The psychic command of the Adeptus Custodes was not a suggestion; it was an absolute. The bickering and politicking of the High Lords died in their throats. Their authority, which shaped the lives of trillions, was a flickering candle in the face of this golden, implacable sun.
Even Lord Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch and Lord Commander, was taken aback. For ten thousand years, his father had been silent, a tortured engine of psychic light. That he would, in any capacity, "take notice" of anything was a miracle beyond the comprehension of even the most faithful.
"My Lord Primarch," Shield-Captain Valerius's mental voice stated, though his helmeted gaze remained fixed on Rimuru. "The path to the Throneroom is open. The Master of Mankind awaits." He turned, his golden armor seeming to blaze with an inner light. "The anomaly will come with us. Alone."
"I will accompany him," Guilliman stated, his voice a low growl of absolute, non-negotiable authority. "I am his sponsor. I will not send him into my father's presence without standing beside him."
The Shield-Captain paused for a single, tense heartbeat, the two demigods—one of flesh, one of duty—locked in a silent contest of wills. Finally, the Custodian conceded.
Varrus and Celestine, for the first time, were relegated to the status of mere spectators, their authority utterly nullified. They could only watch as Guilliman, Rimuru, and the silent, golden Custodian Guard turned and departed the chamber, leaving the High Lords of Terra to their stunned, impotent silence.
The journey to the Golden Throne was a descent into the deepest and most sacred heart of the Imperium. They walked for what felt like miles through corridors of black marble and gold, each step taking them deeper into the history and sorrow of humanity. They passed through halls guarded by Custodians who stood as motionless as statues, their vigil unbroken for centuries. They crossed great adamantium blast doors that groaned open for the first time in living memory, revealing causeways that spanned chasms of humming, arcane machinery.
With every step, the psychic pressure that Rimuru had felt from orbit intensified. It was no longer a distant scream, but the roar of a star, a sun of pure, unending agony and unimaginable willpower. It was a physical force that made the air hum and the metal of the walls vibrate.
Guilliman walked with a heavy, somber tread, the joyous reunion of a son returning home replaced by the grim duty of a warden visiting his most sacred prisoner. This was a place of profound personal tragedy for him, and the psychic onslaught was a familiar torment.
Rimuru, however, felt it differently. His very being, a nexus of order and skill, acted as a natural buffer. The psychic storm battered against him, but it could find no purchase, no emotional hook of fear or ambition to latch onto. He simply perceived it for what it was: a catastrophic, unimaginable expenditure of energy.
They finally arrived before a set of doors so vast they dwarfed even the gates of the strategium. They were wrought of gold and adamantium, depicting the Emperor's triumphs during the Great Crusade. This was the Eternity Gate.
It opened not with a sound, but with a silent parting of light, revealing the Sanctum Sanctorum.
The chamber was a cavern of impossible scale, a fusion of a continent-spanning cathedral and a divine life-support machine. Great, crackling conduits of energy, each as thick as a starship, snaked across the floor and ceiling, all converging on the center of the room. The air was a whirlwind of raw psychic power, and the sound was a deafening symphony of roaring machinery, crackling energy, and the silent, soul-shattering scream of the Emperor's eternal vigil.
And in the center of it all, upon a mountain of gold and arcane technology, was the Golden Throne.
It was a machine of terrible, intricate beauty, a web of stasis fields, life-support tubes, and psycho-conductive machinery that reached up into the darkness like the grasping fingers of a dying god. At its heart, almost lost in the blinding glare of the psychic light it projected, sat a figure. Withered, skeletal, and impossibly small, it was the physical anchor for the maelstrom of power that held the Imperium together: the Master of Mankind, the God-Emperor.
Guilliman fell to one knee, his head bowed, overwhelmed by the sheer, tragic presence of his father. The Custodians stood their ground, their armor and their souls forged to endure this very presence for all time.
Rimuru remained standing, his gaze fixed on the skeletal figure. He saw past the light and the power. He saw a fractured, shattered consciousness, a mind spread across a thousand different battlefields at once. A will holding back a ravenous ocean of daemons from a hole in reality beneath the Palace. A consciousness desperately trying to guide a billion ships through the darkness. A soul burning itself as fuel to keep a failing empire alive for one more second.
He was not looking at a god. He was looking at the most tortured prisoner in the history of the universe.
And then, out of the roaring, chaotic inferno of the Emperor's mind, a single, impossibly ancient and powerful thought isolated itself. It was not made of words, but of pure, raw concept, and it focused on him with the intensity of a dying star. It spoke directly into Rimuru's soul.
<...Anomaly... Unexpected... You are not of the Great Game... not of the Great Devourer... not of the Silent Ones...>
The thought was a question, a statement, and a profound act of recognition all at once.
The question that had followed Rimuru across a hostile galaxy was now being asked by the entity at the very center of it all.