[The eyes of your body and the soul within look directly at what can only be described as a cold sun: a figure seated on an ancient golden mechanism of impossible scale, burning with a light that has no temperature in the physical sense but that your mind registers as heat regardless.]
[You kneel. You are not certain when you decided to do this. Your hand pulls the helmet from your head.]
[Your expression moves through several states in succession, none of them fully settling, before something in you simply stops trying to hold a particular shape and goes still.]
[You lower your head toward this great and tragic human god-emperor who still endures.]
[At the edge of your vision, in the dimness beneath the throne, you catch a glimpse of something: tall, dark, and slender, present in the way that a shadow is present when there is nothing casting it. You try to focus on it. Your consciousness is already fading before you can.]
[You are dead.]
[This simulation has concluded. Duration: one year and one month.]
[The following options may be retained from this simulation.]
[I. The Ancient Black Spear (Masterwork)]
[Note: "This is the personal weapon of Asterion Moloc, Chapter Master of the Minotaurs."]
[Note: "Records suggest this is a masterwork powered weapon, a modified variant of the relic spear pattern held in the Adeptus Custodes' armoury. It can project a disintegration beam, a weapon of the Dark Age of Technology, with formidable and sustained effect. Commander Moloc prefers close combat and has rarely used this method against an enemy."]
[Note: "'My eyes!' Moloc, unexpectedly subjected to the direct gaze of the Emperor through the use of his body, was not killed, but will endure a period of blindness. He is displeased about this but has chosen not to contest it."]
[Note: "Your reputation with Chapter Master Moloc and the Minotaurs Chapter has been raised to Exalted (temporary). See the Diplomacy page for details."]
[II. Cobra-class Destroyer (Standard)]
[Note: "A Cobra-class destroyer that has just completed its final consecration ceremony. The Cobra class is the most widely deployed torpedo attack vessel in the Imperial Navy. Its speed and maneuverability allow it to seize advantageous launch positions on a void battlefield."]
[Note: "In keeping with its role, the Cobra-class destroyer's relatively compact hull is occupied almost entirely by subspace engines and torpedo magazines. Its armor protection is limited. With void shields down, it presents a well-understood target profile."]
[Note: "The Imperial Navy wishes to remind all operators that while there are countless void routes available, an intact Geller field is not optional."]
[III. One Opportunity to Acquire an Emperor-class Battleship (Unique)]** (Choose carefully.)**
[Note: "You will receive a random physical teleportation to an Imperial void battlefield or a Forge World somewhere in the Imperium of Man."]
[Note: "You may use your Primarch identity to bargain, exchange resources, or take by force an Emperor-class battleship belonging to the Imperium. The Emperor-class is among the largest and most powerful vessels in the Imperial Navy, functioning as a main battle platform, carrier, and command flagship simultaneously. The Imperium no longer possesses the capability to construct them from scratch. Every Emperor-class still in service represents an irreplaceable strategic asset."]
[Note: "Regardless of whether you successfully acquire the vessel, you will be returned after a set period. Consider carefully all actions you take in pursuit of the ship."]
[Note: "'Perhaps this is the Emperor's blessing for your service in restoring Holy Terra, and for your first meeting with him. Or perhaps it is compensation for the memories He has seen fit to remove. Hard to say...' A winged blue figure with a beak and an excess of opinions muttered to itself somewhere in the churning unreality of the Warp. The next moment, a psychic force of considerable finality swept in from the depths and removed the creature from the conversation entirely.' (Comedy: Do Not Mock the Emperor in the Warp, performed by a Great Daemon of Tzeentch, one time only.)]
[This simulation has ended. Cost: one Throne Coin.]
[Current Throne Coin balance: two.]
The moment the simulation released him, Nolan opened his eyes and immediately covered his head with one vibranium-plated hand.
His skull felt like it had spent the last several minutes in a centrifuge. The dizziness was accompanied by a sharp stinging sensation behind his eyes that he had never experienced coming out of a simulation before, and his first sound was an involuntary low sound through closed teeth.
"My lord." David's voice came from the cockpit of the Thunderhawk. The Man of Iron's head turned slightly, blue eyes reflecting the instrument glow. "You appeared to be in distress. Should I prepare a panacea?"
"No." Nolan kept his hand over his head until the worst of the spinning passed. "Keep flying."
He sat with it for a minute, letting the stinging recede to something manageable, then pulled up the simulator and went through the reward screen carefully.
The memory gap was obvious: a period beginning from the moment he pushed open the throne room doors and ending with the simulation's conclusion, entirely absent. He knew it was absent the same way he knew where a tooth had been, because the space where something had been was its own kind of presence.
"After I used Moloc's body to push open the door, something happened in there." He said it quietly, half to himself. "Something that the Emperor did not want me to carry back."
What that meant, he could not determine. The memory had been removed cleanly: no jagged edges, no fragments, no residual emotional weight of the kind that sometimes survived even when the specific events were gone. Whatever had happened in the throne room was simply not there. He could not retrieve it by thinking harder about it. He already knew this, and he stopped trying.
His gaze settled on the third reward option.
The winged blue creature cited in the footnote was almost certainly a Tzeentchian daemon, which in the Warp meant either the embodiment of one of Tzeentch's many aspects or simply a Great Daemon operating on his behalf. The comment it had made about memory erasure and compensation was designed to produce exactly the doubt it was designed to produce: the suggestion that the Emperor had taken something from him and owed him a debt, and that the Emperor-class battleship reward was the settlement of that debt rather than a genuine gift.
Nolan considered this for about four seconds.
"If Tzeentch thinks a daemon with a bird beak can shake something I have already decided," he said to the empty cabin, "then the Architect of Fate has a limited model of what I'm made of."
The Emperor was not, by any useful standard, a good person. He had used his sons as instruments, concealed things that should have been spoken plainly, and allowed a galaxy's worth of suffering in the service of plans that the people being sacrificed for had never been asked to consent to. Nolan had thought about this at length and had arrived at the same conclusion each time: none of that changed what the Chaos Gods were. The Emperor's hands were not clean. The alternative to the Emperor was not a clean pair of hands. It was four entities that fed on human suffering and called the feeding love.
He closed that line of thought and focused on the practical question.
An Emperor-class battleship was the largest and most capable capital ship the Imperial Navy fielded. For someone who currently had no void-capable warships of his own, this was not a minor upgrade. It was a transformation of what he could project and where. The Thunderhawk formation and the Pharos Lighthouse were capable assets, but they were surface-to-orbit tools. A battleship was a system in itself: weapons, transport capacity, manufacturing capability, political weight.
The problem was the drive system.
Every ship in the Imperium used Warp drives. The native world had dimensional spaces, but whether a Warp-based subspace engine could interface with them, or function at all in a universe that did not have the Warp as its underlying metaphysical infrastructure, was an open question. If the drive failed in the native world, what he would possess was a very large, extremely well-armed object that could not move under its own power. A stationary weapons platform of considerable capability, yes, but not a ship.
He needed to think about this more carefully before he committed to a choice.
Nolan leaned back, closed his eyes, and let the hum of the Thunderhawk's engines carry the silence for a while.
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