Alpharius looked at the registration form in his hand, his expression twitching slightly. Name... I am Alpharius. Gender... can there even be a female Primarch? Male. Place of Birth... the only Primarch who is a true-blue Terran from under the Aquila; the rest are all stinking outsiders.
Date of Birth... is this necessary? Aren't we all basically the same age? Race... let's go with Human for now. It's not like there are Xenos Primarchs, right?
Application Time... Year 100 of the 42nd Millennium. Legion... sometimes I can play the role of other Legions' Primarchs. Political Affiliation... I am loyal.
Current Position and Title... Current Commander and Primarch of the 20th Legion Astartes, Lord of the Hydra, Master of the Pythons, General Overseer of Intelligence and Infiltration Affairs for the Legiones Astartes.
Education and Academic History... First degree from Malcador's Private School; obtained Outstanding Graduate status from the Imperial Schola Progenium due to work requirements; Ph.D. in Administrative Management from the University of the Departmento Munitorum; Licensed Psyker from the Imperial Scholastia Psykana; Level 2 Bonesinger from the Aeldari Biel-Tan Craftworld Bone-Singing Training Academy; High Over-Tyrant (Big Mek) degree from the Mori-Maoka Ork Vocational University; Combat Suit Professional Researcher degree from the Earth Caste First Technical Academy of the T'au Empire; Night School for Psyker Training at Ahriman's Prodigal Warband; successfully passed the recruitment trials of every Legion except the Space Wolves...
Alpharius felt a bit chagrined as he wrote. He realized his educational background was a bit too "rich." He held degrees or certifications from almost every notable power in the galaxy, as well as various hive academies within the Imperium. As for the Astartes trials, he could have swept all twenty had he not been "elbowed" by the World Spirit of Fenris upon landing there.
To Alpharius, those were his only regrets: his infiltrations of Fenris and the Dark Angels had failed. Fenris failed for metaphysical reasons; as for the Dark Angels, it was hard to say—he wasn't caught, but he realized everyone around him had somehow been replaced by his own legion's infiltrators, and he never quite figured out their command structure. He suspected even the Dark Angels themselves didn't understand it.
Alpharius put down his pen and glanced at the thick stack of documents next to him, deciding to peek at how the others were writing.
Name... Corax. Gender... Male. Place of Birth... Deliverance (crossed out). Alpharius's eyes twitched. Corax had written "Deliverance" in the birthplace column, but his fingers had trembled, his face filled with guilt, and his eyes brimmed with tears. He had frantically crossed out the word "Deliverance" as if he were unworthy of writing those syllables. His finger had lingered there for a long time, unable to write another word.
Further down, under Legion, Corax's shaking hand managed a few letters but couldn't finish. He truly felt he no longer deserved to call himself the father of the Raven Guard. Under Political Affiliation, Corax first wrote "Loyal," hesitated, added "Soldier," then crossed that out and changed it to "Worker." After that, he fell into silence, staring at the forms Guilliman had designed as if they were daggers intended to cut him open and expose his heart.
Goodness, Guilliman is truly wicked! Alpharius lamented inwardly.
He then turned to Constantin Valdor. Well... Constantin had just finished writing the names he had acquired during his first millennium of human history. He still had ten thousand years of names left to go.
A Custodian's name grows longer with every deed, feat, and battle. As the first Custodian and the original Captain-General, Constantin Valdor's name was likely long enough to fill an entire book.
At the edge of the world, there is a tree, Alpharius mused. Once every hundred years, a branch trembles. After a hundred tremors, the bird sleeping upon it wakes. The bird flies through a hundred dawns and a hundred dusks to the peak of a Diamond Mountain to gently sharpen its beak, then returns to the tree at the edge of the world. It waits another hundred tremors before flying again. By the time the Diamond Mountain is worn flat, Constantin Valdor might have just finished the first line of his name...
Alpharius truly couldn't understand why Roboute Guilliman insisted on them filling out these declaration documents. Wait... he suddenly froze.
