[SPEAKER_01]: The cargo holds smelled of old.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle Torven had a knack of reading the histories of ships through their wear and smells.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mineral sharpness of all horrors, the lingering sweetness of agri-transports, the antiseptic sterility of vessels that had carried wounded soldiers home from distant wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the merchants' oath carried a different smell entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: something older and stranger that he could not quite identify.
[SPEAKER_01]: It reminded him of the Great Librarium on Macrack, where he had once delivered a shipment of Sirulian ink to the Ultramarine's archivists and been permitted to walk briefly among their towering stacks of ancient texts.
[SPEAKER_01]: That same quality hung in the recycled air of his new vessel.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was 34 years old, though the years of warp travel had made such calculations, somewhat academic.
[SPEAKER_01]: His face bore the weathering of a man who had spent his life moving between stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fine lines around eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: that had grown accustomed to squinting at manifest ledgers in poor lighting and scanning distant horizons for the tell-tale shimmer of voichels.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Torv and family had been traders for seven generations, working the roots between the Ultramarines 500 worlds,
[SPEAKER_01]: with a reputation for reliability that opened doors, other merchants found permanently sealed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyos grandfather had once delivered consecrated oils to the fortress of Hera itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And though the family's fortunes had diminished somewhat since those days, they still commanded respect among the factors and guild masters who controlled commerce in Ultramar.
[SPEAKER_01]: The merchants' oath represented either the resurrection of that fading legacy, or its final collapse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle had not yet determined which.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had purchased the vessel at auction on Talasar three weeks prior, outbitting two other merchants for a ship that the assessors had deemed serviceable, but requiring significant investment.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was an old vessel, far older than its classification suggested, with registration codes, the traced back to an era before the Great Rift had torn the galaxy apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its previous owners had died or scattered, their fates lost in the chaos of recent decades, and whatever cargo they had carried had long since been claimed or disposed of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also the auction house had assured
[SPEAKER_01]: The second restoreage hold was located in a section of the loading bay that the ship's previous configuration had rendered nearly inaccessible.
[SPEAKER_01]: A cramped space behind corroded piping and beneath cable runs that sparked occasionally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle had discovered it only by accident, following a persistent rattle that had annoyed him during his first test flight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The noise had led him through
[SPEAKER_01]: past junctions that looked as though they had not been opened in decades, until at last he had emerged into a small chamber that the ship's manifest did not acknowledge existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this place, a single container sat against the far wall, half hidden, behind a tangle of decommissioned machinery.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not large, perhaps the length of his forearm, and half, again as wide,
[SPEAKER_01]: The metal of its casing was dark and smooth, unmarked by the corrosion that touched everything else in this forgotten space, and when he brushed his fingers across its surface, it felt very smooth and very cold.
[SPEAKER_01]: The seal broke with a soft hiss of escaping pressure, and Kyle found himself holding his breath as he lifted the lid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Inside, wrapped in cloth, lay a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was bound in material that resembled leather, but carried a weight and texture that suggested something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The guilt lettering on its cover was hard to see in the low light.
[SPEAKER_01]: When it last, the words resolved into something his mind could pass.
[SPEAKER_01]: He felt his breath catching his throat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor, Captain General of the custodian guard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle knew the name, as every citizen of the Imperium knew the name, or thought they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: The custodian guard were legends spoken of, in hushed tones, golden sentinels who stood eternal watch over the Emperor's throne.
[SPEAKER_01]: Protectors, whose mere existence reassured the faithful, that some things in this dark galaxy remained incorruptible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their captain general was a figure of myth, a title rather than a person.
[SPEAKER_01]: The leader of warriors who might as well have been angels for all that ordinary humans ever saw of them, but this book was about a time before all that, before the golden throne was a prison, before the emperor's silence, before 10,000 years of slow decay had transformed
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle settled himself against the cold metal of the Chamber of War, ignoring the discomfort and opened the book to its first page.
[SPEAKER_01]: The text was high gothic, archaic in its construction, but still readable to one who had been educated in the columns of Ultramar.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as he began to read, the cargo hold around him seemed to fade away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Replaced by visions of a terror he had never seen,
[SPEAKER_01]: and a warrior whose story had been orbit forgotten by the galaxy he had helped to forge.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what the book contained.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a story that has come down to us only in fragments, from places that even to speak of their existence carries a weight of danger, and it concerns a child who was taken, and an army that moved to claim him, and the unfathomable length to which the master of mankind would go, to possess what he considered his own.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the days when terror was not yet unified, when the Emperor's dream of bringing humanity together under one banner remained a thing written in blood across every scarred continent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something extraordinary occurred in the endless campaigns of conquest.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor himself turned his attention away from the great work of unification and fixed it upon something far smaller, and yet it would seem far more precious to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He mobilized entire armies for this purpose, moving them across the continents through territories held by hostile powers, expanding resources and lives that might have claimed a dozen enemy kingdoms, all for the sake of a single infant, whose name has long since been forgotten by every soul, save perhaps the emperor himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The child's parents perished in this retrieval, though whether they stood against the Emperor's forces or whether their deaths were simply deemed necessary to whatever design he pursued, no one knows.
[SPEAKER_01]: What has come down through the long millennia is that the emperor of mankind considered one small life worth more than the soldiers who fell to claim it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Worth more than the precious time diverted from his grand campaign of unity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Worth more than any calculation of cost and benefit that a different mind might have applied to such a decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we are left to wonder as so many have wandered before us.
[SPEAKER_01]: What could possibly have made this child so valuable that the master of mankind would pay such a price.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was one who knew something of this mystery, or at least claimed to know, and her name was Amar Astaate.
[SPEAKER_01]: She served as the first director of the Emperor's Biotechnical Division, and was the principal architect of both the Primark Project and the Space Marines that would one day stride across the stars in Humanities' name.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had been with the emperor since the earliest and most desperate days of the unification wars, having survived the horrors of the age of strife by offering her considerable intellect to various warlords, before at last finding one whose vision proved worthy of her gifts.
[SPEAKER_01]: If any mortal soul understood the emperor's secrets in those days, it was surely
[SPEAKER_01]: she confirmed before her death, that the child's parents had indeed been killed, and the timies had indeed moved across continents to retrieve him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet even she, with all her privileged knowledge, offered no explanation for why the Emperor had deemed this necessary.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps she did not know the reason herself, or perhaps she knew, and chose to carry that knowledge in silence to her grave.
[SPEAKER_01]: she died during the palace coup, and whatever understanding she possessed, passed with her into the darkness beyond.
[SPEAKER_01]: Leaving us only with questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: After the child was taken from his family, he underwent an extreme transformation under the instruction of the Emperor.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process by which a space marine is created is well documented, brutal though it may be, a matter of organ implantation and genetic modification.
[SPEAKER_01]: and hypnotic conditioning that takes a youth on the cusp of manhood and reshapes him into something greater and more terrible than he was before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that stands apart from ordinary humanity while still bearing recognizable kinship to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the process that creates a custodian is something else entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that does not just add to what already exists, but rather
[SPEAKER_01]: The bioalchemy employed in this transformation takes root at a cellular level, working changes so profound that some who have studied the matter believe it reaches even deeper than flesh and bone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps touching whatever spark of essence we might call the soul.
[SPEAKER_01]: the process requires decades, long decades of our chemical augmentation, and psychological reconstruction, and magnetic training, during which the aspirin's mind is rebuilt.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their mental architecture fortified and restructured until it becomes an impregnable fortress, capable ofwithstanding horrors that would shatter any ordinary consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or else, it collapses under the weight of what it is being asked to become.
[SPEAKER_01]: For many aspirants did not survive the process, and the road that led to constant town Valdor was paved with the bodies of those who came before him.
[SPEAKER_01]: the child who had once had parents who loved him, who had possessed a name spoken with tenderness, who had carried within him all the potential of a life waiting to unfold in whatever humble or extraordinary direction fate might have chosen.
[SPEAKER_01]: That child ceased to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: In his place there stood something new, something golden and terrible, and magnificent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that moved through the world, with a purpose so singular and absolute.
[SPEAKER_01]: That ordinary human concerns seemed to him like the distant memories of a language he had once spoken fluently, but could no longer recall even the basic words of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even Vowdor himself cannot say with certainty whether he was truly the first of the custodians, or merely the first to survive the process of becoming one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is a distinction that implies a sorrowful history of others who attempted the transformation before him, and whose bodies or minds could not bear the weight of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He does not know the answer to this question, for the memories that might have illuminated it, were erased, along with everything else that once made him, who he had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: Leaving only occasional ghosts of things, half remembered, that flash briefly through his consciousness, inquired moments.
[SPEAKER_01]: The echo of a face perhaps, or the fading resonance of a voice, or the phantom texture
[SPEAKER_01]: These fragments offer neither context nor meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are shadows cast by a sun that set long ago and vowed or learned early that there was no wisdom in chasing them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The young boy's sense of self was replaced with purpose, and a being who has not experienced a single arrogant thought since the dawn of his transformation, who takes no pleasure in his extraordinary capabilities, who feels only what he himself has described as a kind of blunt satisfaction when an obstacle is removed from his path, or an order is followed to completion, or a threat to his master is dispatched.
