An open mind is a vessel to be filled with power or to be poisoned by weakness.
His consciousness was indeed a vessel, adrift on a boundless sea of stars. Here, within the Solitude; an obsidian sphere which projected constellations and star patterns in an inspiring holographic light, the God Emperor was not a monarch, not a general, hardly even a man.
He was an awareness, the most powerful and extraordinary leader humanity had ever seen, that housed him aboard the dreadnought Eternus. He was reaching, as he had for millennia, into the fundamental energy of existence. Into the Nex.
The Nex is a magnificent phenomenon, acting to some as an ocean to be charted, and the tide being the invisible, omnipresent current that flowed through every atom, every sun, every living soul. To commune with it was to dissolve into the totality of the universe.
His mind soared past the familiar constellations of the Imperium's core worlds, past sectors still healing from the scars of the Nexium Wars, and into the raw, untamed wilderness of the cosmos.
He saw time folded upon itself. He witnessed galaxies birthing in silent, incandescent fury, their spiral arms flinging nascent suns into the void like a divine casting of seeds. He felt the gravitational grasp of a black hole, a mournful hunger that warped the very fabric of spacetime. The stars to the North of the interstellar expanse burned faint and cold, but he could feel the thrum of the Nex within them, a worthy force keeping them bright for eons to come, unlike some core stars to Imperial worlds who's shells had been swarmed with legendary Dyson spheres.
This was the beauty he fought to protect, the cosmic nature that humbled even his own grand designs.
His senses, now cosmic in scale, brushed against the spectral echoes of the past—the ghost-light of shattered fleets from the Dissident Allegiance, their violent psychic death cries still a faint, discordant vibrations in the hectic network of the Nex. He had silenced that distortion of rebellion, brought order to the chaos. He had learned to stand by a celestial law: Cosmic Democracy. The kind of law not of votes and councils, but of immortal balance; a universe where the wolf may lie with the lamb, not because the wolf was tamed, but because the shepherd was ever vigilant. And he was the shepherd.
But he was not searching for the past. He was listening for the future.
For centuries, the Nex had been a predictable, if infinitely complex, current. Now, a new pattern was emerging. A disturbance. A single, searing point of convergence where the infinite probabilities of the future were collapsing into a singular, undeniable path.
He focused his immense will, tracing the threads of fate to their source. To witness the birth of a star is a privilege granted to astronomers and gods. To watch a species take its first steps from its cradle world is a sight of profound hope. But to be recognised by the ancient, pre-sentient forces that determine the order of reality—this made his Empire an achievement of worthy note. And those forces were now pointing to one place. One project. One soul.
The Voidwalker. The very man he had retrieved and rescued from the backwards world of Cyreth. Many questions began to arise in his mind, but he remained poised in his calm meditative state.
The tide receded. The boundless sea of stars condensed back into the pinpricks of light embedded in the walls of his chamber. The God Emperor opened his eyes back to the sight of his interior ship through his helmet of judgment. They were old eyes, though not seen by the public since the Imperium's formation, they were ancient beyond the reckoning of any living being in his Empire, yet they held the sharp, focused clarity of a predator.
The weight of his physical form returned—the subtle hum of the Eternus core through the deck, the chill of the recycled air, the ornate but functional lines of the Aculon armor that was more a symbol of status than a tool of war. The mantle of a living god was heavier than any form of nalvanium.
He rose, the motion fluid and absolute, a force of nature unto himself. The dark door to the meditation sphere hissed open like a sigh, revealing the grand, vaulted corridor beyond with his crew of astrogators rushing to and from different areas of the colossal spacecraft, the God Emperor's presence causing some to stop to acknowledge his incidence. His footfalls, the one sounds among many others like his, in the hallowed footsteps and whirring power of the ship, echoed on polished black marble veined with gold that stemmed from his meditation room behind him.
He entered the command centre. A bridge of working imperial officers at different vibrant screens, and a central holotable which portrayed a form of their destination. An immense, curved viewport dominated the space, a window looking directly into the soul of the cosmos. And as the holographic image of their destination descended, there was their destination before his eyes.
Emriss III was a dark blue jewel swirled with clouds of alabaster, staring right back at them on the Dreadnought. It was one of several thousand worlds under his protection, a perfect example of what the Imperium fought for: peace. A world where children could look up at the night sky with wonder and fear no longer.
In its orbit, a marvel of interstellar engineering, hung the Nexus Space Station. It was a spindle of impossible grace, a crown of starlight and steel that served as a station of strength and power. It was a bastion, a laboratory, a symbol of humanity's mastery over the physical realm. The Eternus, was the great ship sailing into the Station's port.
He stood before the viewport, hands clasped behind his back, a solitary figure against the majesty of his creation. This delicate balance—the thriving, natural world below and the technological marvel above—was the physical manifestation of his Cosmic Democracy. Man and Nature, the two aspects of the life forged in space, acting as partners in the grand scheme of existence. He had paid for this peace with the blood of a thousand worlds during the Nexium Wars, and he would pay any price to maintain it.
But the feeling from his meditation lingered. A subtle pressure in the Nex, a force pulling everything towards the station before him. Project Voidwalker was housed there, his greatest chance, his most profound hope. He had directed the fate of the universe, the culmination of ten thousand years of planning, upon the shoulders of a single, nascent being.
He looked from the verdant planet to the steel station, from the past he had secured to the future he was charting. The future of the cosmos did not rest on his shoulders alone anymore.
It rested upon… him.