Kevin Chen had always imagined that death, when it finally came for him, would arrive with some degree of dignity, or at the very least, a modicum of dramatic flair befitting his thirty-four years of existence on planet Earth, a life that he had spent cultivating what he considered to be an impressive collection of Warhammer 40k miniatures, an encyclopedic knowledge of lore that spanned multiple wikis and countless hours of YouTube videos, and a Reddit karma score that he was perhaps a little too proud of considering it mostly came from arguing with strangers about whether the Emperor was actually a good guy or the galaxy's most spectacular failure of a father figure.
But no.
No dramatic last stand.
No heroic sacrifice.
No beautiful woman crying over his cooling corpse while rain fell poetically from a grey sky.
Kevin Chen, devoted fan of the grimdark future where there was only war, died on a Tuesday afternoon in his cramped apartment in suburban Ohio, alone except for the gentle hum of his gaming PC and the judgmental stare of his cat Mr. Whiskers, choking on a single Cool Ranch Dorito that had gone down the wrong pipe at the exact moment he had been typing a particularly scathing response to some fool on r/40klore who had dared to suggest that Roboute Guilliman was the best Primarch when everyone with half a brain knew that distinction belonged to—
Well.
It didn't matter anymore who Kevin thought was the best Primarch.
Because Kevin was dead.
One moment he was there, face turning an impressive shade of purple that would have made a Genestealer Cultist proud, fingers clawing uselessly at his throat while Mr. Whiskers watched with the kind of feline indifference that suggested the cat was already calculating how long he would need to wait before eating Kevin's face, and the next moment Kevin was simply... not there anymore, his consciousness snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane, like a guardsman facing down a Carnifex, like his hopes of ever finishing his custom Adeptus Custodes army that had been sitting half-painted on his hobby desk for three years.
Dead.
Gone.
Finished.
Kaput.
And then, with all the subtlety of a Baneblade crashing through a PDF defensive line, Kevin Chen was suddenly and horrifyingly not dead anymore.
The first thing Kevin became aware of was pain.
Not the sharp, immediate pain of choking on a tortilla chip, not the dull ache of sitting in a gaming chair for sixteen hours straight during a particularly intense Total War: Warhammer III session, not even the emotional pain of seeing Games Workshop announce yet another price increase on models that were already priced like they were made of actual gold rather than plastic and broken dreams.
No, this was something else entirely.
This was pain that existed on a level that Kevin's previous human brain had never been equipped to process, pain that seemed to radiate from every single atom of his being simultaneously, pain that felt ancient and endless and impossibly vast, like the universe itself had decided to use his nervous system as a stress ball and was squeezing with the enthusiasm of a Khornate berserker who had just been told that blood was on sale and skulls were buy-one-get-one-free.
It was, Kevin thought with the kind of hysterical clarity that only comes from complete and total sensory overload, rather unpleasant.
His second observation, following closely on the heels of the first like a Space Marine following closely on the heels of his battle-brother into a clearly obvious trap because the Codex Astartes probably said something about maintaining unit cohesion even when walking directly into an ambush, was that he appeared to have a body again, which was somewhat surprising given that he was fairly certain he had just died.
His third observation was that this body was not, in any conceivable way, shape, or form, his original body.
For one thing, it was significantly larger, and Kevin had the distinct impression that if he could somehow stand up and look down at himself—which he could not, for reasons that were becoming increasingly and distressingly apparent—he would find himself occupying a physical form that made his previous five-foot-nine, slightly overweight, desperately-in-need-of-more-exercise frame look like a particularly unimpressive stick figure drawn by a child with no artistic talent whatsoever.
For another thing, this body appeared to be connected to... things.
Many, many things.
Things that poked and prodded and invaded in ways that Kevin's mind shied away from contemplating too closely, things that burrowed into what he was fairly certain was his flesh, things that hummed with energy that felt somehow both technological and deeply, profoundly unnatural, things that—
Kevin tried to move his arm.
His arm did not move.
Kevin tried to move his other arm.
That arm, also, stubbornly refused to cooperate with his increasingly frantic mental commands.
Kevin tried to move his legs, his fingers, his toes, his head, anything, anything at all, and was rewarded with absolutely nothing but the continued sensation of existing in a body that seemed to be simultaneously his and yet completely outside of his control, like a passenger in a vehicle that had been permanently parked and had the engine removed and had been welded to the ground for good measure.