Could this be... some kind of ritual? By filling out these documents, were they being framed within Guilliman's "Order"? As he looked at the papers, they seemed to transform into thousands of chains wrapping around himself, Valdor, and Corax. Cold sweat slid down Alpharius's bald head. If his guess was correct, Guilliman's ambitions were truly vast.
Ambitious, truly ambitious... But Alpharius also doubted his own guess. Guilliman... does he even understand the Warp? Is this a deliberate act, or is his Warp essence unconsciously expanding its own Order?
Alpharius had once deeply researched the nature of Guilliman's Warp essence. The "Order of Ultramar" was just a general name; in essence, it expressed a current of thought established by Guilliman that had expanded to the Five Hundred Worlds and gained the recognition of trillions of humans.
This current of thought believed that humanity could change the darkness through its own strength to make tomorrow better. It believed in order, politics, balance, hope, and development. Since its birth, it had attempted to expand across the galaxy, eventually seeking to shroud the entire universe.
Now, with the death of the Emperor, the old order of the Imperium—symbolized by Him—had begun to collapse. As Guilliman became the Emperor's successor, his order naturally sought to cover the entire galaxy as a universal value. More dangerously... the Warp is a dimension of will. If this desire became too strong, it could manifest into reality.
Alpharius sensed something was wrong. Doesn't Alexander realize this? Hasn't Sanguinius noticed? Can't Ahzek Ahriman see the tidal turbulence in the Warp? Humans, and all creatures with deep links to the Warp, possess a talent: they can treat an imagined reality as truth and overlay it onto material reality. Religions, faiths, nations, and orders—while having material foundations—are essentially collective imaginations. As civilizations expand and the Warp encroaches, these imagined realities become part of actual reality.
Guilliman's Order and the Emperor's Order are two distinct realities. Normally, Guilliman's could slowly replace the Imperium's, allowing a smooth transition. However, the birth of the Dark King depends on the reality constructed by the Emperor. He will not allow the Imperium's Order to be replaced. If the two orders conflict... if two realities contradict each other, won't reality itself eventually tear apart?
Is this intentional on Alexander's part? Are the Four Gods pushing this from behind?
Alpharius believed the Gods were likely providing help. Overlapping the Emperor's reality with Guilliman's—or even erasing the reality where the Emperor existed—could severely wound the Dark King or prevent His birth. Of course, the Dark King wouldn't sit idly by... but at least they had found a way to fight Him.
Alpharius gave a bitter laugh. His long training as a spy had made intelligence gathering and analysis an instinct. Just by looking at a declaration form, his mind couldn't stop spinning.
He put down the document and looked at Constantin Valdor, who was still laboring over his names. "Didn't you slip away? How did you get caught too?" Alpharius asked teasingly.
"I... I had just retreated when I felt a battle break out on your side. I wanted to see what happened. I looked up, and Sanguinius was descending from the sky." Valdor's voice was dry, raspy, and unpleasant; he had clearly used many incantations recently.
"Oh, no wonder. Even you would find it hard to escape our dear Great Angel," Alpharius chuckled.
"No, I did escape. I used several incantations to hide my form and got away from Sanguinius," Valdor's face looked grim. "But for some reason, several inspirations surged in my mind, driving me toward a specific direction. There, I saw a mortal."
"A mortal?" Alpharius's interest was piqued.
"A mortal, but with one look, you could see the vastness of his shadow in the Warp. It was a Tanuki covered in blue metallic light..." Fear even tinged Valdor's voice.
"Oh." Alpharius nodded slowly. If that person had personally intervened, it meant there was more than just Guilliman's hand behind this.
His guess was likely correct. Even the Emperor's first Custodian and original Captain-General were being integrated into Guilliman's Order, into the reality of Ultramar.
But the Emperor's reality wouldn't be defeated so easily. If Guilliman's Order couldn't reshape the Emperor's reality into its own, what would the consequence of that intense desire be? The most extreme case would be for it to become its own reality, co-existing with the Emperor's...
The Gods would be happy with that; they didn't care what state reality was in as long as the Dark King was suppressed. But what about Alexander? What did he truly want? Alpharius fell into deep thought.
