The Emperor's eyes cleared.


Ra followed the silver sword down to the wounded man. He knew of this battle from the archives, had seen picts ripped from primitive helmet footage of the conflict playing out. He had even seen a few rare surviving murals depicting the man in robes of flowing red, addressing vast crowds. Ra knew who the defeated warlord was.


'The Priest-King of Maulland Sen,' Ra said. 'In the moments before you executed him.'


'That is a title and a moment in time. What do you see?'


'A man. A man kneeling on the snow.'


'That is better,' the Emperor agreed. He stepped closer to the kneeling man, activating His blade. Fire cobwebbed down the circuits lining both sides of His sword. None of the gathered warriors paid any notice, nor did the warlord himself.


'I met him long before he was the priest-king,' the Emperor said. 'He began as a holy man, a mendicant preacher wandering the northern wastes, gathering untainted food and purified water, giving it freely to those in need. He claimed it was his calling, and that his god lived in his kindness. It was a calling, of course. A call that was answered by the beings of the immaterium. They gave him the power to feed his beleaguered tribe and heal their ills, and his clan grew. When savage winters ate away at the other tribes, his clan sheltered beneath the protection of his power. He kept them fed, protected and unseen from the eyes of their hunting foes. Soon, hundreds of men and women were huddling for warmth within his mercy, and offered their thanks to the god that he believed he served. Yet each miracle took more effort, Ra. More sacrifice. The end always justified the means. First the conundrums were moral in nature. What does it matter if another clan starves, if it allows his tribe to survive? Soon enough the rituals grew more occult in order to achieve their ends. What is the murder of a rival, if that death guarantees another ten years of peace? What is the life of one child, if the offer of its bloody, beating heart will ensure a monarch's immortality? Do you see?'


Ra saw. Just as he had seen the monuments to massacre in the pict archives, from the fall of Maulland Sen.


'The warp rarely makes itself known in manifest form. The damnation flooding the webway is the crescendo of its siren song. Its immensity and physicality is what makes the threat so unprecedented. Far more often, the warp seethes behind the veil, it curdles thoughts inside a skull, it inks the blood in men and women's veins. And that is enough. More than enough. It brings us to moments like these, in the company of ambitious, faithful men, too proud to see their own deception.'


Ra stared down at the kneeling, bleeding priest-king. Gone were the gene-abominations and witchcraftmarked men in their thousands that had formed his ragged armies. He was alone, moments from breathing his last. Soon his sick blood would taint the Emperor's blade.


'Think of this man's clan,' continued the Emperor. 'As a holy man he had begun with offers of food and the promise of survival. Sensing his susceptibility, the warp darkened around the candle flame of his life's light. He prayed, and the warp answered. Soon his people were too numerous to hide. Other tribes came for his clan's riches. This man, this revered holy lord, led his people to the machines of the Old Ages, cloning and replicating and geneforging flawed warriors to wage war for territory. The clan branded their own flesh and ran to war alongside these genetic brutes, crying up to the sky for the same power their overlord enjoyed. And how far they had fallen. Committing any act in the belief of their own righteousness. All from superstition. All from ignorance. All because one charismatic man believed that the powers that heeded his calls could be trusted. By the time he realised they could not, he believed himself powerful enough to control them, independent enough to resist them. What harm in one more gift, if it allowed his clan to thrive? What harm in one more sacrifice, if it ensured a strong harvest or victory in a coming war? And when it came time to die, what would this powerful, independent man do? Would he go silently into the ground? Would he slumber upon a funeral pyre? Or would he – for the good of his people – reach for longer life at any cost?'


Ra still stared at the defeated monarch. The Custodian knew all there was to know from the archives. He knew of the barbarity practised by the Maulland Sen Confederacy. He had seen pict evidence of the bone pits, those golgothan barrows; every day of his adult life he had fought alongside other gold-armoured warriors who had been there for the dismantling of the confederacy itself.


'Superstition and ignorance always attract the warp's denizens,' continued the Emperor. 'For the core of religion is the twinned principle of arrogance and fear. Fear of oblivion. Fear of an unfair life and an arbitrary universe. Fear of there simply being nothing, no great and grand scheme to existence. The fear, ultimately, of being powerless.'


