[The passage Valoris leads you through is known only to the Adeptus Custodes. It opens into the outer complex of the Imperial Palace at a point you would not have found in a year of searching on your own, and when you step through it, you understand immediately why the Ten Thousand value their secrets.]
[Night has come over the palace grounds. Your helmet's vision compensates easily, and what it shows you is the weight of ten thousand years settling over ancient stone.]
[The outer palace complex bears the wounds of the Siege of Terra as if time has not touched them. Craters from heavy explosive ordnance remain in the flagstones and the lower facing of the walls. The scorched channels left by powerful melta weapons cut across facades and buttresses, fused and smoothed but not filled. Walls that were breached and then sealed have been sealed rather than repaired: the materials do not match, the lines of the original construction visible where they end and the emergency patches begin. The buildings beyond the inner sanctum, the administrative palaces and residential wings and ceremonial halls that once surrounded the heart of the Imperium, are ruins that have been stabilized rather than rebuilt.]
[No one repaired them. Perhaps it was a choice, a form of memorial. Perhaps the architectural knowledge required to restore them to their original condition no longer existed in the form needed to do it correctly. You have learned that the Imperium frequently lacks the capacity to do what it remembers having once done, and that the reaction to this deficit is most often to leave the evidence in place and avoid looking at it directly.]
[Valoris does not explain any of this. He walks forward and you follow.]
[Shortly into the outer complex, you pass the bone pillar.]
[It stands in a small enclosed garden that may once have been a processional approach: a column of pale material built from the hand bones of the Imperial Fists who died in the Siege, their skeletal remains mortared into a monument and left here beside the place where they fell. At the ends of the individual bones, hanging from thin threads worn nearly invisible by decades of weather, are small fragments of parchment covered in prayers. The writing on most of them is no longer legible. The threads still hold.]
[You look at it as you pass. The Fists built this themselves, or their successors did. You do not stop.]
[The walk takes three days.]
[You suggest to Valoris, early on the first day, that you call for transport. He declines without elaboration. You suggest, on the second day, that a direct route must exist somewhere. He glances at you once and returns his attention to the path ahead.]
[You accept the answer implicit in his silence. There is a reason for the walking, the same way there was a reason Moloc's memories tell you that audiences with the Emperor are not quick affairs and are not meant to be. The approach is the preparation. Three days of walking through the accumulated weight of ten thousand years of human history, through halls and passages and open courts whose original purposes have been forgotten or transformed beyond recognition, is how the journey teaches you the scale of what you are approaching.]
[On the second day, you emerge briefly into an open space: a vast amphitheater, its tiered stone seating rising around an empty floor, its acoustics suggesting that the human voice once carried across it clearly enough for the back row to hear a whisper from the center. Whatever gathered here has not gathered in a very long time. The stone is clean. The silence has the particular quality of a silence that has been maintained rather than simply accumulated.]
[On the outer perimeter of the complex surrounding the throne room, ten enormous statues stand in the thin grey mist. They are the loyal Primarchs: figures of stone on a scale that makes Astartes look like children, each one rendered with the obsessive precision of someone working from direct knowledge rather than artistic interpretation. Their faces are distinct. Their weapons are accurate. Beside them, eleven empty plinths stand where other statues once stood, or were never built, or were removed. The stones that would have supported those figures are clean. Not erased: simply empty.]
[You count the absent spaces.]
[Eleven.]
[You do not say anything. Valoris has not looked at the plinths as you passed them, which means either he does not register them anymore, or he chooses not to.]
[The psykic noise begins somewhere in the third day.]
[It comes in layers. First a tone like glass moving against metal, present at the edge of perception, sourceless. Then volume, gradually: not louder exactly, but more numerous, as though the single tone is revealing itself to have always been many voices speaking simultaneously, and your mind had been averaging them into one note until the separation became impossible to ignore. Then words, fragmentary, in the ancient Imperial language, older than any dialect currently spoken:]
["...Demon... offspring... tool... currency... hope... twenty-two... prime... Horus... thirteen... Terra... eleven... disappointment... war... future... chaos..."]
[The sentences do not form complete thoughts. The words arrive in isolation from one another, and the intervals between them carry weight that the words themselves cannot fully hold. You attempt to focus on any single fragment and find it dissolving into the noise before you can fix it. You attempt to answer and find you have nothing that would serve as a response to what you are receiving.]
[You shake your helmet once, not to clear it, but because the movement is something your body knows how to do while your mind is occupied elsewhere.]
[Valoris glances at you. His expression says he has seen this before.]
[You continue walking.]
[At the bottom of the great staircase, three hundred Adeptus Custodes stand in full formation.]
[They are present in the way that standing water is present: completely still, occupying the available space without effort or announcement, and giving the impression that they have been standing exactly there since the last time someone needed to think very carefully about whether to proceed. Their Guardian Spears are held vertical. Their armor is unmarked. They are not a ceremonial formation. They are the last line that has never been crossed.]
[Valoris does not address them. He stops at their edge, looks at you, and nods toward the staircase.]
[He has taken you as far as he comes.]
[The staircase ascends in a single long flight toward doors that are shut. The steps are enormous, each one designed for the stride of something larger than an Astartes, and the patterns inlaid in the stone resolve, as you begin to climb, into a double-headed eagle spread across the full width of the approach: a design that can only be read from this angle, at this distance, looking upward. You understand that it is intended to be read this way. You understand that the person who designed this staircase wanted the last thing a visitor saw, before they reached the doors, to be the symbol of the Imperium spreading across the stone beneath their feet.]
[The Terminator armor's weight is nothing to you. The stairs take time, and you give them the time they require.]
[At the top, the doors are heavy in a way that goes beyond the physical. You set your hand against the ancient metal and push.]
[They open.]
[What meets you first is not sight but pressure.]
[The presence in the throne room is not like the Emperor's statues, which carry a residual warmth that you have felt in a dozen places. This is the source. This is what the statues reflect, at an immeasurable remove from the original: a presence that has been burning in the same location for ten thousand years and that has acquired a density of being that no language you know was designed to express.]
[Your soul, housed in Moloc's body but still yours, registers it the way a small piece of metal registers proximity to a furnace: not touching yet, but aware that the distance between you and something absolute is decreasing.]
[And something in that absolute attention, which has been turned outward across the full breadth of the galaxy without pause since the Heresy, turns.]
[It turns toward you.]
[You feel it find you, and you understand in the same instant that it has known exactly what you are since the moment you arrived on this world, and that everything that has happened in the thirteen months since has proceeded under that awareness, and that the golden light that broke through the clouds above the palace wall on the day you spoke to Valoris was not a coincidence and was never meant to look like one.]
[You stand in the doorway of the throne room, and the Emperor of Mankind looks at you through the barrier between the material world and whatever state ten thousand years on the Golden Throne has produced, and you feel the full weight of that attention settle across your shoulders.]
[A vast, wordless sorrow underlies it.]
[Pity.]