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A Prayer to the Stars.
They are right in a way. What the Imperium says about me. They say that I live in a state of eternal agony, that only my devotion to Mankind keeps me from slipping into the peace of death.
But in truth I feel no pain, no agony, I feel nothing entombed within this throne. My nerves have long rotted into nothingness even with all the life support devices attached to me. Devices that even without any physical feeling, I can still sense them as they fail. After all these years, death is finally closing in on me. And when it takes me, the Imperium, all of humankind, will be left in the dark as all the predators of this galaxy close in for the kill.
When that happens, all that I fought for, everything that I have suffered for, all the millennia I have spent upon this cursed throne, will have been for nothing.
All the years that I spent, watching as the empire I created, that shining civilization that stood proud at the precipice of a golden age, rot and wither, into a corrupt, brutal tyranny, fueled by fear and awe of me, as I've watched progress devolve into superstition and decay, as countless worlds gradually crumble under constant assault by unimaginably horrible forces.
All these years of doing everything in my dwindling power to fan any ember of hope that can be found in this galaxy, embers that grow fewer and fewer each day, laid to waste.
All these years, wallowing in my own decay, confronted everyday by the fact that I have failed the species I sought to raise to such glorious heights. The Imperium of Man, my greatest ambition and my greatest failure.
No, I do not feel physical pain. My rotted ruin of a body is as distant to me as the stars beyond the Astronoicon. But the agony of my failure, is something that strikes me more savagely than any blade.
Perhaps this is the fate that Curze saw when he looked upon me, when the Night Haunter's foresight peered into my future. What other kind of horror could cause him to nearly take his own life at the sight of it? A hell of over 10,000 years and the only escape comes with the knowledge that I've doomed that which I devoted myself to over countless millennia.
Within the warp, sometimes I can hear the distant laughter of the Chaos Gods, how they delight in my suffering. How they must delight at the fall of their most hated enemy and most delectable source of agony.
The Imperium, along with myself, has been dying a long, slow death ever since the day I was entombed within this damnable throne.
But even so, until my essence is truly gone from this galaxy, I will continue to do everything I can. I've long lost any vestige of hope for the Imperium, but I cannot let go. Even if I despise this horrid, bloodthirsty mockery of a civilization it has become, it is the only thing that can protect the people. And even if I can no longer see any possible way to save them from the coming darkness, until I'm gone I must believe that where there is life, even a cruel life where there is only war, there is hope even if I cannot see it.
And so I protect, as best as I am able, not nearly enough, but it is all I can offer.
That, and something that is quite possibly the biggest betrayal to all that I sought to accomplish in my life. That only now as the end times come for all of us, do I finally offer.
A prayer.
I who had sought to bring illumination and freedom from the shackles of religious mindsets, now pray, desperately for any glimmer of hope for humanity in a galaxy that is running out of time.
I don't know if I'm praying to a deity, some existence that is even higher than my own or merely to the stars themselves, but as the darkness closes in, I pray for just one more light against the darkness, one last miracle to save the people who have suffered so long for my mistakes. I pray that there is some small inkling, just one more small scrap of hope left in this bloodstained galaxy.
My prayers go unanswered of course, but again, until I am gone I will offer all that I can to the species I've failed.
I will offer whatever meagre protection I can give, and I will pray.
The Emperor Protects.
The Emperor Prays.