Kevin had been the God-Emperor of Mankind for approximately three weeks, six days, fourteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes when he finally accepted that the Adeptus Custodes were going to be absolutely no help whatsoever.
This was not, he had to admit, an entirely fair assessment.
The Custodes were, by any objective measure, doing their jobs with the kind of dedication and excellence that would have made any employer weep with joy, that would have resulted in perfect performance reviews and substantial bonuses and probably a nice plaque on the wall commemorating their ten thousand years of unbroken service.
They guarded the Golden Throne with vigilance that never wavered.
They maintained the sanctity of the Sanctum Imperialis with devotion that bordered on the obsessive.
They protected the physical form of their Emperor with a ferocity that would have made a mother bear look like a pacifist by comparison.
They were, in short, the perfect guardians.
They were also, Kevin was discovering, completely and utterly incapable of understanding that their Emperor might want something other than to sit in eternal silence upon a throne of agony while they stood around looking magnificent and golden and entirely unhelpful.
The realization had come gradually, building over those three weeks like a headache that started as a minor annoyance and slowly developed into a full-blown migraine that made Kevin want to bash his skull against the nearest wall except that he couldn't move his skull and there were no walls within bashing distance and also bashing his skull would probably damage something important and doom humanity to extinction.
It had started with the small things.
Kevin had noticed, for instance, that the Custodes who stood guard in the Sanctum Imperialis rotated on a schedule that seemed to have been designed with no input whatsoever from the person they were supposedly guarding, a schedule that meant Kevin was forced to stare at the same golden-armored backs for hours upon hours before a new set of golden-armored backs replaced them, as if the scenery change was supposed to be some kind of entertainment.
He had noticed that the Custodes spoke to each other in hushed, reverent tones that suggested they were in the presence of something holy and not, say, a guy from Ohio who really wished someone would adjust his position slightly because there was something digging into what he was fairly certain was his left kidney and it had been digging into his left kidney for the past ten thousand years and it was really starting to bother him.
He had noticed that the Custodes performed rituals and ceremonies that seemed designed to honor their Emperor but that actually accomplished nothing useful, ceremonies that involved a lot of standing and chanting and the application of sacred oils and absolutely zero attempts to ask the Emperor if He might prefer something different.
But the true understanding, the moment when Kevin finally and completely grasped the depth of the problem, came on the twenty-third day of his new existence, when Captain-General Trajann Valoris himself came to the Sanctum Imperialis to perform some kind of inspection that Kevin assumed was Very Important and Deeply Meaningful to everyone except Kevin, who mostly just wanted someone to scratch the itch that had developed somewhere in the region of his nose and that was going to drive him absolutely insane if it continued for another ten thousand years.
Valoris was, Kevin had to admit, an impressive figure.
The Captain-General stood at a height that made even other Custodes look small, his golden armor gleaming with the kind of perfection that suggested an army of servitors spent their entire existence doing nothing but polishing it, his face a mask of stern authority that would have made Kevin's old middle school principal look like a friendly grandmother by comparison.
He strode through the Sanctum Imperialis with the confidence of someone who had been walking these halls for centuries and knew every inch of them better than he knew his own body, which was probably literally true given that Custodes could live for millennia and Valoris had been doing this job for longer than most civilizations existed.
He approached the Golden Throne.
He knelt.
He spoke.
"My Emperor," Valoris said, his voice carrying the weight of absolute conviction, "I come before You to report on the state of Your realm and the disposition of Your guardians. The Ten Thousand remain vigilant. The walls of the Palace remain secure. The enemies of mankind are held at bay by the strength of Your light and the devotion of Your servants."
Kevin, who had been desperately trying to figure out some way to communicate "please scratch my nose" for the past three days, felt a surge of hope.
This was it.
This was the Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes, the most important person in the entire organization dedicated to protecting and serving the Emperor, standing right in front of him and actually speaking to him.
Surely, surely, this was an opportunity.
Surely Valoris would be attuned to the Emperor's needs.
Surely the leader of the Ten Thousand would be able to perceive some hint of Kevin's desperate desire for someone to adjust his position or scratch his nose or do anything that might alleviate even a tiny fraction of the constant discomfort that had become his existence.
Kevin focused.
He gathered his will.
