As the voice-over explaining the future principles of Imperial navigation drifted down like cold cosmic dust, the vast Throne Room of Terra's Imperial Palace sank into a suffocating, unprecedented silence.
It was unlike the alarm they had felt at the "Iron Men Rebellion," unlike the sorrow of witnessing the "Age of Strife."
This time, the truth revealed on the screen struck like an invisible war-hammer forged of faith and metaphysics, shattering the solid foundation of the "Imperial Truth" for which they had fought two centuries.
Reason, science, logic—these cornerstones of the Great Crusade's spirit—seemed fragile, even… ridiculous, before the absurd reality of "shamanic jumping" and "godly brawls."
The first sound was not an angry roar or stunned question, but a stifled laugh, squeezed from the soul, brimming with boundless joy and relief.
"Ha… haha… hahahahaha!"
Lorgar Aurelian, the Master of the Word hounded for his piety, shot to his feet.
No longer the sinner who hung his head before his father, he stood ramrod-straight, eyes blazing like newborn stars.
He spread his arms as if to embrace the dark screen, the grand shipborne cathedral, the trillion-voiced mortal choir echoing through the void.
"Yes… yes! I finally understand! Hahaha, I finally understand!"
His laughter rolled through the hall—not madness, but a piercing clarity after clouds disperse.
Ignoring the disdain and confusion of his brothers, he crossed the hall, knelt at the steps to the Golden Throne, and bowed low.
In a voice trembling with tears and rapture, he proclaimed to the figure upon the Throne:
"Father! My God! I… finally grasp Your painstaking intent!"
The earth-shattering declaration seemed to drop the hall's temperature several degrees.
"I once anguished over Your rebuke, despaired when You denied Your divinity! I thought my devotion offended Your humility, my words stained the great Imperial Truth!"
Lorgar lifted his tear-streaked face; no sorrow remained, only the fanaticism of a martyr who had found ultimate truth.
"Now I see—it was all a trial! The final test of my faith!"
Pointing at the screen, his voice cracked with fervor:
"You foresaw everything! That in the distant future You would sit upon this Golden Throne, the sole beacon guiding humanity's voyage!"
"You always knew Your Empire would rise upon faith in Your supreme divinity!"
"Thus You visited upon me the harshest punishment!"
"You destroyed my perfect city to teach that temples of flesh turn to dust; only faith rooted in the soul is eternal!"
"You rejected my worship to test whether my faith could survive utter denial and darkness, yet still glimpse Your divine radiance!"
"You did not reject me; You were… shaping me!"
"Forging the most devoted apostle who would lay the first stone for Your future holy Ecclesiarchy!"
He pressed his forehead to the cold floor and, with all his strength, voiced the most pious declaration of his life:
"Father, I have understood Your trial. I… have passed."
Upon the Throne, the Emperor's ageless eyes—bearing all human history and future—showed, for the first and only time, pure… bewilderment.
He regarded the son who resembled Him most, now lost in religious ecstasy He could not fathom.
In a micro-second His mind sifted every possibility.
"I have yet to explain faith's pragmatic value as a psychic weapon, its barrier effect against Warp predators."
"What… does he think he understands?"
"A trial? When did I set such a pointless test?"
At His side, the ever-present Malcador, shadow to the throne, flickered an almost tangible weariness across his ancient face.
He sighed so softly it might not have existed, yet it brimmed with resignation at humanity's incurable urge to self-interpret.
"Delusional ravings."
A cold, hard voice—like rock striking rock—shattered the eerie atmosphere.
Dorn, Praetorian of the Empire, rose slowly.
He did not look at Lorgar; his eyes bored into the screen as if inspecting a fatally flawed rampart.
"I see no 'triumph of faith.' I see a failed logistics system that relies on uncertain variables and gambles the realm's safety on enemy infighting."
"Failure? Dorn, my brother, ever so… unimaginative."
Roboute Guilliman spoke, but his usual composure had given way to cold fury after seeing his ideals overturned.
"This is beyond failure—this is absurdity!"
"A cosmic farce ten millennia long, built on gambling and prayer!"
"Our Empire—won by reason and science—reduced to a tribal confederation that decides survival by 'shamanic jumping'?!"
His gaze swept every brother, voice cracking with disbelief:
"More importantly… where are we? Where are we Primarchs?!"
Guilliman's question struck each Primarch like a hammer blow.
