Title: End of the Golden Age.
Alternate titles: Ending of the Golden Age (first used), Time of Ending of the Golden Age (draft title), Warp Effect (possible future title?).
Type: Crossover between Warhammer 40000 and Mass Effect.
Setting: Takes place in the Mass Effect universe, shortly after Shepard's resurrection.
Status: In progress.
Summary: Chaos spills into the 3rd millennium where the Order of the Reapers would have intervened. By the 10th millennium, there is only war and the laughter of thirsting Gods. Fusion fic.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Warhammer or Mass Effect franchises. I make no profit from this story. All characters belong to their respective owners. You are welcomed to republish, modify, adopt, rewrite, archive or do with this story what you want, as long as you give me credit for the original idea, preferably with a link to my profile, and that you make no profit from the distribution of this material (that'll get both me and you in trouble). You do not need to ask me permission to do this, although a heads-up would be appreciated.
* Exceptions: Lord GEM/Gem is my character; I reserve the right to use him as my property in the future. You should contact me if you want to use this character.
It is the 10th Millennium. For almost a hundred centuries The Empress has sat trapped on the Golden Throne of Earth. She is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of her inexhaustible armies. She is the Just Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that she may never truly die.
Yet even in her deathless state, the Empress continues her eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the fastest route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Empress' will. Vast armies give battle in her name on uncounted worlds. Rescued by her from the perils of the warp and distant times and places are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defense forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. Native to her galaxy, aliens and mutants alike find refuge in her Imperium, saved from the hate and bigotry of an uncaring universe.
But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from xenos, heretics - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in very perilous times. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, hardly to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Commander Shepard, now Empress Shepard, sat on her Golden Throne reminiscing over the last thousands of years. When the times were more simple. When all she had to worry were gangs coming for her, training under the Alliance or saving the Galaxy from Reapers. Thinking about it, she believed she could have pulled it off, and maybe live a decent life, then finally die. Damn Prothean Device. Damn Chaos. Now she was stuck here. Not physically, of course, but politically in the least, and she begrudgingly admitted she was the safest in the Imperial Palace on Holy Terra - she almost snorted at that thought - from all the enemies she had accumulated, that could not only render her flesh useless - a problem she might have little issue with after all this time - but her soul and mind as well. And those were things she dared not leave on the hands of another, especially her race's enemies. Or to leave her Imperium for others to rule who might stear it to madness, for that matter.
And it had been going so smoothly back then. Well, compared to these times, it was pretty smooth. Just some Collectors abducting humans. The Citadel barely payed attention, and now looking at the bigger picture so did she.
Then came Sovereign, the colossal thing, at the gates of the Citadel. Everyone was expecting a firefight, but still, in the interest of acting like they gave a fuck, the Council ordered communication with the... thing, Geth Dreadnaught as they believed it was, to ask its intention. And, to the surprise of Shepard and many others, the thing actually answered. And its news was chilling. It claimed - using Council-speak - that it indeed belonged to a race of Reapers, who may have had intentions that the races of the Galaxy would understand with great difficulty unless they were enlightened, but that that wasn't the reason it was here. No, it came to deliver a warning. Half its species - sentient machines it had described itself - had been corrupted, their creators had literally ran from the oncoming storm, and that there would be a great war coming between those two factions - the pure and the corrupted - but not only that, that this corruption would affect every corner of the Galaxy with a sentient being in it. It went on to describe the true creators, as well as purpose, of the Mass Effect Relays and the Citadel, that for the Reapers to come and "harvest" all space-faring life in order to "protect" it and "preserve" it. It then gave the Citadel races blueprints and instructions on how to disable them from Reaper use only, with only one-way ticket for Sovereign to leave from where he came.
Everyone was stunned, to say the least, at the news, some disbelieving, but with blueprints that not even the Geth could (re)discover in such short amount of time since their creation, they had to believe them, as a race of at least 50.000 years (if they were the creations of the Protheans) and millions of years, if they were what they claimed to be.
