An open mind is a vessel to be filled with power or to be poisoned by weakness.
Within the Solitude, his consciousness was such a vessel, adrift on a shoreless ocean of nascent light. Here, in the heart of the dreadnought Eternus, the God Emperor was divested of his titles. He was not monarch nor general; he was barely a man. He was an awareness, a singularity of will suspended in a sphere of polished obsidian where the constellations were shimmering projections, acting as a mirror to the galaxy held within the confines own mind.
For millennia, he had reached out with thought, plunging into the fundamental substrate of reality. He reached into the Nex.
To the uninitiated, the Nex was a theory. To the psyker, a dangerous current. To him, it was the grand, silent river that flowed through every atom and soul, the invisible tide connecting the birth of a star to the fall of a single leaf. To commune with it was to dissolve, to become a part of the universal whole.
Untethered from flesh, his thoughts soared beyond the familiar beacons of the Imperium's core worlds. He passed through sectors still bearing the psychic scars of the Nexium Wars, pushing into the raw, untamed wilderness of the cosmos. He felt time buckle, witnessing the silent, incandescent fury of galactic nurseries flinging infant suns into the void. He knew the hollow, patient hunger of a black hole as it bent light and memory into its inescapable embrace. The distant stars of the galactic north burned with a cold, faint fire, yet he could feel the deep thrum of the Nex within them—a promise of endurance that shamed the cored-out suns of the core worlds, now caged in the artifice of Dyson spheres.
This was the truth he fought to protect. This untamed, cosmic beauty that humbled even his own grandest designs.
His cosmic senses brushed against the ghost-light of long-dead fleets. The psychic death-screams of the Dissident Allegiance were still here, a discordant remnant on the network of the Nex. He had silenced that war, imposing order on chaos. It was an order he restored: Cosmic Democracy—a law not of councils and votes, but of sublime and supreme balance. It was a cosmos where the wolf may lie with the lamb, not because the wolf has been tamed, but because the shepherd is ever-watchful.
And he was the shepherd.
But he was not dredging the past. He was listening for the future.
For centuries, the Nex had been a predictable, if infinitely complex, current. Now, a new pattern was emerging. A disturbance. A knot in the skein of fate, a single, searing point of convergence where the endless probabilities of what-could-be were collapsing into the undeniable certainty of what-will-be.
The real question: what is this anomaly?
He focused his immense will, tracing the threads of causality to their source. To see a star born is a privilege. To watch a species take its first faltering steps from its cradle world is a profound hope. But to feel the ancient, pre-sentient forces of reality itself shift their gaze, to see them point—that was to know his Empire was more than a fleeting achievement. And they were pointing to one place. One project. One soul.
The Voidwalker. The man he had plucked from the backwards world of Cyreth. A thousand questions bloomed in the Emperor's mind, but he remained a silent mountain in the storm of his own thoughts.
The tide of perception receded. The boundless sea of stars condensed, shrinking back into the pinpricks of light embedded in the walls of his chamber. The God Emperor opened his eyes. They were ancient beyond the reckoning of the Imperium, yet they held the sharp, predatory clarity like a hawk surveying its domain.
The weight of his physical form returned back to the mortal form of heavy and confined. He felt the low thrum of the Eternus's core through the deck plates, the chill of recycled air on his unseen skin, the familiar burden of the Aculon armor that was more a mantle of godhood than a tool of war.
He rose. The motion was not of muscle and bone, but of gravity itself submitting to his will. The hexagonal door to the Solitude sighed open, revealing a grand corridor of polished black marble veined with lightning-strikes of gold. Astrogators and functionaries scurried along its length, their frantic motion halting in a wave of reverent stillness as his presence washed over them.
He entered the command bridge. Here, a show of duty was performed by his officers at their glowing consoles under the immense, curved viewport that served as a window into the space of the cosmos. In the center of it all, a holotable flickered, a light dimming as the ship's destination came into view as a projection, and now as reality.
Emriss III.
A jewel of sapphire and blue, swirled with delicate wisps of cloud. It was one of ten thousand worlds under his protection, the very embodiment of the peace for which he had bled galaxies dry: a world where children could look at the night sky with wonder, and fear no longer.
Hanging in its orbit like a crown of starlight and steel was the Nexus Space Station. It was a spindle of impossible grace and terrible power, a marvel of imperial engineering, a fortress, a laboratory, and the ultimate symbol of humanity's ascendancy. This delicate balance—the flourishing world below and the technological titan above—was Cosmic Democracy made manifest. Nature and humanity, partners in universal order.
He stood before the viewport, hands clasped behind his back, a lone figure against the magnificence of his creation. Yet the premonition from his meditation lingered. The subtle pressure in the Nex, a gravity that emanated from the station orbiting it. Project Voidwalker was housed there. The culmination of many years of planning, placed upon the shoulders of a single man.
His gaze shifted from the shine of the planet's surface to the steel station, from the past he had secured to the future he had charted. The fulcrum of ten thousand years had shifted.
The fate of the cosmos no longer rested upon the shoulders of a god. It now rested upon him.