Nova Terra Interregnum

The Nova Terra Interregnum was a troubled period in Imperial history when the Imperium fractured into warring factions. The Nova Terra Interregnum is also known as the Time of the Twin Empires and it lasted for 900 standard years during the Mid-34th through the late-35th Millennium. During this period the rebellious Ur-Council of Nova Terra dismissed the authority of the High Lords of Terra and claimed separate rule over the Imperium's Segmentum Pacificus.

There exists in what records remain from this tumultuous era scattered and veiled references to a great threat arising from the Ghoul Stars known as the Pale Wasting. Much of the extant evidence relating to this threat has been censored or purposely destroyed, but there are contradictory indications which describe the nature of the threat as both a "Star-spawned plague" that swept away scores of worlds and as "Nightmare engines" slaughtering the populations of whole sectors. The Novamarines Space Marine Chapter took part in the campaign to quell the threat of the Pale Wasting, and though this is one of the Chapter's earliest recorded battle honours, the Chapter's own chronicles are curiously empty of any reference to this conflict. Stationed beyond the frontiers of the Imperium, the Death Spectres Space Marine Chapter currently maintains a constant vigil to ensure that the inhabitants of the Ghoul Stars never again threaten the galaxy.

After almost a millennium of low-grade civil war and political maneuvering, the Cataclysm of Souls in 975.M35 reunited the Imperium. In that year the Ecclesiarchy tried to transform the Imperium into a theocracy and usurp the power of the rest of the High Lords of Terra. Their efforts ended only in stirring up massive religious civil wars against the Ur-Council who were denounced as heretics who stood in defiance of the will of the God-Emperor when they rejected the Ecclesiarchy's attempts to increase its power over the state. This religious rebellion on many worlds of the Segmentum Pacificus ultimately overthrew the Ur-Council and restored the rule of the High Lords over the entirety of the Imperium's territory, though the power of the Ecclesiarchy had been increased throughout the Imperium as a result.