Is the Emperor real, or simply an Oz-style illusion?
I want the curtain to be drawn back, and for Malcador to be revealed as the old man behind the throne, like in The Wizard of Oz. The old man, using his powers to create the image of a glorious golden hero for his warriors to follow. The old man, who doesn't want his psychic projection worshipped, because its just a projection.
The old man, who "dies" at the same time as the "emperor". The old man, who we have been told time and again the emperor was before the unification, simply a "power behind the throne", an aide, a bureaucrat, never a leader till he took a golden warrior as his form and united people behind the image of a great warrior. I want to see the emperor revealed as a myth created by malacador because he knew the primarchs would never follow a human.
Think of present time. Do you watch CNN and hear stories of an eight foot tall man of gold who can level mountains with a thought? No. If the emperor lived today, he could unify Earth in a week, and guide advancement as king. Picture an immortal, psychically strong, who no one follows unless they are enslaved. Imagine him gaining control eventually over a small nation, strong in technology, and designing the first warriors. Warriors need captains. Captains need generals. But why would his generals follow his orders, why would they not simply set themselves up as Kings? So he crafts an illusion. Part light, part energy, perhaps part host statue body, like the Eldar Avatar... And his armies follow their leader, their glorious and powerful leader, the one who is everything they wish to be, huge and powerful and glorious and clean... and they ignore the shadow behind the curtain....
Over the years, as malcador uses the projection more and more frequently, it takes longer to fade away each time.
Imagine the first time his psychic creation doesn't fade away on command.
The first time it speaks of it's own volition.
The first time it acts on it's own.
Then he realizes that he has lost control.
He begins to use it less frequently.
He finds Angron on Nucera, and doesn't use the homonculus to help Angron win the war because he doesn't want to make it more powerful...he teleports Angron into the flagship, leaving the slave army to die and earning angrons hatred and resentment.
Lorgar begins to worship the homonculus. At first malcador ignores it, then he goes to colchis as himself, as a human, to try to stop Lorgar, knowing the creation is becoming more sentient, even though he knows damned well that Lorgar would accept without question a command from the golem, he tries to talk to Lorgar in his human form first. And fails, and has to summon the creation again to chastise the word bearers, even though he knows he's making it more and more powerful.
He uses the primarchs, secretly fearing them but knowing he cannot unify the Galaxy without them. Despite the power of his creation, he retreats from the crusade, trying again to make his role less central, less in the eye of things. He knows that his Frankenstein monster is so powerful it could bring about victory on any front...but every time he calls it it comes faster, stays longer...
So he places Horus in command of the crusade and retreats to earth to try to find a way to stop his creation, or at the very least to stop making it more powerful.
Lorgar goes on his crusade to find the place where God's and man can meet, he finds the eye of terror...and in the eye he finds an Eldar Avatar.....and he turns away from the emperors worship as he realizes the truth...
By the time of the seige, the creation sits on the golden throne. It sits still, like a statue, like the Eldar Avatar before sacrifice brings it to life.
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/2787984/2/The-Battle-for-Earth Malcador feeds his life force into the creation. It takes his soul, and goes to fight Horus. On the battle barge, sanguinius realizes something is different. The creation is out of control, it's fully sentient and believes itself to be the god emperor...but it's not the mind that guided the armies all this time and sanguinius realizes that something is wrong.
The golden statue kills the angel, and the wound sanguinius leaves in him is sufficient for Horus to cripple it before he dies.
Dorn takes Frankenstein's monster back to Terra and puts it into the throne, but malcador has died and the thing is no longer fully viable.
It must consume psychic energy to stay alive....
And they begin to feed it psychics, and the black fleets spend the next ten thousand years feeding it and keeping it alive.
I call it the "Oz heresy", and while it's partly an exercise in possibilities I also find it explains certain mysteries really well.
Why not conquer the world today as god emperor and lead us into a golden age forever? Why much around behind the scenes when you can just rule?
Why not help Angron win, earning his undying loyalty, instead of watching his family be murdered and losing him forever because you can't be bothered to spend ten minutes helping him.
Why have malcador try to discipline Lorgar on colchis, when the emperor is literally in orbit? Why does malcador look sad when he realizes he has to summon the emperor for this task? Why trust a subordinate to such a delicate task when you are right there?
Why keep so distant from the primarchs? Why keep them in the dark and not educate and lead them to the truth?
Why not just finish the crusade? Surely with the god emperor at the helm they could have wrapped it all up in a few years and then he could have retired to research the webway? Why put someone else in charge?
Frankly, why deny your own divinity?
Because the creation was a tool, one increasingly out of control.
It came to me when reading "The First Heretic".
The Emperor doesn't land on Colchis to discipline Lorgar. Malcador does. And when Lorgar rejects the order, a look of sadness crosses Malcadors face. Then the emperor arrives, he was in orbit the whole time. What was he doing? Playing soduku?
