years in diameter occupying the former core realms of the Aeldari Empire. Other worlds across the galaxy were consumed as well and other Warp storms sprung into being around them.At the very instant of heaven's reconstitution, the entire region was consumed in a seething cauldron of Chaos. The Warp erupted into the material universe, creating a wholly unnatural storm as the stuff of reality and anti-reality flowed together. Those who had laboured to rebuild their lost paradise were obliterated body and soul, yet something of them remained, and would do so for all eternity.The cries of anguish they voiced at the very instant of their destruction would echo through the newborn Warp storm for all of eternity, cries born of unbounded torment at seeing all their works cast down by the hedonistic sins of the greater Aeldari civilisation.Thus was born the Screaming Vortex. The Warp storms unleashed at the moment of the Fall of the Aeldari rage as wildly as ever, and the cries of those lost within resound just as loudly. Though the souls of the lost are gone forever, their bitter lament continues, an eternal warning of the fell power of the Primordial Annihilator and its unbounded potential to destroy all that is, or could one day be, good in the universe.Of the interior of the Screaming Vortex, the adepts and scholars of the Imperium know next to nothing, except perhaps that which they discount as the ranting of madmen and Heretics. To date, many of the warlords of the Screaming Vortex have concerned themselves with their eternal struggle for supremacy over the worlds entrapped within its boiling storms.Yet, there are those within who seek to infiltrate Humanity for their own ends, just as there are those without who seek a way into the Vortex and to harvest its unknowable energies. It is only a matter of time before a warlord gains such power as to unite his fractious peers and lead them in a Black Crusade against the domains of the hated Corpse Emperor.This may be all it takes to make the Screaming Vortex as feared a place in the galaxy as the Eye of Terror, and the name of that warlord as dreaded as that of Abaddon the Despoiler or even the Arch-betrayer, the Warmaster Horus himself.