The Webway: The Roads Between Worlds

Beneath the skin of the galaxy runs a hidden road older than any empire of man. The webway is a labyrinth of tunnels strung between realspace and the Warp, a network that once allowed its makers to step from star to star without ever braving the horrors of the Immaterium. Today it is a broken and haunted place, yet it remains one of the most coveted and contested prizes in the galaxy - a secret realm of doorways lying behind the doorways of reality.

The Roads Between Worlds[edit]

The webway is not part of realspace, nor of the Warp, but a dimension threaded carefully between the two. Its passages wind through a hyperspace of their own, linking distant corners of the galaxy like the strands of a vast neural web, so that a traveller may cross unimaginable distances in a fraction of the time such a journey would otherwise demand.

Crucially, the webway offers passage without the terrors of Warp travel. Sealed away behind wards and walls of psychoactive wraithbone, its tunnels hold the raging Immaterium at bay, allowing safe transit where an ordinary voyage would risk daemons, storms and madness. To master it is to hold a key to the entire galaxy.

The Work of the Old Ones[edit]

The network was not built by any race now living. It was created in ages beyond memory by the Old Ones, the ancient beings who seeded life across the stars, as a means of moving through their domain without ever touching the Warp. When the Old Ones passed from history, their greatest inheritance fell to the Aeldari, who came to understand its workings more deeply than any who followed.

Upon this foundation the Aeldari raised a pan-galactic empire. Through the webway they bound their countless worlds together, moving armies, fleets and travellers along its shining roads, and for a golden age they were the undisputed masters of the labyrinth and of the galaxy it spanned.

Gateways into Reality[edit]

Access to the webway is granted through its portals, ancient gates of wraithbone that open a doorway between a tunnel and some point in realspace. Where a single gate offers many possible destinations it is known as a nexus, a junction from which countless paths diverge into the network beyond.

These gateways are what make the webway so potent a weapon. Their users can emerge without warning at a million points across the galaxy, strike, and withdraw before any answer can be made. Yet the gates are also a vulnerability, for a portal left open or seized by an enemy becomes a wound through which the labyrinth itself may be invaded.

The Shattering[edit]

For all its wonder, the webway is no longer whole. The Fall of the Aeldari - the cataclysm that birthed the Chaos God Slaanesh - tore through the network like an earthquake through glass. Countless gates were destroyed, whole regions collapsed, and the protective wards that had kept the tunnels safe for millions of years were breached in an instant.

Into those breaches poured the horrors of the Immaterium. Great stretches of the webway are now overrun by daemons and stranger things still, corrupted into impassable death-traps where the Warp bleeds through the broken walls. What was once a pristine highway has become a ruin haunted by predators, and to travel it now is to risk being devoured by the dark between the doors.

Those Who Walk the Labyrinth[edit]

Despite its dangers, the webway remains both home and highway to many. The craftworlds of the Aeldari dock at its harbours and send their warriors along its paths, while the Drukhari have built their entire dark civilisation within it, ruling the hidden city of Commorragh from the shadows and raiding realspace through its gates. Somewhere in its depths lies the Black Library, the Aeldari's secret vault of forbidden knowledge, guarded jealously by the masked Harlequins who know the labyrinth's paths better than any.

Others merely intrude. The predatory legions of the Chaos Daemons infest its corrupted reaches, and any who dare travel the webway must reckon with the horrors that now lurk in its abandoned tunnels.

The Emperor's Doomed Gambit[edit]

Even mankind once sought to claim a piece of the labyrinth. In secret beneath His palace on Terra, the Emperor laboured to build a human passage into the webway, a project that would have freed His species from its perilous dependence on the Warp and its Navigators forever. Had it succeeded, the history of the galaxy might have run very differently.

It was not to be. The sorcerous warning cast from Prospero shattered the wards guarding the Emperor's half-built gate, and daemons flooded through the breach. To hold the tide, the Emperor was forced to take His place upon the Golden Throne, whose ancient mechanism anchors the gateway shut - a vigil He has kept, broken and undying, for ten thousand years. The road between worlds remains, to this day, a prize that has ruined all who reached for it.