[SPEAKER_01]: He became exactly what the Emperor designed him to be, no more and no less, a perfect instrument of protection and destruction shaped to serve purposes that perhaps only his creator fully understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet the question remains.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why this particular child?
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor's foresight was said to allow him to perceive the threads of possibility, stretching centuries into the future.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we must ask ourselves whether he saw something in that infant that justified such extraordinary measures to secure him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did some cosmic obligation, older perhaps than the imperium itself, demand
[SPEAKER_01]: did the woven strands of fate require that Constantin Valdor exist in precisely the form he would come to take.
[SPEAKER_01]: The answers to these questions, if indeed they exist at all, fell silent when the Emperor's voice was taken from him by Horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: The master of mankind sits now upon his golden throne in eternal twilight, and whatever secrets he carried into that long silence remain his
[SPEAKER_01]: the unification wars were, by their very nature, a time of bloodshed and sorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: When brother fought brother across the scarred face of terror, and the dream of unity could only be purchased through the currency of countless lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet even in that long catalog of battles and betrayals, certain campaigns stand apart in history, casting shadows that would stretch across the centuries, and touch the
[SPEAKER_01]: The Battle of Maul and Sen was one such campaign, and it was there in the frozen wastes of ancient Nordic, that Constantin Valdor first glimpsed the dark truth that would come to define his understanding of the Emperor's earliest creation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Moreland's send confederacy had grown powerful in that cold and unforgiving land, ruled by a figure known as the priest king, who had begun his rise as a humble holy man, offering food and water to the suffering masses of that benighted age.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor himself, it is said, had once warned this man against the path he was choosing, but the priest king had not listened, and in his pride and his hunger to help his people.
[SPEAKER_01]: he had turned to destructive powers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chaos gods answered his prayers, and with each miracle he performed in their name, the cast grew steeper, and the rituals more occult, until little remained of the compassionate man he had once been.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the imperial forces arrived to bring Nordic into compliance, the priest-king commanded hordes of gene-twisted abominations and witch-marked warriors, and his domain had become a place where the boundaries between the material world, and the realm of nightmares, had grown terribly thin.
[SPEAKER_01]: The imperial host that descended upon Maul and Sen was outnumbered approximately 7 to 1.
[SPEAKER_01]: A disparity that would have given pause to any conventional military strategist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor led a force of just 30 custodians into that frozen hell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their golden armour bright against the endless white of the Nordic winter.
[SPEAKER_01]: and alongside them marched several thousand thunder warriors of the fourth legion, under the command of a warrior named Ushotan, whose name would come to carry a weight of tragedy in later history.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first deployment of an entire thunder warrior legion, and the emperor himself walked among his forces.
[SPEAKER_01]: His presence alone enough to turn the tide of battles.
[SPEAKER_01]: The events of the height of that battle would haunt Valdor's thoughts of the Thunder Warriors for all the years that remained to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the warp energies emanating from the Confederacy's sorceries washed over the imperial lines, something changed in Oshotan's warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: A frenzy came upon them like a fever, stripping away whatever restraint or discipline they had possessed, and leaving only a red and howling rage that knew neither friend nor foe.
[SPEAKER_01]: They butchered everyone in their path, not just the enemy forces, but the non-combatants the emperor had intended to spare.
[SPEAKER_01]: The very people they had ostensibly come to liberate from the priest King's tyranny.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor watched it happen with eyes that mist nothing, and in his heart something cold and troubled took root.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had witnessed the thunder warriors strength before, had fought alongside them and admired their effectiveness.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he had never before seen so clearly how thin the line was between their fury and their madness.
[SPEAKER_01]: This, the records tell us,
[SPEAKER_01]: regarding the nature of the Emperor's first soldiers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process that made a thunder warrior was crude compared to what would come later.
[SPEAKER_01]: A simplified and brutal version of the process that had crafted each custodian with such painstaking care, and the results reflected this difference in every way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Physically, the thunder warriors were magnificent, their bodies larger and stronger than a normal human man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their bones were thickened up to shatter a skull with a headbutt, and their strength in close combat was the stuff of legends that would be deliberately forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: but they were fundamentally flawed, and those flaws had been woven into them from the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their genetic structure was unstable, causing mines and bodies to deteriorate at unpredictable intervals.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were prone to violent mood swings and uncontrollable rages that made them as dangerous to their allies as to their enemies.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their lifespans were critically limited.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tragically the Emperor, in his wisdom, or his ruthlessness, had deliberately engineered his first soldiers to die young.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether this was a calculated choice to ensure they could be easily discarded, once they're usefulness ended, or simply an unavoidable consequence of the crude methods used to create them, we can't say.
[SPEAKER_01]: What we know is that the thunder warriors were never meant to see the imperium they were built to create.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they finally discovered this truth, the betrayal cut deep
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet there was something else that set them apart from the golden warriors who would inherit their legacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that vowed or himself would later acknowledge, with what might have been admiration, or might have been sorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unlike the custodians, the thunder warriors had kept their humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process that created them had not led the emotions from their souls, or rebuilt their minds into fortresses of perfect discipline.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could feel joy and hatred and fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: They laughed at crude jokes and mourned their fallen brothers and loved.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were monsters, perhaps, but they were human monsters, and there was something precious in that humanity, even as it made them dangerous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor, who had lost all such things in his own transformation, noted this quality in them,
[SPEAKER_01]: The official Imperial Chronicle speaks of a glorious last stand at Mount Ararat, where the thunder warriors are said to have died to a man while raising the banner of lightning at the declaration of unity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The legendary Aric Taranis, greatest of their number, supposedly fell while raising that banner.
[SPEAKER_01]: His last breath spent in service to the dream he had fought so long to realize.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a beautiful story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is also a carefully constructed lie.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the final years of the Unification Wars, the Thunder Warriors discovered the truth about their engineered life spans.
[SPEAKER_01]: They learned that they had always been intended as disposable tools, designed to conquer terror, and then conveniently die before they could become a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in their rage and their grief and their sense of betrayal, some of them turned upon the Emperor who had created them only to discard them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their end was not a glorious last stand, but a systematic extermination.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor led several hundred custodians into battle, alongside several thousand prototype space marines of the first legion, warriors who would one day become the dark angels, and together they hunted down the thunder warriors without mercy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The battle at Mount Ararat served either as cover for this purge, or as a means of expending the last of the gene soldiers in one
[SPEAKER_01]: Either way, the propaganda was designed not to protect the guilty, who clearly felt no guilt whatsoever, but to provide the terrified mortal populations of terror, with a mythology of heroic sacrifice they could draw inspiration from.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Valdor was later confronted about this massacre, he acknowledged that it had been a crime.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet he also stated that he believed it to be a worthwhile sacrifice in light of the future, it would help to build.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not trusted the Thunder Warriors since more than sentence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had seen what they could become when their restraints failed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cold ethics of practicality governed his thinking.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by those ethics, the thunder warriors had been judged and found wanting.
[SPEAKER_01]: but not all of them died at Mount Ararat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ushotan, the leader of the Fourth Legion, who had led his warriors into frenzy at Maul and Sen, survived that terrible day, along with perhaps two dozen of his brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the following years, as the emperor turned his attention to the stars, and the great crusade began to take shape, a conspiracy formed around a woman named Uwama Kandawire,
[SPEAKER_01]: the grand provost Marshal of the newborn Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Candowire had been born in the Bander Confederacy of Southeastern Africa, to a family of modest wealth, and her experiences with the brutal warlords of that age had instilled in her a fierce and uncompromising commitment to justice and the rule of law.
[SPEAKER_01]: When she discovered that the massacre at Mount Arorat had occurred without the knowledge or approval of the senatorum imperialist, an un-sanctioned execution ordered by Valdor himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: She determined to arrest the Captain General and put him on trial before the Emperor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her conspiracy drew together souls of very different motivations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Candowire herself, who sought legal accountability for what she viewed as murder, who shote on and his surviving thunder warriors, who sought revenge and perhaps the dignity of a death in battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Amar Astati, the architect of the Space Marine Project, who had grown convinced that the warriors were doomed to fail without the primax who had been scattered to the void.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not understand that Valdor had been watching them from the beginning, hunting out those whose bitterness was carefully hidden from sight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The coup was doomed before it ever began.
[SPEAKER_01]: The conspirators enjoyed initial success, sweeping aside the minimal resistance of army personnel as they advance through the still incomplete imperial palace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Inside the great chamber of what would become the senatorum imperialist, they found a single golden figure waiting for them in the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantin Valdor urged them to surrender, they refused, and then 10,000 warriors of the first legion newly emerged from their training and hungry to prove themselves, poured into the chamber in what would become one of the first live combat engagements of the space
[SPEAKER_01]: The contrast between these new soldiers and the Thunder Warriors they faced could not have been more stark.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where Ushotan and his brothers were flamboyant and emotionally unrestricted and individually imposing, the first legion proved functional and mechanical and methodical, fighting as components of a greater machine rather than as individual heroes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each thunder warrior was larger and more powerful than any single space marine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in one-on-one combat, they would have prevailed without question.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the space marine's almost always wounded or maimed their opponents before dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were replaced immediately by reinforcements who continued the work of wearing down the gene soldiers until nothing remained.
