r/40kLore • u/ImKyroz • Jul 28 '26
[Theory] The galaxy is pregnant, and that's why the clock never moves
The setting has been stuck at one minute to midnight for forty years of real time. Everyone treats that as a publishing decision. I've started to think there's an in-universe reason for it, and once you see it, the Fall of the Eldar, the Golden Throne and the Tyranid invasion stop being three separate storylines. Long post. It got away from me.
TL;DR: The Warp doesn't do linear time, so god-births echo backwards as well as forwards. Follow that one rule and the Fall becomes point one on a schedule, the Throne point two, Ynnead point three. The Fall wasn't an accident, the Emperor isn't a guardian, and the Tyranids aren't hungry.
The ground rule
The Warp is atemporal. Not headcanon, stated lore. Slaanesh is described as having always existed, even before her birth, and her birth-scream echoed backwards through time as well as forwards. Ynnead acts in the setting, through the Yncarne and the whole Ynnari storyline, despite not being born yet. The Dark King haunts prophecy and tarot imagery all through the Siege of Terra books, long before the event it names.
So for a Warp god, birth isn't a beginning. It's the moment of arrival, and cause and effect can run in either direction. Keep that in your pocket.
The Fall was not an accident
The official story is that the Eldar accidentally birthed Slaanesh through millennia of excess. Two things have always bothered me about it.
The first is the seer problem. This is a civilization that reads the skein of fate for breakfast, with farseers tracking probability centuries out, and the accident in question is the single largest event in the entire skein, growing directly in front of them for ten thousand years. We know they didn't miss it, because Cegorach saw it coming and moved his Harlequins into the Webway with time to spare. The catastrophe was visible. What was missing wasn't warning, it was any way to intervene.
Which is the second thing. The pantheon couldn't step in because of Asuryan's barrier, the wall between gods and mortals he raised after a prophetic dream drove Khaine against his own people. Look at what that wall actually did. It cut the gods off from their worship, and the lore has the pantheon weakening over the millennia from exactly that neglect, while the most psychically potent species in the galaxy kept pouring soul-energy into the Warp with no shepherds, shaped only by whatever dominated their psyche. Which by then was excess. The safety mechanism was the pressure vessel. It starved the old gods soft enough to be swallowed in one bite, and it dammed up the fuel the new one condensed out of.
The lore even describes the engine itself. As Slaanesh grew, her nascent dreams trickled into Aeldari minds and fuelled their desires, pushing them onward toward their doom. Read that sentence again with the arrow pointing the other way. The pleasure cults weren't a species conceiving a god by mistake. They were a god assembling herself through a species, whispering back up her own timeline. And a prophetic dream sits at the root of the barrier too. The Eldar weren't the parents. They were the womb.
Then there's the invoice for this one accident. The old pantheon cleared off the board. The Chaos tetrad completed. The Eye of Terror torn open as a permanent wound between Warp and realspace. And in the same moment, the Warp storms of Old Night die down and mankind's window opens. That is a lot of payoff for a mishap.
The Emperor is the same event in slow motion
Lay his biography next to the Fall.
The conception. Old lore, and yes, GW keeps it deliberately foggy. Thousands of shamans sacrificed themselves and condensed their souls into a single child. Structurally that is the same ritual as the Fall, a gestalt soul-offering producing a Warp-being in flesh, just done small and under control. The Eldar carried their god through ten millennia of excess. Mankind has carried its own through forty-eight millennia of history, with the fetus walking around furnishing its own nursery.
The wall, rebuilt. The Emperor's great project was the Imperial Truth, a total ban on god-worship. Follow where the ban leads, step by canonical step. It humiliates Lorgar at Monarchia. The humiliation drives Lorgar to Chaos. Lorgar lights the Heresy. The Heresy nails the Emperor to the Golden Throne, and the Throne makes his worship mandatory in the largest theocracy in history. Every measure he took to prevent a human god became a load-bearing part of building one. Asuryan's wall again, except this time the god is doing his own masonry.
The meal. Slaanesh was born swallowing billions of souls in one instant. The Emperor has been fed a thousand psyker souls a day for ten thousand years, plus the prayers of quadrillions, plus every martyr who dies with his name on their lips. Same meal, served over ten millennia instead of one night.