The crowds were converging toward the center of the continent. The warm breeze from the Macragge oceans, no longer blocked by mountains, made the temperature rise, leaving Reyna's clothes soaked in sweat.
Reyna had considered using a small Warp spell to lower the temperature around her, but Joan stopped her. Joan told her that while the Warp was submissive to her will because of Alexander, the Warp entities were still mad and unpredictable. Asking them for a powerful spell to destroy enemies was fine, but asking them to lower the temperature... they might bring a blizzard instead.
So Reyna gave up and followed the massive crowd. Fortunately, there were supplies along the way. Many street vendors had seized the opportunity to sell snacks, drinks, and souvenirs as they moved toward the continent's center. They weren't without pain or grief for the Emperor, but humans have a talent: even if the sky falls tomorrow, life must go on.
If the Ecclesiarchy still held its terrifying power, they would denounce this as unfaithful behavior, desecrating the funeral. But Alexander and the Church of Saint Doraemon didn't think so. Alexander believed this was a form of resilience.
Without this resilience, human civilization would have collapsed the moment the Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne. It was the resilience of mortals wanting to live no matter what that had maintained the Imperium to this day. Alexander even allowed them to sell funeral souvenirs.
In fact, he had used his own ingenuity to design one. Since objects with the Emperor's image would now explode upon His death, Alexander designed a toy: add one stroke of a pen, and the image would pop like a firework. He called it "Yellow-Skin Popper" and introduced it to the vendors. The poor merchants screamed in terror, kneeling and crying that they didn't dare sell such a thing.
However, some of Alexander's other designs were very popular.
"This is delicious!" Reyna looked in surprise at a snack she had just bought from a stall and couldn't help but cry out. The snack was made from fermented flour, steamed until fluffy, and filled with a soft, airy filling that tasted uniquely sweet and fragrant.
"This is made from wheat flour produced by the 'Holiday Farming Kit,' fermented and steamed. In my hometown, we generally call it a bun. It's mixed with coconut hearts from the Macragge coast."
A voice rose from behind Reyna.
Reyna turned her head in surprise, only to see Alexander standing behind her, dressed in the work uniform of an Ashford laborer. He wore a slight smile, looking like any other mortal attending the funeral.
He nodded slightly to Reyna, chewing on a piece of Coconut Heart Bobo as he walked toward her and Joan. "Do you know? The High Gothic word for coconut is Cocos. The word 'Coco' comes from a legendary monster on the Iberian Peninsula."
"The first Iberian sailors who saw coconuts thought the three holes on the shell looked like a monster's face, so they named it that. This 'Coco' monster was even believed to be a type of dragon... The people of Iberia believed the dragon St. George slew was the Coco."
"And as we all know, the legend of St. George slaying the dragon is actually the Emperor defeating the Void Dragon. Therefore, the Void Dragon is actually... an Alolan Exeggutor! No wonder it has the Dragon type."
"...What is an Alolan Exeggutor?" Reyna asked, looking a bit dazed.
Alexander said nothing but handed over a photo showing a creature that looked both like a coconut tree and an animal. It had two legs, a tail, a teardrop-shaped body, and a long neck extending like a trunk, with coconut-like heads hanging under the canopy, grinning with a rather comical expression.
"...Does the Void Dragon know he's an Alolan Exeggutor?" Joan couldn't help but ask from the side.
"His online handle back then was 'Exeggutor,'" Alexander replied with a chuckle.
Reyna's eyes widened as she stared at Alexander in disbelief. "I thought you would be presiding over the funeral ceremony or something..."
"I'm not going. I find it unlucky," Alexander shrugged. "With all the Emperor's filial sons and grandsons presiding, why should I join the commotion?"
It truly was "unlucky." Alexander refused to show his face at the funeral because he wanted no connection to the Dark King. Though the Dark King was dead, its instinct still attacked Alexander from countless points in time.
The "Blessing of the Death God" Alexander once received in the Underhive, the Death Cults of Ashford, and the Genestealers on Baal—all were products of the Dark King's encroaching influence. If Alexander were to preside over the funeral, he would only be inviting corruption, giving the Dark King a chance to erode his essence.