Okay.
Okay okay okay.
Don't panic.
Kevin was very good at not panicking.
He had once maintained his composure during a particularly heated game of Warhammer 40k at his local gaming store when his opponent had insisted that his clearly dead Daemon Prince was actually still alive because of a rule interaction that definitely did not work the way his opponent claimed it worked, and Kevin had only flipped the table a little bit, and only after carefully removing his own models first because he wasn't a complete savage.
This was fine.
This was totally fine.
He had just died, apparently been reincarnated into a new body, couldn't move any part of said body, was experiencing pain on a level that made his previous understanding of suffering seem like a pleasant tickle, and had absolutely no idea where he was or what was happening.
Fine.
Totally fine.
Everything was fine.
And then Kevin made the mistake of trying to open his eyes.
The psychic scream that tore through the Immaterium at that exact moment was felt by astropaths across the entire galaxy, causing three hundred and forty-seven of them to die instantly from the sheer overwhelming force of it, another two thousand to lapse into immediate catatonic states from which they would never recover, and approximately seventeen million more to experience what could only be described as the psychic equivalent of someone turning on a spotlight directly in their brain while simultaneously playing death metal at maximum volume through speakers made of pure agony.
On Holy Terra itself, in the vast and labyrinthine corridors of the Imperial Palace, several members of the Adeptus Custodes—those magnificent golden giants who had served the Emperor for ten thousand years with unwavering loyalty and devotion—actually paused in their eternal vigil, their superhuman senses detecting something that they could not quite identify, a disturbance in the psychic presence that they had guarded for millennia, a brief moment of... something... that felt almost like surprise, or horror, or the mental equivalent of someone who had just realized they had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Captain-General Trajann Valoris, the greatest of the Emperor's golden guardians, the living embodiment of ten thousand years of martial perfection, the warrior who had faced down the horrors of the Warp and emerged victorious more times than could be counted, looked up from the tactical briefing he had been reviewing and felt, for the first time in his very long life, a sensation that he could not immediately identify.
It took him several seconds to realize that the sensation was unease.
He dismissed it immediately, of course, because he was a Custodian and Custodians did not feel unease, and returned to his briefing with the kind of focus that only came from being engineered from birth to be the perfect warrior.
But somewhere, in the back of his genetically enhanced mind, a small voice wondered what exactly had just happened.
Kevin, meanwhile, was having what could charitably be described as a complete and total mental breakdown.
He had opened his eyes.
He had seen.
And what he had seen had broken something fundamental in his understanding of reality, had shattered his conception of what was and was not possible, had taken his previous worldview and thrown it into a blender set to maximum speed and then set the blender on fire and then thrown the flaming blender into a volcano and then nuked the volcano from orbit just to be absolutely certain.
He was looking at the Warp.
Not a picture of the Warp.
Not an artist's interpretation of the Warp.
Not a loving description of the Warp from one of the many, many Black Library novels that Kevin had consumed over the years.
He was looking at the actual Warp, the Immaterium, the realm of Chaos, the dimension of nightmares and madness and things that should not exist but did anyway, and he was looking at it with senses that went so far beyond simple human sight that comparing them was like comparing a child's crayon drawing to the actual thing being depicted.
He could see the currents of emotion that flowed through the impossible not-space, rivers of rage that burned with Khorne's endless hunger for violence, seas of corruption that bubbled with Nurgle's loving embrace of decay, storms of scheming that crackled with Tzeentch's infinite plots within plots within plots, and oceans of sensation that pulsed with Slaanesh's eternal pursuit of excess in all its forms.
He could see the daemons, countless beyond counting, endless beyond ending, entities of pure malevolence that existed only to corrupt and destroy and consume, and they were all—every single one of them—looking directly at him.
He could see the Chaos Gods themselves, or at least the merest fraction of their attention, four vast presences that made everything Kevin had ever imagined them to be look like a child's nightmare compared to the reality of an actual monster, and they were interested in him, interested in a way that felt like being examined under a microscope by something that wanted to dissect him down to his component atoms and then reassemble him in ways that would make him scream for eternity.
And behind it all, through it all, woven into the very fabric of this dimension of madness, Kevin could see the Astronomican.
The great beacon of the Imperium.
The light that guided humanity's ships through the Warp.
