[How can you be here?/ Ah... this one is the perfect instrument./ The pain is fading./ The Warp is calming.]
Voices that no human language could dare describe spread through my mind.
As thousands—tens of thousands—of languages and selves spoke all at once, it hurt as though my head were about to burst.
I lost consciousness.
Radian, the Guardsman and reincarnator standing before the Emperor, fell to both knees.
His eyes remained open, but Radian was already unconscious.
Looking upon him, the Emperor spoke.
[Why, in this world made by true gods.../ A true god./ A god who is omnipotent and yet not omnipotent./ A soul that does not belong to the Warp.]
Vitality began to return to the Emperor's face, which had been little more than bare bone.
Thousands—tens of thousands—of masks covered his skull, and the psychic energy that had been beyond his control began to stabilize.
At that moment, the Emperor distinguished those subjects who followed him from those who had defied him and placed themselves in the care of the Dark Gods.
The Chaos fleets still navigating the Warp while relying on him lost his signal.
He concentrated that signal upon the subjects who followed him, and the Imperial vessels' passage through the Warp grew faster, their routes more stable.
[A true god has saved me./ The pain has stopped./ I want to smash that damned instrument of torture./ It must be repaired again.]
Having consumed the souls of billions of psykers for ten thousand years and received the faith of hundreds of trillions of humanity, the Emperor gazed upon the Golden Throne with power greater than ever before.
[Machine, be healed./ I never wished to sit upon it again./ An instrument of torture./ A symbol of pain and futile hope.]
The Golden Throne's outward appearance did not change much.
The Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne once more.
With the Golden Throne repaired, the pain he felt was not even one-millionth of what it had once been.
The gate linking the Warp, which he had once needed to suppress, had begun to fade the instant Radian entered the chamber. And the moment the Golden Throne was repaired—
The passage connecting Terra and the Warp completely collapsed.
The Emperor read Radian's mind with his psychic power and spoke through telepathy with the unconscious Radian.
It was an interesting story.
And the Emperor's consciousness was becoming whole again.
Thousands—tens of thousands—of consciousnesses found the Emperor, their center, once more. Using the faith flowing into him as glue, the Emperor absorbed those selves into his own.
The Emperor's self, already vast and powerful, grew still stronger.
[At last, I have regained 'myself.']
The gods of the Warp were capricious and temperamental because they had been forged from the emotions each of them embodied.
But the Emperor remade himself around the self he had possessed when he was still human.
The Emperor realized it.
That he must now truly reign over the material realm as a god.
The Great Rift had allowed daemons to act permanently in the material realm and had swelled the forces of Chaos.
Yet his own power, too, had become immense, and he was growing stronger in real time through the faith sent by the subjects who sought him out in this dark age.
Then the Emperor looked upon Radian.
Back in that other world, he had shared chicken and beer with him after work.
It had been a brief connection, lasting scarcely a few months, but a connection nonetheless.
And he was the one who had saved him here.
He must not clumsily perform some procedure on him or bestow a blessing upon him.
It was impossible to overlay anything upon that soul.
[He has a lover.]
He had a lover who feared him, yet loved him all the same.
The Emperor bestowed his blessing upon her.
Youth and safe childbirth.
And absolute love for Radian.
The Emperor spoke.
[Radian. You have saved me. But it must not become known.]
He would have to continue living on Terra.
The Emperor sent a telepathic message to the Custodian Guards.
Provide a place where Radian and his descendants could live for generations to come.
And offer twenty percent of their male descendants to the Custodes.
For the purity of their genes, their descendants would have to interbreed among themselves.
A new instrument.
Humanity could no longer endure without superhumans.
The Emperor sensed the Astartes.
And he sent power to them.
They had now become the true angels of mine.
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