[SPEAKER_01]: were shortened himself, cut down several first legion marines with ease before finding himself face to face with Valdor.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fought as only such warriors can fight, blade against blade, strength against strength, and for a time the Thunder Warrior Primark held his ground against the Captain General.
[SPEAKER_01]: a surprising reflection of his extraordinary skill.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Valdor was something beyond even exceptional warriors, and in the end, Ushotan fell.
[SPEAKER_01]: As the Thunder Warrior leader lay dying, his life-blood pooling beneath him on the cold stones of the chamber, he delivered an assessment of his killer that Valdor could not refute and would carry with him through all the long years.
[SPEAKER_01]: I lived Captain General, Ushatan said,
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was something almost like pity in his failing voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was short, and it was painful, but by the nine hells I lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather have it that way than yours.
[SPEAKER_01]: No joy, no hate, no fear, unbreakable without growth, immortal without passion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor struck the killing blow to end Ushotan's suffering, but he took no gratification from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had admired the thunder warriors in his own distant way.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had recognized in them something precious that had been taken from him in his own transformation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The capacity to truly live rather than merely to exist in service.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but it had also made them real in a way that Valdor himself could never be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among all the Emperor's attempts to create enhanced soldiers, the Thunder Warriors had perhaps been the most human of all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now they were gone, erased from history, their names forbidden, their sacrifices rewritten into comfortable lies.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was one mercy, if it can be called that, in the wake of the failed coup.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor spared Uwama Kandawar, the woman who wanted to bring him to justice.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not fault one who was truly loyal to the Imperium he said, no matter how misguided her methods had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was permitted to retire peacefully on terror, living out her remaining days in modest obscurity far from the horns of power.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a rare act of compassion, from one who had been engineered to feel nothing at all, and perhaps it suggests that somewhere beneath all that golden armour and rebuild consciousness, some small spark of the child who had been taken still flickered in the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the Great Crusade had spread humanity's dominion across the stars, and the Emperor's dream of galactic unity seemed within reach at last.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor had risen to a position of authority that few outside the Imperial Palace could dream of.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stood as one third of a triumvirate that ruled terror itself, the Emperor, whose vision drove all things forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador the Cigilite, whose subtle hand guided the Imperiums administration and kept its countless secrets, and Valdor, whose golden shadow fell across all matters of security and protection, and when necessity demanded precise and surgical violence.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was commonly said in those days that Malkador was the Emperor's right hand, the one who shaped policy and managed the vast bureaucracy and whispered council into the master of mankind's ear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor then was his left hand, the one that held the blade, the one that struck when striking was required, the one that did the work which could not be spoken of in daylight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The authority given to Valdor during this era was complex.
[SPEAKER_01]: For he carried with him always the Magisterium, Lex Ultima, a mark of office that placed him and his custodians above all law except the direct word of the Emperor himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the most extreme of circumstances, this authority granted vowed or absolute power over anything and anyone in the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: A responsibility that would have corrupted lesser souls or driven them to madness with its possibilities.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet those who observed Valdor in those years, noted that he exercised this tremendous power, with a restraint that bordered on asceticism, acting only where his purview was directly concerned, and never with ambition or desire for a grandisement.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could have made himself a tyrant to rival any of the techno-barbarian warlords the emperor had overthrown.
[SPEAKER_01]: Could have bent the newborn imperium to his will through nothing more than the legal authority he carried.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead he served quiet and watchful, intervening only when the emperor's safety or the imperium's survival demanded it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The assassination of Kojizu offers us a window into the nature of Valdor's duties during the early years of the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Tara itself still required the attention of its most dangerous servants, Kojizu was the minister of the unwattens steps, a woman whose crimes were numerous and terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had conducted cleansing pogroms against her own people.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had trafficked in what the records call, forbidden flesh.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had maintained a secret army of gene-worked abominations, in bunkers, hidden beneath the Germanic steps, creatures that awaited only her command to be unleashed upon her enemies.
[SPEAKER_01]: yet none of these horrors warranted her death in the Emperor's judgment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her pogroms were deemed meaningless, her forbidden trade was considered irrelevant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even the prospect of her eventual rebellion was thought to be of no consequence.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was condemned to die for one reason alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her harvest of machines had been drinking the waters of Tara's last remaining ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: In those days, as millions of pilgrims flock to the throne world from every corner of the expanding imperium, water had become the most precious resource on all of terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great oceans that had once covered much of humanity's birth world had long since vanished, consumed by the wars and catastrophes of the age of strife, and what little remained was horded more jellously than gold or adamantium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Koja Zoo's crime was not cool to your ambition, or even treachery.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was theft of the one thing Tera could not afford to lose.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor came for her personally, as was fitting for a matter of such importance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The execution itself is not recorded in detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Valdor departed from the ministers domain, he carried with him, her four-year-old son.
[SPEAKER_01]: A child named Ra, who had committed no crime, saved being born to a mother, who had stolen water from a thirsty world.
[SPEAKER_01]: This boy would be given to the Emperor's bio-alchemists and subjected to the same transformation that had remade Valdor himself, and in time he would emerge as Ra in Dimeon, Tribune of the custodian guard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Commander of the elite squad denies that the Emperor himself would one day call the Lords of Terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fate of Ra in Dimeon would prove significant in ways that no one could have foreseen on the day Valdoch claimed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that is a sorrow for later telling.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during the Great Crusade that Valdor's deepest doubts about the Emperor's grand design, first crystallized into something approaching conviction, though he lacked the capacity to openly question his master's decisions.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been present, you see, when the primax were created in the gene laboratories beneath the Himalayan mountains.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had witnessed those 20 demigods in their infancy, had seen the promise they represented, and understood the role they were meant to play in humanity's conquest of the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had been there when the ruinous powers tore open reality itself and scattered those 20 sons to the far corners of the galaxy, ripping them from the Emperor's grasp before they could mature under his guidance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor waited into that catastrophe to save what could be saved, preserving the gene-seed banks from destruction, even as the primax themselves vanished into the void.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after, when Malkudor spoke of finding the lost sons and reuniting them with their father, Valdor spoke of warning, they must be tainted, he argued, whatever the powers of chaos had done in scattering them.
[SPEAKER_01]: There could be no possibility that they had left the Primarchs uncorrupted.
[SPEAKER_01]: The entire project should be scrapped, the search abandoned.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dream of Primarch led legions set aside in favor of something safer and more controllable.
[SPEAKER_01]: He proposed an alternative path for the Great Crusade, vast armies of mortal soldiers, trained and equipped to the highest standards, led not by the unpredictable demigods who had been touched by chaos, but by his own custodians, whose loyalty was beyond question, and whose souls had been forged by the Emperor's own hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be slower, perhaps, and less glorious, but it would be safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would not carry within it the seeds of its own destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor rejected this council, the primax would be found, the primax would lead, the great crusade would proceed as originally planned.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Maucodor later informed Valdor that the scattered suns still lived, that they had survived their journey through the war, and landed on distant worlds throughout the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Captain General's response was not relief, but deepening suspicion.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not understand why the chaos guards would spare such valuable prizes.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the ruinous powers had the primax in their grasp, why would they release them apparently unharmed?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would they not corrupt them openly and turn them against the Emperor from the start?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is their nature to play games, Malkador replied, but the answer did nothing to ease Valdor's concerns.
[SPEAKER_01]: History, as we know, all too well, would prove which of them had seen more clearly.
[SPEAKER_01]: when the warmaster Horus fell to corruption, and the heresy began to tear the imperium apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor's pragmatic nature asserted itself in ways that brought him into conflict with those who held to different philosophies of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Following the massacre at István III, when Horus revealed his treachery by bombing his own loyal soldiers into oblivion, a secret council was convened to discuss what might be done
[SPEAKER_01]: Markerdor the sigilite presided over this gathering in his role as Grant Master of Assassins, and Valdor was invited to offer his council on how the warmaster might be eliminated.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was Valdor who proposed the tactical innovation that would create the first execution force in imperial history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rather than sending lone operatives who had repeatedly failed to reach their target, he suggested assembling a team drawn from each of the assassin clades, Vindakere and Eversor, Caledus and Collexus, Venenum and Vainus, operating as a coordinated unit.
[SPEAKER_01]: whose combined skills might succeed where individual efforts had not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mission briefing he delivered was characteristically direct.
[SPEAKER_01]: Embed on Dagonet and Terminate Horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: The operation failed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace had been worn by his own corrupted sears, and he sent a proxy to die in his place.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the assassination attempt was discovered, the warmaster ordered the orbital bombardment of Daganit, and the dark apostle Eribus sacrificed the planet's remaining population to the ruinous powers, in a ritual of such horror that its details are best left unspoken.