The psychic lighthouse that had burned for ten thousand years.
And it was coming from him.
The light was coming from inside him, pouring out of him, radiating from him in waves of golden illumination that pushed back the darkness of the Warp, that created a bubble of relative sanity in the heart of madness, that kept the entirety of Chaos from simply pouring into realspace and consuming everything that humanity had ever built.
Kevin was the Astronomican.
Kevin was the beacon.
Kevin was—
Oh no.
Oh no no no no no.
The memories came then, not his memories, but His memories, ten thousand years of agony compressed into a single moment of psychic download that slammed into Kevin's consciousness with all the subtlety of an Imperator Titan stepping on a particularly annoying insect, and Kevin learned exactly who and what he had become, exactly where and when he was, exactly how monumentally, catastrophically, impossibly screwed he truly was.
He was the Emperor of Mankind.
He was the Master of Humanity.
He was the Lord of the Imperium, the Omnissiah of the Mechanicum, the God of a million worlds, the most powerful psyker to ever exist in the history of the galaxy, the being who had united humanity under His banner and led them to the stars, the father of the Primarchs, the creator of the Space Marines, the architect of the Great Crusade, the betrayed victim of the Horus Heresy, and the eternal occupant of the Golden Throne.
He was all of these things.
And he was stuck.
So very, very stuck.
The Golden Throne, Kevin was rapidly discovering, was not at all what he had imagined it to be during his years of reading lore and looking at artwork and speculating with other fans about what exactly it might look like in person.
For one thing, it was significantly less comfortable than the name might suggest.
The word "throne" implied something that one might sit upon, perhaps with plush cushions and a nice back support and maybe some armrests where one could rest one's arms while contemplating the vast responsibilities of ruling a galaxy-spanning empire, the kind of furniture that a mighty ruler might relax in while servants brought them drinks and snacks and perhaps a good book to read during the slow periods between making important decisions about the fate of humanity.
The Golden Throne was not that.
The Golden Throne was, Kevin was coming to understand with mounting horror, essentially a life support machine crossed with a psychic amplifier crossed with a torture device that had been designed by someone who had clearly never heard of the concept of ergonomics and had possibly been actively hostile to the idea of their patient experiencing anything remotely resembling comfort.
There were cables.
So many cables.
Cables that burrowed into his flesh, cables that connected to his spine, cables that interfaced with his brain in ways that made Kevin want to scream except that screaming required the ability to move his mouth which he did not have, cables that fed him nutrients that he could taste with senses that went beyond mere physical sensation and the taste was wrong in ways that he could not describe, cables that drained something from him and pumped something else into him and generally treated his body like a biological component in a vast machine rather than a living being who might have preferences about what was done to him.
There were mechanisms.
Vast, ancient mechanisms that hummed with the power of technology so old that it predated the Imperium itself, mechanisms that the Adeptus Mechanicus would have committed any atrocity to understand but could only maintain through rituals and prayers and the application of sacred oils because the knowledge of how they actually worked had been lost millennia ago, mechanisms that Kevin could feel pressing against his consciousness in ways that suggested they were doing things to him that he really, really did not want to think about too carefully.
There were things.
Things that Kevin's new, enhanced senses could perceive but that his still-mostly-human-Kevin-shaped consciousness could not properly process, things that existed in the spaces between the physical and the psychic, things that the original Emperor had created or bound or bargained for in the desperate final hours before taking His place upon this terrible machine, things that were helping to keep him alive in some technical definition of the word "alive" that Kevin found deeply unsatisfying.
And everywhere, everywhere, there was pain.
Pain from the Throne itself, which was slowly—so slowly that it had taken ten thousand years but still inevitably—breaking down, its mechanisms failing one by one, each failure sending new spikes of agony through the vast psychic network that connected Kevin to the machine and the machine to Kevin in a symbiosis that was slowly killing both of them.
Pain from the Astronomican, the endless effort of maintaining the beacon that guided humanity's ships, a psychic output that would have killed any lesser being instantly but merely caused him constant suffering that had become so background that the original Emperor had learned to ignore it but Kevin had not had ten millennia to develop that particular coping mechanism.
Pain from the Warp itself, from the constant pressure of Chaos pressing against his mental barriers, from the endless assault of four gods who wanted nothing more than to see him fall, from the weight of maintaining the psychic wards that kept daemons from manifesting directly in the Imperial Palace and ending humanity's last hope in a single catastrophic moment.
