Terra - History: The Age of Terra, also called the Age of Progress, is the name given by Imperial scholars to the time from the dawn of Mankind's civilisation before the Imperial Calendar was instituted in the 1st Millennium AD to the founding of the first truly united interstellar Human civilisation at some point in the 15th Millennium. Cities such as Atlantys and Nova Yourk are cited as being the most legendary and ancient cities of Old Earth in this time.Nations now known in the oldest and most incomplete fragments of Imperial records only as Jermani, Merica, Britania, and Bania are said to have prospered, competed and wilted during this legendary time when Humanity was slowly taking its first steps out towards the stars.For the next 10,000 standard years, during the era called the Dark Age of Technology in Imperial chronologies, Terra served as the capital of Mankind's first galactic civilisation. This period was a Golden Age of scientific advancement when many technological wonders such as the Standard Template Construct (STC) databases and the artificially intelligent Men of Iron were brought into being.Humanity developed the Warp-Drive and spread at an explosive pace across the galaxy, settling thousands of new colony worlds and making first contact with the other intelligent races of the galaxy, including the Aeldari and the Orks. This period ended in violence and horror as the Men of Iron revolted against their Human masters and the first widespread appearance of Human psykers caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people when these men and women, unprepared to wield their new powers, unleashed the horrors of the Warp upon their unsuspecting fellow citizens.The final nail in the coffin for the advanced Human civilisation of this period came when the gestation of the Chaos God Slaanesh in the Immaterium led to the onset of giant Warp Storms across the galaxy, completely disrupting interstellar travel and communications. Many Human worlds, now isolated from one another, regressed to a pre-industrial state, the glories of their past lost to myth, legend and small stockpiles of archeotech.Terra itself was consumed by terrible civil wars between nations of techno-barbarians that began in the 27th Millennium and resulted in the use of biological, chemical and thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction that killed billions and forever scarred the sacred landscape of Mankind's homeworld.Only with the end of the Age of Strife in the 30th Millennium following the birth of Slaanesh and the Fall of the Eldar was sanity restored to the people of Terra when the Emperor of Mankind first rose from deliberate obscurity to launch the Unification Wars that would unite all the nations of Terra beneath His rule and formally establish the Imperium of Man.After forging an alliance with the Cult Mechanicus of Mars to allow the Tech-priests to maintain their autonomy and religious freedom in return for providing the newborn Imperium with the starships, materiel and war machines it would need to reunite Humanity under the Emperor's rule, the Master of Mankind unleashed the Great Crusade upon the galaxy.As the Imperial expeditionary fleets loaded with Space Marines, Imperial Army troops and Mechanicus Titans once more brought Mankind under a single rule defined by the secular Imperial Truth in the early 31st Millennium, the current Age of the Imperium finally dawned.The Emperor's dream of a new Golden Age of reason and progress for Mankind collapsed in the wake of the galaxy-wide Imperial civil war known as the Horus Heresy. The Warmaster Horus, Primarch of the Sons of Horus Legion and leader of the Great Crusade after the Emperor retired to Terra, was corrupted by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and rebelled against his father.Fully half of the Space Marine Legions, the Imperial Army and the ancient Mechanicum threw in their lot with Horus and the other Traitors and for nine standard years they waged a brutal and total war upon the galaxy, leaving countless worlds blazing in thermonuclear fire as they closed in on Terra.During the Siege of Terra the Traitor Legions laid siege to the Imperial Palace itself and billions of Terrans died in loyal defence of their Emperor. Hundreds of millions of Terran civilians who became trapped behind the lines of the forces of Chaos after their landings suffered horribly at the hands of the servants of the Dark Gods. So great was their suffering that a morbid fear of Space Marines became a permanent fixture of Terran culture ever afterwards.But the Emperor and His Loyalist servants ultimately prevailed, and slew Horus at the height of his power on the bridge of his own flagship, the terrible Gloriana-class Battleship, Vengeful Spirit, in high Terran orbit. But the price was high, for the Emperor was mortally wounded and only survived by having His ravaged body interred within the cybernetic life support mechanisms of the arcane device known as the Golden Throne. Though the Emperor's mind remained fully empowered and active within the Immaterium, he could no longer directly communicate His wishes to those who remained behind to govern His Imperium.And so for the last 10,000 Terran years stagnation, technologically, culturally and even morally, has come to define the Imperium of Man. The Imperial Truth's official atheism has wilted in the face of the terrible dangers that confront Mankind in the Milky Way Galaxy, replaced by the comfort of a religion that holds that the Emperor of Mankind is the God Incarnate of Humanity.Terra has become the heart of an interstellar Imperium stretching across tens of thousands of light years and encompassing more than 1 million inhabited worlds, though it does so through the administration of a galactic government that is at best an uncaring, faceless bureaucracy and at worst a brutal, xenophobic and narrow-minded tyranny. Hundreds of billions of people now call the sacred soil of Terra home, but they are packed into the Human warrens known as hive cities, which are islands of tortured civilisation in a vast, toxic urban landscape that stretches across the entire world.The lucky are able to find work within the bureaucracy of the Imperial Administratum, while the majority are condemned to the poverty and heartbreak of lives as common manufactorum labourers or serfs. In the late 41st Millennium, there is no doubt that Terra will become the scene of Mankind's ultimate salvation at the hands of the Emperor's loyal servants...or the last outpost of Humanity to fall before a tide of heretical rebellion, xenos genocide and Chaos damnation.