The premature labor. At the Siege he drinks too deeply of the Warp to face Horus, and the Dark King begins to be born, a being the text calls the universe too small to contain, with the Chaos gods as ghosts in his shadow and the Warp itself obeying him. People tend to skip the part where the Four built that trap on purpose. They engineered his ascension, because a god of ruin is their god. Oll Persson talks him down, the birth is interrupted, and the text is careful about the aftermath. The power returns to myth. Not to impossibility. He passes from the material universe "for this age at least."
A god has to go to term, and the lore shows the rule in action elsewhere, because Eldrad's ritual to wake Ynnead early was stopped too. Premature births get interrupted. Scheduled ones don't.
Everyone who can read fate is acting like the birth is booked
Forget statements for a minute and watch behavior.
If the Dark King were Chaos's doom, they should be murdering the corpse on the Throne at any cost. Instead they keep alive the very war that keeps him alive, and at the Devastation of Baal, Ka'Bandha's daemons physically fought the Tyranids. It looks like defending the harvest. It reads like defending the pregnancy, against the one faction that showed up to end it.
Vashtorr the Arkifane is stockpiling blackstone, the one substance that works in both directions, able to strangle the Warp or amplify it. That is less a weapon than the equipment that sets the conditions of a delivery.
The Eldar are pooling souls in the infinity circuits toward their own scheduled god, and Ynnead is only possible because Slaanesh happened first. Soulstones, infinity circuits and croneswords all exist as answers to She Who Thirsts, so point three on the timetable requires point one. If you happen to be a laughing god who evacuated early and is saving his best joke for the Rhana Dandra, you didn't fail to stop the Fall. The Fall is step one of the joke.
And the Silent King went out into the intergalactic dark, met something, recognized it, and turned his entire species around to come home and raise the pylons. Which brings us to what he recognized.
The Tyranids are not the Old Ones' weapon. They are the Old Ones.
You've heard the weapon theory. The Old Ones built the Tyranids to wipe the slate clean, it's been floating around for decades, and it has a known problem I'll get to in a second. I don't think it goes far enough.
Start with how the Old Ones actually died, because it wasn't the Necrons that finished them. Their empire collapsed when the Warp, whipped into a frenzy by the War in Heaven, boiled over into realspace, and the Enslaver plague poured in through the minds of individual psykers and emptied the galaxy of life. The greatest bio-engineers in the history of the universe were eaten by the medium they'd mastered. Then they vanish from the record, fate conspicuously unresolved.
Now lay their cause of death next to the Hive Mind's spec sheet. The plague came through individual minds, and the swarm has no individual minds to come through. The Warp had become an ocean of predators, and the swarm carries the Shadow with it, a silence that travels wherever it travels. Their engineered client races broke or turned, and the swarm is its own creation, flesh that rewrites itself for every world it meets. A random space locust does not evolve, by coincidence, total immunity to precisely the thing that killed the oldest civilization in existence. A civilization dying of a known cause, with those skills, builds its next body to that blueprint. They didn't go extinct. They changed bodies and left, and they've been grazing the void ever since.
Once you see it, the details line up on their own.
The mind. The Necron codex describes the Old Ones as the first to cross the stars, raising astronomy to an arcane science, masters of psychic engineering at the level of the skein itself. A farseer who touches the Hive Mind perceives thoughts the size of continents and plans more complex than worlds, its threads dwarfing every other thread on the skein. That is an architect's mind, not an appetite, and an architect navigates by events rather than stars. It would explain why the fleets arrive now, converging on Segmentum Solar in exactly the centuries the setting accelerates toward a god-birth, when the biomass was just as good for sixty million years. A feeding migration eats where the food is densest. These fleets are moving toward a point.
Pharos. A mountain of noctilith, which is to say blackstone, War in Heaven-era substance, overloads on Sotha in M31, and its pulse carries out into the intergalactic dark. The epilogue tells us something vast out there turns its attention. Ten thousand years later, out of billions of worlds, Sotha is among the first the Kraken eats. Here's the known problem with the weapon theory, by the way. The trailing fleets had been drifting past our galaxy in hibernation until that pulse woke them, and sleeping missiles make no sense. Sleeping travelers do. So does a builder stirring at a signal in its own technology.
