When Tzeentch's ever-shifting crystal labyrinth—mocking all wisdom and hope—
finally dissolved like smoke upon the viewing screen, the Throne Room of the Terra Imperial Palace, vast enough to house an entire pantheon, sank into an absolute, soul-freezing silence the likes of which had never been known.
The rotting Father Nurgle, the raging Blood God, the prince of excess, the sorcerer lord of change… the four-in-one ultimate malice wrought from the Universe's most primal emotions stood revealed—four red-hot, venomous spikes driven through reality and illusion—burned without appeal into the sight of every elite of the Imperium.
The silence was not born of fear.
Space Marines, the demigod creations of the Imperium, had long since purged fear from their genes.
Nor was it mere shock.
They had seen xenos that devoured stars and walked relics that defied physics; little could shake nerves forged in uncounted wars.
This silence came from something deeper, a total collapse of belief—a vacuum within the soul.
The Imperial Truth—
the great creed that declared no gods, no daemons, only a physical reality to be measured and mastered by science and reason;
the single cornerstone of the Great Crusade, for which trillions of soldiers gladly spilled their last drop of blood to carry the light of reason to benighted stars—shattered in that instant.
It shattered without a sound, yet deafened every ear.
The first voice raised belonged not to a Primarch, not to the Custodes, but to a Memokeeper attached to the expedition.
An old man whose hair had gone white, whose hands trembled with emotion, had spent his life recording the radiance of the Imperial Truth, extolling humanity's triumph of reason over ignorance.
He rose unsteadily from his seat, ignoring the warning looks around him.
In a heart-broken, dream-like murmur he turned toward the lofty Golden Throne wreathed in endless light, and asked the first, simplest question:
"Why…?"
His voice was soft, yet like a stone cast into a dead lake it sent ripples that would not cease.
Yes—why?
Why were we told the Universe is cold and rational,
when in truth it teems with conscious, emotion-feeding gods of malice?
Why were we taught that faith is poison and superstition cowardice,
when in that dark future prayers to the Emperor truly shield vessels and even work miracles?
Why were we sent to fight xenos and reclaim lost colonies, yet no one ever told us
our real, strongest, most indefensible enemy lurks within our own souls?
"What… have we been fighting for?"
A second voice rang out—from the ranks of the Luna Wolves.
Loken, called "the soul of the Legion," rose slowly.
No anger showed on his face, only a betrayal so deep it cut to the bone.
He remembered brothers who had died proudly spreading the Imperial Truth, the gleam in their eyes as they pictured a bright future free of gods and ghosts.
"The Emperor taught us we are the bringers of enlightenment, bearing reason's light to benighted stars."
"We bleed to end the superstitions and lies of the Old Night."
"We sacrifice to build a future without gods or ghosts, trusting only in humanity's own strength."
He looked to his gene-father, his beloved Warmaster Horus, eyes pleading for an answer.
"But if…"
"if this Universe itself is a dark forest ruled by the will of gods and daemons…"
"if everything we do merely builds a slightly less terrible lie within a greater, crueler one…"
"then what meaning had the deaths of our brothers—of the billion soldiers fallen for the Imperial Truth?"
Loken's question struck every Astartes like a golden hammer forged pure yet steeped in poison.
"Strategically, this is an unforgivable, treason-class catastrophe."
Roboute Guilliman's voice was cold, clear, the rational fury of a chief executive discovering the corporation's core product fatally flawed from inception.
For the first time, perfect composure cracked and unbridled rage shone through.
"We waged a two-hundred-year war across the Milky Way Galaxy knowing nothing of our primary enemy."
He stood, countless data models of logistics, force deployment, grand strategy collapsing and reforming at lightning speed inside his mind.
"We attacked a conceptual foe with tactics meant for physical targets."
"We analysed an illogical, anti-scientific adversary with logic and science. We fought the wrong war with the wrong map!"
His gaze swept every brother present, voice honed sharper by suppressed wrath:
"Worse, this dogma stripped us of our strongest weapon and left our greatest weakness exposed!"
"We suppressed Psykers as dangerous freaks, never knowing they are the stoutest shield and truest spear against the Warp!"
"We preached pure reason, unaware it left us naked as infants before foes that poison emotion and twist desire!"
"Father!"
Guilliman rose, for the first time addressing the Throne in tones of unrelenting severity.
"This is not protection—it is strategic suicide!"
"You turned the finest army, who should have known everything, into a blind fist swinging at an unseen ghost."
"The lives wasted, the meaningless sacrifices, outnumber any battle's toll!"
