The Eye of Terror is not a world but a wound in the fabric of reality itself, a vast region where the boundary between the material universe and the Immaterium has collapsed entirely. Across a swathe of the galaxy's northern reaches the warp has bled through and swallowed whole star systems, and within its swirling, iridescent depths the ordinary laws of time, space, and matter simply cease to hold. To gaze upon it from afar is to see a great baleful stain upon the void, an eye that seems to stare balefully back.
Within this hell drift the daemon worlds of the Ruinous Powers, unstable planets reshaped moment to moment by the dreams and rages of the Dark Gods, where mountains breathe and rivers run with blood and a day may last a heartbeat or a thousand years. It is here, in this timeless purgatory, that the traitor Legions fled after their defeat in the great civil war, and here they have festered and schemed for ten thousand years.
From the Eye the Chaos Space Marines launch their Black Crusades, sallies of unimaginable violence hurled at the Imperium whenever the warp-tides run in their favour. Because time flows so strangely within, warriors who were mortal at the dawn of the Imperium still live to make war upon it, their hatred undimmed by the passing millennia.
For most of Imperial history a single fortress-world stood guard over the Eye's only stable exit, and the story of its ruin is told in the Fall of Cadia. With that bastion broken, the horrors of the rift spilled freely into the galaxy, and the Eye of Terror gapes wider than ever upon the Imperium's flank, a doorway to damnation that no wall can ever truly close.
The atlas continues