[SPEAKER_01]: After the failed attempt, Rogel Dawn, Prime Mark of the Imperial Fists and Pretorian of Terror, confronted Valdor about the operation, and the philosophical conflict between them crystallized into words that would define their differing approaches to the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don, argued that keeping Horace alive served a strategic purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: For a known enemy is a predictable enemy, and predictability has value in warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than this, he contended that assassination was fundamentally dishonorable, that the imperium must maintain a moral code, even in its darkest hour, if it wished to remain worthy of survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: to preserve the Imperium he declared, we must have a moral code.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor's counter argument was equally direct and far colder.
[SPEAKER_01]: The methods of the official assassinorum were not cowardly, he maintained, that expedient.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace had bombed his own sworn brothers into a blitteration without hesitation or remorse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing, no matter how vile, was beyond him.
[SPEAKER_01]: To match Horace's evil, Valdor said, we must not stop at underhanded tactics.
[SPEAKER_01]: The debate required the Emperor's personal intervention to settle.
[SPEAKER_01]: His verdict was a compromise of sorts, though one that satisfied neither party fully.
[SPEAKER_01]: No more shadows, no more veils.
[SPEAKER_01]: The affiture assassinorum would continue to exist and to operate.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it would do so more openly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its actions acknowledged rather than hidden in darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a moment recorded in the histories of that era that speaks more eloquently than any battle or debate to the true nature of what Constantine Valdor had become by the time of the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone, the records do not say who asked him what remained for him after all he had given to the Emperor's service.
[SPEAKER_01]: What more could possibly be taken from a being who had already surrendered his memories, his emotions,
[SPEAKER_01]: his capacity for joy or sorrow or love.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was left of the child who had been claimed from his murdered parents all those decades ago?
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor's answer was delivered without hesitation, without self-pity, without any emotion at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing, he said.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a response that invites us to feel sorrow on his behalf, even though he himself was incapable of feeling that sorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: The boy who had been taken, the parents who had died, the decades of transformation that had stripped away everything that makes a life worth living, all of it had been given to the Emperor's service.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what remained was a perfect instrument, a golden centenal who could no longer remember what it felt like to be anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thunder warrior Ushotan had seen this truth clearly in his dying moments, had pitted the captain general, even as Valdor's blade descended to end his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unbreakable without growth, he had said, immortal without passion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps there is no greater tragedy in all the long history of the Imperium than to be exactly what you were designed to be, to fulfill your purpose with perfect fidelity, and to have that purpose require the surrender of everything that might have made existence a gift rather than a burden.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are tragedies in the long history of the Imperium that were born of malice, where villains chose darkness with open eyes and willing hearts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there are tragedies of a different and perhaps more sorrowful kind, those born of misunderstanding and manipulation, where good intentions were twisted into catastrophe, and brothers who might have stood together were instead set upon paths that could only
[SPEAKER_01]: the burning of prospero belongs to this latter category, and Constantine Valdor for all his peerless skill and unwavering loyalty.
[SPEAKER_01]: Found himself caught in the machinery of a disaster, he could see unfolding, but could not prevent.
[SPEAKER_01]: It began with Magnus the Red, and his desperate attempt to do what he believed was right.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crimson king had seen a vision of Horace's corruption on the moon of Daven.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had witnessed through his sorceress arts, the pact that the dying warmaster had made with the ruinous powers and the galaxy spanning civil war that would follow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Desperate to warn his father of the doom that was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Magnus had turned to the very powers the Emperor had forbidden him to use, casting his psychic form across the vast distances between Prospero and Terra, in a feat of sorcery that should have been impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: His warning reached the Emperor, but the cost of that warning was beyond calculation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emperor had been laboring for years upon a project of such ambition that its completion would have changed the fate of humanity forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: A network of passages through the webway that would have freed mankind from dependence upon the warp for interstellar travel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Magnus' psychic intrusion, for all its noble intent, shattered the delicate wards that protected this work, and tore open riffs, through which the denizens of the immaterial came pouring into the tunnels beneath the imperial palace itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a single act of desperate love, Magnus had doomed his father's greatest dream, and condemned the emperor to an imprisonment that continues to this day.
[SPEAKER_01]: The furious master of mankind dispatched Constantine Valdor to lead a host to prosperer, with orders to bring Magnus back to terror alive, to face judgment for what he had done.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not meant to be an execution, not without trial, not without the opportunity for Magnus to explain himself, and perhaps find some path to redemption.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor bore the Emperor's writ of censure, and the authority of the Magisterium, Lex Ultima, and the mission parameters were unambiguous.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Crimson King was to be taken, not slain.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Horus, who had already fallen to corruption, though none yet knew it, saw an opportunity to remove a potential ally from his father's side.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Warmaster intercepted communications with Lehman Rass, the Wolf King, whose space wolves' legion had been assigned to a company Valdor's custodians to Prospero.
[SPEAKER_01]: Using his authority as warmaster, and his knowledge of the ancient enmity, the twin-rust and Magnus, Horus convinced the Wolf King that bringing Magnus back alive would be a waste of time and resources.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mission parameters were changed without the Emperor's knowledge or consent, from a rest to execution.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor resisted this alteration, arguing against the wholesale destruction that rest now advocated.
[SPEAKER_01]: But his custodian force, for all its elite status, was too small to overall a primarx decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the corruption of Prospero's sorcerers became apparent in the heat of battle, even Valdor's objections fell silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: What should have been a diplomatic action became a massacre, and the Captain General found himself fighting alongside the very forces he had cautioned against unleashing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among the defenders of Prospero, there existed a warrior sect, who's skill in combat was spoken of, with something approaching awe, even among the thousand sons themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: their precognitive gifts, allowing them to perceive enemy attacks before they were launched and respond with counters.
[SPEAKER_01]: That seemed to go against the normal flow of cause and effect.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fought as a single consciousness, distributed across many bodies, their telepathic bonds weaving them together so tightly that they moved with a unified precision, that made them appear less like a group of warriors than a single fighter manifested in multiple bodies simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their dual-force swords were forged from psycho-crystal-infused serimite, inscribed with Sidious, corresponding to each warrior's secret names and great deeds, and even without the psychic charge that normally empowered them.
[SPEAKER_01]: These blades could share through power armour as easily as a hot knife through wax.
[SPEAKER_01]: Almost a hundred of these elite warriors cut a path toward Valdor himself during the height of the battle, believing that if they could wound or kill the leader of the Golden Host, the censure force might falter, and Prospero might yet be saved.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fought through the custodians and sentinel guard that surrounded the Captain General.
[SPEAKER_01]: Leaving bodies in their wake, their blades singing through the ash choked air of their dying
[SPEAKER_01]: Less than 30 of them survived long enough to reach Valdor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those 30 closed upon him as a single body.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their weapons raised in perfect synchronization for the killing blow.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sisters of silence who accompanied the imperial forces had been dampening the psychic abilities of the thousand sons throughout the engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their pariah nature, creating zones where sorcery simply ceased to function.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blade masters who faced Valdor had been stripped of their pre-cognition, robbed of the ability to perceive his attacks before he made them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But even without their gifts, 30 elite swordsmen attacking as one should have been sufficient to overwhelm any single warrior, no matter how skilled, but Valdor slew them all.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the last blade master fell, his life bleeding out onto the crystalline sands of prospero, the captain general bore only a single wound, one cut, from one blade, that had somehow found its way through his defenses, to leave red blood staining his golden armor.
[SPEAKER_01]: The many warriors who witnessed this feat would speak of it afterward with reverence and awe.
[SPEAKER_01]: His reaction time, they said, seemed to halt the flow of time itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved as though he experienced time differently than his opponents, perceiving their attacks while they were still forming in their minds, responding to threats before they had fully materialized.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was in the rest after the battle that observers in the Imperial Court first began to use a phrase that would follow Valdor for all his remaining years.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is another moment from that day that deserves to be remembered, though it is one of tragedy rather than triumph.
[SPEAKER_01]: Phoses to car was the captain of the thousand sun's second fellowship, and one of the greatest telekinetics on all of Prospero.
[SPEAKER_01]: Famed for his ability to generate shields of pure psychic force that could turn aside weapons fire from engines of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the battle turned against the defenders, he drew deeply upon his powers and raced toward the position where Lehman rusts commanded the assault.
[SPEAKER_01]: Determined to strike down the Wolf King or die in the attempt.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the strain of channeling such tremendous energies triggered something that had lane dormant within him for nearly two centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: The flesh changed, the mutation curse, that had secretly plagued the thousand sons since their founding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warping their bodies in grotesque and uncontrollable ways, whenever they push their psychic gifts too far.
[SPEAKER_01]: As to car ran toward his target, his flesh began to twist and flow, bones reshaping themselves beneath his skin.
