The Culture explores 40K II: Now With 100% more Fanfiction

[The Glyphstone]

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Epilogue (from both endings)
A cyberspace-level 7 historian examines records of the Second Great War and notes parallels between the Culture's final actions and those of the original Chaos. Indeed, depending on the definition, the current "Culture" behaves much like the prior Chaos did in the essence of the term.

True, the New Chaos is not divided and the gestalt feeds off raw soulpower instead of aspects, and the New Chaos is not structured off hostile power relationships. Culturally, New Chaos is nothing like the old.

But the actions taken to win that conflict could be said to have defeated the point, countless numbers of sentients were sacrificed and an impossible-to-estimate amount of potential culture was lost. The only thing that remains is the Culture.
The Culture survived... only by becoming its enemy.

Just as planned.

I like this alternate future mainly because I'd been saying from the start that Tzeentch was the only Chaos God theoretically capable of co-existing with the culture, and the narrative conspicuously doesn't mention how it fared in the final war...which means it could have faked its death and subsumed itself into the new way of things. Tzeentchian retirement, effectively, voluntarily Changing itself into a benign form so that it could secretly continue, and wait for even the Culture's reign to end.