Heresy from the Emprah’s point of view

The following article is a /tg/ related story or fanfic. Should you continue, expect to find tl;dr and an occasional amount of awesome.

Pretty much this. The Emperor was 'born' in 8,000bc, somewhere around Anatolia. Likely to be Nevali Cori and the nearby temple of Gobeliki Tepe. He's the living reincarnation of hundreds (or more) shaman elders, and probably has their souls shouting at him the whole time. He has no fixed appearance, and basically unlimited power (to all practical extent). He hid out, probably under the insistence of his shaman 'fathers' for thousands of years, taking a back seat and watching, learning and sometimes guiding as humanity staggers its way into the future, fuckup by fuckup. Everyone he knows is born and dies in the blink of an eye. He has no peers, no equals, nobody who can even comprehend *what* he is.

You know how when you're a kid, ten minutes seems like forever? And at thirty, two days is right on top of you? You can probably remember yesterday in full, probably most of the last week. What do you remember from when you were ten? Flashes and highlights, probably an hour's worth altogether. Now compound that out thirty eight thousand years.

So he has trouble forming relationships, because he has absolutely nothing in common with anyone, and they all just keep dying all the time. That's what comes of being the New Man.

But he's got all those dead Shamans living inside him, and they're steering him towards the good. He's passive, most of the time, because he's seen enough and knows enough that a giant golden immortal leader stepping forwards, at most points in history, would damage humanity's development more than help it. Sure, he does make a couple of appearances under one guise or another to point in the right direction over the millennia, but he limits it to a minimum since it tends to complicate things whenever one of his appearances gets a religion built around him. For good or ill, the human race needs to find its own way forward and build itself up on its own. And it does, all the way to the heavens themselves. Twenty five thousand years of growth and prosperity, the colonisation of the galaxy, humanity's star rises and shines brightly.

And then the Age of Strife hits. Old Night, the gestation of Slaanesh. Interstellar travel becomes nigh-on impossible, worlds are cut off from one another and left to fend for themselves, psykers spring up like weeds, artificial intelligences go haywire, the whole thing unravels.

So then this immortal takes on the mantle of The Emperor, fashions himself a radiant golden form, and steps in. Because if he remained passive, there wouldn't be a human race left. He wrests control of Terra, unifies the world and breaks down the ideologies that inevitably throw up barriers between subgroups. Religions, kingdoms, nations, it all gets scrapped in the name of Unification. Especially religions because as he has seen, while they do unite people in the beginning they are all too often more trouble than they're worth in the long run whenever a greedy human or two exploit them to get secular power. On top of that, with the Warp going haywire, they would only serve as conduits for demons to come out and play, so: out with them!

Uniting Terra takes some time, but he doesn't plan to stop there so he creates the Space Marines. If he's going to actually lead armies and rule the galaxy, he wants soldiers that a) can keep up to his standards somewhat, and b) won't die of old age before he's even gotten started. To lead these exceptional soldiers, he needs exceptional generals, and this might just be the chance for him to have company he might be able to relate to, even slightly. So the Primarch Project kicks off. The Emperor looks into the Warp and makes bargains, looking for power to infuse his 'sons' with, to bring them to a level close to his own.

It goes pretty well. There's a slight hitch, and the Primarchs get scattered, but that's not too bad, and the Emperor can actually use it as a good catalyst for the whole Great Crusade thing. For two hundred years he leads the Crusade personally, finding his lost Primarchs and rebuilding humanity's empire amongst the stars. He's distant, as his sons see it, both because of the aforementioned difficulties an all-powerful immortal has in forming relationships with lesser beings, and because he's got a thousand things to do at once. Twenty sons to shepherd, two of which he has to (probably) kill and two others who he's constantly having to keep an eye on in case they need to go too. Thousands of fleets to manage. A million worlds to watch over. A court full of intrigue back home. Politics, shenanigans and power plays from greedy mortals who'll only be dead in a few years anyway. A hundred actual battlefields that he has to personally step onto and kill shit on a regular basis. The warp's hanging over everything, and even though he's done his best to make an empire that'll have the best chance of avoiding falling into its grasp by accident - a faithless society that scorns gods - he knows he'll have to do something, even if only because some of the Primarchs are getting curious and in over their heads.

So he decides to build a webway. A human webway, alongside and within the ancient Eldar webway. That would remove the reliance on the bloated and inbred Navigator Houses, remove the need to stare into the warp, and connect the worlds of the Imperium in a way that can resist another Old Night.

To do that, he needs to take some time off. Not long, just a couple of decades, to get the fiddly bits right. He can't just brute force it, not if he wants it to work without him. So he puts his favourite son, Horus, in the place of Warmaster, tells him to keep up the good work, but daddy's got important work to be doing. He doesn't tell anyone *what* important work, because, well, he's not a social genius and he honestly just thinks they don't need to know. The things they *do* know are getting them in enough trouble as it is. He spent thirty thousand years unlocking the secrets of the cosmos, they can wait a decade or two for Christ's sake.

So he's back in the palace, probably losing track of time, and doesn't want to be disturbed.

Then, practically as soon as he's started (from his point of view), Magnus smashes the whole project to shit talking some shit about Horus being a traitor to the Imperium, scares the peasantry shitless manifesting as a giant blazing crimson demon, and vanishes. The Emperor tells Leman Russ to go fetch Magnus so they can have a nice, long talk about knocking before entering.

And before he's even gotten started on picking the pieces back up and clearing out the flood of daemons that Magnus has let into Terra, the news comes in from all over - Horus is actually a traitor to the Imperium and has started a fucking civil war.

The Emperor, at this point, is likely thinking "What the fuck?" He's left them alone for a few fucking years, and it all goes completely to shit. Leaving them alone so he can do other things than lead an army was the entire fucking point of creating the Primarchs in the first place.

God dammit people.

Then he has the honor of discovering the hard way that faith actually harms the monsters of the warp and helps unify people to achieve beyond their limits. Defeating the whole psychological, sociological, and fundamental anti-spiritual basis of creating the Imperium the way he did and instead stripping humanity of any defenses against Chaos.

Oops.