Pain from his own body, which was not dead but was certainly not alive in any way that Kevin would have recognized as life, a corpse that was not allowed to be a corpse, a ruin that was forced to continue functioning long past the point where any sane universe would have let it rest.
Kevin had read the descriptions.
Kevin had seen the artwork.
Kevin had thought he understood what it meant for the Emperor to be trapped on the Golden Throne for ten thousand years.
He had not understood anything.
He had not understood anything at all.
Time, Kevin was learning, worked differently when you were a being of such immense psychic power that your mere existence warped reality around you.
It also worked differently when you were trapped in a sensory hell with no way to move, no way to speak, no way to interact with the physical world in any meaningful way, no way to do anything except sit (if you could call this sitting) and exist (if you could call this existing) and perceive (and oh, how he wished he could stop perceiving).
Seconds stretched into hours.
Hours compressed into moments.
Days might have passed, or weeks, or years, and Kevin had no way of knowing which because his only frame of reference was his own consciousness and his own consciousness was very much Not Okay with anything that was happening.
He tried to move.
He tried so hard to move.
The original Emperor's body responded to his commands about as well as a car with no engine, no wheels, no steering wheel, and no seats responded to someone's desire to drive it to the grocery store—which was to say, not at all, not even a little bit, not even a twitch of a finger or a blink of an eye or any other tiny motion that might have given him some hope that he retained any control whatsoever over this magnificent, terrible, completely non-functional body that he now inhabited.
He tried to speak.
He tried so very hard to speak.
Words formed in his mind, desperate attempts to communicate his situation to anyone who might be listening, cries for help and explanations of who he really was and requests for someone to please, please just kill him and let him move on to whatever afterlife might be waiting because surely anything was better than this, surely the void of non-existence was preferable to this eternal moment of suffering, surely—
But the words never reached his lips.
His lips did not move.
His vocal cords did not vibrate.
His lungs did not push air through his throat in the patterns that would have created sound.
He was a mind trapped in a prison of flesh and metal, a consciousness without any means of expressing itself, a passenger in a vehicle that had been welded to the ground and then buried under a mountain.
He tried to reach out with his psychic powers.
And this, finally, produced something.
The power was there.
Oh, was the power ever there.
Kevin had always imagined, in his idle fan fantasies, what it might be like to have the psychic abilities of the Emperor of Mankind, to wield the kind of mental might that could destroy daemons with a thought, communicate across the galaxy with a moment's concentration, and reshape reality itself through sheer force of will.
He had imagined it would feel like being a superhero.
He had imagined it would feel like being a god.
He had imagined it would feel awesome.
It did not feel awesome.
It felt like being connected to the sun, if the sun was also screaming, and the screaming was in your head, and you were the one doing the screaming, and also you were on fire, and the fire was made of the collective suffering of a million psykers who had been fed to you over the course of ten thousand years to keep you functioning.
Kevin could feel the power.
He could feel the limitless power.
He could theoretically do almost anything with this power—blast enemies into atoms, peer across the galaxy, send messages through the Warp, manifest miracles that would make saints weep with joy.
He could do all of this.
In theory.
In practice, the moment he tried to actually use the power for anything other than maintaining the Astronomican and keeping the Warp at bay, he felt the strain on the already-failing Golden Throne increase, felt the delicate balance that kept him alive and kept Terra from being consumed by daemonic invasion shift dangerously toward catastrophe, felt the mechanisms that sustained him groan under the additional load like a bridge being asked to support just one more car when it was already at maximum capacity and the supports were rusting.
He could not use the power.
He could not do anything with the power.
He was the most powerful being in the galaxy, sitting on a throne of unimaginable might, surrounded by technology and psychic energy that could reshape worlds, and he could not do a single thing except exist and suffer and keep the light burning and slowly, inevitably, die.
This, Kevin realized with the kind of horrified clarity that comes from truly understanding one's situation for the first time, was going to be a very long eternity.
The first Space Marine that Kevin became aware of—really, truly aware of, in the sense of actually paying attention to rather than simply perceiving as part of the vast tapestry of psychic information that constantly assaulted his senses—was a Captain of the Imperial Fists who had come to the Sanctum Imperialis to pay his respects to the God-Emperor before leading his company into what would almost certainly be a suicidal campaign against a Tyranid splinter fleet that had been threatening the Segmentum Solar.