He pushed against the limitations of the Golden Throne, straining to send even the smallest message, the tiniest hint of his desires, the barest whisper of communication.
Nose, he tried to project. Itchy. Please. Scratch. Nose.
The strain was immense.
The Throne groaned.
The Astronomican flickered.
Somewhere in the Warp, a Navigator on a ship traveling through the Immaterium screamed as the light that guided him momentarily dimmed, sending his vessel careening off course and into a patch of unreality that would delay its journey by three weeks and result in the loss of approximately forty crew members to madness.
Kevin immediately stopped trying.
The strain eased.
The Astronomican steadied.
The Navigator stopped screaming and the ship returned to its course, the crew none the wiser about how close they had come to disaster because their Emperor had really wanted someone to scratch his nose.
And Valoris, kneeling before the Golden Throne, completely failed to notice anything unusual.
"Your silence speaks volumes, my Emperor," Valoris said, apparently interpreting Kevin's complete inability to communicate as some kind of profound wisdom. "I understand. The burdens You bear are beyond the comprehension of even Your most devoted servants. We shall continue to serve, to guard, to protect, as we have always done and shall always do."
No, Kevin wanted to scream. No, you don't understand. I'm not being profound. I'm not dispensing wisdom through silence. I'm just STUCK. I can't MOVE. I can't SPEAK. My nose ITCHES and I want to DIE but I CAN'T die because if I die everyone ELSE dies and this is NOT FAIR.
But he couldn't say any of this.
He couldn't say anything.
He could only sit in silence while Valoris interpreted that silence as confirmation of whatever the Captain-General wanted to believe.
"I shall take my leave now," Valoris continued, rising to his feet with the kind of grace that seemed impossible for someone wearing that much armor. "Know that Your Custodes remain ever vigilant. Know that Your throne is protected. Know that Your light guides us all."
And with that, Trajann Valoris, Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes, the one person in the Imperium who should have been most attuned to the Emperor's needs and desires, turned and walked away without ever once considering the possibility that the Emperor might want something as simple as having his nose scratched.
Kevin's nose continued to itch.
It would continue to itch for the next three centuries, until a minor shift in the Golden Throne's mechanisms caused Kevin's body to move approximately two millimeters to the left, which somehow relieved the sensation.
Those three centuries were not pleasant.
The soul-binding happened on what Kevin had arbitrarily decided was day thirty-seven of his new existence, though it might have been day thirty-six or day thirty-eight because time had become increasingly meaningless when you were trapped in an unchanging environment with no external reference points and an itch on your nose that was slowly driving you insane.
Kevin had known, from his previous life's extensive research into Warhammer 40k lore, that the Emperor was responsible for soul-binding the Imperium's astropaths.
He had known that this process was how psykers were rendered safe enough to use their powers in service to humanity without being immediately possessed by daemons or driven mad by the whispers of the Warp.
He had known that the process was unpleasant for the psykers involved, that it typically resulted in blindness and other side effects, that it was one of the many grim necessities that kept the Imperium functioning.
What he had not known—what the lore had never adequately described, what no amount of reading could have prepared him for—was what the process felt like from the Emperor's perspective.
The first hint that something was about to happen came in the form of a psychic disturbance, a ripple in Kevin's awareness that suggested something was approaching, something important, something that would require his attention in a way that most things did not.
Kevin had, over the past thirty-seven days, become accustomed to perceiving vast amounts of information about the galaxy around him—the movements of fleets, the fall of worlds, the endless tide of violence and suffering that was life in the 41st millennium—but most of this information washed over him like background noise, present but not demanding, relevant but not urgent.
This was different.
This was focused.
This was coming here, to the Sanctum Imperialis, to the Golden Throne, to him.
And then they arrived.
The astropaths.
Kevin perceived them as a procession of broken souls, a line of human beings who had been gathered from across the Imperium and brought to Holy Terra for the singular purpose of being bound to the Emperor's will, their psychic potential shaped and constrained by a process that would transform them from dangerous liabilities into useful tools.
There were thousands of them.
Thousands upon thousands, a seemingly endless stream of men and women and others whose genders Kevin couldn't quite determine, all of them shuffling forward in a line that stretched back through the corridors of the Imperial Palace and out into the vast spaces beyond, all of them waiting their turn to kneel before the Golden Throne and have their souls seared by the Emperor's touch.