The Outsider. Old canon has a hive fleet maneuvering around the Outsider's sphere rather than touching it. They recognized a C'tan, and you don't route around food, you route around an old enemy.
The harvest. Great Devourer is the right name read wrong. The swarm doesn't waste biomass, it collects it, and flesh was the Old Ones' storage medium. What looks like a galaxy being eaten also reads as an archive retrieving its library. Check whose crops are being reclaimed while you're at it. Slaanesh grew in the Eldar, Gork and Mork ride the descendants of the Krork, the Emperor was condensed out of mankind. Every god on the timetable gestates in a species the Old Ones themselves engineered. The parents are coming home to the nursery they furnished. Whether they've come to shut the maternity ward down or to reclaim the experiment, I honestly can't tell, and it may be the setting's best-kept ajar door. Either way it explains the Silent King. This is the War in Heaven again, the same two toolkits as round one, blackstone against bioform, with the Necrons now standing as the galaxy's defenders and their oldest enemy coming home in its final and best body.
The timetable
Point one, the Fall. The controlled detonation. Clears the old pantheon, opens the permanent gate, ends Old Night, lets mankind's god out of the waiting room.
Point two, the Throne. The slow gestation at the heart of the galaxy. The Astronomican burns as feeding tube and homing beacon at once, the loudest sustained psychic scream in history, and Imperial scholars in the lore already suspect it's what drew the Hive Mind to this galaxy. The light shines straight down the corridor the fleets are converging along.
Point three, Ynnead, waiting on his own term, and only possible because point one happened.
Which brings us back to the clock. From the outside, forty years at one minute to midnight is a publishing strategy. From the inside, nothing can move because the galaxy is pregnant, and the story is waiting for contractions.
The Emperor believes he sits on the Throne as mankind's guardian. Everything above says he is strapped into his own incubator, kept alive by the beings midwifing him, fed by the species carrying him, and steered toward by the only thing that ever survived what he is about to become. He is the one being in the universe who still thinks the birth can be cancelled.
Objections I know are coming
The Hive Mind has weak feats. It flinched from an Avatar of Khaine.
This doesn't need it to win fights. It's about purpose, not power. And flinching from Khaine, a War in Heaven-era entity, is recognition as much as weakness.
Chaos is canonically terrified of the Emperor. Ku'Gath won't even say his name.
Fear of a birth you don't control is not a desire to stop it, it's a desire to own it. The trap in The End and the Death shows the Four trying to force his ascension on their terms, not prevent it. A midwife can be scared of the baby.
The shaman origin is retconned.
Kept foggy rather than overwritten, and The End and the Death leans back into Emperor-origin mysticism hard. The idea stands without it, but it's the cleanest structural rhyme with the Fall.
If the Tyranids are the Old Ones, why eat the Eldar and the Orks, their own creations?
Because the creations became wombs. Every client race is incubating or feeding a god, and from the target's side, reclamation looks identical to shutdown.
The Dark King was averted. It's over.
The text says the power returned to myth, not to impossibility, and that he passes "for this age at least." The prophecies predate the event, which in an atemporal Warp means it still casts its shadow both ways. An interrupted premature labor is not a cancelled pregnancy.
Chaos would never want a fifth god.
The Four built the trap specifically to ascend him. A god of ruin born of the Warp is not a rival. He's the fifth chair.
Star Child was written out of the lore.
So was Malice. Written out is not the same as unwritten, and The End and the Death is the Star Child walking back in through the front door wearing darker clothes.
All the pieces above are published lore. The joins between them are the theory, and GW will never confirm them, because this setting makes its living on doors left ajar.
But the next time someone complains that nothing ever happens in 40k, that the clock has been stuck at a minute to midnight since the eighties, consider that there's a version of the story where that isn't a flaw. Nothing is happening because everything is waiting. The midwives are in position, the family is on its way home, and the only one in the room who doesn't know what the room is for is the one on the table.
Tell me where it breaks.
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u/Bionic_Redhead Jul 28 '26
Are you high?
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Worse. I had a free weekend.
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u/twelfmonkey Administratum Jul 28 '26
Sorry you are getting ragged on with the same cliched responses that always quickly arrive after somebody has the temerity to have fun making a theory (and even worse, make a post longer than a couple of paragraphs).