He chose to hide behind the scenes as a mortal—as Alexander, an inconspicuous identity—rather than descending as Saint Doraemon. He didn't want the collective consciousness of humanity to link Saint Doraemon with the Emperor. Human thought is difficult to tame; among trillions, some would inevitably think Saint Doraemon was the Emperor reborn, which would be extremely dangerous for him.
"Are you... alright?" Reyna asked with concern. Though she often felt his presence during prayers, it felt like a lifetime since she had seen him in person like this. "I mean... are you still the same person you were back then?"
" 'Back then' is a difficult term to pin down," Alexander said thoughtfully, stroking his chin. "There is no absolute time in the Warp. Even many of my past experiences are products of the present interfering with the past. The past changes every moment, and my will encompasses all of it. The 'me' from back then is certainly me, because the 'me' from back then is the 'me' of right now."
"I am that I am."
"Uh..." Reyna looked completely lost.
Alexander fell silent for a moment, then pulled a paper bag from his pocket filled with large melon seeds, roasted until they smelled of fragrant oil. He stuffed them into Reyna's hands. "Just eat your seeds," he said, shaking his head with an expression that was half-annoyed and half-amused.
Reyna looked a bit miffed but took the bag. "I just don't understand what you're saying." She remembered Alexander saying that in his hometown, giving someone melon seeds to eat was a custom for dealing with "fools."
"It's fine. I usually don't have a clear picture of my full self either, but that's a good thing," Alexander grabbed two seeds from the bag, giving one to Joan and cracking the other into his own mouth. "The Warp is a dimension of will. When I am unaware of something's existence, I can treat it as non-existent. But if I became fully aware of my entire scope, I wouldn't be 'me' anymore. It's like... the moment the Emperor realized He was the Dark King, He ceased to be entirely the Emperor."
"It is through this self-enclosure and self-hypnosis that I dug my sense of self back out of the Warp."
As they spoke, Alexander's will expanded across Macragge. He could feel the tides of the Warp and the presence of the Four Gods. They, too, had descended in inconspicuous forms, walking among the mortal pilgrims.
The crowds moved like a whirlpool, and the atmosphere changed accordingly. To accommodate the trillions of pilgrims, half of Macragge's mountains had been leveled. Without them, the warm, moist air from the oceans swept across the continent.
Grey clouds gathered, and a mournful wind began to howl. The air turned cold and damp. An old man held a crying child; tears mingled with the rising humidity. For the old man, the Emperor had been a constant presence throughout his life—at his parents' funeral, his wedding, the birth of his children, and the death of his son in the Imperial Guard. Now, there was no longer a face watching over him.
Thunder rumbled, and a pale lightning bolt pierced the clouds. Then, the sound of crying was drowned out by the pitter-patter of rain. Tears were hidden in the downpour.
The ground turned to mud, making every step a struggle. Reyna and Joan, hardened by war, walked with ease, but others struggled. Yet, a gentle power seemed to protect the crowd, preventing anyone from falling or being trampled.
In Alexander's vision, the scene was far busier. Warp daemons—or "Guardian Spirits," as the Thousand Sons now called them—were frantically working behind the scenes. They helped pull the legs of the elderly out of the mud, lowered the fevers of shivering children, and guided the flow of the crowd.
The Guardian Spirits worked diligently to protect every human life. Any death at this funeral could provide fuel for the Dark King's power. This was why Guilliman had stopped Corax from taking revenge on Alpharius—a single death of a Primarch could have been enough to nourish the Dark King's shadow.
Crunch...
A small truck nearby got its tire stuck in a deep mud pit hidden under a puddle. The owner, an old woman wrapped in a thick cloak, tried desperately to push it out but lacked the strength. The nearby Guardian Spirits wanted to help, but seeing Alexander standing right there, they froze in hesitation.
Alexander chuckled at their reaction. He walked over and placed a hand on the truck. Reyna and Joan rushed to help, and seeing two young girls helping, several other pilgrims joined in.