They were afraid.
Kevin could feel their fear, a collective emotion that pressed against his awareness like a physical weight, the terror of thousands of beings who knew that they were about to undergo something terrible, something that would change them forever, something that many of them would not survive.
And they were right to be afraid.
Because as the first astropath approached the Golden Throne, as the robed and hooded figure knelt before Kevin's withered corpse-body, as the Tech-Priests and Custodes and various other functionaries performed whatever rituals were necessary to initiate the process, Kevin felt something happen that he had not anticipated.
He felt the connection form.
It was automatic.
It was instinctive.
It was something built into the very nature of what the Emperor was, a function that had been hardwired into this body millennia ago and that operated without any conscious input from Kevin whatsoever.
The connection reached out from Kevin to the astropath.
The connection pulled.
And Kevin, watching in helpless horror from inside his own mind, felt himself touch the soul of another human being for the first time since his reincarnation—and immediately wished he hadn't.
The astropath's name was Mira Valenson.
She was thirty-four years old.
She had been taken from her home world at the age of seven, when her psychic potential had manifested in the form of prophetic dreams that her parents had been too poor and too ignorant to hide from the Black Ships that came to collect the Imperium's tithe of psykers.
She had spent the next twenty-seven years being trained and tested and indoctrinated, learning to control powers that she had never asked for, preparing for this moment when she would kneel before the God-Emperor and have her soul bound to His will.
She had a mother she had never seen again.
She had a brother who had died in a mining accident three years after her departure.
She had dreams of a life she would never live, hopes she had long since abandoned, fears she had learned to suppress, and a soul that was about to be burned.
Kevin knew all of this in the instant that the connection formed, the astropath's entire life opening up before him like a book whose pages he could not stop reading, her memories and emotions and innermost secrets laid bare before his unwilling gaze.
And then the burning began.
The Emperor's power—Kevin's power, though he had no control over it—poured through the connection, searing itself into Mira Valenson's soul, branding her with psychic marks that would protect her from daemonic possession but would also bind her forever to the will of the being on the Golden Throne.
It hurt.
It hurt him.
Not as much as it hurt her—Kevin could feel her screaming, feel her soul writhing under the assault, feel the parts of her psyche that couldn't handle the power beginning to burn away—but it hurt nonetheless, a sharp spike of agony that cut through the background suffering that had become his normal existence.
And there was nothing he could do to make it gentler.
Nothing he could do to ease her pain.
Nothing he could do except watch as the process completed, as Mira Valenson's eyes boiled away in their sockets, as her psychic potential was reshaped into something the Imperium could use, as she was transformed from a person into a tool.
She survived.
Many didn't.
Kevin watched as astropath after astropath approached the Golden Throne, as the process repeated itself thousands upon thousands of times, as some survived with only blindness and others survived with additional disabilities and others simply didn't survive at all, their souls burning away completely under the Emperor's touch, their bodies collapsing as empty husks that were quickly removed to make room for the next in line.
He felt each of them.
He knew each of them, in the brief moment before the burning, in the instant when the connection formed and their lives poured into his awareness like water into an already overflowing cup.
He knew their names and their histories and their fears and their hopes.
He knew the families they had been taken from and the lives they would never live and the dreams they had been forced to abandon.
He knew them as individuals, as people, as human beings with value and worth and dignity.
And then he burned them.
Over and over and over again.
For hours.
For days.
For what felt like an eternity of suffering, both his and theirs, an endless procession of souls being seared by his power while he watched helplessly from inside his own mind.
By the time it was over, Kevin understood something that he had not understood before.
He understood why the original Emperor had become the cold, distant figure that the Primarchs had complained about.
He understood why the being on the Golden Throne had withdrawn from human connection.
He understood why ten thousand years of this would turn anyone into something that no longer resembled the person they had once been.
Because if you had to burn thousands of souls every day, if you had to know each of them as individuals before destroying what made them unique, if you had to feel their pain as they were transformed into tools...
Eventually, you would have to stop caring.
Eventually, you would have to distance yourself from the horror of what you were doing.
Eventually, you would have to become something other than human, because no human could endure that knowledge and remain sane.
