Chapter Text
The Emperor blinked for the first time in ten millennium. He was in his lab. He was sane, debatably. Was this another dream of the warp? No, he checked himself over. His soul was intact.
His soul was intact ! He wasn’t broken across the galaxy, acting as a… as a…
God.
What had he become? What had his dream turned into? He scoffed out loud, then broke out into deranged laughter. Dream! It was a nightmare, it was a nightmare from the moment he took on the name of Emperor and he just kept telling himself it would be worth it in the end. Every atrocity, every “statistic,” every act of cruelty, it would be worth it, humanity would be safe and would never fall so far again. Trillions dead to save decillions in the future, his humanity sacrificed and ripped away so humanity would endure. And then everything fell apart, everything shattered.
And he was too arrogant to think he could fail. He told himself if he made every sacrifice, he couldn’t fail. If he gave everything to this dream, his humanity, his very morality, then it would succeed. Untold suffering, the worst of humanity laid bare for the universe to see for over ten millennium, all because of him. All because he justified every means to get to his end, without care as to what message he was sending, or what he was doing to humanity, his beloved mankind.
A psychic cry cut through the silence. He froze, and raised his head. Around him, were gestation pods, numbered I through XX. Before he realized what he was doing, he dashed to XII. Inside, XII cried, his form shifting between a human infant and red sand forming a vaguely winged humanoid shape. The Emperor scooped him up, staring down in wonder. “You’re alive…” he breathed. XII— Angron’s cries softened. “It’s alright, you’re alright. There’s no pain, there’s no nails, father’s here—” He choked, tears blurring his vision. “Father’s here.”
Then he said the words that he knew may save or damn humanity. “And he won’t let anything happen to you.”
He couldn’t do it. Not again. He couldn’t watch his son think he abandoned him, that he let his friends die without a care. He couldn’t send his son to war while those damned nails ripped apart his mind, as he put all plans of fixing it on the backburner until the Crusade was over. He couldn’t keep them out of the fighting, but he couldn’t throw his children to the wolves again. Well, metaphorically at least. Leman would kill him if he didn’t—
The Emperor looked up, glancing over at pod VI. It was occupied. He turned his head to I, then over to II and froze. The inside of the pod was scorched. Taking care not to drop Angron, he ran over and touched the surface before his psychic reach told him what his mind didn’t want to accept. He was gone.
Duo died upon collision with the planet, but his body did not. It became a puppet for some alien hive, one which lied and tricked his sons, endeared itself to them, then tried to kill them, infect them. It even managed to trick them into seeing him as a healthy, alive primarch, instead of the bloated, twisted undead corpse that had been forced to grow to his adult size by the hive. And Undecim— he stopped that train of thought. Chaos was enough of a memetic hazard in its own right, but a pure infohazard should not be thought of more than necessary. Sure enough, when he looked at XI, the inside was also charred to a crisp.
They died young, too young. Their souls moved on past where he could ever reach. And theirs were the pods destroyed. A quick check told him every other pod was intact and safe, but seeing those two obliterated caused the pain to well up all over again. Putting the mourning aside for later, he continued on his rounds through the pods.
When he reached Horus’s, he shifted Angron to one arm and reached inside. Gently, almost afraid of breaking some illusion, he brushed his fingers against Horus’s cheek. A pair of bright eyes looked up at him, shifting from a sea green to gold and back again, utterly guileless, utterly untouched by the Ruinous Powers. The Emperor closed the pod again and, after checking the last of the pods, returned to XII, setting the now calmer Angron back inside.
His sons were here, and they were safe. Suspicion nagging at his brain, he pulled out a dataslate and looked at the date, then broke down sobbing again, this time out of sheer, overwhelming emotion. It was the day after he finished the primarch project. The Great Crusade hadn’t begun, and they were still preparing for what lay ahead. He had made mistakes, and even now he wasn’t sure what the right answer was, but he certainly knew what the wrong answers were. He could fix things.
No, he corrected himself. He had a chance to fix things. That didn’t mean he would succeed. Idly, he strode over to IX and picked up Sanguinius. His form shifted between a being of pure light dripping rivers of phantom blood and a wide-eyed infant reaching up for him with a smile. He had believed in him until the end, he had died for him, his body torn and beaten into a quite literal bloody pulp. That was what awaited him if he failed again. Regardless of how they lost, regardless of if humanity raged against the slow but inevitable dying of the light or were wiped out in one cruel stroke, Chaos would make sure to hurt his sons in the process for the sole reason that they were his sons.
Carefully, he set Sanguinius back in his pod and continued on, picking up Roboute, who was sticking in his human form for now. He had adjusted quickly, the Emperor noted. His thirteenth son, the Imperium’s last hope in the far flung future, who had carried the fate, the hopes, and the survival of humanity on his shoulders. His very own custodes had served as his personal guard, knowing his was one of the last glimmers of hope for the Emperor’s carrion dream.
His custodes… Constantin… Malcador… how would he explain any of this to them? Should he? Should he burden them with potential knowledge of a future he had lived, one which had evidently affected parts of the present? He wanted to tell them, he especially wanted to tell Malcador, to confide in him, but that kind of knowledge was painful. If he were to tell them, it could forewarn them, but it would ultimately be selfish. The warning was minimal, as there was little either of them could do with the knowledge that he himself couldn’t do on his own. But… not confiding in his sons had caused several of them to fall, could doing the same with Malcador lead to a similar outcome? They had been in this together since the moment he had taken his current name, and he had never hid anything of this magnitude from him before, not without Malcador knowing he was keeping information from him and why. Yet when he thought of Malcador’s death, tortured, ripped asunder— he couldn’t talk to Malcador about it, whether he told him the truth or not. Even now, the memory ached, and he knew he couldn’t get through the recount without breaking down.
Which meant that he would likely need to steer this ship on his own, so to speak. He needed to save humanity, he needed to prevent the theocratic Imperial future, he needed to protect his sons and those he held dear: in that order, unfortunately. One constant those all held was the need to defeat Chaos. Humanity’s future would never be secured while it could overrun them, it would always be a driving factor in forcing humanity to run to other divinities to protect them, and it would always try to get at him through his sons.
The door to his lab slammed open. He set Roboute back in his pod and turned, only to see Constantin and Malcador running in. Malcador, his oldest and truest friend, the man he had taken as his partner in life, the man who had sacrificed himself completely for humanity, for him, was alive, and in front of him. He still hadn’t decided if he would burden him with his knowledge, but right now merely having Malcador here was enough. And Constantin, his original son, stood beside him. Another son he had failed, which he would need to remedy.
He opened his mouth to feign normalcy, to ask why they were here, but frowned as he took in their expressions. Constantin looked shellshocked and was staring at him like he had seen a ghost, whereas Malcador had on an upset expression that the Emperor dubbed ‘angry with worry’ in Gothic—the language lacking a better exact word—only to a far greater extent than he had seen a long time. Constantin stumbled forward, then dropped to one knee in a reverential bow. Malcador, on the other hand, marched up to him and grabbed him by the collar, looking like a storm cloud.
“Revelation, if you ever become a god again, I will atomize every bone in your body, burn the ashes of your soul, then smother your divine self with a pillow!”