Guilliman's composure, the discipline of a demigod who had commanded legions and held a dying empire together, finally broke. He stared at Rimuru, his face a mask of disbelief, hope, and terror all at once. "Fix... his chair?" he repeated, the words a hoarse whisper.
Then the full, crushing weight of the implication hit him. The Golden Throne. The failing, ten-thousand-year-old engine of his father's agony and humanity's salvation. The possibility that it could be mended.
He seized Rimuru's shoulders, his immense strength, even held in check, was like a clamp of adamantium. The Primarch's eyes, which had seen the birth of the Imperium and the death of his brothers, were now filled with the desperate, pleading hope of a lost son.
"He spoke to you?" Guilliman demanded, his voice cracking. "Truly? You heard his voice? And he asked this of you?"
"It was not a voice of words," Rimuru replied, his own mind still reeling from the contact. "It was a… request. A projection of knowledge. He showed me the machine. It is breaking. He asked if I could fix it."
Shield-Captain Valerius and his Custodes, who had stood as silent golden statues, now stirred. A wave of unreadable emotion washed through their psychic link. They were the Companions, the guardians of the Throne. They had watched it decay, seal by seal, conduit by conduit, for a hundred centuries, their greatest shame their inability to halt the inevitable. And now, this anomaly, this xenos, was claiming their Master had asked him to do what they never could.
There was no decision to be made. There was no debate to be had. A request from the Emperor, however faint, however impossible to verify, was a command more absolute than any law.
Guilliman released Rimuru, his weary posture gone, replaced by the fierce, indomitable energy of a general with a new, singular purpose. "This changes everything," he declared, his voice ringing with the authority of the Lord Commander. "All other concerns—your journey, the political state of the Imperium, the wars on a thousand fronts—are now secondary to this. This is the only war that matters."
He turned to the Shield-Captain. "Valerius! This sanctum is now a workshop. The entity Rimuru Tempest is to be given unrestricted access. He is to be protected with your lives. No one, not the High Lords, not the Ecclesiarchy, not even my own brothers should they return, is to interfere. This is my decree, in the Emperor's name."
The Shield-Captain slammed his guardian spear against the floor, the sound a thunderclap of agreement.
"But how?" Kael's voice was a whisper from the doorway, where he and the others had been watching in stunned silence. "How does one even begin to repair a machine no one has understood for ten thousand years?"
While Guilliman began to issue a torrent of commands over his private comms channel, summoning the greatest minds of the Adeptus Mechanicus to Terra, Rimuru was in his own internal conference.
<
Her analysis continued, cold and precise. <
<
Rimuru understood. This wasn't a repair job. It was a reconstruction.
Hours later, the political and logistical gears of the Imperium were grinding at a speed they hadn't known for millennia. A secret, inviolate perimeter was established around a section of the Inner Palace. Archmagos Valerius from Ryza was summoned. The Fabricator-General of Mars himself, a being of immense mechanical power and ancient knowledge, was on his way, under the pretext of a war council of the highest secrecy.
In a newly consecrated and shielded chamber deep within the Palace, a workshop unlike any other was created. Here, a new council convened. Roboute Guilliman, the Son and Regent. Shield-Captain Valerius, the Guardian of the Throne. And Rimuru Tempest, the Anomaly and Architect.
A massive holo-lith flickered to life, displaying a schematic of such impossible complexity that it seemed to writhe with a life of its own. It was the Golden Throne.
Guilliman and the Custodian stared in silence. It was the first time any living being had seen a complete blueprint of the machine in ten thousand years.
Rimuru calmly walked up to the display, his small, slender form dwarfed by the two Imperial demigods and the colossal schematic. He studied it for a moment, his head tilted.
"This is a very complicated piece of machinery," he said, his voice a quiet understatement that was almost comical in its gravity. "There's a lot of… inefficient wiring and several feedback loops that are causing most of the degradation."
He pointed to a critical, glowing red junction deep within the machine's heart on the schematic.
"We will have to start there. But to do so," he said, turning to face the two most powerful figures in the Imperium, "I'm going to need some materials I'm fairly certain you don't have." He gave them a calm, confident smile.
"So, first, we'll have to make them."