Kevin was not there yet.
Kevin still cared.
Kevin still felt the horror of what he had just participated in.
But he understood now how it would happen.
He understood that given enough time—and he had nothing but time—he too would become distant, cold, inhuman.
He would become the Emperor that the Primarchs had known.
He would become the figure that the Imperium worshipped.
He would become something that was no longer Kevin Chen from Ohio.
And he wasn't sure if that was a tragedy or a mercy.
Roboute Guilliman came to the Sanctum Imperialis on what Kevin had decided was day forty-two, though the actual count had become increasingly unreliable as Kevin's grip on linear time continued to deteriorate.
Kevin had known he was coming.
Kevin had been dreading him coming.
Because Roboute Guilliman was the Primarch of the Ultramarines, the Lord Commander of the Imperium, the son who had been resurrected after ten thousand years of stasis to lead humanity in its darkest hour—and he was coming to speak with his father.
His father who was not his father.
His father who was actually Kevin Chen, a man who had once gotten into a three-day argument on Reddit about whether Guilliman was overrated (Kevin's position) or the glue holding the Imperium together (his opponent's position).
This was going to be awkward.
This was going to be so awkward.
Kevin could perceive Guilliman approaching through the Palace, the Primarch's massive psychic presence moving through the corridors like a battleship through a canal, displacing everything around him simply by existing.
He could feel the weight of Guilliman's grief.
He could feel the burden of Guilliman's responsibility.
He could feel the desperate hope that Guilliman carried, the hope that his father might somehow communicate, might somehow provide guidance, might somehow ease the impossible task of trying to save an Imperium that seemed determined to destroy itself.
Kevin felt terrible about what was about to happen.
Because Guilliman was going to kneel before the Golden Throne.
And Guilliman was going to pray.
And Guilliman was going to wait for a response.
And Kevin was going to be completely unable to provide one.
And Guilliman was going to leave, disappointed again, his hope crushed again, his burden no lighter than when he arrived.
And there was nothing Kevin could do about it.
The doors to the Sanctum Imperialis opened.
They were massive doors, Kevin had learned, crafted from materials that no longer existed anywhere else in the galaxy, inscribed with wards and protections that had been created by the Emperor Himself in the days before the Heresy, designed to keep out anything that might threaten the being on the Golden Throne.
They opened now for Roboute Guilliman, the Avenging Son, the Lord Commander, the Primarch who had inherited an empire that was nothing like what he remembered and was trying desperately to hold it together.
Kevin watched him enter.
Even through the pain and the distortion and the difficulty of perceiving anything clearly through senses that were never designed for a human mind to process, Kevin could tell that Guilliman was impressive.
The Primarch stood over ten feet tall, his armor gleaming with the blue and gold of the Ultramarines Chapter, his face a perfect combination of noble authority and barely suppressed exhaustion.
He looked like what Kevin had always imagined a Primarch should look like—superhuman, magnificent, capable of inspiring entire armies simply by existing.
He also looked tired.
So incredibly, impossibly tired.
The kind of tired that went beyond physical exhaustion into something deeper, something that came from carrying responsibilities that would have crushed lesser beings, from making decisions that affected billions of lives every day, from knowing that no matter how hard you worked and how much you sacrificed, it would never be enough.
Kevin recognized that tiredness.
He had felt a small version of it in his previous life, when work and bills and the general stress of existence had piled up until everything felt overwhelming.
But Guilliman's version of that tiredness was multiplied by a factor of about a trillion.
Because Guilliman was trying to save humanity.
And humanity, as Kevin was learning, was very difficult to save.
The Primarch approached the Golden Throne.
He dismissed the Custodes with a gesture, and they withdrew to the edges of the chamber, giving their returned Primarch privacy for his communion with their Emperor.
He knelt.
And he spoke.
"Father."
The word hit Kevin like a physical blow.
Because it was loaded with so much—so much grief, so much hope, so much desperation, so much love that had been denied expression for ten thousand years and that was now finally, finally able to be spoken aloud, even if the recipient of that love could never respond.