[SPEAKER_01]: His body becoming something that bore less, and less resemblance to the proud warrior he had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor stepped into his path.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the Captain General's eyes, Fosis Takah saw himself reflected, saw what he had become, what nearly 200 years of careful control had finally failed to prevent.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the flesh changed had made of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The monster that stared back from that golden visor was not the warrior who had served the Emperor with such devotion.
[SPEAKER_01]: was not the friend and brother who had fought beside his fellow thousand sons through a hundred campaigns.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something that filled him with a horror.
[SPEAKER_01]: Monster vowed or cried, his spear raised for the killing stroke.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, Moses to car replied, and there was such sadness in his voice, such weary acceptance of what he had become, and what must now follow.
[SPEAKER_01]: He dropped his weapons, he closed his eyes, the golden blade found his heart, and death was a mercy he had not known to hope for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The battle for Prospero ended not with Imperial victory, but with a howling wound torn in the fabric of reality itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Magnus, broken and defeated by Lehman Ras, in a duel that had shattered his body, used the last of his strength to work one final great sorcery.
[SPEAKER_01]: In an instant, he and fifteen hundred of his surviving sons vanished from Prospero's surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: translated across impossible distances to reappear in the eye of terror, on a world that would come to be known as the planet of the sorcerers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warp rift that his departure created began to consume what remained of Prospero.
[SPEAKER_01]: Reality itself unraveling as the immaterial rushed in to fill the void.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only with the aid of Valdor's custodians were the space wolves able to extricate themselves from the destruction before the planet was swallowed entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even then, the evacuation was a desperate and bloody thing that claimed lives that
[SPEAKER_01]: In later years, Valdor would speak of Prospero, with a weariness that even his engineered emotional control could not entirely conceal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mission had been a failure by any meaningful measure.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been sent to bring Magnus back alive, and Magnus had escaped to join the enemies of mankind.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been sent to censure the thousands sons, and instead they had driven a legion
[SPEAKER_01]: The manipulation of Horace had not yet been discovered, and so the true architect of the tragedy remained hidden.
[SPEAKER_01]: Laughing perhaps had how easily he had turned the Emperor's servants against one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Disaster the record say, was there only reward, a world had burned, a legion had fallen.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the great unraveling that would come to be called the Horace Heresy, had claimed another victory, though none who fought on Prospero yet understood the scope of what they had lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: While the galaxy burned and brother turned against brother in the great civil war that would come to bear the warmaster's name, another conflict raged in secret beneath the very stones of the imperial palace, a war so desperate and so costly that it would consume nearly everything the legio custodies had built across the long centuries of unity and crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was the war within the webway, and though few outside the highest circles of Imperial power, ever knew it was being fought, its outcome would shape the fate of humanity for 10,000 years to come.
[SPEAKER_01]: to understand this hidden war, one must first understand what the emperor had been building in the darkness beneath his throne.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what dreams he had harbored for humanity's future before those dreams were shattered.
[SPEAKER_01]: The webway was an ancient thing, older than humanity itself, and network of tunnels woven through the space between real space and the immaterial by the
[SPEAKER_01]: in ages so remote that even they had forgotten the names of those who first conceived it.
[SPEAKER_01]: These passages allowed travel between distant stars, without exposure to the horrors of the warp, without the need for navigators to guide ships through that hellish realm, without the whispered temptations of things that hungered for mortal souls.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor discovered a fragment of this network beneath terror during the unification
[SPEAKER_01]: and he had conceived a plan of such staggering ambition that its completion would have changed everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would extend the web way.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would build new passages connecting all the worlds of humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would sever his species from the warp entirely, freeing them from the predations of chaos and the terrible risks of warp travel in a single magnificent stroke.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Golden Throne, the device which now serves as the Emperor's prison and life support, was originally designed for an entirely different purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a control nexus, a seat of power from which a sufficiently gifted cycle could open portals into the webway and maintain the protective wards that kept the human-built sections safe from demonic incursion.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor had intended it for Magnus the Red, whose psychic gifts were second only to his own, and who might have sat upon the throne for centuries, while the Emperor himself continued to guide humanity's destiny.
[SPEAKER_01]: but Magnus, in his desperate attempt to warn his father of Horace's betrayal, had unleashed psychic energies that shattered those carefully constructed wards.
[SPEAKER_01]: The demons of the warp came flooding through the breaches, and the emperor was forced to take his place upon the throne, not as a master directing a great work, but as a guardian, holding shut a door that could never again be allowed to open.
[SPEAKER_01]: For as long as the demons threatened the portal beneath the palace, the golden throne would be his prison.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dream of the webway, which might have elevated humanity beyond the reach of chaos forever, died in that moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war that followed lasted five years by the Imperial calendar, and it was fought in conditions that were difficult to come to terms with, for those who never witnessed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The custodian guard established offensive positions throughout the human-built sections of the webway, centered upon the city of Calistar, a place of aildarry construction, where architecture seemed far more advanced than anything humans had made.
[SPEAKER_01]: and bridges spanned Kazem so deep that anyone who fell from them would spend a very long time falling before reaching the bottom.
[SPEAKER_01]: Behind these barricades, Macanacum workers labored frantically to repair damaged sections and seal the rifts through which the enemy poured.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before them, the golden warriors of the Ligio custodies launched counterattack after counterattack.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their guardian spears, reaping a harvest of demonic flesh that would have seemed miraculous, had it not been so utterly futile.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the enemy they faced wars in the most literal sense, infinite.
[SPEAKER_01]: Demons are not creatures of flesh and blood, as mortals understand such things.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are manifestations of emotion and belief given form by the warp, and when they are slain in the material realm, they do not truly die, they simply discorporate, their essence returning to the immaterial to eventually reform and attack again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every demon banished by a custodians' blade would one day return to the fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every victory one by the defenders was temporary at best.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scales of the war were brutally simple.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium was bleeding against an enemy that could never truly be beaten.
[SPEAKER_01]: The custodian guard had numbered approximately 10,000 warriors at the war's beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 10,000, as they were known, each one must work, each one irreplaceable in any quick time frame.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the war's end, fewer than 1,000 remained.
[SPEAKER_01]: At 90% casualty rate sustained over years of continuous combat against an enemy that knew neither fatigue nor mercy, nor the concept of strategic withdrawal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every custodian who fell was a loss that was hard to recover.
[SPEAKER_01]: The process that created them took decades, and there were no decades to spare.
[SPEAKER_01]: The defenders fought knowing that they were spending a currency that could not be replenished.
[SPEAKER_01]: That every brother who died in those tunnels was one fewer who would stand upon the walls when Horace finally came for terror itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: and what of Constantine Valdor during these desperate years?
[SPEAKER_01]: The Captain General did not fight within the webway himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: His role was different, and in some ways more terrible, he commanded the war from terrorist surface, coordinating the allocation of forces between the secret conflict below and the preparations for the siege that everyone knew was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: He served as liaison between the emperor who sat trapped upon the golden throne and could communicate only through psychic visions, and the wider war effort that demanded attention, even as the palace's foundations were soaked in the blood of his brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: It fell to Valdor to decide which custodians would descend into the webway, and which would remain above.
[SPEAKER_01]: It fell to him to manage the impossible balance of a dual war, to balance the immediate existential threat beneath the palace, against the approaching existential threat that marched ever closer with every passing month.
[SPEAKER_01]: It fell to him to watch day after day and year after year as the reports came in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another tribune fallen, another squad overwhelmed, another section of the defensive line collapsed and rebuilt.
[SPEAKER_01]: While Istvan burned and the drop-site massacre claimed the lives of primax and shattered the strength of their legions, Valdor remained on terror, while Calth fell to treachery and the word bearer's ritual tore a wound in reality that would come to be called the Ruinstorm.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor remained on terror, while the loyal legions fought and bled and died across a thousand battlefields, desperately trying to reach the throne world before Horace could claim it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor remained on terror, watching his brothers die by the thousands in the tunnels below, unable to join them, unable to save them, able only to ensure that their sacrifice was spent
[SPEAKER_01]: One can only imagine what that role cost him.
[SPEAKER_01]: If indeed he still possess the capacity to feel such costs, 9,000 golden warriors, each one known to him personally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each one a brother, in the truest sense the word could carry, for beings such as they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: 9,000 funerals that could never be held.
[SPEAKER_01]: 9,000 names that would be remembered only by those few who survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: 9,000 empty places in the ranks that would never be filled.
[SPEAKER_01]: The end came, when even the desperate measures that had held the line for all those years finally proved insufficient.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dracnean had come, the end of empires, the echo of the first murder, a demon so ancient and so terrible that it predated the chaos gods themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was born from the first act of murder in human history.
[SPEAKER_01]: When one of humanity's earliest ancestors took a stone and struck down his brother, and it had lurked beneath every killing since, growing stronger with each life taken in violence.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could not be destroyed, not even by the Emperor himself, for it was woven into the fabric of human nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor ordered the unspoken sanction, the sacrifice of 1,000 cycles, whose deaths would power the golden throne for a single day without his presence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he descended into the webway to face the demon personally, leaving his throne
[SPEAKER_01]: The conflict was witnessed by the few surviving custodians who fought at their master's side, and their accounts speak of it with something approaching or.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor appeared as a burning dawn in that sunless realm.