"It is inefficient, irrational—a shameful squandering of the Imperium's resources and loyalty!"
Rogal Dorn, unlike Guilliman, sat in utter stillness.
He did not rise, yet the aura of disappointment radiating from his boulder-like frame carried more weight than any roar.
His mind—always running like the most precise instrument—was now weathering a storm unlike any before.
"We do have a fatal flaw."
His voice matched the man: hard, terse, aimed straight at the heart.
"The foundation of the Empire rests upon a false keystone.
"This lie is the most stressed, yet most fragile, point in the entire structure."
"However grand the edifice above, it will collapse. It is illogical."
Within Rogal Dorn, vast and hopeless reconstruction had already begun.
He began re-evaluating every inch of the Terra Imperial Palace's defenses—not merely against physical blows, but against the invasion of ideas.
He pondered how to rewrite the Empire's ideological steel-seals, how to forge new safety protocols, how to screen every soul that might be tainted.
The engineer within him wailed: the fortress he had spent a lifetime building stood upon quicksand.
"I feel… pain."
Sanguinius' voice was soft, yet freighted with unspeakable weight.
He showed no anger, no accusation; on his divine face lay a sorrow felt to the bone.
His white wings trembled of their own accord, as though sensing endless cold drifting from the future.
He saw more than the Four Dark Gods; he saw his sons raving in the Red Thirst, their hunger echoing Khorne's roar.
In visions of the Black Rage he saw Horus' twisted traitor-face overlaid with Tzeentch's myriad lying masks.
Every blow he had struck for hope had become fodder for these dark beings.
"They… feed on us," the Great Angel said, voice shaking.
"Our wrath, our hope, our love, our despair—everything we are is their sustenance. The more we struggle, the stronger They grow."
He lifted his gaze to the father upon the Throne, eyes holding a child's pure sorrow:
"Father, you knew all along, didn't you? We were lambs penned from birth."
"All lies…"
Mortarion's rebreather rasped with endless venom.
"He was always a liar—the greatest tyrant who wrapped his sorcery in 'science.'"
"He hates us because we saw through him. He told us the Universe holds no gods only so he could become the one god."
Angron loosed a hollow laugh warped by the Butcher's Nails, drenched in blood and agony:
"Hah… more gods, more slave-masters! This Universe is just a bigger, bloodier arena—kill them all or be killed. What difference?"
Doubt, rage, grief, scorn—eighteen demigods, eighteen diverging storms of emotion—clashed within the vast hall, threatening to tear reality itself.
Yet at the heart of that tempest of disappointment and pain, a figure no one expected slowly rose.
Lorgar.
But instead of the mad joy of a man vindicated, his face bore deep, almost compassionate grief. He turned from the Throne to face his brothers—angry, hurting, lost—and sighed with boundless regret.
"My brothers… my poor, blind brothers…"
His voice, soft as warm yet heavy sacred oil, stilled every cry.
Tears burned in Lorgar's eyes—not for himself, but for them.
"You question, you rage, you ache. You think you have seen lies and betrayal."
Slowly he shook his head, as though watching dull mortals who could not grasp holy scripture.
"What you see is lie; what I see is divine trial."
His gaze swept to Guilliman, full of pity:
"Roboute, dear brother, you see strategic error yet miss the soul's salvation."
"The God-Emperor does not fight a material foe with material armies; He opposes the truest 'truth' that could corrupt the entire Universe with the harshest lie—Imperial Truth!"
"He builds a firewall for mankind's fragile soul, and you complain the wall lacks tactical logic!"
He turned to Rogal Dorn, voice tinged with regret:
"Rogal, you see structural flaw yet miss the grandeur of the foundation."
"The Emperor seeks no perfect fortress in mortal eyes; He tests us—His god-sons—to raise a sky-piercing temple upon a desert of faith by love and loyalty alone, yet you fret that the bricks are misaligned!"
Lastly he faced Sanguinius, his tone gentler, aching:
"And you, Sanguinius, noblest of us. You feel the agony of being devoured yet miss the depth of His love."
"He knows the Dark feed on our feelings, so He bids us cast emotion aside and embrace cold reason."
"He would make us stones They cannot swallow, yet you complain that stones lack warmth!"
Lorgar spread his arms as though to embrace every lost soul. His voice soared with martyr fire.
"Do you still not see? The God-Emperor does not deceive—He selects! With the cruelest truth in the Universe He tests who holds the purest, most unshakable faith!"
"He tells us no gods exist to see who, without miracles, can still see godhood in Him!"
