Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

== My Dinner With the Emperor ==

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“So what exactly happened during the Raid on Nurgle’s Mansion, anyway?”

The Emperor was glad for his enhanced reaction time at that moment, else he would have spit up the wine that he was drinking. To be honest he always considered himself more of a vodka person, or one of those "tanna" drinks the Valhallans always raved about having originally come from Earth. However, Sonoma was a planet known for its wineries, and that meant wine-tasting was the order of the day.

The government of the planet was a plutocracy, which meant that in practice the person with the largest voice in government was the who owned the largest percentage of the wineries on the planet. It was a world that had been part of the Imperium for some time, having been unified by one of the primarchs during the Great Crusade (Fulgrim, he immediately recalled), but one he had never been to personally, being on the far end of the Segmentum Tempestus. So when the Travelling Court was due to pass through that region of space, it was a lost opportunity he wanted to make sure to rectify.

The plutarch, as was often the case, was overjoyed that the Travelling Court had decided to visit his world, and immediately insisted on a stately dinner where he could introduce the Emperor and Empress to the other major shareholders in the vineyards on the planet. The Emperor was personally not that interested in a fancy dinner with the heads of state, but he didn’t want to turn down such hospitality. Now he was kind of wondering if he should. Isha was the epitome of civility as always, though the Emperor knew she was probably at least a little bit bored. Despite her demure nature, she always said she liked visiting former feral worlds more, claiming that the people there weren’t as repressed as these high society types and as such they knew how to live a little more.

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The Emperor wasn’t surprised that the plutarch would ask about that story, it was probably one of the two stories he was asked most often to tell, but he was rarely asked about it so bluntly and while Isha was with him no less. He didn’t mind telling the story, but when Isha was around he always felt slightly guilty because it always made her seem like a damsel in distress. Granted, she had been had been held captive by one of the most powerful entities in the universe for thousands of years and tortured in ways only a god could truly comprehend, but sometimes it seemed like the story made her look bad.

“That old story?” Isha said from across the table. “Come now. You've told that story from Ultramar to Xenobia. Everyone probably knows it by heart at this point."

The Emperor internally sighed, he was privately grateful to Isha for that. In part because it meant he didn't want to dredge up the bad memories that represented, and in part because he didn't want to embarrass Isha in front of the plutarch with one of the low points of their life.

"Here's an idea. Why don't you tell them the story of what happened down on Sarosh."

The Emperor almost choked on his wine again.

“Are you sure?” the Emperor deflected, “Most of that story is rather dry, and I don’t think this is the kind of crowd who would be interested in that kind of thing. Besides, you know everything that happened there already. I wouldn’t want you to get bored, too.”

"Oh you can tell it. I don't mind."

Isha positively glimmered, the edges of her upper jaw plate like little fangs as she bit her lower lip.

"I'm sure you wouldn’t," the Emperor grumbled.

“With all due respect, your majesties,” the plutarch said, slightly red-faced, “Would someone please just start saying what happened already? It sounds like there’s a juicy story to be had and the rest of us don’t know about it. It just isn’t right to have a good wine without a good story to go with it.”


“Very well,” the Emperor sighed with resignation, “But in order to fully understand the story you’ll need to be familiarized with the planet of Sarosh. Sarosh was discovered near the end of the Great Crusade, but the War of the Beast broke out before it could be incorporated into the Imperium. After the war fully integrating Sarosh into the Imperium became top priority. This wasn’t merely for charitable reasons. Sarosh had managed to survive the Old Night with much of its technology intact. They had lost some of their most advanced technology and were behind us in other areas, true, but they retained technology that most of the rest of the galaxy had lost and it’s possible they may have even had STC printouts on their world. The Saroshi even claimed that their government was the same as it had been all the way back before the Age of Strife. If Saroshi technology could be reverse-engineered and exported to the galaxy at large, the standard of living in the Imperium would have jumped dramatically, and it would have gone a long way towards reparing the damage done by the War of the Beast.

When the Imperium first discovered Sarosh during the Great Crusade, the Saroshi welcomed us with open arms, and eagerly joined the Imperium as a Survivor Civilization However there always seemed to be problems whenever someone tried to integrate Sarosh with the rest of the galaxy. Attempts to build infrastructure to connect Sarosh to the wider Imperium were sabotaged. Funds meant to improve standards of living were embezzled by government officials. And any efforts to figure out exactly who was mishandling things was stymied by a bureaucracy that was downright labyrinthine. As is so often the case, I heard that there was trouble on Sarosh and set that as the next destination for the Travelling Court to get things straightened out once and for all.

I ran into the exact same problems that all the people before me did. I even met with the leaders of Sarosh themselves, who tried to assure me that things were progressing as fast as they could. On top of that the Saroshi ambassador, who was my primary contact with the Saroshi government during my time there, seemed to have a dislike for me that was borderline pathological. I tried to read his mind to figure out what his problem was, but his thought process was too oily and muddled to get anything out of him without breaking something. Not exactly unheard of in a politician. At the time, I merely chalked it up to him thinking I was just another two-bit warlord here to try and take away Saroshi sovereignty, rather than a potential ally greeting another survivor of the Long Night. It turned out to be something rather worse.