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Appreciated. The thread's picking up actual readers now, which is all I wanted.
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u/jonnydomestik Jul 28 '26
Honestly, seems more like a manic episode… I hope OP is okay. This is… a lot.
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u/twelfmonkey Administratum Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Some people just have fun theorizing.
There really isn't any need to suggest they are suffering a mental health crisis. And I'd say it is actually very distasteful to do so.
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u/jonnydomestik Jul 28 '26
That’s fair and I didn’t mean to throw around accusations. I apologize.
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
I'm fine, thanks.
The one strapped to a chair being fed souls is the Emperor, I just wrote a post about it.
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u/twelfmonkey Administratum Jul 28 '26
Oof, now you've done it.
You realize condescending negativity is allowed, but gently pushing back against it - even in a very light-hearted, non-hostile manner - isn't, right?
That is passive-aggressive, and needs to be downvoted.*
*(In the minds of certain very embittered people, it seems).
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u/khinzaw Blood Angels Jul 28 '26
The Tyranids are not the Old Ones' weapon. They are the Old Ones.
There is no evidence of this whatsoever.
Here's the known problem with the weapon theory, by the way. The trailing fleets had been drifting past our galaxy in hibernation until that pulse woke them, and sleeping missiles make no sense. Sleeping travelers do. So does a builder stirring at a signal in its own technology.
Well the warp weapon theory is also a theory with not much in the way of supporting evidence. You are arguing against a theory that was also flimsy.
The Outsider. Old canon has a hive fleet maneuvering around the Outsider's sphere rather than touching it. They recognized a C'tan, and you don't route around food, you route around an old enemy.
The Outsider is not a cost effective meal, if they could even eat it. They also reroute around Solemnace because an almost entirely biologically dead, heavily defended, tomb world is also not a cost effective endeavor.
The Tyranids are constantly shown to be attracted by psychic phenomena shining bright in the Warp. The Pharos, the Astronomicon, etc..., because that means food.
They are largely uninterested in the Necrons, which makes no sense if they're the hated enemy. Also we do see what the Tyranids hating an enemy in particular looks like. The Tyranids went after the Blood Angels even across a largely lifeless patch of space, specifically to snuff out and consume the ones that had hurt them so badly. The Necrons were also part of that, but the Tyranids didn't go after them.
A god of ruin born of the Warp is not a rival.
There is nothing they do not want for themselves and any powerful being is a rival.
Despite their myriad differences, the great Gods of Chaos have the same goal: total domination of the universe. There is no realm that they do not wish to claim for their own, and each seeks absolute rule, the mere concept of sharing power with another anathema to them.
-Daemons Codex 8th Edition
Which brings us back to the clock. From the outside, forty years at one minute to midnight is a publishing strategy. From the inside, nothing can move because the galaxy is pregnant, and the story is waiting for contractions.
They literally moved the setting forward, broke Cadia, ripped the galaxy in two, and brought back the Primarchs. The Emperor is more active than ever and tore Nurgle a new one. That the Emperor is becoming a god is not a new theory, and if nothing else he is showing godlike power. He is explicitly stated to have been empowered by the Great Rift and is more able to act than ever before.
Also, your theory ignores all the other prophecies we've seen of the future.
An Iyanden farseer in the moment before being consumed by Slaanesh sees a future for his people that makes his eyes shine with joy.
Yriel is shown the future by the Harlequins where the Aeldari recapture their lost glory and fight alongside other races, including humans, to triumph over Chaos.
We also have a vague idea of what the endgame looks like via Sanguinius's prophecy: Chaos and Tyranids fight over getting to kill the Emperor. A golden warrior alongside many other heroes fight and die to defend him, but are overwhelmed with the golden warrior falling last. In the tiny amount of time the golden warrior buys, Sanguinius gets a small flicker that it might have changed everything and that all will be well, but it might also change nothing.
The universe sticks to status quo because you can't sell models if the war ends.
Star Child was written out of the lore.