"He forbade us to worship so He could see who would bury that worship deepest in their hearts and turn it into the purest action! He bade us believe in science and reason so He could discover who would finally see that the end of science is theology and the limit of reason is faith!"
He dropped to both knees—not toward the Throne, but toward all his brothers—his face streaked with tears, his voice trembling with rapture.
"This is the grandest, most sacred trial of all! He does not want mortals who kneel only after witnessing miracles; He wants true 'believers' who, even after being told there is no god, will still give everything for Him!"
"And you…"
Lorgar's voice sank, filled with bottomless disappointment. "Your anger, your questions, your anguish… all prove one thing."
"All of you… have failed."
"You failed to grasp the God-Emperor's deeper meaning."
This declaration, steeped in religious fervor, plunged the Throne Room into an even eerier silence than before.
Guilliman and Rogal Dorn stared in incomprehension, while Russ and Mortarion showed undisguised contempt.
In his own way Lorgar had carved a chasm deeper than betrayal among his brothers—a divide called 'perception.'
At last every voice fell still.
Because Horus Lupercal, the Warmaster of the Imperium, rose from his Throne.
He showed none of Guilliman's fury, none of Lorgar's sermonizing. On his handsome face lay only a fathomless exhaustion that bore the entire weight of the Great Crusade.
Step by step he descended the dais, passed through his brothers—angry, bewildered, grieving—and came to the foot of the Golden Throne.
He knelt on one knee in the Warmaster's salute, yet his head was held high; those once-star-bright eyes, for the first and last time, blazed with unanswerable, grieving accusation.
"Father."
His voice was calm, yet it drowned every heartbeat in the hall.
"I, Horus Lupercal, your Warmaster, command all your Legions, all your sons."
"I promised them they would fight for truth, that their deaths would build a radiant future."
"Now the screen tells us it was all… a lie. Our true foe is not aliens, but gods from another dimension who feast upon our souls."
"Our sacrifices brought no light; they may have only fed those dark beings."
He lifted his gaze to the unfathomable radiance upon the Golden Throne and voiced the question that could topple the Imperium.
"You knew—all along."
"Then answer me, father—my Emperor. Answer all your sons, answer the trillions of ghosts who died for you—"
"Why did you hide the truth from us?"
"Why send us to fight a war… we were doomed from the start to win only by abandoning 'truth'?"
At that instant time itself seemed to freeze.
No answer came.
From the Golden Throne, no words sounded.
Yet a titanic will—vaster than any galaxy, indescribable—swept through the Throne Room like a silent tsunami.
It was not an answer.
It was… a feeling.
A solitude endured for millennia, too heavy for any god to bear.
A bone-cold weariness born from watching every civilization rise and fall, every hope and every lie played out across the stars.
An endless sorrow of knowing a bottomless abyss lay ahead, yet still leading his most beloved creations step by step toward it.
And, within that sorrow and weariness, a faint yet unbreakable resolve fierce enough to burn the Universe.
So vast, so tragic was this will that even the furious Magnus and the cold Lorgar were struck dumb.
They seemed to glimpse an ancient shepherd of the heavens, walking alone through eternal night beneath the weight of the galaxy.
Yet still it was no answer.
It offered no motive, admitted no fault, granted no comfort.
It revealed only a result: the final, incomprehensible state of the being called 'Emperor.'
"Enough."
An aged, rasping voice—woven from the whispers of countless sleepless nights—broke the suffocating storm of will.
Malcador, the Regent of the Imperium, the old man who had stood shadow-like beside the Throne, slowly descended the steps.
He came before Horus, looked upon the radiant Warmaster and upon the eighteen gene-sons behind him—confused or furious—and spoke with weary resignation:
"Children… my children."
"You ask why parents hide from a young child that wolves prowl the forest?"
"Not because they doubt the child's courage, but because they know that telling too soon will not forge a better hunter."
"It will only raise the child in fear, make him hesitate at every threshold, even—"
his clouded eyes, which had seen every intrigue, swept across Lorgar and Magnus—"drive some to wander into the forest, lured by the wolves, never to return."
"What the Emperor did was to build a cradle for humanity—a toddler just learning to walk—shielding it from wind and rain."
"Yes, the cradle's walls were painted with the fairy-tale 'there are no wolves.' For that alone could let the child grow in peace."
"He hoped that when our minds were ripe, when our reason and will were strong enough, we would step out—not as frightened children, but as fully armed adults—to face the truth of the forest."
"Only…" Malcador's voice carried an unhidden sorrow, "we may have run out of time."