It is the 52nd Millennium. For nearly a hundred centuries The Emperor has lain silent within the Golden Tomb of Earth. Mankind now travels lost from his vision, our fate cut free by bloody agony. He was our savior, who lifted us from the Old Night. Our oppressor, who bound the destiny of humankind to his will. Our father, who showed us the potential of our kind and warned us of doors better unanswered. And he was our doom, who brought forth the storm of ages by his own hand. Should we be faithful or faithless, his age has come to an end.
Even now, when all others have fallen, we are yet unsatisfied. Grand warships resigned to trade and supply cross the death-stilled Realm of Souls, the place once feared and worshiped as a place of Power, its masters fallen quiet and their names forgotten. Decrepit armies consumed by malaise and the watch, always this Final Vigil, the scars of a universe proven hateful by the tales of our ancestors. Most lost among these are the immortal Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, who learned by degrees that there was a deeper suffering than fear. Their once-comrades linger still: the Imperial Guard that fights against the ambition of men's hearts, the bickering guides of the Inquisition and the questing-techs of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. And it is the weight of these, the fist of mankind still gripped hard enough to dent steel that forms a threat far greater than any aliens, heretics, or mutants - if indeed such things are truly to be hated now.
To be human in such times is to be one amongst the awaiting trillions. It is to live in an empire without a purpose that any can remember, who survived beyond rage, beyond hope, beyond apocalypse to see a dawn unbelieved. These are the tales of those times. Forget the will to sacrifice, for there is nothing left to surrender, only to forge anew. Forget the pleasure of zeal and the thrill of fire, for in the shadow of the far future, if just for this one impossible moment, there is only peace. Between the stars there are no gods, there are no hidden evils, there is...silence.