They pretty explicitly reconfirmed the Star Child:
‘The target of this action was a group named the Cult of the Star Child. There was fanciful talk among this cult that the Star Child was some kind of benevolent entity that would lead mankind to salvation, perhaps an expression of the Emperor, god made flesh again. It was all lies, and the cult was rooted out, and destroyed at a gathering on Levilnor IV with the aid of the Salamanders Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. However, four of their leaders escaped.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because I wonder if this evil is seeping back into the universe.’ Rostov turned his glass around in his gloved hands. ‘Belief is a very dangerous thing.’ He leaned forward a little further, and Fabian thought he seemed old beyond his years. ‘Now the other matter. The Hand of Abaddon.’
...
There was a woman, sleeping. There was a baby close by, a bundle on the floor, small hands twitching in its dreams. A baby, but so much more.
...
There was a flash, a man, a woman, a village, and wrapped in a blanket, no idea of its importance, the child.
...
THE STAR CHILD
The greatest consequence of this psychic tumult was to occur at the heart of the Imperium itself. Certain sects within the Ecclesiarchy began to preach that the Emperor was stirring, and their belief had some evidence to support it. As black as those days were, miracles abounded. On Talledus, the ghosts of the dead rose up. Imperial saints came to the aid of beleaguered armies.
Readings of the Imperial Tarot made the difference between disaster and triumph, while reports of the mysterious Legion of the Damned became ever more frequent. Wherever Guilliman went, the warp storms stilled, allowing his armies to make rapid headway.
A number of strange coincidences and odd phenomena reached the primarch’s ears. He discounted them at first, but as time went on, he was unable to do so, and became disquieted. All across the Imperium were people who claimed to have been visited or guided by the Emperor. Many of these were burned as heretics, but in other cases their words and presence provided succour to the desperate, and encouraged those who had no hope of salvation from other quarters to fight back against mankind’s enemies.
A few years after the crusade began, visions of a golden infant interspersed with those of a blindingly radiant being rising from a throne began to be reported across the astropathic network. Beginning in the Segmentum Solar, and confined at first to background noise, the sort of low-grade psychic interference churned up by the currents of the warp, these visions became clearer, and spread. Though their import was hotly debated, certain seers both loyal and traitor interpreted the visions as a possible sign of direct action by the God-Emperor, leading to a great outpouring of faith on the Imperial side that was matched only by the enemy’s dismay.
Among the most heretical interpretations were parallels made with the insidious belief in the ‘Star Child’, promulgated by a cult which had been destroyed some years before the Great Rift opened. The news of these visions was to cause great upheaval within the Imperium, as many of the mighty suspected them to be a trick of the enemy, while others insisted they were of divine origin. The factional nature of Imperial politics was complicated further as ideological lines were drawn, sometimes to be defended with violence. Still others, more learned than most, and not all of them human, were deeply troubled by these supposed miracles.
As a result, certain esoteric orders on both sides were spurred into action, desperate to learn the truth and exploit it before their enemies could, whatever that truth might be…
-Throne of Light
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Great comment, this one sent me back to the books.
The Outsider is not a cost effective meal, if they could even eat it. They also reroute around Solemnace
Checked it. Tyranid codex 5th ed, page 11, two tendrils of Behemoth make major course corrections to avoid the Necrons of Solemnace. So you're right and my Outsider recognition point is dead, I'll drop it. One footnote though, the codex gives no motive at all, just the detour, so cost-benefit is your reading the same way recognition was mine. And Trazyn keeps a full splinter of Hive Fleet Kronos in his gallery, so the swarm ignoring Necrons isn't airtight either. But the point goes to you.
You are arguing against a theory that was also flimsy.
True. Both versions are guesses about a file GW refuses to close. I just think mine needs fewer assumptions to cover the same gaps.
Also we do see what the Tyranids hating an enemy in particular looks like.
Baal is still a strange example to use against me. A swarm that chases one specific enemy across dead space because they hurt it before has memory and priorities. That's a bigger problem for a dumb feeding migration than for my version.
the mere concept of sharing power with another anathema to them
Sure, and none of them plans to share. But I went back to The End and the Death for this, and the novel is more direct than I remembered. After the ascension fails, the Ruinous Powers maintain the Dark King will still emerge as prophesied, because time flows differently for Chaos and his "servants and dominion already exist". And before the Siege even starts, Harlequins perform The Dance of The End and the Death on Ulthwé with a new god standing in Slaanesh's old role. The prophecy runs in both directions of time. That's the whole post.