"I have come to report," Guilliman continued, his voice steady despite the emotion that Kevin could feel roiling beneath the surface. "The Indomitus Crusade progresses. We have reclaimed seven hundred and forty-three worlds in the past solar year. The Cicatrix Maledictum remains a barrier, but we are finding ways to navigate around it. The Primaris Marines have proven their worth in countless engagements."
Kevin listened.
He could feel Guilliman's need to share these burdens, to lay them before someone who might understand, to speak to a father figure even if that father figure could never respond.
"The Ecclesiarchy resists reform," Guilliman said, and Kevin could hear the frustration in his voice. "They cling to doctrines that would have horrified You, that contradict everything the Imperial Truth stood for. I have tried to guide them toward a more rational approach, but ten thousand years of religious fervor cannot be undone in a few centuries."
Tell me about it, Kevin thought. I've been watching this nonsense for weeks and it's already driving me insane. I can't imagine how you're dealing with ten thousand years of accumulated stupidity.
"The Mechanicus is similarly intractable," Guilliman continued. "They worship technology rather than understanding it. They hoard knowledge rather than sharing it. They treat innovation as heresy rather than progress. I have attempted to work with them, to find common ground, but their superstitions run deep."
Yeah, no kidding. I watched a Tech-Priest spend six hours applying sacred oils to a device yesterday and I'm pretty sure all it needed was a firmware update.
"And the Inquisition..."
Guilliman paused.
Kevin could feel the weight of what the Primarch wanted to say, the frustration and anger and barely contained fury at an organization that claimed to serve the Emperor while doing things that the Emperor would never have sanctioned.
"The Inquisition remains a necessary evil," Guilliman finally said, the words clearly carefully chosen. "But their methods... Father, I do not understand how You could allow such an organization to develop. I do not understand how You could permit them to commit atrocities in Your name."
I didn't, Kevin wanted to scream. I wasn't here! I just got here! I'm from Ohio! I don't know how any of this happened! I used to work in IT support! My biggest responsibility was resetting passwords for people who forgot them! I am NOT QUALIFIED FOR THIS!
But of course, he couldn't say any of that.
He couldn't say anything.
He could only sit in silence while Guilliman poured out his heart to a father who wasn't really there.
"I miss you," Guilliman said, his voice dropping to something barely above a whisper. "I miss the father I knew before... before Ullanor. Before you withdrew. Before everything changed."
Kevin felt a spike of something that might have been guilt, if guilt could be felt by a being whose emotional processing capabilities had been fundamentally altered by sitting on a psychic life support machine for several weeks.
Guilliman missed his father.
Kevin was not his father.
Kevin was an imposter, a stranger wearing the Emperor's corpse like a suit, pretending to be something he wasn't.
He should tell Guilliman the truth.
He should somehow communicate that the being on the Golden Throne was not the father the Primarch remembered, that everything Guilliman believed about this conversation was wrong, that he was praying to a man from Ohio who had died choking on a Dorito.
But how?
How could Kevin possibly communicate something so complex when he couldn't even communicate something as simple as "my nose itches"?
How could he explain the concept of reincarnation, of isekai, of a fan from another universe being inexplicably transported into the body of the setting's most important character?
Even if he could somehow convey words, would Guilliman understand them?
Would anyone?
Or would they assume that the Emperor had finally gone mad, that ten thousand years on the Golden Throne had broken His mind, that His claims of being "Kevin from Ohio" were the ravings of a lunatic who needed to be managed rather than listened to?
Kevin didn't know.
He couldn't know.
He could only sit in helpless silence while Guilliman continued to speak to a father who wasn't there.
"I have tried to follow Your vision," Guilliman said. "I have tried to build the Imperium You would have wanted. But I am not certain I understand what that is anymore. The galaxy has changed. Humanity has changed. Perhaps Your vision would have changed as well, if You had been able to guide us through these millennia."
Kevin thought about the original Emperor's vision.
He had access to those memories, scattered and fragmentary as they were, the recollections of a being who had lived for tens of thousands of years and had accumulated more knowledge and experience than Kevin could ever hope to process.
The original Emperor had wanted humanity to evolve.
He had wanted humanity to become a psychic race, capable of traveling the Warp without the need for the Astronomican or Navigators, capable of resisting Chaos through sheer mental discipline, capable of taking their place as the dominant species in the galaxy.
