Unlike the Emperor, who burned with psychic brilliance and radiated divine charisma, this being was the void incarnate—a null so profound that even the Warp recoiled from his presence. He was the Emperor’s unspoken counterbalance, a weapon that had never been unleashed.

For over 50,000 years, he had remained in his self-imposed exile. When humanity first crawled from the dark days of the Age of Strife, he waited. When The Emperor, with his plans, his brilliance, and his arrogance, sprouted out waited. As a null, he was utterly disconnected from the Warp’s chaotic influence. The psychic screams of dying mortals and daemons alike reached him as nothing more than echoes in the void. He had been spared the whispers of Chaos, the corrupting of the Ruinous Powers. But he was not spared the burden of knowledge.

“You should have let me fight by your side,” he muttered, addressing the distant, unseen Emperor. “You feared me as much as you needed me. Now, you reap what you have sown.”

He thought of the Emperor’s choices—of his refusal to truly trust anyone. The Primarchs had been tools, the Legions pawns in a game too grand for any to fully understand. And yet, the Emperor had ignored his greatest equal—the one who might have helped steer the galaxy away from this brink.

“Perhaps you thought I was too much like you, he mused. “Too dangerous. Too... unpredictable.”

And so, he watched. He stood motionless as the Emperor faced Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He felt the ripples of power as the Emperor struck down his favored son, even as his own body was broken in the process. He saw the fallout as the Traitor Legions were cast into disarray, retreating into the Eye of Terror. The Emperor’s body was carried to the Golden Throne, broken and barely alive, his dream preserved but fractured.

The Man of Gold turned away from the spectacle, his gaze shifting to the distant stars. “You won the battle,” he murmured. “But you lost the war. And now, you are a god in death, Emperor— a god of a fractured empire.”