The Emperor of Mankind

He has ruled humanity for ten thousand years without speaking a single word, a withered husk fused to a machine of gold at the heart of the Imperium of Man. Yet before the corpse there was a man, and before the man there was something stranger and older still, a being who walked among mortals for millennia and bent the destiny of the human species toward a future only He could see. The Emperor of Mankind is the most powerful psyker ever to draw breath, the architect of a galaxy-spanning dominion, and a god that He Himself never wished to become.

To grasp His story is to hold two irreconcilable truths at once. He is the desiccated relic venerated by uncounted trillions as a living deity, and He is the coldly rational visionary who loathed all gods and set out to strangle faith itself. The chasm between what He was and what He has become is the central tragedy of the age, a wound at the very core of mankind's dominion.

The Nameless One of Antiquity[edit]

The Emperor has never disclosed the truth of His birth, and perhaps no single truth exists. The most enduring account holds that He first drew breath in the region of Anatolia on ancient Terra, thousands of years before the modern calendar, the reincarnated union of countless Neolithic shamans who deliberately ended their own lives so that their souls might fuse into one immortal vessel. Whether myth or history, the being that resulted was effectively deathless, healing from every wound and outliving every civilisation He watched rise and rot.

For age upon age He is said to have moved through the story of mankind unseen, a guiding hand behind prophets, conquerors and scholars, nudging the species back from the edge of extinction. He learned that raw force alone could never save humanity, and that the true peril lay not in the material universe but in the warp, the roiling ocean of the immaterium where the predatory gods of Chaos feed upon mortal emotion. Everything He would later attempt was shaped by that single terrible knowledge.

The Unification of Terra[edit]

When the long nightmare called the Age of Strife shattered human civilisation and drowned the stars in warp storms, the Emperor at last stepped from the shadows to rule openly. Terra had fractured into the fiefdoms of techno-barbarian warlords, each hoarding the ruins of lost technology, and He resolved to forge them into one.

To wage this war He engineered the Thunder Warriors, brutally augmented soldiers who were the crude forerunners of the Space Marines, and unleashed them upon His enemies. Realm by realm the tyrants of Terra were broken or bound to His cause in the campaign remembered as the Unification Wars. When the cradle of humanity was His at last, He turned the same genius upon the red sands of Mars, striking a lasting concord with the priesthood of the Adeptus Mechanicus that would arm the crusade to come.

The Great Crusade and the Primarchs[edit]

With Terra unified, the Emperor conceived His grandest design: to reclaim every world lost to humanity and bind the scattered species into a single, secular, enlightened realm. This was the Great Crusade, and to lead it He created twenty demigod generals, the primarchs, gene-forged sons who embodied His own titanic power in fractured form.

Yet the gods of the warp saw the threat and struck first, scattering the infant primarchs across the galaxy through the immaterium before they could be raised at His side. From the genetic legacy of these lost sons the Emperor still raised the Space Marines, the superhuman Legions who would carry His banner to a million worlds. One by one the primarchs were rediscovered on the far-flung planets where they had come of age, and reunited with the father who had made them, though not all of them would remember Him with love.

The Webway and the Great Silence[edit]

At the height of the Crusade the Emperor withdrew from the battlefields, entrusting supreme command to His favoured son Horus and vanishing beneath the Imperial Palace. There He laboured on His true masterwork, a project He had concealed even from His generals: the seizing of the webway, the ancient labyrinth of the Aeldari that threads between the stars without ever touching the warp.

Could He master it, humanity would travel and communicate without exposing its soul to Chaos, and the tyranny of the warp would be broken forever. But the effort demanded that He hold open a breach between the Palace and the immaterium, and the daemons of the Ruinous Powers flooded toward it like sharks to blood. Isolated, misunderstood and seemingly abandoned by their father, His sons grew resentful, and into that resentment the Dark Gods poured their patient poison.

The Wound That Would Not Heal[edit]

The corruption bore its bitter fruit when Horus, the Warmaster and best-beloved of the primarchs, turned to Chaos and dragged half the Legions into rebellion. The Horus Heresy engulfed the galaxy in civil war and climaxed in the cataclysmic Siege of Terra, where traitor and loyalist tore the birthworld of humanity apart.

At the last the Emperor teleported aboard Horus's flagship for a final reckoning. He could have unmade His son with a thought, but love stayed His hand until Horus had struck Him down again and again. Only when the Warmaster murdered a loyal warrior before His eyes did the Emperor unleash His full might, incinerating Horus's very soul so utterly that not even the Dark Gods could reclaim it. Victory cost Him everything; His body was ruined beyond any mortal healing.

The Golden Throne[edit]

To keep the shattered Emperor from death, His servants bore Him to the arcane life-support mechanism He had built for the webway project. Upon this Golden Throne His broken form has remained ever since, neither living nor dead, His flesh slowly crumbling to dust while His will endures.

From the Throne He works two miracles that hold the Imperium together. He projects the Astronomican, the psychic beacon whose light lets ships navigate the warp across the galaxy, and He wards the webway breach beneath the Palace against the daemons that forever claw at it. Each day the Adeptus Custodes tend His decaying body, and each day a tithe of a thousand psykers is fed screaming into the Throne to sustain His fading power. He is a rotting god, kept alive by ceaseless sacrifice.

The God He Never Wanted to Be[edit]

The Emperor waged the Great Crusade as an avowed atheist, teaching that gods were merely warp-predators wearing borrowed masks, and forbidding all worship of Himself. History repaid Him with cruel irony. In the millennia since His interment, mankind has enshrined Him as the literal God-Emperor, worshipped through a vast state religion whose cathedrals darken the skies of a million worlds. Where He wished to free humanity from superstition, His name has become the greatest superstition of all.

And there lies the enduring question of the 41st Millennium. Is the thing upon the Throne still the rational man who dreamed of a galaxy without gods, or has the faith of trillions, pouring endlessly into the warp, begun to make a true god of Him at last? No mortal can say. The Master of Mankind keeps His silence, and the Imperium He built grinds on in His name, a monument to a dream betrayed and a sacrifice without end.