[SPEAKER_01]: His psychic might blazing forth, until it seemed the tunnels themselves were filled with gold and fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: He summoned an army of the loyal dead, spectral warriors reathed in flame, echoes of those who had fallen in his service, fighting one last time against the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Among them, some witnesses claim to see a giant among giants, a figure with great hands beared who might have been the echo of Ferris Manus.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Gorgon who had died at Istvan briefly reborn in his father's emulating wrath.
[SPEAKER_01]: A draconian confronted the emperor, taking the form of a stone-age warlord, a figure from the very dawn of human violence.
[SPEAKER_01]: It struck at the master of mankind, with talons that had ended empires, piercing his back, drawing blood, inflicting what the demon claimed would be his death.
[SPEAKER_01]: but the emperor tore the creature free from his own flesh, and forced it into the shape of a sword.
[SPEAKER_01]: Drakenyan could not be destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could only be imprisoned, and a prison requires a jailer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rai and Dimeon had served the emperor since Valdor had claimed him as a child from his mother's domain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had risen through the ranks of the custodian guard to become a tribune, had commanded
[SPEAKER_01]: through decades of warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been shown the Emperor's true vision for humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had understood the dream of the webway, in ways that few others ever would.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had been prepared, though he did not know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: For this single moment since the day Constantine Valdor took him from his mother's arms.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor hurled the demon sword at Rah, impaling the tribune through his chest, binding
[SPEAKER_01]: and raw understood in that instant of searing pain, what his master required of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor spoke a single word into his mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ra in Dimeon, draconian's golden jailer, the son of a water thief, abade the last command he would ever receive.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned and fled into the infinite depths of the webway, carrying within him, a horror that could unmake civilizations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Running until he could run no more, and then running still further, bearing his burden into regions of that labyrinthine realm,
[SPEAKER_01]: He was never seen again.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emperor sealed the webway gate behind his retreating servant and returned to the golden throne.
[SPEAKER_01]: His dream of humanity's liberation now ashes scattered across the corpse of a hope that could never be rekindled.
[SPEAKER_01]: After this event, the emperor spoke to Diocletian chorus, one of the surviving custodians who had witnessed the war's final hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war is over, Diocletian.
[SPEAKER_01]: Win or lose, Horace has damped us all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Man kind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species last breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand, but it will fall diaclution.
[SPEAKER_01]: It will fall.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shining path is lost to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we rage against the dying of the light.
[SPEAKER_01]: The webway project was dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: 9,000 custodians had given their lives for a future that would never come.
[SPEAKER_01]: And somewhere in the infinite darkness of the webway, Ra in Dimeon ran on, carrying the end of empires away from the realm of humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: a golden figure, bearing an impossible burden into eternity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor had watched it all from above, unable to intervene, unable to save his brothers, unable to do anything, but ensure that their sacrifice bought what time it could for the war that was still to come.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shining path was lost, only the dying of the light remained.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Horus came at last to claim terror, bringing with him the corrupted remnants of nine space marine legions, and all the demonic hosts that the powers of chaos could vomit forth from the warp.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor stood ready to meet him, upon walls that had been built to withstand the ending of all things.
[SPEAKER_01]: The siege of terror would be the crucible in which the fate of humanity was decided.
[SPEAKER_01]: And though the Captain General had already given more than any soul should ever be asked to give, their remains still more to sacrifice before the darkness was turned back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roguel Dawn, the Praetorian of Terror, who had labored for years to transform the Imperial Palace into a fortress capable ofwithstanding the assault he knew was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had identified for crisis points, whose fall would doom the defense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Four gates and walls and bastions that must be held at any cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: For if any one of them were breached, the traitors would pour through, and all
[SPEAKER_01]: The Colosseum gate was among these critical positions, and it was there that Valdor took his place alongside Jagatai Khan of the White Skars and the Blood Angels' first captain Raldoran.
[SPEAKER_01]: Commanding a coalition of forces drawn from those legions and the remnants of the custodian guard.
[SPEAKER_01]: The enemies they faced were terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: The deathguard came in their rotting thousands, their bodies blessed by knurgo, with pestilences that could fail ordinary men with a breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their advance accompanied by clouds of flies so thick that the defenders were forced to wear cumbersome protective equipment that lessen their effectiveness, even as it preserve their lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thousand sons, exiled sorcerers who had once been brothers to the Imperium, launched psychic assaults that sacked the will to fight, and summoned demons of such horror that just looking upon them, could shatter a mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the custodians who fought at Valdor's side were no ordinary warriors, and the nature of their creation proved to be a weapon in itself against
[SPEAKER_01]: Their souls had been shaped by the emperor's own hand, forged in the same fires that had crafted the master of mankind's will across millennia of preparation for this very conflict.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where the touch of chaos could corrupt ordinary men, and even transhuman space marines, the golden warriors of the Legio custodies stood as a shield to everything the ruinous powers represented, their very presence, a rejection of the warps influence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Loyalist marines who saw Valdor in combat during the fighting spoke afterward of what they had seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: The captain general moved through the ranks of the traitor legions, as easily as those same traitors might have moved through formations of ordinary humans or lesser zenos.
[SPEAKER_01]: His abalone and spear reaping corrupted flesh that seemed almost effortless, where other defenders struggled and bled and died to hold their positions, Valdor carved paths of destruction through enemy formations that should have been impenetrable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Colosseum gate held against everything the forces of chaos could bring against it, the gate held.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet even, as Valdor fought upon the walls, other matters demanded his attention in the darkness beneath those same fortifications.
[SPEAKER_01]: Basilio Faux was a name that belonged to an age before the Imperium existed, a genetic engineer so old that he might have been born before the long-night itself swallowed humanity's first civilization.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had served various warlords throughout the age of strife, creating biological weapons and gene crafted abominations that he unleashed upon terror's suffering population, with what witnesses described as glyphoabandoned.
[SPEAKER_01]: unlike later practitioners of the genetic arts who tried to perfect humanity or preserve it against extinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Foe was an anarchist who expected the species to destroy itself and saw no reason not to enjoy the spectacle while it lasted.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor had captured him during the unification wars and imprisoned him in the blackstone vaults beneath the palace, where walls laced with cadian mine, noctilith, rendered psychic interference impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: There he had remained for centuries, two dangerous to release, but two potentially useful to destroy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until the chaos of the siege provided him an opportunity to escape.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor hunted him through the subterranean passages that honeycomb terrors crossed, tracking the ancient monster through tunnels that had not seen light since before the emperor first rose to power.
[SPEAKER_01]: When at last he found foe, wounded, captured by a roaming nightlaught whose demonic patrons had revealed the gene which is identity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Captain General faced a choice that would have troubled a more conventional conscience.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Silio Foe claimed he could create a weapon capable of killing all space marines, or primax, or transhuman beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the sort of horror that should have been destroyed without hesitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sort of knowledge that no sane mind would allow to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Valdor was not guided by conventional morality, and the siege had grown desperate enough that even abominations might serve a purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saved foe from the night lord who had been about to execute him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He returned the ancient engineer to imperial custody, not for punishment, but for utilisation.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are no bystanders in the war of life and death, Valdor had once said, and in those words lay a pragmatism that governed his every decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: If a weapon existed that could end primax, then that weapon could end horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: The morality of its creation mattered less than the survival of everything the Emperor had built.
[SPEAKER_01]: The final hours of the siege brought with them a desperate gamble, that would either save the Imperium or doom it utterly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace, in his arrogance or his cunning, had lowered the void shields protecting his flagship, presenting the loyalists with an opportunity that could not be ignored.
[SPEAKER_01]: It might have been a trap, but with the palace warms crumbling, and the defenders being pushed back toward the thrung room itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no longer any choice but to take the bait and pray that whatever awaited them aboard that corrupted vessel could be overcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Operation and Abbasis was the name given to this final assault.
[SPEAKER_01]: Four strike companies teleporting directly onto the vengeful spirit in a last attempt to end the war by killing its architect.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor himself led the hatiron guard, his personal companions, sangrinius brought his blood angels, rogued on, commanded his imperial fists, and vowed or led a company
[SPEAKER_01]: the last remnants of the 10,000, who had once been humanity's greatest protectors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador the sigilite took the emperor's place upon the golden throne before they departed.
[SPEAKER_01]: For someone had to maintain the psychic barrier that kept the demons from pouring into terror through the breech's magnets had created so long ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was an act of sacrifice that all present new would be fatal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador was powerful beyond any baseline human who had ever lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was not the Emperor, and the effort of maintaining the throne would burn through his life force in hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor, before he departed for what might have been the last time, gave Malkador a new name.
[SPEAKER_01]: What awaited the loyalists aboard the vengeful spirit was worse than any of them had imagined.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horus had prepared for their coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: Using the dark powers his patron gods had granted him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warmaster scattered the teleporting strike forces throughout his vessel, separating them, isolating them.