Yes, the warning was heard, and with it, the Collectors and the Geth came, claiming to be under the Old Machine's protection, and offered their help with maintaining the borders of the Galaxy from threats without, while everyone hoped the Reapers would annihilate each other and spare the Galaxy their wrath. For, what could be so bad as to make sentient machines tens of thousands - or millions - of years old run to sentients and warn them of impending doom? And from what Shepard knew of the original agenda of the machines, she knew even if the purists would win, they'd bide their time to rise to full strength again and harvest the Galaxy.
Then it got bad, for even as the united races of the Galaxy were preparing for deranged Reapers (more deranged than they considered them already), Earth moved inwards, protecting its colonies more fervently and making fortresses of the populated zones on every world, while on Terra Firma, The Illusive Man's party was gaining strength, urging for the retreat of humanity into its borders and for his often "humans first, aliens afterthought" agenda regarding resources, help or defense. Even if the Asari were building dreadnaughts at an alarming speed, as well as the other races, and giving them to protect most homeworlds, even as the genophage had been cured and the Krogans were multiplying, even as the Salarians were advancing technologically faster than ever, there was still a sense both of desperation and foreboding.
Once again sadly, nobody looked inside their own ranks. Shepard even now knew that without the description they lacked from the Reapers on what was about to happen and even with seeing the signs in time, it would have been probably too late, and everything would be only obvious (and believable) in retrospect, still she wished they had been more careful and more observant.
For the worst was about to happen. Subtle currents of warp energy had already engulfed the Galaxy and had started coalescing around the points of interest to its denizens: lust, rage, deceit and death. But there was only one Lord of Excess, only one who had truly, mightily, forcefully destroyed the boundries between reality and immaterium on such a scale as to let his brothers' minions in. Indeed, even rage and hate were tempered, for how would an excessive killing place birth any new entertainment? As well as death, and the Great Betrayer was just too subtle for this kind of thing.
But these Asari... Thessia... and the Lord of Excess proved to be a very bad combination. The Asari were all but Eldar in nature: long-lived, considered beautiful by all races, psychic through their own means yet unaware of their own potential, and worst of all horny, insatiable and bored. So it began, the fall of Thessia and of an old empire, slowly at first, excesses committed, hidden by the matriarchs in fear it would "send the wrong message" to the rest of the species that respected them, then worse and worse until Thessia and many worlds around them were considered worse for visiting (to those in the known) than Omega, or hell, even a Batarian colony on a bad day. The extranet was still censored for the outside species, but for Asari, the message was clear: if you're still sane, run! Run away from the Asari core worlds!
By the time the streets of Thessia ran blue with blood (and sometimes red, green and other assorted colors both on buildings and on gleeful asari), the matriarch began thinking, that maybe, there may have been a plague at work here. Possibly. Those on the streets preached that it was the natural evolution of their species, the culling of the weak and the Asari taking their place over the "lesser species". Still, the matriarchs said nothing, hoping it was "just a phase" (after all, "sexing like bunnies" in their youth didn't seem too strange compared to "torturing like bunnies" by their point of view, and they were their people), and although the Salarians knew, they kept it under wraps as a favor to what even they considered their superiors, dooming many Asari as consequences.
For, eventually, on a lost date in time to all but a few privileged or lucky, reality broke over Thessia, and hell spilled on the streets. Blood-soaked Asari opened their arms and yelled in ecstasy to the sky, awaiting their new-birthed (or at least summoned/released) God. And Slaanesh obliged in gorging on their souls and making Thessia his first planet of pleasure (and torment) in this Galaxy.
As the news spread to the Citadel after the psychic scream of the eaten sisters, most inhabitants were... baffled. Not even the Salarians could guess at what the hell happened. Yes, they had measured strange readings while surveying Thessia for any kind of disease, heard radio whispers that shouldn't been there, found unusual particles, but this... it was beyond imagination. And it couldn't be contained or hidden. So the announcement was made: Thessia and many of its core worlds had been lost in a "time-space anomaly". Even if they hoped to recover the worlds and its inhabitants, it was obvious that now, it was harder to travel through it than in an anomaly-ridden nebula. But what scared the observers most is what exactly formed in the wake of the Asari homeworld: a baleful red eye, as the eye of a demon, god or something worse, watching them with thirst and glee, welcoming them in its damned domain.
Author's Notes: See above.