Kevin perceived the Space Marine with senses that went far beyond mere sight, taking in not just the physical form—the power armor, the weapons, the enhanced physique that made normal humans look like children by comparison—but also the psychic signature, the soul-stuff that marked this being as one of the Emperor's own creations, a descendant of Rogal Dorn through the magic of gene-seed and hypno-indoctrination and the countless other processes that turned ordinary humans into the Angels of Death.
The Space Marine knelt before the Golden Throne.
The Space Marine prayed.
The Space Marine spoke words of devotion and duty and sacrifice, words that had been spoken by countless others before him and would be spoken by countless others after, words that meant everything to the speaker and that Kevin could hear with perfect clarity.
And Kevin listened.
And Kevin understood what the Space Marine was saying.
And Kevin felt his first real emotion since his reincarnation—an emotion that went beyond mere pain and confusion and horror, an emotion that was sharp and specific and directed at a particular target.
The emotion was frustration.
Because the Space Marine, this genetically enhanced warrior who had been created to be the ultimate defender of humanity, this living weapon who had trained for centuries and fought in countless battles and mastered every form of combat known to the Imperium, this supposed pinnacle of human evolution...
...was an idiot.
Not in the sense of lacking intelligence—Kevin could perceive that the Space Marine's mind was sharp, honed by decades of experience and enhanced by the modifications that made Astartes superior to baseline humans in almost every measurable way.
No, the Space Marine was an idiot in a much more fundamental sense.
The Space Marine believed things that were wrong.
Not just slightly wrong, not just mistaken in minor details, but catastrophically, fundamentally, universe-shakingly wrong in ways that made Kevin want to scream and would have made him scream if he had any ability whatsoever to produce sound.
The Space Marine believed that Kevin—the Emperor—wanted to be worshipped as a god.
This was incorrect.
The Space Marine believed that the Emperor had always intended for the Imperium to be a theocracy built on religious devotion and the persecution of anyone who failed to properly venerate His divine majesty.
This was so incorrect that Kevin could feel the original Emperor's memories practically vibrating with retroactive rage at the mere suggestion.
The Space Marine believed that psykers were evil abominations that needed to be controlled and destroyed, never mind that the Emperor Himself was the most powerful psyker in human history and that the Imperium literally could not function without psykers manning the Astronomican and the Astropathic choirs.
This was incorrect and also deeply ironic in ways that the Space Marine clearly did not appreciate.
The Space Marine believed that aliens should be exterminated on sight, that there could be no coexistence with xenos species, that the only good alien was a dead alien—and while Kevin could access the original Emperor's memories well enough to know that this was at least partially in line with the official Imperial Truth of the Great Crusade era, he could also see the nuances that had been completely lost over ten thousand years of dogmatic religious fervor, the strategic thinking that had been replaced by blind hatred, the pragmatism that had been consumed by fanaticism.
The Space Marine believed many, many other things.
Almost all of them were wrong.
And Kevin could do absolutely nothing about it.
He could perceive the wrongness.
He could understand exactly how and why the Space Marine was mistaken.
He could formulate perfect arguments that would explain the truth.
He could not communicate any of this.
He could not say a single word.
He could not make a single gesture.
He could not send a psychic message without risking the stability of the Golden Throne.
He could only watch as the Space Marine finished his prayers, rose to his feet, and departed to go fight and probably die for an Imperium that was built on lies and misunderstandings and ten thousand years of accumulated stupidity.
"That's not what I meant," Kevin tried to scream into the void. "That's not what He meant. That's not what ANY of this was supposed to mean!"
Nothing happened.
No one heard.
The Space Marine left, confident in his faith, ready to die for his God-Emperor.
And Kevin sat on his throne of agony and realized that this was going to happen again, and again, and again, for as long as he existed, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
The Imperium of Man, Kevin was learning through his constant psychic awareness of basically everything happening within range of his perception (which was, distressingly, quite a lot), made no sense.
Not "no sense" in the way that a complicated bureaucracy might seem confusing to an outsider but would reveal its internal logic upon closer examination.
