Collegia Titanica - Fall of the Old Empire: During the Age of Terra the Human race advanced beyond its ancient pre-industrial past to obtain spacefaring capability. In this ancient time, Mankind slowly and painstakingly began to settle the habitable worlds in its own solar system and in the neighboring star systems near its homeworld using massive starships capable of only sublight speeds.Mars was one of the first colony worlds to be settled by Humanity, if not the first. Hundreds, then thousands more were to follow during the period of Human history that would become known later as the Age of Technology. For twenty-five standard millennia Mankind ruled the stars, tamed them, and bent them to its will. Wonders beyond imagining were commonplace in this age and no miracle of technoarcana was beyond Human skill. The worlds of Humanity were like silvered jewels that glittered among the firmament, and Mankind held in its hands the means to sunder reality itself or to remake it to the mould of its thoughts.Only the haughty Aeldari and, long before them, the cold-blooded Slanni, had stood higher in the ranks of creation, and like the domains of those once-mighty ancient civilisations, Humanity's utopian interstellar realm would not last.Some archeodata available to the Adeptus Mechanicus suggests that the fall of Humanity's old empire was precipitated by the spontaneous manifestation of species-wide psionic abilities and the widespread emergence of Human psykers; some fragmentary surviving records relate a massive invasion of Human space by myriad alien species. Other archives record a galaxy-wide Warp Storm which sundered the commerce and communication of the worlds of Mankind. Others still relate that the sentient machine intelligences created by Humanity as soldiers and servants, which Humanity had come to rely on in all matters, rose up in the Cybernetic Revolt and laid Human civilisation low on every world across the entire empire in a single moment of horror.In truth, it is most likely that all of these events occurred. Certainly, when the fall came, its onset was swift. When the killing blow of Human interstellar civilisation landed, it was delivered by many hands. Paradise was lost, in no small part through the hubris and weakness of those men and women who had misused what the Cult Mechanicus would later believe were the sacred gifts of advanced technology.Whatever the causes, at a stroke, the once galaxy-spanning empire of Humanity collapsed into anarchy, insanity and death. Those Human-settled worlds not swallowed up by the raging Warp were consumed by slavering alien nightmares. Those not torn apart by the hands of their own machine servants were laid low by their own, a cannibalistic rage that consumed formerly enlightened peoples as their economic and social conditions suddenly collapsed.It is even said that great swathes of Humanity were enslaved at this time to the will of unknowable, malevolent intelligences born of the Warp itself, that reality which Human FTL-capable starships relied upon to traverse the vastness of space, "possessed" as Humanity's distant ancestors would have understood it.Interstellar travel and communications became erratic as the Warp Storms became more frequent and more intense as the birth pangs of the Chaos God Slaanesh roiled the Immaterium. The use of Warp-Drives and astropaths to tie together Human-settled space became increasingly useless during this time. Billions eventually died as a result of the wars, renegade psykers, daemonic possessions and starvation that ran rampant in this dark period.Across the galaxy, the light of civilisation was extinguished. The greater part of Humanity was slain by the various calamities and the fraction that remained were plunged into an age of anarchy, savagery and insanity that would rage across the galaxy for some five Terran millennia.This was the Age of Strife, and never was an era of Human history so aptly titled.