The sky above the Emperor's Throneworld didn't just break; it fractured. It didn't merely scream; it laughed. Not the joyous peal of victory, but a sound like tearing metal and breaking minds, a million madhouse doors thrown open to the cosmos. This was M31.005, and the Great Joke had arrived.
Terra, the heart of the nascent Imperium, bled light and shadow as gaping maw-rents tore reality asunder. From these wounds poured the impossible, the anathema made manifest. Not the ordered legions of the Warmaster this time, but the raw, screaming id of the warp itself. The Ruinous Powers, tired of proxy wars and simmering hatred, had sent their own.
First, the crimson tide. A landscape erupted into a charnel pit as Angron, the Red Angel, Daemon Primarch of Khorne, exploded through a rift like a meteor of pure rage. His stride was a calamity, each step shaking the foundations of the continent. Around him boiled the Blood Legions – not just World Eaters, but Khornate Berserkers from a thousand disparate cults, Bloodthirsters roaring their god's name, and the very ground turning to gore beneath their ceramite boots. Their war cry wasn't for victory; it was a hunger, a biological imperative for slaughter, a sound Khorne himself could hear and approve of.
Next, the pallid miasma. The air curdled, growing heavy with the scent of decay, ozone, and something indescribably foul. Mountains of diseased flesh coalesced from the warp, shifting, groaning, resolving into the bloated, pox-ridden form of Mortarion, the Daemon Primarch of Nurgle. He didn't stride; he drifted, a plague-bearing ghost wreathed in flies and psychic despair. With him came the Plague Legions: Death Guard, reeking and resilient, their armour fused with corrupted flesh; Great Unclean Ones, vast, jolly embodiments of entropy; and Nurglings, giggling, corrosive sprites pouring from every festering wound in reality. Their advance wasn't a charge; it was a slow, inexorable creep, a fungal bloom consuming all in its path.
Then, the glittering, screaming excess. A wave of pure sensation washed over the Imperial Palace, a discordant symphony of pleasure and pain, beauty and horror. Fulgrim, the Phoenician, now a serpentine Daemon Primarch wreathed in impossible light and shadow, coiled forth from a rift that bled iridescent ichor. He was perfection twisted into depravity, his every movement an insult to natural law. His retinue was a carnival of the damned: Emperor's Children, exquisite sadists revelling in every sensation; Daemonettes, elegant, cruel, and utterly captivating; and Keepers of Secrets, forms a dizzying array of claws, beauty, and sonic weapons that turned reason to madness. Their assault was an orgy, an artistic expression of damnation.
And finally, the impossible calculation. Above the unfolding catastrophe, where reality was thinnest, the air shimmered, shifting through a million colours before stabilising into a blinding blue. Magnus the Red, Daemon Primarch of Tzeentch, appeared not as a physical entity initially, but as a psychic presence vast enough to crack the planet's psychic shields. His cyclopean eye surveyed the unfolding chaos with a detached, knowing gaze. With him came the Thousand Sons, dust-filled armour containing nothing but arcane energy; Lords of Change, avian schemers whispering impossible truths; and Horrors, capering daemons whose every split multiplied their numbers and their maddening energy. Their arrival wasn't a physical descent; it was a convolution of space and time, a logic puzzle manifest as war.
But amidst these titans, these avatars of cosmic horror, there was another. A figure who didn't lead a legion, didn't bellow divine praises, didn't embody a singular force. He was just there. High above the fray, perched incongruously on a spire that groaned beneath the psychic pressure like a tuning fork struck wrong, sat a figure cloaked in colours that should not exist together, shifting and mocking the eye. His face was obscured, but his posture, the tilt of his head, the almost visible shrug of his shoulders, conveyed an attitude of profound, disturbing amusement.
This was the Joker.
Not a champion of Chaos—but now something more. The Gods had tested him, branded him, elevated him... and then he had outgrown them. He no longer served Chaos. He had become its director. The orchestrator. The conductor of this shrieking, glorious madness.
He had set the board, arranged the players, and now, with a silent, mirthless laugh that echoed in the souls of men, he watched his masterpiece unfold. He was the architect of the Great Joke—and its punchline was the collapse of order itself.
The Chaos Champions descended alongside their primarchs—Darth Vader, Shao Kahn, Hisoka, Griffith, Witch-king of Angmar, and Dr. Henry Wu—all now executing their private machinations amidst the galactic bedlam.
And the corruption ran deeper than war.
Below, amidst the carnage, a squad of Ultramarines, reinforcing a desperate line, suddenly faltered. Their bolters, moments before tracking Khornate berserkers, swung wildly, targeting the Imperial Army troops huddled behind them. Their faces, visible through cracked visors, weren't contorted with rage or alien possession—but with confusion, agony, and a chilling, absolute conviction.
"We must purge the weak!" one roared, his voice layered with an echo that wasn't his own. "The Imperium must survive! Only the strong are worthy!"
They turned their bolters on the terrified humans, cutting them down in sprays of blood and bone. A nearby squad of Imperial Fists, seeing the betrayal, reacted instantly. "Traitors!" they bellowed, opening fire.
But the Ultramarines didn't fight like traitors. They fought with disciplined, tactical ferocity. For the Emperor! they screamed—even as their bolters tore apart the loyalist lines.
This was no possession.
This was the Joker's masterpiece—a corrupt geneseed virus seeded years before, a slow-burning psychic poison that had rewritten the Space Marines' fundamental principle:
Loyalty.
Not converted to Chaos. Not turned to a specific god. These were loyalists who had reinterpreted their purpose to horrifying extremes. The Emperor's will? It now demanded the elimination of weakness. The Imperium? It must be protected at all costs, even if that meant burning half of it down.
Across Terra, other pockets of this paradox emerged.
Raven Guard stalked loyalists in the shadows, believing they were cleansing 'impurities' no one else could see.
Space Wolves tore apart Imperial command centers, claiming they were possessed by warp-entities only their senses could perceive.
Blood Angels knelt weeping over fallen comrades, claiming they had saved them from deeper corruption.
It wasn't heresy. It was fanaticism—perverted beyond all recognition.
The Daemon Primarchs and their legions were the hammer. The Joker was the whisper in the forge that made the metal strike true. While others fought for victory, the Joker fought for collapse.
Below, Khârn the Betrayer waded through molten ferrocrete, axe Gorechild a crimson blur. Typhus, the Herald of Nurgle, marched with a living plague front. Lucius the Eternal danced a ballet of agony and beauty. Ahriman, the Arch-Sorcerer, rewrote existence line by line, spell by spell, syllable by syllable.
The defenders of Terra—Solar Auxilia, Imperial Army, Custodes, the few loyalist Astartes—stood against the tide, their resistance heroic but ultimately doomed.
And above it all, the Joker laughed.
Not with joy. Not even with malice.
He laughed with understanding.
This wasn't about winning. This wasn't even about revenge or gods.
This was about irony.
That the greatest weapon ever forged by mankind—loyalty—would be its ultimate undoing. That those who had survived the Horus Heresy would now fall to something worse:
Themselves.
And as the sky above Terra cracked wider, as reality groaned and bled, as Chaos sang its dissonant chorus, the Joker turned his head toward the Eye of Terror and whispered:
"Now… for Act Two."