[SPEAKER_01]: turning what should have been a coordinated assault into a desperate struggle for survival in the bowels of a ship that had become something other than a ship.
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where reality itself had grown thin, and the laws of nature no longer reliably apply.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor and his custodians materialized in darkness surrounded by horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Demons pressed in from every direction, shifting and flowing in ways that confused and disoriented.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their hunger for the golden warrior souls, a palpable force that seemed to thicken the very air.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that moment, for the first time in his long existence, Constantine Valdor felt something
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not fear for his own survival, such concerns had been engineered out of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: If indeed he had ever possessed the metal.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the fear of failure, the cold and terrible realization, that he could not fulfill the duty for which he had been created.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor was somewhere aboard this vessel, fighting his way toward a confrontation with Horrors that would decide the fate of humanity, and Valdor could not reach him, could
[SPEAKER_01]: could not stand at his side in the moment when his presence was needed most.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Captain General had never failed in his duty before.
[SPEAKER_01]: The possibility that he might fail now at the moment of ultimate crisis was a horror worse than any demon the warp could spawn.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the killing work did not stop simply because hope had dimmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor fought his way through the darkness, slaughtering the enemies that tried to buy his path.
[SPEAKER_01]: His spear blazing with the light of the Emperor's own forging, as it cut through demonic flesh.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not reach his master in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew this, felt it in his bones, but he would not stop trying until his body failed him entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The forces of the Warmaster found him before he could fight his way clear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just air-intermanators, the elite of Horace's own legion, along with veteran wordbearers whose devotion to chaos, had made them something more and less than what they had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fell upon Valdeur and his remaining custodians in numbers that would have overwhelmed any normal force.
[SPEAKER_01]: The captain general fought with everything he had.
[SPEAKER_01]: His reactions still faster than anything around him.
[SPEAKER_01]: His blade still finding throats and joints, and the gaps in Terminator armor where death could slip through.
[SPEAKER_01]: A group of justairin pinned him against a bulkhead.
[SPEAKER_01]: A power sword wielded by one Heluspsichar found its way through Valdor's defenses and impaled him
[SPEAKER_01]: Aberdon was there, the first captain of the sons of Horus, the warrior who would one day become the greatest enemy, the Imperium had ever known.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pressed the attack with his forces, seeking to finish what his subordinates had begun, to claim the life of the Emperor's most loyal servant, as a trophy for the Dark Gods.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor wounded and outnumbered and fighting against the odds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somehow managed to wound a badminton with his spear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The weapons properties had always been unique among the Emperor's creations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where its sister blade, the Dionysian spear, granted truths to those it cut, the Apologian spear granted truths to its wielder, from those it wounded.
[SPEAKER_01]: Normally this power could not function against inanimate objects or the unliving, but a battle was neither.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a vessel of corruption.
[SPEAKER_01]: His soul stained with the touch of powers that had existed since before humanity first crawled from the oceans.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through that brief contact, Valdor glimpsed the future.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw ten thousand years of war stretching out before him, like an endless road paved with bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw a baton leading Crusade after Crusade against the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw world's burning, and population screaming, and the forces of chaos growing ever stronger, as the centuries passed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw the imperium grinding itself to dust against enemies that could never be permanently defeated, saw the slow decay of everything the Emperor had built, saw the dying light that would flicker ever dimmer, until at last it was extinguished entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vision lasted only an instant, but it was enough to change something fundamental in Valdor's understanding of what was to come.
[SPEAKER_01]: He looked at a button, this warrior, who had not yet become the monster, he would one day be, but who carried within him, the seeds of all that future horror, and he spoke a single word.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dispoiler, then he punched him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roguel Dawn's intervention broke the gridlock, his imperial fists crashing into the flank of the traitor forces, and buying Valdor the seconds he needed to disengage.
[SPEAKER_01]: The captain general escaped with several of his companions, leaving behind the bodies of custodians who would never rise again, and carrying with him wounds that would take time to heal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vision did not leave him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The knowledge of what a baton would become, of what the future held, of how utterly the Emperor's dream would fail, despite everything they sacrificed to preserve it.
[SPEAKER_01]: This understanding settled into Valdor's consciousness like poison, and it would colour everything that he would go on to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They found the emperor in Lupacouse court, the great chamber at the heart of the vengeful spirit, where father and most favored son had fought their final battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace was dead, Horace dead as such a being could be, his body reduced to little more than a skeleton, within charge and smoking armour.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever power the chaos gods had poured into him could find no refuge from the oblivion the Emperor had decreed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of the magnificent warrior who had once been the brightest of the primax, nothing remained but ash and bone and the echoes of a corruption that had doomed half the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sangrinius, Laney Abai, his white wings broken, his beautiful face frozen in death.
[SPEAKER_01]: The angel had fallen first, giving his life in a futile attempt to reach whatever fragment of his brother might have remained beneath the corruption.
[SPEAKER_01]: His sacrifice had purchased nothing but his own ending.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, some whispered afterward, it might have weakened Horus just enough for the
[SPEAKER_01]: and the emperor himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor had served the master of mankind for a long time, had fought beside him through the unification wars, and the great crusade, and the desperate defense of terror itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had seen the emperor wounded before, had witnessed the toll that even his magnificent body could suffer in battle against worthy foes.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he had never seen anything like what lay before him now.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor was broken.
[SPEAKER_01]: His body had been shattered beyond any hope of forehealing, his flesh torn, and his bones crushed, and his organs ruptured.
[SPEAKER_01]: He lay in the ruin of his armour, like a fallen god, and the only sign that life remained within him at all was the faint tortured rhythm of his breathing,
[SPEAKER_01]: Before they could lift him, before they could begin the desperate work of carrying him back to the golden throne that might preserve what remained of his existence, the Emperor spoke a single word.
[SPEAKER_01]: It might have been now, it might have been no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who heard it would debate its meaning for centuries afterward, for the master of mankind's voice was barely a whisper, and his intent remained forever unclear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did he command them to act immediately, to place him upon the throne before his spirit fled entirely?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or did he beg them not to?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did he plead in that final moment, for the release of death, rather than the eternal imprisonment that awaited him?
[SPEAKER_01]: No one would ever know for certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor looked upon the broken form of the being he had been created to protect, and he wept.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other surviving custodians wept with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tribune Diocletian Chorus, who had witnessed the horrors of the Webway War, and emerged with his sanity intact.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wept.
[SPEAKER_01]: The golden warriors who had held themselves apart from human emotion, for centuries, who had been remade into something beyond such weakness, stood in that chamber and let their tears fall upon the blood soaked deck.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roguel Dawn would later speculate that Valdor went half mad from the shock grief of that moment, and perhaps there is truth in his assessment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something broke in the Captain General when he saw what had become of his master, some final remnant of whatever faith or hope had sustained him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through all the long years of service, the Emperor was not dead, but what remained of him might have been worse than death.
[SPEAKER_01]: and Valdor had been powerless to prevent it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They carried the emperor back to terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: They placed him upon the golden throne, where Malkador had already begun to crumble from the effort of maintaining the barrier in his master's absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: the sigilite managed only a few final words, the four his life fled entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: His sacrifice complete, his reward nothing but the ending of his existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Constantine Valdor, who had given everything and failed nonetheless, stood in the shadows of the throne room and said nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The siege of terror ended, as all seages must eventually end, and the survivors were left together what remained of their lives from the wreckage of a civilization.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would never again be what it had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace was dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emperor sat in tombed upon the golden throne, his voice silenced.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Constantine Valdor, the first of the 10,000, the shield who had failed to protect his master from the wound that would never heal, walked the corridors of the imperial palace, like a ghost haunting the halls of his own failure.
[SPEAKER_01]: those who encountered him in the months and years after the heresy's end, spoke of a changed man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where once he had been controlled and measured in all things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now he displayed traits that those who knew him found deeply troubling.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was more brutal in his assessments, more impatient with those who wasted his time, more prone to outbursts of anger that seemed entirely at odds with the engineered serenity that had always surrounded him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vision he had glimpsed through the Appalonian spear, 10,000 years of grinding war, of slow decay, of everything the Emperor had built crumbling inexorably toward oblivion, had settled into his consciousness like a splinter that could not be removed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He rarely left the throne room in those days.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Great Chamber where the Emperor sat had become something like a watch station for the Captain General, a place where he could stand in attendance upon the master he had failed to save.
[SPEAKER_01]: What passed through his mind during those long hours of contemplation, no one can say.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he prayed, if such a being was capable of prayer, perhaps he simply waited, though for what he might have been waiting, none could guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: The custodian guard transformed themselves in the wake of their failure, adopting the trappings of penitence, rather than the proud warriors they had once been.
[SPEAKER_01]: They changed their cloaks from the rich red that had marked them throughout the great crusade to the black of mourning, a visible symbol of the grief they would carry.
[SPEAKER_01]: They swore oaths of penance, committing themselves to an eternal watch over the master, they had been unable to protect in his hour of greatest need.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their tyrant guard, the emperors in a most companions, went further still.
