Author's Note

Yeah so.

Had myself an idea when I was trying to sleep, so here you go, I hope you like it!

I am by no means an expert in Warhammer or Star Wars lore, so please don't send me any mailbombs if I get something wrong.

Also, I am not interested in your art commisions. If I have one more "person" send me an unsolicited art ad, I am going to scream.

Chapter One : An Obscure, Green Star

Long ago, in the shrouded stretches of the Outer Rim, before even the oldest veterans of the Clone Wars had been born, before the Republic was a name spoken across a thousand worlds, there came a stir in the dark — from a system lost to time and fear, a system that didn't have a name back then. A system with numerous worlds and a sickly green star.

It began subtly, as most calamities did. Strange emissions of green-tinged energy filtered through the black between stars, interfering with hyperlane charts, fouling the instruments of early explorers who dared venture near. Planets were whispered of — cracked worlds and bloated moons, each home to squabbling, clawed civilizations that seemed, at first glance, too fractured to pose a threat. And yet, during the era of the Old Republic, from the festering pit of Skavenblight, they rose.

The Skaven. They were not so easily categorized as the usual threats the Jedi had catalogued — not Sith, not Mandalorians, not mindless beasts. They were a plague of living things, each driven by madness, greed, hunger, cunning, and an unnatural link to the corruptive energies of the void. In a rare convergence of their volatile nature, the Skaven clans — once bickering, eternally sabotaging one another — managed a fleeting unity. They gathered a Vermintide: an exodus of pestilence and ruin, a crusade of ramshackle warpstone ships stitched together from dead worlds and cursed ingenuity.

The Vermintide struck like a fever across the frontier. Outposts fell in the dark without distress signals ever reaching Coruscant. Corvettes, frigates, battleships and more would go missing with little evidence left behind in empty space. These ships would later be found amongst the Vermintide fleet, retrofitted with warpstone technology that was far more deadly than it was understood by the baffled Republic authorities.

Yet for all the chaos they unleashed, it was not the Jedi, nor the fleets of the Republic, that truly defeated them.

True to their nature, the Skaven betrayed themselves. As their initial victories mounted, so too did the whispers of treachery, ambition, and desperation among their leaders. Clan turned on clan. Warpstone-fueled vessels bombarded their own kin to secure better plunder. On ravaged worlds, rival Skaven warlords would gut each other over the spoils of war, indifferent to the fact that organized resistance was growing around them. There was one account of a Jedi surrounded by a pack of Stormvermin, surely doomed, only to be saved by the Stormvermin fighting themselves over who would plunder the lightsaber.

The Republic never truly understood what had happened — only that the tide of destruction, which had seemed inevitable, had collapsed inward like a diseased lung. Skavenblight, and the horrors that hailed from it, were pushed back into the blackness from whence they came. The last organized efforts to study or explore the system ended in cryptic failures: fleets disappearing without trace, research stations left hollow and silent. By the height of the Republic's golden age, the Skaven were relegated to rumor, half-remembered footnotes in crumbling archives.

It became convenient to believe that Skavenblight was a myth. A cautionary tale for the ambitious, the foolhardy, and the mad. Officially, it was marked as a restricted, dangerous zone — an unspecified hazard — and left off most modern starcharts. In truth, few even knew the name anymore. It lingered only in the oldest, dustiest corners of the Jedi Archives, behind locked access codes and the cryptic warnings of ancient Masters who had seen things they would not speak aloud.

Far from the civilized lanes of the galaxy, beneath the sickly green light of their dying star, the clans still churned. Warlock-engineers in rusting manufactorums belched out cruel, chittering weapons powered by unstable warpstone reactors. Grey Seers — shamans of pestilence and prophecy — scrawled forbidden rites on the skin of their own followers.

One moon in the system had a vital settlement. It was there that the Council of Thirteen would meet. Leaders of the twelve major clans, Skyre, Moulder, Moors, Eshin and more, would negotiate uneasy alliances for them to collapse just weeks later. The thirteenth was of course, the Horned Rat, a figure that none outside Skavenblight dared acknowledge.

And so it was, as the galaxy tore itself apart in civil war — with Republic and Separatists locked in brutal attrition, with Jedi stretched thin across a million worlds — that the ancient stirrings in Skavenblight began anew.