346 – Bingo

“Well, this is going to complicate things,” I mused aloud, having just been treated to the sight of a Custodian’s first meeting with Emps Jr … or maybe Small E. 

So many fun nicknames. 

“Certainly,” Alex said, though he had a happy, wistful smile on his face. “But all things worth doing are either hard or complicated. Besides, it doesn’t need to be complicated, does it? If Octavian here can recognise me, the rest of them will be the same, and if there is one thing that is certain even in this time of doubt and suspicion, it’s that their loyalty is absolute.”

Octavian looked mildly confused, but kept his mouth sealed even though I could sense he had questions. Oh, he had so many questions; they were eating him alive from the inside, but there was also guilt and shame that ran free, keeping him from voicing them. He probably felt like he had no right to speak unless spoken to. 

Right, the Custodians and their silly little inherited generational guilt. 

They were also bound to be loyal to the Emperor, both through indoctrination and other means. Like Space Marines and their Primarchs, the Custodes had the same instinctive craving to obey their Lord, but it was much more perfect than anything the Astartes had, considering not a single Custodes has ever betrayed the Emperor or has fallen to Chaos. 

All that is to say, I agreed with Alex, though I wasn’t willing to assume all Custodes would accept him as the Emperor reborn with the same fervour and ease as Octavian had. Besides, even if they did accept him, there was the possibility that they would deem his safety to be more important than his will. They could probably reason themselves into a position where they decided Alex’s judgement was in doubt, since he was a solitary soul-shard torn away from the whole of something equally silly.

Custodes were incredibly intelligent, but that didn’t make them immune to mistakes or to being misled by strong emotions. 

*****

Amberley Veil stood in silence, doing her very best to act like just another piece of furniture in the room. She had a good few centuries of practice in that; she’d often taken on the guise of a singer or some other form of entertainer at noble parties she wanted to infiltrate, so she knew how to be invisible to their eyes. 

Despite that, fooling inbred, egotistical nobles who couldn’t pick what to wear for the day without help was hardly the same as trying to go unnoticed by Lord Octavian and … and Him.

Ciaphas was pretending to be a statue, and Jurgen always had a talent for appearing invisible despite managing to look out of place in every single room Amberley had seen him in. 

Amberley stared at Octavian’s kneeling form, having nearly jumped out of her skin in fright when he crashed onto his knee with a desperate haste she’d never seen from him. 

And then he spoke those words. The words.

“Octavian Gaius of the Adeptus Custodes greets the Master of Mankind.” His rumbling yet cultured voice still echoed in her mind, its aftershock far from over.

So it’s true. It’s really true. Amberley thought numbly, her wide eyes fixed on the golden giant. She didn’t dare move her gaze over to the ch- … to Him. 

She was in the same room as Him. She’d spoken to Him. Him! 

There was no more denial to hide behind, no more shields made of doubt; there was nothing to save her from the realisation that she was sitting in the same room as the God-Emperor of Mankind. 

If she listened closely, she could almost hear her sanity crumbling to dust, or maybe it was just her worldview. 

No. It couldn’t break; she couldn’t break. Amberley Veil had fought, survived and exterminated the monsters that haunted mankind for centuries. She’s faced everything from Necrons to Drukhari, from Orks to innumerable Genestealers. She couldn’t break, couldn’t falter when it mattered most. 

He was here. She’d always thought that as an Inquisitor, she knew all the deepest, darkest secrets of the Imperium, and the Galaxy as a whole. She understood the Xenos more than almost anyone else, understood the Ruinous Powers, the Warp, she’s read records that’d been kept from the populace, even once that had been ‘purged’ or ‘burned’ ages ago at the orders of some Inquisitor or Ecclesiarch. 

Maybe that was why she was so ill-prepared when the realisation hit that her understanding of the world was much less … complete than she’d been led to believe. 

It was hubris, she realised, the arrogant belief that she knew what was true and what was not. She’d thought she knew what was impossible, and what wasn’t. 

Echidna had shown her otherwise, hadn’t she? Still, the lesson hadn’t quite managed to sink in yet. 

How many of her Ordo Malleus colleagues whom she’d written off as having a rather nebulous relationship with sanity were actually right? How many of them looked at her like an arrogant fool who remained willfully ignorant of the truths of the world they all lived in? 

She glanced at Ciaphas in an attempt to distract herself from the … the bantering between Echidna and the Starchild. Ciaphas, Emperor bless his poor soul, wore that wooden smile indicative of prolonged and intense internal screaming. Jürgen stood behind him, still looking confused about how the Emperor could both be sitting on the Golden Throne and standing in front of him in a juvenile body, despite Ciaphas having spent two hours last night trying to explain the concept of avatars and soul-shards to him. 

She still wasn’t sure whether they’d managed to make him understand, but at the very least he’d taken the order to keep any thoughts he had to himself to heart. It was one thing for him to mouth off to Echidna when he thought she couldn’t hear him, and another thing entirely to do so to the possible — now confirmed — Starchild. One let Amberly get a better grasp of the dangerous psycher’s character by seeing how she reacted to the Blank’s muttered insults; the other would have just been pointless stupidity.  

No one who knew him would even accuse Jurgen of being particularly intelligent, but he was loyal and took to the military hierarchy as if it were a divine mandate. He didn’t need to understand why orders were given; he just needed to follow them. 

With those distractions over, her mind inevitably curled back around to examine all she remembered of the Starchild’s words. Previously, they’d been clouded by doubt and … she had to admit, she had been fearful of dwelling on them too deeply, or considering their implications. A part of her had convinced the greater whole that the supposed Starchild was very likely the Changeling in disguise, making a game out of trying to break her faith and her belief in herself. 

The truth was somehow worse. So much worse. 