The Saroshi ambassador had come aboard the ''Bucephalus'' every day for nearly two weeks straight with nearly nothing to show for it. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Saroshi government reported to me that they had a major breakthrough in the integration problems, and they wanted me to come to the planet’s surface for the first time since I had initially came to Sarosh to tell me in person. They asked me to meet with the ambassador who was arriving on a low-orbit shuttle, and would escort me to the Saroshi capital personally.

The first sign I noticed that something was wrong was when Constantin Valdor came up to me and asked if he could stand in front of me when the doors opened to meet the Saroshi ambassador. I asked him if something was the matter and he just replied that he had a funny feeling about the whole thing.

When the doors to the shuttle bay opened, the ambassador entered the Bucephalus the same way he had for the past two weeks, surrounded by his nine bodyguards. Except of course, this time the bodyguards had their weapons unholstered and their rifles levelled at us. The ambassador had this wild look in his eye, ranting about how my hour of reckoning had at last come at hand. One moment the ambassador was having his moment of megalomaniacal ranting, spittle flying from his lips.

The next thing I knew, the ambassador had a handmaiden standing behind him, one of those thorn-swords jutting out of his chest. I'm used to the speed at which Eldar move and even with that in mind, I have to say, the followers of Isha and Cegorach are fast.


While I had been meeting directly with the leaders of Sarosh, the Handmaidens had made their way to the planet's surface by their own means and had been discreetly conducting their own investigation of the planet's population. What they found was rather disturbing. The inhabitants of Sarosh were, to put it bluntly, Chaos worshippers, and they were itching at the opportunity to take revenge against the man to openly defy the Ruinous Powers and the goddess who would spurn the affections of the Plaguefather. The ambassador himself had even been ritually prepared for the role, having accepted a major blessing from Tzeentch in exchange for the chance to strike a blow against the most hated foes of Chaos. The blessing not only prevented anyone from reading his mind, but even worse made psykers think it was absolutely normal that they couldn’t do that unless directly told otherwise.

“The Handmaidens reported their findings back to their mistress and their leader told the whole story to Constantin, which is how the Custodians knew. Those two always shared everything with each other.”

“Pardon me,” the plutarch said, “I don’t mean to interrupt a good story, but that reminds me of something. Where, might I ask, was the Empress during all this?"

"Ah, funny thing about that. She was down in the cargo bay, disarming the bomb. See, the insurgents had realized they needed a back-up plan in the likely event that Plan A failed. So they sent a re-wired cyclonic torpedo aboard, tried to disguise it as one of our own. While we were focusing our attention on the assassins, the torpedo would have detonated and killed us all. Crude but effective. It might have worked, if not for one thing."

"Which was?"

"It turns out the capacitors of a cyclonic torpedos don't work so well when they have a solid centimeter of Eldar rinnweed growing between the two conductor plates."

“The story, unfortunately, doesn’t have that happy of an ending. The Handmaidens and Custodians dealt with the intruders easily enough, but the planet was another problem. The Saroshi were gearing up a massive Chaotic ritual designed to pull a massive number of daemons into realspace. We ended up having to Exterminatus the planet to stop it in time. No amount of ancient technology was worth creating a massive, active Warp rift right in the middle of Imperial space. And even then it was hard to tell what tech and what were really “blessings” from the Ruinous Powers. I have my suspicions that the high level of technology the Saroshi had were either Chaos-derived or due to their leaders bargaining with the Ruinous Powers for sanctuary during the Age of Strife.

I learned two things from the whole debaucle. The first being you can never be too paranoid when it comes to diplomacy with unknown powers.”

“And the second?”


“Never underestimate your wife,” the Emperor said flatly.

Milady," a voice said from behind the plutarch, "the inspection is complete."

"What the devil?" He exclaimed.

"Ah, Galadrea," the Emperor said. "Glad you could make it".

He should have known Galadrea would have chosen that moment to intervene. Galadrea had always been as humorless as Valdor but she did have a bit of a flare for the dramatic. He had noticed the green-clad Eldar enter the room, but aside from Isha he was perhaps the only one to do so, the rest of the occupants too fixated on his story to notice. The fact that she had entered from the one direction where no one else could have directly seen her only furthered the Emperor's suspicions that she had chosen to make her entrance as dramatic as possible.

“Plutarch,” the Emperor said, watching the man continue to sputter in confusion, “I would like to introduce you to Galadrea, Head of the Handmaidens of Isha. Now, Galadrea, I believe you said you had something to report?”

“We found no signs of Chaos corruption. No worship of the Ruinous Powers. There are the usual issues, crime, poverty, but no more so than any other Imperial world. The world is clean.”

“Well, there you have it,” the Emperor told the plutarch, “A clean bill of health from the acolyte of a literal goddess of healing. You have nothing to worry about.”

"Thank you, Galadrea", Isha said, "You may go now."

The Eldar gave a curt bow and then left as silently as she arrived. The source of his shock eliminated, the plutarch gradually managed to calm himself back down.

“Well, that was a bloody good story, but that doesn’t really answer my initial question. Sorry for asking, but you don’t get answers of what happened during these things straight from the horse’s mouth every day you know. You hear so many rumors but it’s hard to believe even half of them are true. I’d still like to know what really happened during the Raid. And what about that whole hulabaloo with the ork diplomats during the War of the Beast?"

Internally, the Emperor sighed. It was going to be a long day.

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