"Yes—where did we go?"
Lion El'Jonson's glacial voice rose as he stood, tall shadow stretching long.
"Even if Father could no longer walk among us, so long as any one of us remained, the Empire could never sink into such ignorance!"
"Religion? The very weed we purged from Terra's ashes now becomes the Empire's cornerstone?!"
The Lion's eyes flashed dangerously as he looked to Horus and every brother, voicing the pivotal question:
"Does Horus's rebellion… ultimately… erase us all?"
"Or kill us!"
Angron bellowed, Butcher's Nails twisting his voice into venomous glee. "Good! Glorious! Look at this hypocritical Empire!"
"Look at the fraud on the Golden Toilet! He built all this with lies, and now survives only through the faith he despised most!"
"The best joke in the entire Universe!"
"If that's true…" Perturabo's gloomy voice cut in, resentment in his eyes replaced by sick, logical excitement.
"If we loyal sons are all dead—or missing…"
"Does that mean the final victor is the weakest, most useless of us all, the one who can only chant scripture…"
Every gaze snapped like searchlights to the still-kneeling, fervent figure—Lorgar Aurelian.
"…He won?"
Perturabo hissed the words, the absurdity and humiliation shaking even his iron will.
"Impossible!"
Russ slammed the table, roaring,
"Him? The coward who hides behind the lines?"
"I'd sooner believe the Cyclops turned us all to ice with sorcery than see him laughing last!"
"Silence, you howling fool-wolf!"
Magnus surged up, the cyclopean eye blazing with rage and grievance.
"But... Perturabo's deduction isn't baseless."
"If... if the future truly unfolds like this, it can only be after an extinction-level civil war that engulfs every Legion and every Primarch."
"A war... in which we all lose."
"I can't accept that."
Guilliman's voice rang out again; this time it carried the categorical veto of the Imperium's chief architect.
"Where is Rogal Dorn? He would never sit idle and let this happen!"
"And me—Roboute Guilliman! I would never allow anyone to script the Imperium's future in such a primitive, benighted, and inefficient way!"
"An empire incapable of guaranteeing stable logistics has no right to exist!"
His questions struck like hammer blows, for he understood better than anyone what a stable, predictable supply chain meant to a galaxy-spanning realm.
"Unless..."
A voice rose—free as the steppe wind, sharp as a hawk's cry.
Chagatai, Master of the White Scars who had stood apart from the rest, spoke slowly.
"Unless in that future 'stability' and 'predictability' themselves have become the most unrealistic of luxuries."
"Unless the foe we face refuses to play by logic at all."
"Then, perhaps... prayer would be the only weapon left."
The Khan's words plunged everyone into silence.
They watched the fleets struggling in the Warp on the screen, the reinforcements that had survived only because their gods fought among themselves.
For the first time they realized how fragile their vaunted art of war and science of logistics were before a higher, more unreasonable set of "rules."
"Hmph—nonsense."
Mortarion's rasp came from behind his rebreather mask.
"All I see is the triumph of superstition. Lorgar, the biggest religious fanatic, ended up ruling his Imperium in the only way he knew—pitiful."
Sanguinius let out a long, sorrow-laden sigh.
He joined no argument; he merely stared at the Imperial warship that had been "flung" out of the Warp centuries late.
It was as if he saw the warriors long turned to dust, drifting alone and hopeless through the river of time.
"How many centuries... in endless darkness... not even knowing the war had ended."
The Great Angel's whisper sent a chill through every soul present.
Within the Throne Hall stood eighteen demigods, eighteen wholly different states of mind.
Doubt, rage, scorn, bewilderment, elation, grief... these emotions crashed like Warp storms among them.
The rift opened by the prophecy of the Horus Heresy was now torn wider by this grotesque vision of tomorrow.
The Emperor still sat upon the Throne, his gaze sweeping each son, noting every overly fierce, overly "human" expression.
He offered no explanation, no comfort.
He knew any words would be superfluous now.
What they had seen was the Imperium's future.
A cold, cruel future... that even He was loath to admit, yet for which He would have to sacrifice everything.
If the Primarchs' reactions were a mountain range quaking at the foreknowledge of its own collapse,
then the response of the hundreds of Astartes filling the vast Throne Hall was a wilder, purer tsunami set off by that quake.
They were weapons, tools, the sharpest spearheads of the Imperium.