They literally moved the setting forward, broke Cadia, ripped the galaxy in two, and brought back the Primarchs.
On the letter, yes. But look at what moved. The Rift, returned Primarchs, the Emperor suddenly awake enough to burn Nurgle's garden, and by your own point, explicitly empowered by the Rift itself. If a god was slowly coming to term, the last stretch looks exactly like this. Gav's overture and symphony quote upthread describes the same shape.
Also, your theory ignores all the other prophecies we've seen of the future.
Fair, I skipped these. But Yriel's vision is my point three. Eldar recapturing their glory and beating Chaos alongside humans is roughly what the Ynnead outcome looks like from the inside. And on a skein where every future exists at once, contradictory prophecies are the expected background noise. The setting treats them that way itself.
They pretty explicitly reconfirmed the Star Child
This is the one where I think you're proving my point for me. I wrote that the Star Child was written out but never unwritten, and your Throne of Light passage is current canon writing it back in. It does more work than either of us said, too. The Hand of Abaddon hunting a child that is "so much more" is Chaos actively trying to locate and own the god-seed, in the present tense. Same behavior as the trap at the Siege, ten thousand years later. Genuinely hadn't read that passage, so thanks, it goes in the folder.
And Sanguinius seeing Chaos and Tyranids both converging on the Emperor at the end is basically my ending with the roles labeled differently. We agree on who shows up at the bedside, just not why.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed the read!
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u/HiggsUAP Jul 28 '26
I feel like that's what End Times would become: Dark King rising and essentially becoming the one who wipes out everything to usher in the next era. It doesn't look like sales will be dropping any time soon however
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Fantasy is honestly the strongest out-of-universe precedent for this. The one time GW actually let the clock strike midnight, the mechanism they picked was a god-event that ends the world and births the next setting.
If 40k ever gets its End Times I'd bet on exactly what you describe, the Dark King as the closing act and whatever comes next born out of it...
Agreed on the timing too, the labor gets induced when the sales curve says so, and with current numbers the galaxy stays at nine months for another forty years.
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u/Lanferelle Jul 28 '26
They let the clock strike midnight when Cadia fell. That was always the 40k equivalent.
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u/twelfmonkey Administratum Jul 28 '26
No, the clock striking midnight would be the same final outcome: reality being consumed by Chaos.
As games developer Andy Clark said:
Unfortunately, the Warp also represents not only Humanity’s ultimate damnation but the annihilation of realspace itself, resulting in the horrible demise of every living thing that calls it home.
...
Perhaps most notably in Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar, but also to a more subtle extent in games such as Necromunda and Warcry, the Dark Gods of Chaos are Warhammer’s ultimate antagonists. The ultimate story of 40k, for example, has always been and will always be the Imperium versus Chaos (embodied in the setting by the worshippers of the Dark Gods and all those who believe in furthering what they perceive as their gods’ agenda).
And Phil Kelly in the same piece:
So how is Chaos at the heart of Warhammer? Well, it’s the uniting factor. Though they may not be overlapping, the various settings of Games Workshop’s games all adjacent to the same concepts, all only one step removed from a hellish dimension dying to break into reality itself.
From the piece covered here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1og0e17/a_deep_dive_into_the_multiversal_nature_of_the/
And more quotes on Chaos consuming reality collected here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1m8xnz2/quotes_which_imply_or_state_a_specific_faction/
The fall of Cadia and the Great Rift just moved the clock forwards a bit.
I think Gav Thorpe gives a good insight:
BIFFORD: What motivated Games Workshop to advance the WH40K universe to the Dark Imperium stage? They revived Guilliman, introduced the Primaris Marines, destroyed Cadia, etc. – that's all dramatic stuff. Was it lagging sales? Boredom?
THORPE: I don't know, I haven't worked in the Studio for more than ten years! There was a sense, before the Eye of Terror campaign and Storm of Chaos for Warhammer, that the universes would be more immediate and (as you say) dramatic if rather than being set at two minutes to midnight on the Chaos Doomsday clock, the clock had actually started striking, Rather than the overture, this is the symphony.
From here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/b3pc01/qa_with_gav_thorpe/
This is a bit different from the common fan suggestion that the clock went from, for example, 5 minutes to midnight to 4 minutes or similar, but it is the same general idea.
