Tzeentch's will swept across his infinite domain, and his phantom form arrived before the golden sun, clutching a handful of twitching souls.
"Master of Mankind," the Chaos God purred, his voice a low, gravelly whisper. The Master of Mankind—the golden will had called himself that. In the wake of the Aeldari Empire, a new species had risen in the mortal universe: Humanity. And this man was their strongest psyker.
"Where is my payment?" the golden sun replied, neither confirming nor denying his identity.
Tzeentch laughed, his voice like the crackle of ancient lightning. He handed over the twenty divine sparks and chuckled, "Master of Mankind? Heh heh."
This human was no mere mortal. He could face the Four Gods and wield the power of the Warp without paying the cosmic price. Any power, psychic or otherwise, came with an equal and opposite debt. Tzeentch knew that underneath the human skin, the golden will was something far more ancient, something with a love for humanity—and an endless, devouring darkness.
The Master of Mankind, well aware of who he was dealing with, kept his silence. Facing the master of fate, every word, every gesture, was a minefield. He took the souls, and with a swirl of golden energy, he and his prize vanished into the Warp.
"I look forward to the day you stand alongside us," Tzeentch's voice echoed behind him, a chilling promise.
"I will never stand alongside you. I am the Master of Mankind. I am the Emperor!" the golden sun replied, its defiance ringing through the void.
Tzeentch simply smiled a sinister, wide grin. "You will…" he whispered, watching the spot where the human had disappeared. "We will all bear witness to the fall. The birth of the King of Darkness."
A new cycle had begun, and the Great Game would have another player—perhaps two. The other gods—Khorne, the brutish jock; Slaanesh, the debauched party girl; and Nurgle, the moldy dad—were merely pawns in Tzeentch's eternal plan. He returned to his palace, eager to start his calculations.
Meanwhile, in the real universe, time marched on. Civilizations rose and fell, and the tide of life surged endlessly. Humanity, with its boundless desire to conquer the stars, discovered the Warp and the secrets of faster-than-light travel. From the 1st to the 15th Millennium, they ruled the galaxy with technology and logic, their destiny seemingly unshakeable.
Their golden age of technology was a sight to behold. Powerful "Golden Men" guided them, while bio-engineered "Iron Men" assisted in the day-to-day. For protection, the Iron Men created self-aware thinking machines called the "Iron Men." What could possibly go wrong with an army of sentient robots?
Then, for reasons no one knows, the Iron Men turned on their creators. A brutal war of creator versus creation tore across the galaxy. Entire star systems were annihilated, stars were drained of energy, and nanobots devoured all life. The Aeldari, who had watched from afar, even stepped in to help, but it was too late. Humanity won, but at a horrifying cost. The machines were defeated, but humanity's vast empire was now in shambles.
Without their A.I. assistants, much of humanity's technology was lost forever. Isolated colonies regressed, and humanity was at the mercy of its own broken technology. Then, as if things couldn't get worse, the Warp's residual poisons began to infect various worlds. Psykers appeared, mutations spread, and without a central government, many planets fell under the rule of Chaos and depravity.
The "Age of Strife" had begun. From the 25th to the 30th Millennium, humanity teetered on the brink of extinction.
And then, HE appeared.
A man who had been there all along. A "Perpetual," a secret immortal who had lived through humanity's entire history, gathering knowledge and power. He was an ancient, powerful psyker, who had lived for thousands of years in secret. His name was lost to history, but now he called himself something new: the Emperor.
He began his great work on humanity's home world, Terra, a broken planet ruled by warlords and tech-barbarians. He created a legion of genetically modified soldiers, the "Thunder Warriors," to unify the planet. But they were deeply flawed and couldn't be used to retake the galaxy. The Emperor was faced with a choice: a slow, painstaking reconquest that might take millennia, or to do something he had avoided his entire life: return to the Warp.
"Did you succeed?" a low, hoarse voice whispered as the Emperor's consciousness returned to his body. It was a voice filled with worry and desperate hope.