[SPEAKER_01]: They renounce their golden armour entirely, standing their watches in nothing but cloaks and loincloths and black helms, then near nakedness, a proclamation of shame.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the Grand Council of Reconstruction convened to determine what shaped the Imperium would take in the aftermath of the Heresy, Valdor was present but contributed nothing to the deliberations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rogodorn and Roboot Gilliman debated the future of humanity's realm.
[SPEAKER_01]: argued over the division of the legions and the structure of governance and a thousand other matters that would shape the next ten millennia and the captain general simply watched.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sided with neither faction, he offered no counsel, he was there and that was all that could be said of his participation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he already knew that none of it would matter, perhaps the vision had shown him that whatever decisions were made in that chamber, the outcome would be the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Slow decay, endless war, the dying of the light, that the emperor himself had prophesied in the depths of the webway.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, one night, he was simply gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It happened around the same time that Lehman rusted on his own mysterious journey, though whether there was any connection between the two disappearances has never been established.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Wolf King announced his intention to seek the tree of life in the eye of terror, to find some means of healing the Emperor, or restoring what had been lost, a quest that most believed to be hopeless, but which rust pursued nonetheless, vanishing into the warp with a company of his most loyal warriors and never returning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Valdor offered no such explanation.
[SPEAKER_01]: he simply slipped out of the Imperial Palace during the dead of night, passing through gates that should have been impossible to breach undetected, walking paths that none witnessed him travel.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had resigned the Captain General's position to a successor before his departure, an orderly transition that suggests this was no impulsive flight but a deliberate choice, long contemplated and carefully prepared.
[SPEAKER_01]: His fate remains unknown, even to the custodians who succeeded him.
[SPEAKER_01]: They maintained no records of where he went, or why.
[SPEAKER_01]: They possessed no knowledge of what became of the greatest of them, after he walked away from everything he had been created to protect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some believe he succumbed at last, to the grief that the siege had awakened in him.
[SPEAKER_01]: that he sought some quiet corner of the galaxy, where he could simply cease to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others maintain that he embarked upon a mission of such importance, that even his own brotherhood could not be trusted with its nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: A secret duty that continues still in the shadows between the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then there are the whispers, rumours that have circulated through the darkest corners of the Imperium from a Lenya.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spoken only in places where the inquisitions ears cannot reach, pieced together from fragments and hints, and the testimonies of those who claim to have glimpsed something impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: They speak of a figure known as the King in yellow, a being who commands resources that would make primax envious, and who pursues goals that neither the Imperium nor its enemies can fully understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: This figure, the whispers say, dwells in a place called the city of dust, a pocket dimension existing outside the material universe entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: A realm where a palace of impossible scale sits upon a white beach beside an infinite black ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beneath the sky dominated by the burning eye of the great rift,
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who have glimpsed this place, speak of it with the haunted voices.
[SPEAKER_01]: Within this domain the rumours continue, their wait thousands of winged astarties held in stasis.
[SPEAKER_01]: Space marines bearing wings that sprout organically from their bodies.
[SPEAKER_01]: Reminiscent of the lost angel sangrinius himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are hundreds of cloned blanks, each hosting beings of order rather than chaos.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a golden war fleet of such power that its deployment could shift the balance of any sector war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Five elder craft worlds, Oothway, Alaytok, and three others whose names are spoken rarely even among their own kind, have allied in a coalition dedicated to locating and destroying this king in yellow.
[SPEAKER_01]: An application of force that the ancient race reserves only for threats of the most existential nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: Multiple traitor legions have devoted resources to hunting him, the alpha legion and the word bearers, the emperor's children and the nightlords, the thousand sons and the iron warriors, all united in their desire to see this mysterious figure eliminated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would the enemies of humanity expense such effort against someone who appears to oppose them?
[SPEAKER_01]: What threat could this king and yellow possibly represent to powers that have ward against the Imperium for ten millennia?
[SPEAKER_01]: In the closing years of the 41st millennium, a hexagramatic cipher was decoded by those who had spent decades attempting to unravel the mystery of the king in yellow's identity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cipher had been recovered from the city of dust itself, and its contents consisted of a single name.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first words of an identifier that stretched to millions of characters, but which began with something recognizable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constantine Valdor
[SPEAKER_01]: The identification remains unconfirmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nature of the King and Yellow, his true purposes, whether he serves the Emperor still, or has become something else, all of this remains shrouded in deliberate mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who have investigated too deeply have a tendency to disappear, their fates unknown.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the pattern, for those with eyes to see it, is consistent with everything we know of the first of the 10,000.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolute dedication to a cause, willingness to act outside the bounds that constrain others, to employ methods that some morality would condemn, to sacrifice whatever must be sacrificed in pursuit of a goal that justifies any cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vision that extends across centuries, patience that spans millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the King and Yellow is indeed Constantine Valdor, then his duty did not end when he walked out of the Imperial Palace 10,000 years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: It simply changed its form as he whispered it would, transformed into something that could not be accomplished from within the Imperiums boundaries.
[SPEAKER_01]: and if it is not him, if the Cypher was a deception, if the rumours a story is told to frighten those who peer too deeply into shadows, then the first of the ten thousand remains lost, his fate as mysterious as his origins, his story incomplete in ways that may never be resolved.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle Torven, close the book slowly, his fingers lingering upon its strange cover, as though reluctant to sever the connection that had bound him to its contents for so many hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cargo hold had grown cold around him.
[SPEAKER_01]: the recycled air carrying a chill that seemed to have seaped into his bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he finally looked out from the final page, he was surprised to find that the chrono on his wrist indicated that hours had passed since he had first broken the containers seal.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not eaten, had not moved, had scarcely breathed while the story of Constantine Valdor unfolded before him in archaic high gothic script that seemed to glow faintly in the dim light of his hand luminator.
[SPEAKER_01]: You
[SPEAKER_01]: His legs protested painfully as he shifted his weight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cramped muscles of his back and thighs, reminding him that he was no longer the young man, who had once thought nothing of sleeping in cargo nets during long halls between systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a trader in his middle years, soft in places where his father had been hard, and hours of sitting motionless, on cold metal decking, had extracted a price that would take a day or so to fully pay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, as he massageed feeling back into his calves and worked the stiffness from his shoulders, Kyle found that he could not bring himself to regret a single moment of his discomfort.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story he had read was not the kind of history they taught in the scholars of Ultramar, where the Imperium's past was taught in broad strokes of glory and sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of heroes whose virtue was beyond question and villains whose corruption was absolute.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was something older and sadder, and more honest than any imperial text he had ever encountered.
[SPEAKER_01]: It spoke of a warrior who had been engineered to feel nothing, and yet who had wept at his master's broken body.
[SPEAKER_01]: It spoke of duty that transcended death, and loyalty that outlasted empires.
[SPEAKER_01]: It spoke of a being who had given everything he was, and everything he might have been to a cause that demanded still more, until at last there was nothing left to give.
[SPEAKER_01]: The merchants' oath hummed around him as he walked, the soft vibration of systems that had carried countless people across the void before him, and would carry countless more after he was gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a good ship, he thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: A ship with secrets, a ship that had kept faith with this strange book for who knew how long, waiting for someone to find it, and read it, and remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he emerged at last into the main cargo hold, the artificial lighting seemed to bright after so many hours in darkness, and he stood blinking for a long moment while his eyes adjusted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the armored porthole above the loading ramp, he could see the stars of Ultramar spread across the void, like diamonds scattered on black velvet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kyle did not know what he would do with the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not sell it, the very thought felt like a betrayal of something sacred, though he could not have explained why.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not simply keep it hidden, either, not when the story it contained deserve to be remembered by more than one merchant trader with ink-stained fingers and a modest route through the 500 worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he thought, he would find someone worthy to receive it.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chronicle, perhaps, or a remembranceer in the old tradition.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone who would understand what these pages contained and
[SPEAKER_01]: The story of Constantine Valdor had survived 10,000 years to reach him here, in this forgotten corner of Ultramar, and it seemed wrong to let it fade back into obscurity, simply because he did not know what else to do with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: For now, though, he would keep it close.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would read it again more slowly this time, letting the words settle into his memory until he could recite them from heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in quiet moments, when the merchants' oath was sailing between stars and the void outside his porthole, seemed to stretch toward infinity.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would think of the golden warrior who had given everything to
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know if Constantine Valdor still lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know if the whispers of the King in yellow were truth or legend or something stranger still.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he knew this much, the story he carried was worth preserving, worth remembering, worth passing on to those who would come after him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor's shield had not been forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not entirely, not yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps, Kyle thought, as the warp engines began there for milieu wine.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps, in a galaxy of darkness and despair, the simple act of remembering was its own small form of defiance.
[SPEAKER_01]: A candle held against the dying of the light.
[SPEAKER_01]: A whispered refusal to let the shadows claim everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: The merchants' oath slipped into the warp, carrying its cargo of secrets toward whatever destiny awaited.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the stars of Ultramar burned on in the endless night.