They had been taught to conquer stars with logic and courage, to scatter the superstitions of Old Night with the light of reason.
Yet what the screen revealed was a basin of filth—god-blood, demon-piss, and mortal prayers—flung over the gleaming credo of Imperial Truth they wore like polished armor.
"So after two centuries of war, victory hinges not on whose guns are better, but on whose big shot upstairs can better 'call in favors'?"'
This absurd conclusion froze the entire Astartes formation in a silence so deep their power-armor respirators seemed to stop.
The first to break that silence was neither an angry roar nor a pious prayer.
It was a flippant whistle—the kind you give a bad joke in a tavern, dripping with derision.
"Phew—"
Sevatar, First Captain of the Eighth Legion, the "Crow Prince" whom the Custodes had politely corralled behind a barrier of force,
regarded the now-black screen with the lazy air of a man watching a third-rate farce.
The corner of his ever-mocking mouth stretched into the broadest, most predatory grin, baring white fangs.
He looked like a child who had found a cosmic secret and only wanted to retell it as a joke.
"Friends, my dear loyal... friends."
His soft voice sliced through the taut membrane of shock like a poisoned scalpel.
"Haven't you realized? This is... the greatest insurance policy in the galaxy!"
Every gaze—angry, bewildered, lost—snapped instinctively to this raving madman.
"Think about it," he said,
Sevatar spread his magnet-cuffed hands as if displaying some priceless treasure.
"When you're lost in some Warp hell-hole, your Navigator's turned into a puking mushroom, and your last supplies are a tin of expired nutrient paste..."
"Do you despair? Suicide? No, no, no!"
He wagged a finger, face alight with mischievous glee.
"You just drop to your knees and shout with the most sincere, sickening voice you've got: 'For the Emperor!' and you're set!"
"Then—boom!"
"You and your rattling wreck are fished out of time's sewer by an unseen hand and hurled like a dirty rag onto some battlefield you don't even know!"
Sevatar's laughter grew louder; he shook with it, chains rattling.
"What does that tell us?"
"It tells us that when our great, all-knowing 'Emperor of Mankind' needs cannon-fodder—pardon, 'holy reinforcements'—he doesn't care who you are, where you're from, or where you're going!"
His gaze swept the hall, settling at last on the loyalist Astartes black with fury at Horus's name, and he delivered the punchline in a tone of black-humored epiphany:
"So... if one day we poor sods—branded 'traitors'—get tired, lost, stuck in some Warp dead-end..."
"And just happens that His Majesty needs a little... 'surprise,' say a pack of seasoned, fearless meat-shields to mess with the enemy on some crucial front..."
Sevatar paused; his eyes—always dancing between madness and sanity—blazed with the vision.
"Would he... would he reach into the cracks of time, haul us out, and boot us right in front of the loyalist lines?"
"Just to hear the bang, or for a bit of sport for both sides?"
"After all, in a way, we too are his 'long-lost good sons,' aren't we? Ha... hahaha!"
Sevatar's manic laughter echoed through the hall, carrying no anger, no despair—only the pure, morbid joy of a man who has seen through every rule and role.
He cared nothing for loyalty or betrayal; to him, this Universe—where even logistics hinged on the mood of some god—was the grandest farce, worth a hearty laugh.
"Shut your filthy mouth, Nostraman scum."
A voice, cold and hard, as though forged from pure wrath and faith, rang out.
Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists, rose slowly from his seat.
He didn't even glance at Sevatar; his gaze was locked on a point in the void, as if he could see the Astronomican still burning ten thousand years hence.
"The Emperor's will is the law of the Universe. The Emperor's miracles are His most sacred rewards to the faithful."
"A gutter rat whose very soul has rotted will never grasp the weight of the word 'faith.'"
He eased his hand onto the hilt of the Black Sword at his waist; every movement carried the ritual solemnity of a duel about to begin.
"Don't laugh too soon, Sevatar. You'll feel that 'reward' firsthand—beneath my blade."
Sigismund's riposte, like ice hurled into hot oil, detonated the Astartes ranks.
"He speaks truth! The Emperor's might knows no bounds!"
A Word Bearers warrior whispered in rapture, handsome face flushed with fervor.
"It wasn't 'thrown'—it was a miracle! The God-Emperor saving His lost lambs!"
"A war decided by faith… this is why we were created!"