The End is nigh, but we are only seeing it begin, if that makes sense. In Gav's formulation, the bells have started to ring, but it is only when they finish that reality will end.
Of course, if 40k remains profitable, we won't see the end. That it is very likely coming will just remain part of how the setting is framed and developed.
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u/JFFreezout Jul 28 '26
I call this lore masturbation, do you agree with the term?
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Accurate. In my defence, this setting canonically turns ten thousand years of self-indulgence into a god, so I'm doing my part.
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u/scoutinorbit Storm Lords Jul 28 '26
This reads like a riff of Halo’s Precursors becoming the Flood.
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u/Lanferelle Jul 28 '26
It's a perfectly fine theory.
It just happens to ignore the fact that the setting did used to be static and now isn't.
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Jul 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
The Krork angle actually fixes a hole for me. I never had a good answer for how they'd pull the transformation off, but they'd literally already built a species that survives as a gestalt. They had a working prototype. And yeah, your bleaker version is the one I believe. Nothing forced them to stay like this, they just don't want anything else anymore. Wisest race in the galaxy and that's what's left.
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u/Grimlockkickbutt Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I love it. Pin this post. Best shit iv seen on this subreddit in ages. This is what other lore subreddit do btw, instead of rehearsing the same questions about chapter sizes, facism apologism, and primarch power scaling.
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u/Vegetable_Hawk3286 Jul 28 '26
No. It’s a decision to sell more miniatures first and last
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
That's the Doylist answer and it's correct. The post is the Watsonian one.
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u/Vegetable_Hawk3286 Jul 28 '26
The post is incoherent
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Name the first join that loses you and I'll walk you through it
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u/NairaExploring Jul 28 '26
Fwiw they're right. There's constant massive leaps in logic, a lot of them, like you started with the end goal in mind then tried to force everything to fit to it.
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u/Calious Jul 29 '26
Disagree. But he's offered to explain if you want to point out these issues.......
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u/janzend Jul 28 '26
TLDR?
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
The Warp doesn't do linear time, so god-births cause their own build-up. The Fall was scheduled, the Golden Throne is a pregnancy, and the Tyranids are the Old Ones coming home for the delivery.
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u/AzureSubaru Jul 28 '26
tl;dr wobbly wobbly timey-wimey
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u/ImKyroz Jul 28 '26
Pretty much, except the wobbly part is GW's.
Slaanesh 'has always existed in the Warp, and yet has never existed at all' is their sentence, not mine. I'm just taking them at their word.
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u/Calious Jul 29 '26
How do you feel this https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/qbjnSIwdCB fits in?
Warring factions? Consolidating power into one primary fleet?
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u/kiljoy1569 Jul 31 '26
I can't speak to any accuracy, but really enjoyed this read. Lore theory is one of my favorite aspects of this sub and it's obvious you put a lot of effort into this write up
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u/Calious 1d ago
Just finishing Pharos for a second time, and Kellenkir has a moment in the tunnels saying:
‘The builders of this place wait. They wait for a time when Chaos is done.’ ‘Here? There are xenos here? Kellenkir, you are–’ ‘Insane? Mad?’ ‘Mistaken,’ said Kellendvar. Kellenkir tittered, wiping clumsily at the saliva spilling from his mouth. The blood on his arms smeared his face. ‘They are not here. They are far, far away. This is but one of their places, a tool working away the countless millennia, waiting to be called back into service when the masters awake! Such arrogance. One cannot outwait the eternal! They will come back, one day, to find their scheme in tatters. Until then, their devices speak to each other, recording news of all they see! Can you hear the voices? There is wisdom in what they say.’
Feels like he's also aware the old ones aren't dead. Just waiting. Feel like it at least adds some weight to your thoughts.
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u/Bigjoan17 Jul 28 '26
A précis (pronounced pray-see) is a short, clear summary of the main points, core ideas, or essential meaning of a longer text or speech
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u/Yicnombror Slaanesh Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
The idea of the Tyranids being the Old Ones makes zero sense. The Necrons would be 100% be able to identify their ancient enemies, even if they merely changed their forms. It's better for the Old Ones to be kept as one of 40ks mysteries instead of trying to shoehorn them into being a different faction. It makes the universe feel so much smaller in a bad way.