They call Him a god now. He would despise what they have made of Him.
The Revelation After Old Night
Understand this first: He had lived among you for thousands of years before He ever showed His face. Biding His time, working through your ancestors, walking among humanity for longer than any man could know. When at last He revealed Himself amid the ruin of Old Night, it was not as a prophet. It was as a conqueror — and Terra was united beneath Him.
Twenty Sons, Scattered by the Warp
Then He made sons. Twenty of them, engineered from His own genetic structure to be His lieutenants in the reconquest of the galaxy. You have heard what happened: they were snatched from Him by strange powers of the warp, cast into the heavens, thrown across the galaxy on unnatural tides, and scattered to distant worlds. He spent a crusade gathering them back, one by one, and the Legions that bore their gene-seed burned a path across the stars behind them.
Why He Left the Great Crusade
For two centuries the Great Crusade remade the galaxy. And then, at Ullanor — at the very height of triumph — He stepped away. Command of His hosts passed to His most brilliant son, the newly named Warmaster, and the Master of Mankind went home.
Why? I will tell you what few ever knew. Beneath the Imperial Palace, in the dungeon levels no cartographer ever mapped, He laboured on His Great Work: a soul-engine, a throne of gold harnessing and focusing His psychic might into the webway, to win for mankind safe passage between the stars — free of the warp, free of the predators that swim in it. Everything — the Crusade itself — was for this.
The Golden Throne
You know how it ended. The son He trusted most brought war to His walls. When it was over, Rogal Dorn found His broken body in the ruins of the Warmaster’s throne room, and through mangled lips He whispered instructions for the machine that would preserve Him. They sealed Him into the Golden Throne — and there He remains, ten thousand years on, neither living as you live nor dying as you die.
A god? He spent His whole eternal life telling us there were no gods. That is the cruellest joke of the Imperium he left behind: it worships the one being who begged it not to.
Questions from the Archive
Who is the Emperor of Mankind?
The Emperor of Mankind is the immortal ruler of the Imperium of Man: the being who united Terra in the Unification Wars, created the twenty primarchs, led the Great Crusade to reconquer the galaxy, and has endured upon the Golden Throne since the Horus Heresy.
Why did the Emperor leave the Great Crusade?
After the triumph at Ullanor He named Horus Warmaster, handed him command of the Crusade, and returned to Terra — descending into the Palace dungeons to labour on the webway project, a hidden network meant to free mankind from the perils of warp travel.
Is the Emperor alive or dead?
Neither, as mortals reckon it. Mortally broken in His final battle with Horus, He was sealed into the Golden Throne at His own whispered instruction — and His body has been preserved there for ten thousand years, neither living nor dying.