The Age of Chaos

The golden centuries of the Age of Myth ended not with a single battle but with a slow, smothering darkness that history would name The Age of Chaos. The Dark Gods, long held at bay, poured their legions through every unwatched gate until the realms themselves seemed to sicken. What had been a pantheon of gods and mortals building wonders became a scattered resistance fighting only to survive.

City by city and realm by realm, the works of Sigmar and his allies were thrown down. The Slaves to Darkness crowned warlords atop the ashes of civilizations, and the Everchosen Archaon rode at their head, gathering the favour of all four Ruinous Powers. Old gods were slain, enslaved or driven into hiding; the great alliance that had raised the realms fractured as each power fought its own doomed war, and the wonders of an age of miracles were put to the torch.

At the last, betrayed and outnumbered, Sigmar closed the gates of Azyr and withdrew into his heavens, abandoning the realms to save the souls he could still reach. For long ages Chaos ruled almost unopposed, raising bloody monuments across the realms and warring only with itself. Daemon princes carved out grotesque fiefs, and the survivors of the free peoples were driven into the deep and hidden places, keeping the old names and stories alive by little more than stubbornness and firelight.

Yet the God-King had not surrendered: he had merely gone to forge a weapon. The Age of Chaos was the setting's long night, the ruin from which every later war of reconquest would draw its bitter urgency, and the reason the storm, when it finally came, struck with such fury. To grasp how deeply the Dark Gods rooted themselves, see Chaos in the Age of Sigmar.