The Rune-Priest worked in silence, save for the deep thrum and crackle of the machinery around it. Here, the presence of the Omnissiah was so great as to make speech seem unconscionable. The thought of daring to break the silence, of profaning the air with sounds originating from its own unworthy flesh, was enough to make the figure quake in disgust.

There was nothing that could be said, in any case. The Machine God had no use for words, here. Flesh was fallible. All that rose from flesh was thus fallible by extension. Only ritual sufficed.

So it knelt and offered silent prayers to the Omnissiah. It conducted the motions required of it with absolute, uncompromising reverence. It prostrated itself before this most holy of machines, pleading with its spirit to accept its most humble servant, to bestow upon it the tiniest fragment of the knowledge it required.

Exactly twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds later, when the votive candles had burned down to weak, flickering lights in the dimness, it raised its head. Then it reached out with its metallic dendrites - no flesh could be permitted to touch such a holy artifact as this - and opened the panel.

Not counting the additional thirteen minutes and forty-four seconds spent in ritual supplication throughout, the inspection took nearly an hour.

And the result was the same. It was always the same, and no amount of prayer or meditation upon the will of the Machine God could quell the fear that rose up in the Tech-Priest's mind as a result.

Before it was the Golden Throne of Terra itself, perhaps the single greatest testament to the glory of the Deus Mechanicus in the entirety of creation. Here was the collected wisdom of the Ancients given form. Each single fragment of its colossal form contained lost knowledge more terrible and more holy than the priest's limited mind could ever begin to appreciate.

It filled a complex the size of a city. The sheer power that it contained, fed by the life-force of a thousand psykers every day, was enough to shake the earth beneath the priest's feet. Even the minor access panel that the Tech-Priest had spent the last hour dealing with was a gateway to impossible glories.

And it was failing.

The Tech-Priest dared, for a single moment, to lift its gaze upward. Above it, lost in a haze of eldritch power, was the silent form of the God-Emperor of Mankind, the Omnissiah, the Machine God's physical avatar within the unworthy world of Man. The Golden Throne was a testament to the glory of the Machine God, and served to ensure the continued presence of the Omnissiah within their plane.

The task of its care and maintenance was a charge that the Priesthood of Mars had undertaken with the full knowledge that they were not worthy to lay hand upon it. They had approached it with all due reverence, worthless but striving to become worthy, hoping beyond hope that they might somehow repay their god's faith in them.

For ten thousand years they had strived. Now they were realizing that they were entirely correct in their evaluation of themselves. They were not worthy, had never been worthy, of the task given to them. They had failed, and the Golden Throne was falling into ruin. The fallible flesh of Man had proven unequal to the sacred Quest for Knowledge, and their failure had doomed them to lose this most holy of relics.

None among them even knew what the problem was. The workings of the Throne were beyond the ken of even the most learned of the Priesthood. The Fabricator-General of Mars was helpless in the face of it. All that they knew for certain was that the Golden Throne was breaking, and, when it went, the Omnissiah would leave them to suffer in the darkness, away from the light and knowledge of the Machine God.

The God-Emperor of Mankind would die, and Man would die with him, as befitted their failings.

The Rune-Priest knew that the inner workings of the mind of such an entity as the Omnissiah were beyond it. It could not hope to fathom a fraction of the mind of its god. But, for a moment, it allowed itself to wonder - perhaps, even, to hope - that the Omnissiah was aware of their plight, and had a plan.

---

The Emperor had no plan.

For the past ten thousand years, his immobile, rotting carcass of a body had remained upon the Golden Throne, installed there after his mortal wounding at the hands of the Warmaster Horus. For the past ten thousand years, his mind had wandered the ethereal realm of the Warp, fighting to protect his people from the unspeakable horrors that dwelt within it.

His titanic will alone directed the power of the Astronomican, the beacon of psychic power that kept Mankind united throughout the galaxy. His unquenchable spirit alone saved uncountable lives each day, as he beat back the daemons of the Warp from their unceasing attempts to breach the thin walls to the world of the real. It was due to him and him alone that humanity still existed within the cosmos.

And he was dying.

The Golden Throne was failing. He had known it as soon as it had started, but he could do nothing to stop it. He was as close to omnipotent as any human could ever be, but powerless to do so much as speak to those he protected. He could not tell them how to repair the machine that kept him alive. All he could do was hope against hope that they would find the solution themselves.

