After leaving the Pantheon, Orsaga wandered the streets of an Aeldari colony world like an aimless drifter. Shops lined the avenues, vibrant with the slave trade; displays of flayed trophies and cages of screaming captives advertised prosperous businesses. Orsaga paused to inspect them, then hummed indifferently and moved on.
The air smelled faintly of blood, and the occasional public execution or ritual torment only seemed to please him. It reminded him—comfortingly—of his home in the Abyss: savage, cruel, and familiar. This planet's decadence suited his tastes.
The portion of the Art divinity he had acquired in his bargain with the other Chaos god was, in practical terms, of limited use. Still, for his own amusement it was a worthwhile purchase: at last he was truly a god of Art, not the pale knockoff he had once been. The extradimensional intelligence he had traded for was similarly unimpressive on the Abyss's market; in most realms such gossip would be ignored even by dogs. In a backwater like this, however, it had value—so the deal, in Orsaga's view, had been a near gift.
Whether the other Chaos Powers would misuse the information did not concern him. Even if they did, Orsaga had no intention of deep involvement: he was lodged in this universe more by obligation than by choice. He could always abandon his position and run—after all, as a prime Abyssal demon he still had options others lacked. The native Chaos Powers of this realm, by contrast, were inseparable from the universe's rules; their disappearance would amount to annihilation. That ignorance would cause them greater suffering than any curiosity.
With these thoughts, Orsaga whistled and entered a street food stall. He ordered local specialties—grilled eyeballs, brain mash in secret sauces—and ate with relish while watching a grotesque, high-taste spectacle on the pavement: a scheduled public torment performed as both prayer and entertainment. Here, citizens routinely tortured slaves at appointed hours, offering the spectacle to their gods. As a patron of pain and torment, Orsaga saw no reason to object. In fact, he rather enjoyed that his influence would benefit from such rituals; to him, these worshippers and their twisted deities were merely part of his economic ecosystem—one that he could profitably ignore while it prospered.
That calculation explained why, when the lesser god of Torment had suggested a reckless provocation in the Pantheon, Orsaga had not immediately snapped his neck. The petty deity and his clique were useful: industrious, discrete, and obedient. Better to leave them alive as unpaid laborers than to remove them and upset the steady flow of devotion.
After finishing his meal, Orsaga faded from the colony's streets and departed for other parts of the galaxy.
—
Earth, Year 24,669 (GST).
Although Orsaga's presence had become known to certain Aeldari intelligence divisions, the Empire's upper echelons preferred to ignore the Human Federation. In their eyes humanity remained a nascent power with one foot already in the grave—recklessly accelerating yet inherently fragile. Unbothered, the Aeldari left the Federation to its own devices.
Free to expand without interference, humanity's domain exploded. The number of ecologically habitable colony worlds under the Federation's control surpassed one million, with countless additional resource planets awaiting development.
Over time, detailed investigations answered at least one question: why had that earlier skirmish ended in the near-annihilation of a Federation fleet? The answer lay largely in the Aeldari's superior psychic abilities. Beyond admiring that superiority, human analysts had to ask: what practical countermeasures could be devised?
Biological limits constrained humanity. Compared with the Aeldari—who were born with latent psychic talent—humans lagged terribly in raw psychic potential. Only an extraordinarily gifted human telepath could approach an ordinary Aeldari's baseline; in a population of billions, such people were vanishingly rare.
Faced with this reality, one program rose to prominence: the Time Experiment.
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