The Custodian narrowed his eyes. Rarely did the Emperor elucidate His reasoning in such stark terms. And why now? To what end? Ra felt the prickle of unease making its threading way up his spine.


'Look at him, Ra. Truly look at him.'


Ra looked. The priest-king could hardly have appeared less like his treacherously magnificent depictions, with his red robes of office reduced to scorched rags hanging at the edges of his broken armour, and the cloak of cloned fur blackened from flamer burns. The great demagogue stared up at the Emperor with the unshattered half of his face dirtied by blood and matted hair.


'Sire, I don't…'


But he did.


Talons rippled in the shadows cast by the man's cloak, glassy and obsidian, impossibly liquid in their caresses. Claws clicked and scratched against one another inside the wide pupil that looked like a hole drilled into the yellowing white of the priest-king's remaining eye. Bulges wormed their maggoty way through the man's veins, bubonically swollen. The defeated warlord, this impoverished and humbled ruler, was riven from within.


'What am I looking at, sire? What is this?'


'Faith,' said the Emperor. 'You are seeing his faith, through my eyes. Maulland Sen's massacring priestking is… what? Another of the Unification Wars' warlords? Terra had hundreds of them. He died beneath my executing blade, and history's pages will mark him as nothing more. And yet, his life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence. This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.'


Ra wiped his snow-flecked face with a gauntleted palm. His breathing was calm. His heart was slow. Yet his fingers trembled. 'Are they gods?'


'What is a god?' the Emperor replied at once, though without challenge. He sounded curious, not defiant.


'I don't know, sire.'


'A being of great power, perhaps. Am I then a god?'


'Of course not.'


'Is a god the focus of prayer and ritual, then? You are named in a god's honour. Ra – a god of the sun. How many cultures have worshipped the sun or given its arcing journey into the responsibility of a godling's care? More than even I can count. More than even I have seen. Each sun god or goddess bore a different name, and was revered by different people. The sun rose and fell, as it always has. Did it do so because of their prayers and offerings?'


Against all odds, Ra gave a mirthless, unpleasant smile. 'No, my king.'


'Look at the sky above us now, overcast with the coming storm. Most humans would name the shade of the clouds grey, in various languages. How are we to know if the grey one man sees is the same hue seen by the woman at his side? Or the grey his mother and father saw? A blind woman would see nothing, but she still feels the storm's approach on the wind. She knows the sky is grey because she has been told it is so, yet she has never seen it. What, then, is grey? Is it the shade I see, or the hue seen by another man's eyes? Is it only a colour, or is it also the feeling of the wind against your skin, promising a storm?'


Ra exhaled. 'I understand.'


The Emperor seemed suddenly weary. He shook His head, a rare moment of human expression. 'Beings of varying sentience and influence exist, given different names by different cultures and species. Gods. Aliens. Entities. It matters not.'


'I don't think I want to know these things, sire.'


'Your wishes are irrelevant, Ra. You will fight harder once you understand what you are fighting for. That is why I tell you all of this.'


'A matter of practicality?' he asked the Emperor, taking no offence. 'Not trust?'


'A matter of victory. You still see the war in the webway as the battle for my dreams and ambitions as a ruler. But I have told you – it is the war for humanity's survival.'


The sudden crack of an aggravated power field snapped Ra's focus back to the snowy tundra. Blood sizzled on the Emperor's blade. The priest-king's headless body toppled, neck stump steaming, into the dirty snow.


Sagittarus gripped the severed head by its long hair, holding it up to the miserable sky. He roared, and thousands of Thunder Warriors roared with him. The Emperor cleaned His deactivated blade on the dead man's cloak, then sheathed the sword across His back.


'Always so barbaric, Sagittarus.'


The Custodian tossed the head onto the ground. 'Exultant in victory, my king. That's all.'


The Emperor rested an armoured boot on the priest-king's head. Knee servos thrummed. He hesitated, for the span of a single breath, as all eyes fell upon Him. Then the boot came down, grinding the trophy into the dirt beneath the snow. When He lifted His tread, nothing but wet, red shards remained, stringy with slick hair.


'Burn the body,' said the Emperor. 'Burn all of their bodies.'