Diocletian let his gaze roam over the cavern’s wreckages. ‘No, my liege.’
The Emperor kept walking, moving from structure to structure the way a man might browse the aisles of librarium. The thunder that shouldn’t be audible this deep in the earth rumbled louder than before.
‘There are those in the Cult Mechanicum, among the Unifiers, that surmise I found the core of the Golden Throne here, beneath the sands of Terra. A relic, they venture, of the Dark Age.’
Diocletian wasn’t sure what to say. He had witnessed uncountable hours of the Golden Throne’s planning and construction processes. Yet, as he said, he recognised nothing here. He didn’t know if that was a flaw in his understanding of the Throne’s genesis among these machines, or simply because this machine crypt had nothing to do with the Emperor’s greatest work at all.
‘Perhaps there was merely inspiration to be found, here,’ the Emperor mused softly. ‘The idea taking form, based not on the successes of an ancient race but the failures of our own.’ He exhaled a rueful sound, not quite a sigh, not quite a chuckle. ‘Did I see these machines, how they fell short of their intended purpose, and resolve to create a far superior incarnation? There is a certain poetry to that, isn’t there, Diocletian? The belief that we know better than those who came before us. That we will suit a throne better than they did.’
‘Sire, I… Are you well?’
‘Or perhaps the idea was mine in its entirety. Any relics of lost ages that have proven useful for their parts being the legacies of dead species that had the same idea, millennia before my birth. In such an instance, each race envisions its own salvation independent of the others, only to discover that other species, other empires, have already failed to save themselves.’
Diocletian breathed slowly in the dark. ‘Does it matter, sire?’
The Emperor turned to him, His eyes focusing on the Custodian for the first time. ‘The war is over, Diocletian. Win or lose, Horus has damned us all. Mankind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species’ last breath. The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans. The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But it will fall, Diocletian. It will fall. The shining path is lost to us. Now we rage against the dying of the light.’
‘It cannot be this way.’ Diocletian stepped forwards, teeth clenched. ‘It cannot.’
The Emperor tilted His head. ‘No? What then do you intend to do, Custodian? How will you – with your spear and your fury and your loyalty – pull fate itself from its repeating path?’
‘We will kill Horus.’ Diocletian stared at his defeated monarch, illuminated in emberish light of the lumoglobe in his hand. ‘And after the war, we can begin anew. We can purge the webway. The Unifiers can rebuild all that was lost, even if it takes centuries. We will strike Horus down and–’
‘I will face the Sixteenth,’ the Emperor interrupted, distracted once more by the machine graveyard. ‘But there will come another to take his place. I see that now. It is the way of things. The enemy will never abate. Another will come, one who will doubtless learn from Horus’ errors of faith and judgement.’
‘Who, my king?’
The Emperor shook His head. ‘There is no way to know. And for now it is meaningless. But remember it well – we are not the only ones learning from this conflict. Our enemies grow wiser, as well.’
Diocletian refused to concede. ‘You are the Emperor of Mankind. We will conquer any who come against us. After the war, we will rebuild under your guidance.’
The Emperor stared at him. He spoke a question that wasn’t a question, one that brooked no answer.
‘And what if I am gone, Diocletian.’
The Custodian had no answer. Thunder pealed above them, shaking the cavern and jarring loose a rattling hail of falling pebble-dust.
‘My king, what now? What comes next?’
The Emperor turned away, walking into the darkness of the cavern while the storm hammered the dead city so far above. He spoke three words that no Custodian had ever heard Him speak before.
‘I don’t know.’
AFTERWORD
The war is over. Humanity has lost. Warhammer 40,000 – in all its Gothic, towering, Cyclopean, decrepit, doomed, rotting Byzantine majesty – has taken its first irrevocable step.
Oh, the Horus Heresy isn’t quite over yet. Horus’s ambitions haven’t dried up and vanished, and the Imperium still has to deal with the Chaos-deluded primarch making his way to Terra, but the malignant forces of the warp have achieved their ultimate aim. Humanity’s chance to free itself of the warp has been lost. No matter what happens from now on, no matter how hard the Imperium fights against itself, against its enemies, the laughter of mad gods will echo behind the veil.
But this isn’t news to you, I’m sure. The central tenet of Warhammer 40,000 has always been the pitting of humankind against itself, the oldest lore hearkening back to that angelic rebellion called the Horus Heresy, where humanity began its long, inevitable decline. Warhammer 40,000 has always been about how the centre cannot hold; about raging against the dying of the light.
The Imperium of the Dark Millennium, ten thousand years after the Heresy, can’t beat its foes. That was never on the cards. Warhammer 40,000 is the kind of setting where your sins risk breeding very real daemons, where so much knowledge has been lost or sealed away as heretical or dangerous, and above alclass="underline" where humankind devours itself, day by day, feeding thousands of psykers into the soul-engines of the Golden Throne to maintain the last flicker of the Emperor’s divine will. This is a species sacrificing its future for its present, destroying its own evolution into a psychic race because to evolve, to ascend, is to shine like a beacon to the creatures of the underworld.
Almost every xenos threat besieging the dying Imperium of Man would be enough, on its own, to eventually seal the empire’s fate – yet one damnation takes thematic primacy and always has. Predatory alien hordes endlessly eat away at the Imperium’s borders, but it’s the taint of Chaos that holds a blade to the throat of every man, woman, and child.
The Emperor knew this. Freeing humanity from reliance – heck, from as much contact as possible – with the warp was the species only chance at long-term survival. With the death of that dream comes the long, drawn-out death rattle of the species.
What a cheery thought.
Heavy stuff, right? I can’t even begin to frame the context for how many involved discussions and back-and-forths with various loremasters I had during the planning and writing of this book. I’ve read every single word ever published about the Emperor, and talked about it all about, say, eight squillion times. When you’re writing a novel about the greatest figure of unimaginable mystery in the entire setting – in either of its main eras – then of course you’re going to need to treat it with some care.
There were no mandates on what had to be included and what needed to be excluded, but I went into it with a fairly tight focus on the things I wanted to show, and the things I wanted to avoid at all costs.
The former is obvious. Pretty much everything I wanted to show has been shown; unless you started here then you’ve probably just read the book and are now making your way through my rambling thoughts.
The latter is a far trickier deal. I’m sure this novel will divide people in terms of its reception. In many ways it can’t help but do that given its subject matter, and I’m accordingly braced for it.
The fact is (let’s rip this band-aid off right now) I didn’t want to reveal anything about the Emperor as any kind of definitive, objective truth. I don’t think anyone should, either - partly because understanding the Emperor’s nature and origins hasn’t been important for three decades of enjoyment in the supremely popular setting (and it’s never going to be necessary for that), and partly because, well, no answer will ever be satisfying enough or believable enough for everybody. Nothing will match everyone’s massively varied perceptions of the setting, and that’s as it should be. It’s Warhammer 40,000, after all. No one faction is “right” in the setting, it’s all just levels of ignorance and occlusion.