A soul so big and charged that it could rival the Emperor's own soul screamed in the warp.
The soul split into 4 pieces with a Bang!!, sending waves throughout the immaterium. The wave was felt by every entity with any connection to the warp.
"Who has dared such violence?" a being seated on a throne of copper said as his blazing red eyes followed the wave.
"Haha... this is going to be fun. Where have I felt this energy before?" In the labyrinth of unimaginable twists and turns within the deepest part of the labyrinth, the Changer of Ways delighted at the new game.
"Who would have such an unusual soul? Taking death in such a way..." In the garden of puss and diseases, the Great Father looked upon the wave with a mix of interest and wet, bubbling annoyance.
"From the humans again? How are they doing this?" Amidst countless bodies writhing in pleasure and pain, She Who Thirsts commented, tasting the soul-scent on the aether.
On Terra, it was a whole different story. The Emperor, Malcador the Sigillite, and Captain-Commander Constantine Valdor discussed what they just felt.
"The ripples are clouded. Who has awakened such a soul, such that we could sense it even here?" Malcador looked to the Emperor in confusion.
"I do not know who it is, but they have just alerted those things in the immaterium," the Emperor responded, his gaze fixed on the distance.
"I know not if they will be able to survive the attention they have drawn."
"Can we intervene, and secure such a person?" Valdor suggested, his hand tightening on his spear.
"A psyker of that magnitude would be useful to the plan, or a danger to it."
"Indeed, though the location of the person eludes me," the Emperor admitted.
"Is there a general location we can follow? Directing our expansion in that direction would increase our chances of finding the person before Chaos does."
"We cannot locate the person. The phenomena occurred only on the soul basis; there was no connection to the body," Malcador interjected, and the Emperor nodded in agreement.
After a few more conversations, the three movers of the Imperium separated to continue their tasks in preparation for the upcoming crusade to reclaim the lost colonies of humanity.
The same conversation occurred within the Farseers of the Aeldari. Some other races that possess psykers also noticed the situation and it started a conversation on what was going to happen.
Meanwhile, the souls in question hung there within the immaterium, not moving for a few seconds.
With a sudden explosion, one soul shot out of the immaterium into realspace, becoming invisible as it shot towards Luna, within the Sol system.
The rest of the fragments stayed there for a few seconds, until the foul stench and grotesque feeling of foul demons appeared in their area.
They split up into different directions, trying to rid themselves of their would-be predators.
Even as they ran, they refused to move into the material universe. They kept on moving through the immaterium, running through places that seemed safe for them.
One even came across the Emperor, but moved away fast enough, believing he would not be known.
"What a familiar feeling..." An ethereal voice sounded out of a sun hanging in the immaterium.
One particular fragment went around almost every dangerous place, almost seemingly drawn to knowledge.
It did not know when a Prince of Tzeentch caught his scent and followed it. The demon did not strike; he just followed him around, watching.
Like this, the dance of years began.
798.M30, Segmentum Solar, Sol System, Terra
The Unification of Terra was not an end, but a bloody preface. By 798.M30, the thunder of the Unity Wars had faded into a cold, industrial silence.
The techno-barbarian warlords were ash, the gene-cults of Luna were shackled, and the Treaty of Olympus Mons had bound the Red Planet to the Golden Throne.
The Warp-storms that had isolated Sol for five thousand years, the Age of Strife, had finally broken. The galaxy lay open, a wounded beast waiting to be claimed or consumed.
At the Plaza of Unity, on the highest plateaus of the Himalayan peaks, within the shadow of the burgeoning Imperial Palace, the Emperor of Mankind stood before his gathered host.
He was a figure of blinding auric light, draped in the mantle of a conqueror who looked not at the ground he had won, but at the stars he had yet to take.
Beside him stood Malcador the Sigillite, a shadow in grey robes, clutching a staff that hummed with the weight of a thousand secrets.
Below them, the ranks were no longer the wild, short-lived Thunder Warriors of the unification campaigns.
These were the Legiones Astartes, the First, the proto-Legions, clad in the grey of unpainted ceramite or the heraldry of their early victories.
They stood in absolute, terrifying silence. Hundreds of thousands of transhuman soldiers, their hearts beating in a synchronized rhythm that shook the very bedrock of the mountain.
The Emperor made a proclamation not using a vox-caster. His voice moved directly into the minds of every soldier, every citizen of Terra, and every tech-priest of Mars.
It was a golden resonance that carried the weight of absolute certainty.
"The long night is over. The shadows that have held our species in thrall for five millennia are cast back by the dawn of reason. We are the masters of the Sol System, but we are not yet the masters of our destiny."
He gestured toward the sky, where the thinning warp-mists revealed the glittering sprawl of the Milky Way.
"Our brothers and sisters are scattered across the void, drifting in the dark, prey to the alien and the warp-born. We do not go to the stars to conquer as tyrants."
He paused looking at the people before him, as a father would his children.
"We go to reclaim what is ours by right of birth. We go to bring the Imperial Truth to the lost, to cast down the false gods, and to forge an empire that shall never fall. This is the Great Crusade. And it begins now."
With that, ships from Mars, Jupiter, and Terra launched the greatest crusade of mankind under the leadership of the Emperor.