He had wanted to protect humanity through this transition, to guide them through the dangerous period when their psychic potential was emerging but not yet developed enough to defend itself.
He had created the Primarchs to help with this task.
He had created the Space Marines to protect humanity during the transition.
He had launched the Great Crusade to unite humanity under a single banner before the transition began.
And then Horus had ruined everything.
And the Emperor had ended up on the Golden Throne.
And ten thousand years had passed.
And humanity was no closer to the transition than they had been at the start.
If anything, they were further away, their psychic potential suppressed rather than cultivated, their evolution halted rather than encouraged, their future as a psychic race apparently abandoned in favor of simple survival.
Was this what the Emperor would have wanted?
Kevin didn't think so.
But he also didn't know what the Emperor would have wanted, given the circumstances.
The original Emperor's memories were not complete.
They were fragments, pieces of a vast consciousness that Kevin could access but not fully comprehend, moments of clarity separated by vast gaps of incomprehensible experience.
Kevin knew what the Emperor had wanted before the Heresy.
He didn't know what the Emperor would want now, after ten thousand years of everything going wrong.
Maybe stasis was the right call.
Maybe survival was the best that could be hoped for.
Maybe Guilliman was doing exactly what needed to be done, even if it wasn't what the original vision had called for.
Or maybe everything was wrong and someone needed to fundamentally rethink the Imperium's approach to... everything.
Kevin didn't know.
He was a guy from Ohio.
He had worked in IT support.
His qualifications for determining the fate of the galaxy were... limited.
"I will continue to serve," Guilliman said, his voice growing stronger as he apparently found some resolution to whatever internal struggle he had been experiencing. "I will continue to fight. I will continue to do what I believe is right, and I will trust that You would approve. If I am wrong... if I have strayed from Your path... I can only hope that You will forgive me."
I forgive you, Kevin thought. I'm not actually your father and I have no authority to forgive or condemn anything you've done, but for what it's worth, I think you're doing the best you can with an impossible situation. You're dealing with ten thousand years of accumulated problems and you've been awake for like a couple centuries. Cut yourself some slack.
He tried, desperately, to project some kind of positive feeling toward Guilliman, some sense of approval or acceptance that might ease the Primarch's burden.
He pushed against the limits of the Golden Throne, straining to send even the smallest message of support.
The Throne groaned.
The Astronomican flickered.
Somewhere in the Warp, another Navigator screamed.
Kevin stopped.
He couldn't do it.
He couldn't even give Guilliman this small comfort without risking everything.
Useless, Kevin thought. I am completely and utterly useless. The most powerful being in the galaxy and I can't even tell my... His... the Primarch that he's doing a good job.
Guilliman rose from his kneeling position.
He looked at the Golden Throne—at Kevin, though he didn't know that was who he was looking at—with an expression that Kevin couldn't quite read.
There was love there, certainly.
There was devotion.
There was the kind of desperate hope that came from wanting something so badly that you couldn't quite admit to yourself that it was impossible.
But there was also something else.
Something that looked almost like... suspicion?
No, not suspicion exactly.
Uncertainty.
As if Guilliman had sensed, on some level that he couldn't quite articulate, that something was different.
That the presence on the Golden Throne was not quite what he remembered.
That the father he was speaking to was not quite the father he had known.
Kevin felt a spike of fear.
What if Guilliman figured it out?
What if the Primarch's superhuman senses and millennia of experience allowed him to perceive what no one else could—that the Emperor was no longer the Emperor, that something had changed, that the being on the Golden Throne was an imposter?
What would happen then?
Would Guilliman try to help him?
Would Guilliman try to remove him?
Would Guilliman tell the Custodes, and would the Custodes decide that Kevin was some kind of Chaos-spawned abomination that needed to be destroyed?
Would killing Kevin kill the original Emperor completely?
Would it doom humanity?
Kevin didn't know.
He didn't know anything.
He was trapped in a body that wasn't his, in a situation he didn't understand, surrounded by people who worshipped him as a god but who would probably kill him if they knew the truth.
And Guilliman was looking at him with that expression of uncertain recognition, as if he was trying to reconcile what he expected to see with what he was actually seeing.
"Father," Guilliman said slowly, "are you... are you still there?"