He was not sure, exactly, how long it had been before he had realized that they would not. He was even less sure how long he had spent trying to find a way to ensure Mankind's survival after his inevitable demise.

What he did know was that, search as he might, there was no solution to be found within his own world. The Imperium, flawed as it was, had ensured Mankind's survival for the past ten thousand years. It had done so by turning itself into a brutal and cruel machine that he could not have dreamed of in his darkest nightmares, but it worked. Under its rule, Man was not happy, but under its rule, Man survived.

But the Imperium was dependent on him. Without the Astronomican, ships would be unable to navigate the Warp, rendering faster-than-light travel impossible, sundering the Imperium in an instant. Without his protection, the billions upon billions of dormant psykers across its million worlds would find their minds opened up to the predations of the daemons, and every planet in the Imperium would know agonies the likes of which had never seen before.

Even if the Warp threat could be stemmed, the other threats against Mankind were too great to be turned aside. It was only a question of from whence the killing blow would come. Perhaps the Orks, the mindless green savages with their crude weaponry that still, somehow, served to tear through ceramite as though it were paper. Perhaps the Tyranids, the unrelenting, ravenous horrors from beyond the galaxy that consumed everything and left behind dead worlds in their wake. Perhaps even the Necrons, the mysterious robotic threat from the depths of time that wielded technology beyond even his understanding.

It was not a question of if Man would fall, but how.

For a while, the Emperor had believed that there might still be a way to save them. For all their flaws, for all the brutality and horror of the Imperium, humans were worth saving. So, in his desperation, he had exerted himself more than ever before. He had sent his consciousness deep into the Warp -

- and out the other side, into the multiverse beyond.

Finding the other worlds had been a shock, at first. Then it had been a beacon of hope for him. Perhaps, somewhere within the multitude of universes laid out before him, there was an answer. But each of them was the same. In each, he found only death.

Many of them had died before he ever reached them, overrun by the Orks or the Tyranids or whatever their equivalents in that world were. Many more were in their death throes. Some of them even had Emperors of their own, but they had no answers for him. They could only share in his anguish at the death of their peoples.

Time was a difficult concept when outside his home universe, but the Emperor knew that he had searched for centuries and found nothing.

Then, as he was about to surrender hope entirely, he found it. There, amidst the dead and dying embers of universes, was a single world that shone like a jewel. It was vibrant with life and hope.

The Emperor approached it slowly, half expecting it to vanish as he neared. It did not.

This world was... strange. It was so like his own, but as if seen through a mirror. There was the mind like his, shining with golden light, guiding its people with wisdom and kindness. There was the jeweled palace from which they ruled. And there, ruling by their side, was the one that the Emperor had seen fall to darkness.

Somehow, in this world, they had been saved.

Hope kindled within him once more, and the Emperor sent his psychic self speeding across the new world. There - a hungry, ravenous presence at the edge of the world. The Great Devourer lived here, as well, but here it had been defeated with... music?

There were the sadistic, shadowy beings that came and went like ghosts, leaving pain in their wake and retreating to their homes in the unreachable, hidden passageways of their hives - but they, too, were beaten, driven away by the love and loyalty of a great warrior.

It seemed too good to be true. There had to be more. This could not possibly be the salvation that he had searched for. Slowly, dreading what he might find, the Emperor cast his net wider, searching for the imperfections that he most dreaded.

And he found them. The taint of Chaos.

But even that had been beaten. The Emperor's heart leapt. There was the limitless rage and hatred of the Blood God, but it was locked away in the north, kept within a prison of ice. There was the desperate hunger of Slaanesh, but it was confined within the hives of its servants. There was the pestilent, twisted love of Nurgle, but it was held prisoner beneath a tree of jewels. And, most incredibly, there was the crazed, manic manipulativeness of Tzeentch, turned away from the rest.

This was not a world that was threatened by Chaos. This was not even a world that had beaten Chaos. This was a world that took Chaos and turned it into something else.

This was a world of Harmony, and it was the answer to his need.

The Emperor knew that his body was dead. He could not have moved it even if he had wanted to. It was impossible for him to change his expression in any meaningful sense. But in the darkness of the Void, the God-Emperor of Mankind smiled.

And, a thousand universes away, without really knowing why, Princess Celestia of Canterlot did the same.