[X] Upgraded Malice. While Malice grows stronger, he is merely a peer to the Four, as he has concern over having his existence overtaken by the Darkness he's calling upon. Chaos Four become ChaosFive, with all that implies.
The shadows had merely been a curiosity when Tzeentch had first foreseen them. That changed quickly when he discovered their virus-like ability to spread extended to Daemons, which he assumed extended to the Four. They were profoundly lucky they'd already been keeping an eye on the wrench their actions had created from the ripples they'd made in the Warp when those things had appeared. It only made sense that some things had changed, but now the future was shifting into something unrecognizable from their goal.
Now, they'd contained the shadows, ironically with help from the Eldar, humans, and Orks, along with another set of interlopes that seemed to almost resemble a more optimistic version of the Necrons, but that was not the end of it. Malice had learned to tap into the primordial well of Darkness that spawned the shadows, which by his nature, the relatively minor god was well-equipped to use. He was the excessively negative impulses of the gods, the especially whimsical portions that could cause them to work against themselves.
With the exception of Tzeentch, who'd elected to hang on to the majority of his own self-destructive impulses, the Chaos Gods had ejected these parts of themselves. Unfortunately, this mass of incredibly negative emotional energy had formed into a Chaos God in it's own right. Relatively minor and easily squashed, but incredibly difficult to permanently pin down, due to his nature allowing him to recover from shattering with much greater ease.
Malice had begun learning the intricacies of the dark power he could call upon, and grew rapidly in strength, feeding off of the rough equivalent of the Warp of another universe. Specifically their most negative, self-destructive impulses. The Four had banded together to try and quell him when they learned he was experimenting with the shadows, but recently Malice's insane growth had tapered off. Eventually, they learned the reason why.
Malice had noticed that as he dove deeper into the well of negativity, his thoughts and goals began to... drift from what he'd originally intended. While it didn't have a mind in the way they did, it did have intentions, and Malice was concerned that he would draw too deeply, and the Darkness would use him for it's purposes, instead of the other way around.
While he'd taken over a number of their worlds in the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom, as the materials called them, he was unlikely to ascend any further. Luckily for reality, he wasn't completely insane. Emphasis on completely, as he was still using the shadows and what he'd learned of the Darkness to boost his Daemons and grant them similar abilities.. Still, now they could focus on dealing with the more slow-burning flames they'd had to ignore while they dealt with Malice. Certainly, they couldn't simply ignore him, but they could devote more than a tenth of their attention to things besides the building universal threat. The Orks and The Bastion were going to be a problem if this continued, so why not have them work against each other?
Chaos briefly worked together to begin nudging the Orks in sectors nearby to the one occupied by The Bastion to attack. While major attacks would take some time to build up, as the Four weren't being very active in their efforts, they did have other matters to attend to. Slaanesh was particularly spiteful towards the bridge between the humans and an enclave of Eldar for what she'd managed to accomplish, and was rather willing to continue the efforts by itself as the other focused on their own pursuits.
Tzeentch, for example, wanted to get his hands on the crystals. They originated from the same universe as the shadows, and they'd all felt the... shift that had recently occurred as more powerful instances of them came into being. He'd like to be sure there weren't any nasty surprises waiting to occur, and there were more immediate benefits to being able to provide a bit more incentive for worshipers.
AN: 15 years until major Waaghs hit from surrounding 9 sectors all at once. Slaanesh is really, REALLY, salty.