No, the Imperium made no sense in the way that a fever dream made no sense, in the way that a nightmare constructed by a committee of sadists made no sense, in the way that something designed by malevolent forces specifically to cause maximum suffering while somehow still barely functioning might make no sense.
Kevin had, in his previous life, spent many happy hours discussing the absurdities of the Imperium with fellow fans, laughing about the grimdark excess of it all, appreciating the satirical elements that had been present since the setting's creation, enjoying the over-the-top nature of a galaxy where everything was terrible and getting worse and the good guys were only good in comparison to the even worse bad guys.
It had been funny then.
It was not funny now.
Now Kevin could see the supply chains that fed the endless war machine, could perceive the billions of lives being ground up and spat out by industrial processes that valued human beings as interchangeable components, could feel the suffering of countless souls who were born, lived, and died without ever experiencing anything that Kevin would have recognized as freedom or joy or hope.
Now Kevin could observe the Adeptus Administratum at work, could watch as bureaucrats processed forms and filed documents and stamped approvals for operations that would determine the fate of worlds, could see how information was lost and distorted and delayed as it filtered through layers upon layers of functionaries who were more concerned with following proper procedure than with actually accomplishing anything useful.
Now Kevin could witness the Inquisition conducting its holy work, could perceive the torture chambers and the execution grounds and the planets being subjected to Exterminatus because it was easier to destroy everything than to surgically remove the corruption, could feel the terror that the Inquisition's agents inspired in loyal Imperial citizens who lived in constant fear that some minor deviation from orthodoxy might result in their entire family being disappeared.
Now Kevin could sense the Ecclesiarchy spreading its message of faith, could observe how the religion that had grown up around his unwilling godhood twisted everything the original Emperor had believed, could watch as Cardinals and Confessors and Missionaries preached doctrines that would have made the pre-Heresy Emperor vomit with disgust if He had still possessed a functioning digestive system.
It was all insane.
It was all horrifying.
It was all happening, constantly, everywhere, all the time, and Kevin was aware of all of it, and he could do nothing about any of it.
He wanted to shout instructions.
He wanted to send guidance.
He wanted to reach out with his vast psychic power and fix at least some of the countless problems that plagued humanity.
But every time he tried, he felt the strain.
Every time he reached beyond the essential functions that kept humanity alive—the Astronomican, the wards against Chaos, the sheer psychic presence that held back the tide of darkness—he felt the Golden Throne shudder beneath him, felt the delicate mechanisms that kept him functioning protest the additional load, felt the whole precarious edifice that was the Imperium's survival tilt just slightly closer to total collapse.
He could save humanity.
Or he could try to fix its problems.
He could not do both.
And so he did nothing.
And humanity continued to suffer.
And Kevin continued to watch.
And somewhere, in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, Kevin Chen—former Warhammer 40k fan, former resident of suburban Ohio, former owner of a half-painted Custodes army that would never be completed—began to laugh.
It was not a happy laugh.
It was not a sane laugh.
It was the laugh of someone who had suddenly understood a cosmic joke at their own expense, who had realized that the universe had a sense of humor and that sense of humor was cruel, who had comprehended that they were stuck in a situation so absurd that the only possible response was hysterical laughter at the sheer unfairness of it all.
He had wanted to be in Warhammer 40k.
He had dreamed about it, fantasized about it, imagined all the cool things he might do if he somehow found himself in the grimdark future.
And now he was here.
And he was the most powerful being in existence.
And he could do nothing.
The laugh echoed through the Warp, causing several nearby daemons to pause in confusion at the strange psychic emanation that seemed to combine infinite power with infinite frustration in a way they had never encountered before.
In the Sanctum Imperialis, a Tech-Priest who was monitoring the Golden Throne's systems noted a brief anomaly in the readouts and made a note to investigate further, though the investigation would eventually be lost in the Administratum's filing system and never completed.
In the Imperial Palace, Trajann Valoris felt that strange unease again and again dismissed it, because Custodians did not feel unease and whatever was happening with the Emperor was surely beyond his capacity to understand or influence.
And on the Golden Throne, trapped in his prison of flesh and metal and endless suffering, Kevin Chen continued to laugh at the cosmic joke that had become his existence.
He had all the power.
He could do nothing with it.
And this was going to be forever.
Forever.
The Primarchs, Kevin had always thought, were the coolest part of Warhammer 40k.
