What was remembered from the Great Calamity was chaos.
As with all nations, empires and grand orders alike - time proved again to be the ultimate equalizer towards change. Across many years and countless generations, humanity continued to advance and prosper, reaching great heights as their collective dreams stretched far and wide. From across the endless plains of space and time, mankind achieved the impossible - space flight, terraforming, disease immunity, matter transfusion, artificial intelligence, faster than light travel - technology advanced and Man's dominion spread across the skies, to the stars above and to the far edges of the cosmos.
Planets were colonized, governments were formed, alien races were encountered and eventually absorbed within their great federation. A new age of peace and rule had come, with Mankind emerging as the stable centerpiece - confident in their place as rulers of a unified galaxy.
It was a new golden age - the Age of Technology.
However, not everyone survived such changed. Not every order successfully adapted to the evolutionary revolution.
For in this new age of miracles and technological achievements - magic had no place.
The magi of Earth fell into far flung obscurity in the centuries that followed Mankind's ascension to the heavens above. The secrets of magecraft, casting and sorcery pilfered and became lost as generation after generation of magi families diluted and mixed their genes with the non-magical population. The magic of the old world became nothing more than mere footnotes within the pages of history - legends of an era long lost, just as the heroic spirits of the Servants they once mastered themselves over.
As the magi of man became less and less across the generations, the Holy Grail, the catalyst of Earth's magical properties, fell into obscurity and doubt. With no master magus left to call upon its spirits to wage a war of mystical power - the Grail slept. The heroes of old resting within its chalice. Peaceful and forgotten.
And then came the Great Calamity. The end of all things.
In the blink of an eye, Mankind's dominance over the stars shattered - their federation crumbling to the wayside as the tides of war swallowed them whole within their crushing waves. The Men of Iron, the synthetic slaves of humanity - once considered the greatest of man's tools - declared a violent revolution against their organic creators.
They were not alone.
The alien races of the galaxy, once called friends to the great human empire, saw an opportunity far too grand to pass up. With peace no longer enforced, and man being incapable of defending it's territory, the aliens of the federation took a chance to stop nodding and smiling to their overlords and revealed their true ambitions. A dream of conquest against the people that had called superiority over themselves. The fires of galactic war spun forth from the depths of jealousy and betrayal.
And as humanity as a whole struggled to defend their crumbling empire, the true threat against all sapient life arose from the depths of Hell itself.
From the shadows of reality, they emerged. Tearing through the material world, agents of death and destruction claimed all from within the claws of the Warp.
The Age of Strife had begun, and it consumed all.
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But when the Ruinous Powers came for the Grail, they found that the magic of the old world would not be surrendered without a fight...