Why? Why not just land and explain to your son in person what Lorgar misunderstood?
And on Nucera. The emperor arrives in orbit, with his armies, and the War Hounds. He then teleports Angron into captivity and leaves his family and friends to die. WTF? Why not fight by your son? Why not save his people? Why leave then to die?
Unless the emperor is a tool, and a tool with a high cost, used sparingly to control an increasingly difficult swarm of warlords. Unless Malcador is the power behind the throne, and the emperor is a facade.
The Oz Heresy.
Malcador used science and sorcery to create the legions and the primarchs. The idea that they are descended from their "father" the emperor was put forward to instill loyalty in the primarchs. The construct is intended to be a godlike father-figure leading the galaxy, why not tell your super soldiers that they aren't just some weapons bred in a lab, disposable and ultimately nothing special, nothing grand. Tell them they are physically part of their godlike leader, and they are even more likely to follow him.
If the god-emperor were born in 10,000 BC, why would his genetics help you design anything? If he rewrote his own genetics to make himself incredibly powerful....then he could just make his primarchs the same way, he wouldn't need his genes.
The story of his primarchs being taken from his genetics is just yet another effort by malcador to ensure their loyalty. Even if every word of this theory were disproven, there would still be no reason for the golden one to use his own code to make his soldiers.
Malcador knows the danger of the warp, he doesn't want anyone exploring it. By Nikaea though, he has other worries. His creation keeps acting of it's own accord, and he's starting to freak out about it. It's why he turned over leadership of the crusade to Horus, to try to use the thing less often. He's built the ultimate weapon and the ultimate god leader, he's stopped using it as a weapon, though it could break any siege, win any battle. Now he's desperately trying to control things without using this god effigy. He can't afford to let it talk at Niksea for long.
Because....what if, when it had everyone assembled at Nikea, and it was talking about the empyrian...
What if it proclaimed itself a God and demanded they worship it?
So malcador uses it to issue the shortest possible message and proclamation that he can get away with, and issues the orders for no one to tamper with the warp while he tries to figure out his problem: he has the tiger by the tail and dares not let go.
Magnus rode the warp with malcador. He recognized it as the emperor, because it was the psychic mind he always knew as the emperor: malcadors soul separated from his body.
He's supposedly almost fifty thousand years, nine feet tall, radiates golden light, and is the most powerful psycher to ever exist...and they see him as a man? They need glasses. Just a little joke there.
My personal suspicion is that the thing really has no exact physical form. Reports of conversations with the emperor vary wildly based on who gives them. Different listeners hear different things, different people see different things. There is tremendous psychic strain on the reality around it. I wouldn't be surprised if its war form was literal molten gold. It would fit with visions of him, and it would be similar enough, yet different from, the eldar avatar, as to make sense.
Id have to ask, does anyone know the real origin of the sisters? Whether my theory is true in any way shape or form, the idea that the emperor is able to appear as whatever he wants to, even when faced by their power. If their appearance and powers could have had anything to do with the emperor/malcador/the imperium (as opposed to freak chance), then clearly they were designed with a blind spot to their master. If you were a powerful psycher, making anti-psychics you couldnt dominate would be insanity: rouge nulls could kill you when nothing else could touch you. Unless they didnt have power over you.
Does anyone know when they first appeared? According to this theory, its just before Horus becomes Warmaster that the thing becomes dangerous, I'd say immediately prior to that. Maybe malcador had hints of it before, but if it did something dangerous, showing independent action, refusing to go back into statis/quietude, saying something completely unexpected...then (I believe) he would have to immediately retire it. There was no indication ever that the emperor would stop crusading, would step down, that he would appoint another. It was sudden and shocking. Why stop when the goal is in sight? So were the sisters around significantly before this? Were they there for the whole crusade? If they were new, then the creature had much closer to its final form. If they weren't, it was likely the strength of the thing and any blind spots they had.
Normal humans, nulls, psychics, they are children next to the power of whatever guides the throne. Children can argue all day long about the tooth fairy or Santa claus...the truth is just that they are too far outclassed to be able to tell much of anything about the thing on the throne.
Lorgar went into the eye of terror and found an Eldar Avatar, and afterwards rebelled. What is an Avatar? A giant statue of metal, sitting on a throne, waiting to be awoke through the power of a sacrifice. Perhaps this emperor is the same, and that's what Lorgar saw and recognized.
The custodians might know their leader isn't human, but if he's a statue of gold who sometimes animates, they might not suspect. Especially since he's always been that way. And, after a while...he begins to animate more and more often on it's own. This is what had malcador so afraid, his thing is less and less a construct and more and more independent.
The custodians are unthinkingly loyal, they've never known different, and if the emperor wants to sit on his throne for weeks, they assume he's doing psychic business.