‘You are his discarded Humanity.’ 

Why would He discard his Humanity?

‘Hiding, obviously.’

Why would He need to hide?

‘I have lost count, probably in the low hundreds, sometimes as a baby, sometimes as a toddler; I only made it to puberty on roughly every fifth life. They really do hate Psykers nowadays, don’t they? It probably didn’t help that I was babbling about weird stuff in a dozen different languages before I could even walk. I got called a Demonhost more times than I care to count.’

She hated how she didn’t even doubt that. It fit. If a child with especially strong psychic potential was born on any world held by the Imperium, it was standard protocol to have them killed. Only psykers below a certain level of power were even taken by the Black Ships; all others were deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live.

It was the Ordo Hereticus’ purview, but Amberley had ordered a few such assassinations herself. 

She hated how she could see herself ordering the death of an infant psyker babbling in unknown languages. Just days ago, she would have deemed that decision reasonable, necessary. It was just how the world was; people just had to learn how to live with it. Powerful psykers running amok were just psychic explosions, daemonhosts, daemonic incursions or worse, waiting to happen. 

Have I been the one to order one of those deaths? 

The thought refused to leave her alone. Was she responsible for delaying the awakening of the Starchild by one more reincarnation? 

We could have had the Starchild awaken mere centuries after the Horus Heresy.

Ten thousand years. They have been killing every single one of the Emperor’s reincarnations for ten thousand years straight before they could be fully realised. 

What have we done?

‘Stupid numbskulls. I should have blown Mars into the Sun; maybe then some people would have been allowed to develop a brain in my absence.’

Echidna had been right. The Emperor hated Mars and its Cult of the Machine God just as much as she did. 

Amberley vaguely recalled the white-haired woman telling her that the Emperor had been one of, if not the greatest scientists mankind had ever produced. 

What would he think if he knew that calling oneself a scientist in the modern Imperium was grounds for being accused of tek-heresy, the punishment for which was censorship or even servitorization? Not even Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl, Lord Guilliman’s new favourite pet tech-priest, dared to call himself that despite all the political favour he enjoyed.

Did he know? He had said he hadn't been in a place since the Heresy to gain access to information about the state of the Imperium. All he knew came from Divinations done more than ten thousand years ago … and from Echidna’s mouth. 

‘I’d sooner stick my head inside a Lord of Change’s beak than trust the Imperium in its current state not to get in my way and to protect me properly.’

The reborn Emperor did not trust his own Imperium to protect him and serve him. It burned like nothing else; it felt like some manner of betrayal, but … Amberley had always been good at putting herself into the shoes of others to see things from their viewpoint. It was something essential for her job. 

It burned even more that she couldn’t disagree with the sentiment. The High Lords had tried to have Lord Guilliman assassinated. The Lord Commander of the Imperium, a Primarch, betrayed by those who should have served as his hands,  eyes, ears and fists. 

Greedy old assholes that had enjoyed ten thousand years of rule, of their office being the highest in the Imperial hierarchy. They couldn’t cope with their authority being superseded for the first time in living memory.

The Inquisition borrowed its unlimited authority from the Emperor through his Regent, Malcador the Hero, who had first laid the foundations of their order. 

How many of her colleagues in the Inquisition would choose willful ignorance when they were presented with the existence of the Starchild, just because they couldn’t bear the thought of the Emperor actually telling them how to do their jobs? It would be subconscious, just as it had been for Amberley. But what if they didn’t accept that a Custodian would know better whether someone was, or was not, the Emperor?

‘My new friend here might not be as experienced yet, but she is already a more powerful Psyker when it comes to pure power and potential than anyone I’d ever met outside of perhaps myself at my prime.’

The Emperor trusted his new ‘friend’ above anyone in the Imperium, with the exception of maybe the Adeptus Custodes. There was also that tiny little snippet about Echidna having the same level of raw psychic might as the Emperor had when he battled Horus and fought personally in the Great Crusade. 

Now that was a thought she really didn’t like thinking about, so she put it aside for now. Instead, she swiftly reviewed the rest of the conversation she’d witnessed, noting a few things she would have to look into. 

She had never heard of a ‘Human Webway’, nor a ‘Molech’, but the way both Echidna and the Starchild were talking of them, both terms must have been important. She could somewhat guess the first one, even if it made her feel horribly strange. A section of the Webway for humanity. It would have been within her Ordo’s purview to stop any foolish Magos Xenologis from attempting something like that, likely with a bolt to the metallic cranium. 

Molech, though … that sounded like a place, not an object or a thing. Another thing to look into. There was also the problem of Lord Octavian looking like a lost child whose mother stopped to chat with a stranger at the store and has been ignoring him for half an hour.

Alas, that wasn’t her problem. 

Two mysteries of lesser priority she would also have to figure out were what the frak a ‘Bingo’ was and why the Emperor would call himself ‘Alexander the-‘

Amberley cut off that thought, suddenly recalling one of Echidna’s rambling anecdotes and the offhand mention about the Emperor having likely been a number of historical figures she’d learned about in some ancient Terran schola-equivalent.

Hadn’t one of the names she mentioned been ‘Alexander the Great’? A great conqueror from Old Terra’s ancient past? 

So that was true as well. 

Alexander The-Not-So-Great. Because he was reborn as a preteen boy. The Emperor had confirmed his identity to Echidna through a shared joke only someone who knew long-forgotten history and the Emperor's own secret past would understand. 

Before Amberley's sanity could take another step towards the edge of the cliff, she reoriented herself and put that particular realisation out of her mind. Being an Inquisitor meant she had some practice in safeguarding her precious sanity even in the face of some world-shattering revelations.

All that’s left to figure out is what the frak a ‘Bingo’ is.