Alexander lightly activated his authority as the Master of Vile Arts, "reviving" the truck's engine just enough so that with the crowd's push, it surged out of the pit. The old woman thanked everyone profusely and cleared space in the back of the truck, inviting them to hop in to escape the rain. The only problem was that Alexander had to sit while hugging a crate of Baal Red Wine.
"The ride is a bit bumpy. This truck belonged to my father; it's nearly a hundred years old," the old woman called out from the driver's seat. "Feel free to open a bottle of wine. It's a specialty of Baal. They say the Angels love to drink it."
A few pilgrims opened a bottle and took a sip, their faces immediately twisting and twitching in agony. But thinking it was the legendary wine of the Angels, they forced themselves to swallow. Whether it was their sheer willpower or the woman's wine being "impure," their mortal bodies actually survived the bitterness of the Baal vintage.
"You're from Baal?" Reyna asked, striking up a conversation.
"Yes, Baal Secundus," the old woman smiled.
"I'm from Ashford," Reyna replied.
The old woman's eyes widened. "Ashford... my father was from Ashford. My mother was from Lysios. I heard stories of the Pandemonium System... but how can you be so young? And this scar..." She stared at Reyna's facial scar and then at Joan's burns, realizing something.
Reyna froze, not expecting to be recognized. Joan quietly leaned forward and put a finger to her lips, signaling the woman to keep the secret.
"You... my father mentioned you," the woman whispered. "He followed you back on Ashford. He was part of the Ark Gang... his name was Denton."
"I remember him!" Reyna exclaimed, tapping her head. "He fought against the Tyranids. He got a scar on his face from a Hormagaunt and almost died."
Alexander's gaze moved slightly. "I remember him too. On Baal Secundus, he and this very truck gave me a ride once," Alexander said with a light laugh. "He said he'd spend the rest of his life bragging about surviving that Hormagaunt."
The woman stared at Alexander, her breath catching. "Yes... he really did tell that story his whole life. The last time he told it was in a tavern opened by 'Old One Eye' on Baal. He was telling it to some youngsters, and right when he got to the part where the Hormagaunt swung its blade... he passed away. His soul..."
Tears rolled down the old woman's cheeks. "He has returned to the 22nd Century," Alexander said softly. "He's gone to enjoy his life."
A look of gentle joy spread across the woman's face.
Suddenly, a gagging sound came from the back. A man dressed as a miner from a mining world looked embarrassed. "Sorry... I..." He held the half-finished Baal wine timidly.
Reyna, Alexander, Joan, and the old woman all burst out laughing. "I said you should taste it, not finish it," the woman chuckled. "The wine the Angels drink is not for mortals to judge."
Alexander quietly produced a bottle of crimson nectar from Ashford—the kind brewed by Old One Eye. He had "stolen" it from Old One Eye's shelf in the past using the Warp. Back then, Old One Eye couldn't find it and blamed Ragge, who was so drunk he actually believed he had stolen it himself.
"Try this." Alexander poured a glass for everyone. The rich, crimson liquid shimmered. The miner took a sniff, and his eyes lit up.
"A toast to this kind lady for giving us a ride," Alexander said, raising his glass. The woman looked flustered and humble.
"To the kind lady!" the others echoed, raising their cups. "To Ashford!" "To Baal!" "To my home on Cattail-4!" "To Holy Terra!" "To Ultramar!" "To the Primarchs!" "To the Great Astartes!" "To the soldiers of the Astra Militarum!" "To Saint Doraemon!"
The sounds of the toast filled the small truck as they drank. The strong nectar from the Ashford hives slid down their throats, warming their stomachs and bringing a slight redness to their eyes.
Alexander drank most of his glass, then gently raised it toward the horizon outside the truck.
"To the Master of Mankind, our Emperor," he said. "And to all the living and the dead."
As Alexander's voice trailed off, a faint glimmer of sunlight appeared on the distant horizon. Through the mist, a grand structure stood at the center of the continent—the tomb of the Master of Mankind.