The Great Cataclysm
Today we can only guess at what exactly went wrong and why.
Those who were present and might have known did not survive the event to explain. There are many theories, but in truth, we don’t even know if it was a single event or a series of unfortunate coincidences that triggered the final Great Cataclysm. Some accounts claim that the blame doesn’t rest with The Old Ones, but with another race of space travellers, the Eldar. Because, by now, many races were using the interdimensional gateways to expand their galactic empires.
Whatever the cause was, the effects were catastrophic for not only The Old Ones and the Eldar, but for the entire material universe.
The exact date when The Great Cataclysm occurred is difficult to determine accurately, most sources place it as sometime during the 30th Millennium of the Warhammer 40K timeline and that corresponds to a time somewhere between of 4,500 to 5,600 years before the crowning of Sigmar, the first human Emperor, in the Warhammer Fantasy timeline.
Anyone who witnessed the event and survived is long since dead, and their stories have lapsed into myth and legend in the same way as any evidence of the event has been buried or dispersed over time.
One possible explanation can be found in the pages of a tome called ‘Realm of Chaos, The Lost and the Damned, where Page 177 recounts the myth of The Birth of Slaanesh, a new Chaos God whose creation in the warp was said to have been the event that triggered the Cataclysm.
The story of the birth of Slaanesh is plausible, but for obvious reasons is not accepted as factual by every academic, least of all the Eldar. Who have their own preferred explanation and theory blaming everything on a reptilian race called the Slann and upon the ignorance of humanity.
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