Ocularis Terribus

[Wulfkry]

I was recently doing an overview of the Eye of Terror itself and i was wondering if any legions or primarchs encountered the eye. The history of the eye is that it covers much of what was the Eldar Empire and was created the same time slaneesh was "born". So the EoT is roughly around 10k years old. With the spread of the crusade and legion homeworlds close to the eye such as my beloved Fenris were any of the primarchs aware of its existance and the nature of the EoT. Or did the big E pretty much say "okay boys this area completely off limits, no if ands or butts". Hell maybe the two missing two "missing" legions happend to stumble upon it and had all sorts of nasty done to them. Any factual based input or even pure speculation would be welcomed.

[Legatus]

IIRC Caliban used to be right next to the Eye, so you were probably able to see it from there with the naked eye (though it was only a few decades old at that point, and I am not sure how many light years the distances in the galaxy map are. Perhaps it could not yet be seen on Caliban after all)

[A D-B]

Funnily enough, "Where is the Eye visible from?" was one of the squillions of questions I asked when I planned The First Heretic.

 

Some themes that ran strong from GW HQ and the HH lore talks:

 

- The Eye of Terror isn't visible from Terra.

- There are thousands of minor warp storms (let alone everything else) between Terra and the Eye anyway, which would obstruct a clear stellar view.

- The Eye likely spreads/grows over the centuries after its initial genesis.

- There are so many warp storms in the heavens that one more isn't a big deal, especially in the secular and daemon-denying Great Crusade Era.

- Space is huuuuuuuuuuuge. Even worlds relatively close to the Eye (like, as Legatus astutely pointed out, Caliban) are a long, long, long, long distance away in terms of how far and how fast Imperial vessels can travel.

- Space is huuuuuuuuuuuge. Imperial fleets were months, even years away from each other (and habitable worlds) during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy.

 

Hope some of that is at least a little useful.

[Legatus]

A quick google check provided that our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. That means that in M41, about ten thousand years after it's creation, the Eye of terror would be visible a tenth of the galaxy diameter away. In M32, about a thousand years after it's creation, it would have been visible a mere 1/100th of the galaxy diameter away, and during the Great Crusade probably even less than that. Though I am not entirely sure at what point exactly it had been created, and the Great Crusade went for 200 years.

[Walter Payton]

In 3.5 Ed C:CSM, they talk of how the Eye is visible from Cadia and hundreds of other worlds. They say that it "dominates the night sky in every world in that cursed region", though I don't know if they mean the entire Segmentum Obscurus or simply the Cadian Gate and Arx Gap.

 

Given its size, I imagine that it will be visible from a great many worlds, though only as a small purple pinprick from some.

[Rain]

Yeah, the space is huge idea doesn't really wash as the eye itself is so huge. It would certainly be visible from Caliban and I'm guessing would take up the entire sky on the side of the planet facing it. Keep in mind that they eye is a "nebula" that itself appears to be many many lightyears across, and the distance between Caliban and the eye is negligible compared to the size of the eye itself. We are many "sun-widths" away from the sun and yet it's still fairly large in our sky, so logically, the Calibanites really would have a roiling purple sky. That said, the creation of the eye actually seems to overlap with the heresy so it all doesn't make much sense as to what happened when.

[Lay]

About the Eye in M41: "Across every system within ten thousand light years it can be seen clearly with the naked eye: a pulsing ocean of sickly purple from Cadia, a vast sore eating at the sky from Fenris, a baleful, glowering malignancy from Terra." 4E rulebook, pg.139

 

Also, the 3.5 CSM Codex tells how the Imperium tried to set foot in the Maelstrom during the Great Crusade. They lost hundreds of ships and the Emperor declared the region "Purgatos". Maybe the Imperium decided to stay away from the Eye and similar areas after these events.

[overlordjebus]

You would have thought that the Imperium would have known a bit more about fighting demons and such after encountering the eye, near the end of the crusade, they had almost conquered the whole galaxy, surely SOMEONE would have noticed the extradimensional, physics breaking beings that attack planets that are very close.

[Iron Father Ferrum]

They did, but they were dismissed as a sort of xenos breed, not as the physical embodiments of extra-planar deities. This is stated in several of the HH novels.

[overlordjebus]

They did, but they were dismissed as a sort of xenos breed, not as the physical embodiments of extra-planar deities. This is stated in several of the HH novels.

 

At what point?

[mob16151]

They did, but they were dismissed as a sort of xenos breed, not as the physical embodiments of extra-planar deities. This is stated in several of the HH novels.

 

At what point?

 

In the Horus story arch, the very first novel(I think) one of the Lunar Wolves get's possessed by a demon. Horus himself says(and I'm paraphrasing here) No such thing as demons, there just weird aliens. Lalalalalalalalalalalala

[Iron Father Ferrum]

They did, but they were dismissed as a sort of xenos breed, not as the physical embodiments of extra-planar deities. This is stated in several of the HH novels.

 

At what point?

 

Legion, page 98. Ingo Pech is talking to John Grammaticus and says:

 

"We already know of Chaos, and have numbered it in the litany of xenos hazards."

[overlordjebus]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that, wierd how when the Interex guy is talking to Loken, he seems to have no knowledge of it.

 

Meh, probably because the galaxy is so big, some people know about it, some people don't.

[increaso]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that, wierd how when the Interex guy is talking to Loken, he seems to have no knowledge of it.

 

Meh, probably because the galaxy is so big, some people know about it, some people don't.

 

I got the impression from Horus Rising that the Son's of Horus didn't really know much about chaos/creatures of the immaterium.

 

But in Legion and the Dark Angel books the legions appear to know a little bit more about chaos.

[Pulse]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that, wierd how when the Interex guy is talking to Loken, he seems to have no knowledge of it.

 

Meh, probably because the galaxy is so big, some people know about it, some people don't.

 

I got the impression from Horus Rising that the Son's of Horus didn't really know much about chaos/creatures of the immaterium.

Thats right. The Legion knew nothing of chaos or the creatures that dwell within.

[Kodanshi]

A quick google check provided that our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. That means that in M41, about ten thousand years after it's creation, the Eye of terror would be visible a tenth of the galaxy diameter away. In M32, about a thousand years after it's creation, it would have been visible a mere 1/100th of the galaxy diameter away, and during the Great Crusade probably even less than that. Though I am not entirely sure at what point exactly it had been created, and the Great Crusade went for 200 years.

The entire universe is constantly expanding, so 28 thousand years from now you’d expect the galaxy to be a lot wider than it is now…

[Legatus]

I don't know at which rate the universe is expanding, but from what I have heard about astronomical time scales so far I somehow doubt that 30,000 years will amount to "a lot" of change. Also, while the universe as a whole might be expanding, I don't think that the objects collected around a common centre of gravity will neccessarily all move farther away from another. I.e. the solar systems making up this galaxy will probably keep spinning around the galactic core, while it is mainly the distance between galaxies that will increase.