Twenty demigods, each a unique expression of the Emperor's genetic mastery and psychic power, each designed to be the perfect general for a particular aspect of humanity's great crusade across the stars, each a living legend whose deeds had shaped the galaxy and whose fates had determined the course of human history for ten millennia.
Kevin had spent countless hours reading about them, debating about them, ranking them in various categories (combat ability, leadership, coolness factor, likelihood of surviving a drinking contest), and generally appreciating them as the magnificent characters they were.
He had thought he understood them.
He had thought he knew what made them tick.
He had been wrong.
Because now Kevin had access to the original Emperor's memories of His sons, the full and unfiltered recollections of creating them, raising them, losing them to the Chaos-tainted scattering that had spread them across the galaxy, finding them again, and watching half of them turn traitor in the greatest catastrophe humanity had ever faced.
And what those memories revealed was not what Kevin had expected.
The Primarchs, Kevin was learning, were idiots.
Not idiots in the way that the Space Marine Captain had been an idiot, following doctrine that had diverged from reality over millennia of accumulated misunderstanding.
No, the Primarchs were idiots in a much more fundamental way.
They were idiots because they were designed to be idiots.
Oh, not intentionally.
The original Emperor had certainly not set out to create twenty sons who would be incapable of communicating with each other, incapable of setting aside their egos, incapable of recognizing when they were being manipulated by forces beyond their comprehension.
But that was what had happened anyway.
Because the Emperor, for all His incredible power and vast intelligence and millennia of accumulated wisdom, had made a fundamental error in the creation of His sons: He had made them too much like Himself.
Each Primarch had inherited the Emperor's certainty.
Each Primarch had inherited the Emperor's conviction that he knew best.
Each Primarch had inherited the Emperor's inability to truly understand perspectives that differed from his own.
And because each Primarch had been designed to embody a different aspect of the Emperor's nature, they had each been certain about different things, each convinced that their approach was correct, each unable to comprehend why their brothers didn't simply see the obvious truth that they themselves perceived so clearly.
Horus had been certain that he understood the burden of command, that he alone could carry the weight of leading humanity's armies, that his father's withdrawal from the Crusade was a betrayal that justified his own betrayal.
Lorgar had been certain that the universe required faith, that humanity needed something to believe in, that his father's rejection of his devotion was a wound that could only be healed by finding new gods to worship.
Magnus had been certain that knowledge was power, that his psychic abilities made him special, that his father's warnings about the Warp were the fears of a lesser mind that didn't truly understand the potential of sorcery.
Perturabo had been certain that his genius was unappreciated, that his sacrifices went unrecognized, that his father and brothers saw him as nothing but a tool to be used and discarded.
And on and on it went, each Primarch trapped in his own certainty, each unable to bridge the gaps between himself and his brothers, each walking inevitably toward the catastrophe that would shatter the Emperor's dream and doom humanity to ten thousand years of darkness.
Kevin could see it all.
He could see how it had happened.
He could see how it could have been prevented.
He could see exactly where the Emperor had failed as a father, exactly where communication had broken down, exactly where a single honest conversation might have changed everything.
And he wanted to scream.
Because it was all so stupid.
It was all so preventable.
It was all so tragically, unnecessarily, cosmically stupid.
These were supposed to be the greatest beings humanity had ever produced, the pinnacle of human potential, the demigods who would lead humanity to a golden future of peace and prosperity.
And they had thrown it all away because none of them could simply talk to each other.
Horus could have talked to his father about his concerns instead of listening to Chaos-tainted whispers.
Lorgar could have talked to his father about his need for faith instead of secretly worshipping the Ruinous Powers.
Magnus could have talked to his father about his visions instead of shattering the Webway project with his arrogant "rescue attempt."
Perturabo could have talked to literally anyone about his feelings instead of nurturing his grievances until they consumed him.
But they hadn't.
None of them had.
Because they were all too proud, too certain, too convinced of their own rightness to admit that they might be wrong, that they might need help, that they might not have all the answers.
They were, Kevin realized, exactly like the arguments he used to have on Reddit.
Everyone was convinced they were right.
No one was willing to actually listen.
And the result was disaster.
The only difference was that Reddit arguments resulted in hurt feelings and blocked accounts, while Primarch arguments resulted in a galaxy-spanning civil war that killed trillions and doomed humanity to an eternity of suffering.