Another Word Bearer—beside Angul-Tai—eyed their baffled Ultramarine and Iron Warriors cousins with pity, eyes blazing the same fanatic fire.
"You still weigh victory with mortal logic, blind to the divine will behind it. Pitiful."
Yet in the Luna Wolves' formation, the mood was starkly different.
Garviel Loken, called the soul of the Legion, stared at the screen in near stupor.
His mind—once brimming with ideals, logic, and boundless adoration for the Warmaster—was now blank.
Faith? Ritual shamans? Gods brawling in the sky?
What was all this?
Had our Great Crusade, the blood we shed, the Imperial Truth we preached, all been to build a future held together by superstition and charlatans?
He instinctively looked to Abaddon beside him, hoping—if only for shared outrage—to find some echo in his rival brother's eyes.
But Abaddon did not return his gaze.
No anger, no confusion on the First Captain's face—only a dour chill, as though he had foreseen it all.
"See, Loken?"
Abaddon's voice was low, laced with the Cthonian gang-scorn for weakness.
"This is the 'civilization' of Terra you prize. In the end it's no different from our old underworld customs—whose backer is tougher, whose god answers prayers faster."
"At least on Cthonia we never pretended we were better."
Loken's heart sank; for the first time he found a cruel, undeniable 'truth' in the gang logic he had once despised.
He lifted his gaze to the high Primarch dais, seeking his father, the Warmaster he revered—yearning for that familiar confidence, that effortless dismissal of all absurdity.
But he saw only weariness—a depthless exhaustion he had never before seen on Horus's face, as if the whole Universe pressed upon him.
With a sound almost audible, Loken's faith cracked.
In the Death Guard ranks, Garro's reaction was more tangled.
The old Terran veteran lacked the deep-seated distrust of the Emperor born in his Barbarus brothers.
He was loyal—to the Imperium, to the Emperor himself.
So when he saw a future Imperium relying on faith in the Emperor to hold the Warp at bay, something within him whispered, It should be so.
Yes, the Emperor is mankind's Guardian; His power should shield His children.
Yet when that centuries-lost fleet was 'thrown' onto the battlefield, that same certainty gave way to a darker worry.
"At what cost?" he murmured.
He thought not of miracles but of a far more practical question.
Were the minds of those warriors, stranded in the Warp for centuries, still intact?
Did their ships still function?
Committing such a 'ghost fleet' of unknown variables to a decisive battle—how was that any different from a reckless gamble?
Had the Imperium's future truly been reduced to wagering wars on such dice-throws?
Garro clenched Libertas, feeling a confusion he had never known.
He remained loyal—but the object of that loyalty was growing ever more indistinct.
"Fascinating thesis,"
said Chief Librarian Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, scholarly excitement glittering in his eyes.
"Faith, as a high-intensity, directed collective psychic energy, can manifest realspace defensive barriers…"
"It proves the possibilities of the psyker arts are infinite! And the Emperor always knew—yet chose suppression and prohibition!"
He looked toward Magnus, regret and defiance shining in his gaze.
"We could have studied it systematically, quantified it, turned it into an exact science!"
"Instead it now erupts in the rawest, most uncontrollable form of religious frenzy!"
"This is the gravest waste of knowledge! Ignorance—ignorance will be the Imperium's doom!"
"Don't give a damn what it is!"
bellowed a savage, battle-hungry voice from the World Eaters—one of their own.
The Butcher's Nails hummed in his skull, yet his ever-rageful eyes blazed with pure warrior glee.
"I don't care how the sky-gods fight! It just means more foes thrown before us—more skulls, more blood!"
Khârn slapped the shoulder of a similarly Nails-addled brother, grinning.
"Listen, brother! Quit the useless thoughts!"
"While the battle lasts and our chainaxes still roar, that's enough! Demon or centuries-old relic—who cares?"
For Khârn, the absurd future brought not confusion but an unprecedented purity.
The reason for war no longer mattered; what mattered was that war itself would never end.
The Astartes—supermen forged as the ultimate rational weapons—now beheld a single truth and saw countless divergent futures of their own.
Some saw faith's collapse, others proof of godhood.
Some saw strategic folly, others eternal war.
Some saw knowledge squandered, others… the perfect joke.
The rift torn in Horus's name was no longer a line.
It had become a web—of clashing creeds, logics, and passions—slowly tightening.
One day it would ensnare them all… and drag them together into the abyss.