Yes, Kevin wanted to scream. No. Sort of. It's complicated. I'm here but I'm not him and he might still be here too, somewhere in the back, but I'm the one in the driver's seat now and I don't know how to drive and the steering wheel doesn't work anyway and PLEASE DON'T KILL ME.
But he couldn't say any of that.
He could only sit in silence.
And hope that Guilliman would interpret that silence as something other than what it was.
The Primarch stared at the Golden Throne for a long moment.
Kevin held his metaphorical breath.
And then Guilliman shook his head, as if dismissing whatever suspicion had been forming in his mind.
"Forgive me, Father," he said. "The strain of command has me imagining things. Of course You are there. Of course You are watching over us. I should not doubt."
He bowed once, deeply, with the kind of reverence that made Kevin feel incredibly guilty for not being the being that Guilliman thought he was.
And then he turned and walked away.
The doors of the Sanctum Imperialis closed behind him.
And Kevin was alone again.
Alone with his pain.
Alone with his uselessness.
Alone with the knowledge that the Primarch who had just left was going to continue fighting an impossible war, shouldering an impossible burden, hoping for guidance that Kevin could never provide.
This is fine, Kevin thought to himself. This is totally fine. I'm just going to sit here forever and watch everyone I care about—wait, no, I don't actually care about them, they're fictional characters, except they're not fictional anymore, they're real and they're suffering and I could theoretically help them but I CAN'T because any attempt to help would doom everyone and...
Kevin stopped thinking.
It was too much.
It was all too much.
He focused instead on the one sensation that he could control, the one small mercy in his otherwise unending torment.
His nose had stopped itching.
That was something.
That was at least something.
The next few weeks passed in a blur of suffering and helplessness that Kevin was slowly, reluctantly, becoming accustomed to.
He watched the Custodes guard him and completely fail to understand him.
He felt the soul-binding process repeat itself dozens of times, each iteration burning new astropaths into his awareness and reminding him of the cost of his existence.
He observed the Tech-Priests performing their maintenance rituals, applying sacred oils and reciting prayers that might once have been technical instructions but were now meaningless superstitions that somehow still worked, probably through sheer force of faith or the universe's perverse sense of humor.
He perceived Guilliman fighting his wars, trying to save an Imperium that didn't seem to want to be saved, pushing against ten thousand years of inertia and dogma and accumulated stupidity.
He sensed the movements of the other factions—the Mechanicus with their theological approach to technology, the Ecclesiarchy with their fanatical devotion to a god who wished they would stop worshipping him, the Inquisition with their terrible methods and their worse decisions.
He felt the pressure of Chaos, always there, always pressing against his mental barriers, always waiting for a moment of weakness that might allow them to finally breach the defenses that kept Terra safe.
He endured.
Because that was all he could do.
He endured, and he waited, and he hoped that someday, somehow, something would change.
But nothing changed.
Nothing ever changed.
The Imperium continued to grind forward through its self-imposed darkness.
The enemies of mankind continued to threaten from every side.
The Golden Throne continued to decay beneath him.
And Kevin continued to sit in his prison of flesh and metal, the most powerful being in the galaxy, completely and utterly helpless.
In his previous life, Kevin had sometimes felt trapped by his circumstances—trapped in a job he didn't love, trapped in a routine that felt meaningless, trapped in a life that seemed to be going nowhere.
He would have given anything to feel that kind of trapped now.
That kind of trapped was freedom compared to this.
That kind of trapped was paradise compared to the Golden Throne.
I wanted to be special, Kevin thought to himself, the bitter irony of his situation not lost on him even through the constant haze of pain. I wanted to be the protagonist. I wanted power and importance and the ability to change things.
Well, here I am.
The most special being in existence.
The ultimate protagonist.
All the power in the universe.
And I can't do a goddamn thing with any of it.
If Kevin could have cried, he would have.
Instead, he just sat there.
And suffered.
And waited for something—anything—to change.
It would be a very long wait.
End of Chapter Two
Next Chapter: Kevin experiences his first major psychic event when a Black Crusade forces him to actually exert himself, discovers that the Adeptus Ministorum would absolutely consider his actual opinions to be heresy, and learns that the Chaos Gods have noticed something different about the being on the Golden Throne—and they find it absolutely hilarious.