Kevin would have laughed again, but he was too busy being horrified.
These were the beings that the Imperium worshipped as saints, that Space Marines tried to emulate, that the entire structure of Imperial society was built around honoring.
And they were idiots.
Magnificent, powerful, legendary idiots, but idiots nonetheless.
And Kevin was stuck with the consequences of their idiocy.
Forever.
The Golden Throne was failing.
This was not new information—Kevin had absorbed the knowledge from the original Emperor's memories and understood, on an intellectual level, that the mechanisms keeping him alive were slowly breaking down, that the Mechanicus could only delay the inevitable rather than prevent it, that each passing century brought the final collapse closer.
But understanding something intellectually and experiencing it directly were two very different things.
Kevin could feel the Throne failing.
He could feel it in the way that certain systems required more effort to maintain, in the way that pain spikes occurred with increasing frequency as backup mechanisms activated to compensate for primary mechanisms that were no longer functioning, in the way that the Mechanicus Tech-Priests who performed the sacred maintenance rituals were becoming increasingly desperate in their ministrations.
He could feel the Throne dying.
And when the Throne died, he would die.
And when he died, the Astronomican would go out.
And when the Astronomican went out, Warp travel would become impossible.
And when Warp travel became impossible, the Imperium would fragment.
And when the Imperium fragmented, the forces of Chaos would sweep across the galaxy.
And when Chaos swept across the galaxy, humanity would be destroyed.
It was all very simple, really.
Very logical.
Very inevitable.
And Kevin could do nothing to stop it.
He could feel his power, vast and infinite and utterly useless for anything except maintaining the bare minimum functions that kept humanity alive for one more day, one more week, one more year, one more decade, one more century, one more millennium.
He could feel the solutions that might save everything, the repairs that might be possible if someone with the right knowledge and resources were to attempt them, the alternatives that might work if the Imperium were willing to take risks that its dogmatic leadership would never accept.
He could feel all of this.
And he could communicate none of it.
Because any attempt to communicate would strain the Throne.
And any strain on the Throne would hasten its failure.
And hastening its failure would doom humanity.
So Kevin sat in silence.
Kevin sat in pain.
Kevin sat in the full knowledge that he was the only being in the galaxy who understood exactly how to save humanity, and he could do absolutely nothing with that knowledge.
This, Kevin reflected, was probably the worst isekai story ever written.
He had been reincarnated as the most powerful being in existence.
He had all the cheat abilities a protagonist could ever want.
And his cheat abilities were completely, utterly, absolutely useless.
He couldn't use his power to defeat enemies, because using his power would collapse the Throne.
He couldn't use his knowledge to guide the Imperium, because communicating his knowledge would strain his abilities beyond their limits.
He couldn't use his position to make changes, because he had no position—he was a corpse on a chair, worshipped but never consulted, venerated but never heard.
He was the God-Emperor of Mankind.
And he was completely, totally, utterly helpless.
Somewhere in the depths of Kevin's psyche, the part of him that had once been an ordinary human being with ordinary human problems—bills to pay, a job to tolerate, a cat to feed, miniatures to paint—that part of him curled up into a tiny ball and began to sob.
He had wanted adventure.
He had wanted power.
He had wanted to be special.
And now he was the most special being in the galaxy, with more power than he could ever have imagined, trapped in an adventure that would never end, and all he wanted was to go home.
Home to his apartment.
Home to his gaming PC.
Home to Mr. Whiskers, who probably had eaten his face by now but who Kevin would still have been overjoyed to see.
Home to his ordinary, boring, wonderful life where the worst thing that could happen was choking on a Dorito, and choking on a Dorito meant dying, and dying meant stopping, and stopping sounded so beautiful right now that Kevin would have wept if he had any ability to produce tears.
But he didn't.
He couldn't.
He could only sit.
And suffer.
And watch.
And wait.
And keep humanity alive for one more moment.
And then another.
And then another.
Forever.
And ever.
And ever.
Amen.
End of Chapter One
Next Chapter: Kevin discovers that the Adeptus Custodes are even worse at understanding his needs than he thought possible, learns exactly how the soul-binding process works (and wishes he hadn't), and has his first "conversation" with Roboute Guilliman, which goes about as well as you might expect when one participant cannot speak and the other participant has no idea that the person he's speaking to is not actually the father he's been mourning for ten thousand years.