The throne room managed the impressive feat of making the gate look subtle and constrained.
It was a spherical chamber sized to house a warlord titan with ample space left over, the ceiling was lined with a great interplay of house symbols and suspended by five knights of enormous scale taking the role of a medieval atlas. The processions filed off to the fields of stands flanking the chief walkway towards the throne, their stands were separated from the hundred of already filled stands which were consumed by tens of thousands of knights, merchants, dignitaries and guildsmen.
The room gave a good idea of how massive Gwyar was due to both territorial extent and the anachronisms that made it the superior of a truly medieval world. Tens of millions dwelled in the kingdom and their elite were represented here.
The four other great houses split off from the Ailbe to assume their places on four of the five elevated plinths at the foot of each knight.
All of this took considerable time given the sheer scale of the room and throughout the whole affair, the Ailbe continued their solitary march towards the throne itself.
The entire room looked at the thrones, each colossi dipped its head towards it, each stand looked to it and the patterns and murals which lined the dome all seemed to look to it in subservience.
The throne room had one clear message in its design.
'One of us is the king and it is not you.'
The throne itself was two sections.
The king sat at the apex of at curved walkway which housed a dozen lesser seats, held by his queen, children and councilors. The throne's rise was covered in reliefs of hundreds of house sigils which fed into his tall seat from which sprouted five swords longer than the tallest man. Flanking the throne were four of the great war robots of the royal house, each of the giant machines wore a mantle of interwoven knotworks and metallic chains over their painted hulls.
That was the lesser of the two parts of the throne.
Dominating that throne was the seat of a god, a great work of white marble and black basalt more suited to Zeus than a machine. From the great seat sprouted two stone wings which stretched out to embrace the entirety of the chamber in its stone feathers over which the rest of the various ornaments were superimposed. From the core of these wings sprouted two massive screen which showed the king's visage surveying the room with his calm visage.
But that all paled compared to the giant that sat like a long-fallen king lounging on its throne and surveying the world before it.
I… I did not recognize the model of the Immram.
Great armoured feet were more human in profile and proportion than a conventional knight, greaves painted a startling and lined with reliefs until they disappearing beneath a great plated skirt. Its heavy gauntlets each finishing in perfect imitations of human hands with rounded pauldrons lined with the five crests of the great lords. The most recognizable part of its form was the hunch of its torso and the knightly visage of its warmask. Under each gauntlet were underslung cannons of unfamiliar profile and from its great back rose the missile launchers the size of a large carriage. On its lap was a sword of familiar white steel that gave a keening quality as we approached.
I could all but feel Calyburne hum in interest as we approached in silence.
It was a knight.
But it was a knight of a completely different profile, a baroque giant scaled more closely to place between a warhound or a reaver titan than to one of its cousins among the imperium.
Its nature was apparent to me as I neared it.
It was a thing of this world, a paladin born to match the foulest blade of hell.
I think there are members of the Mechanicum that would start a holy war over making this room look more opulent in praise to the thing, I mused internally.
It struck me as mildly horrifying that the Treasures of this world could not only produce the thing but that they had been sufficient to fell its five brothers.
We fell to our knees as we arrived at the end of the room and waited as there as the last of the sounds died out.
The silence that echoed the room was absolute, the cyclopean structure might as well be uninhabited save for the sounds of thousands of distinct heartbeats.
The quiet held court for precisely Six minutes, then Seven, then Eight, then Nine.
Finally, once the silence had been held for the thirty-minute span, two old men which shared the thrones beneath the queen and spoke into their hidden beads so that the sound could echo across the chamber.
"Six for the Goat, Seven for the Slug, Eight for the Horse and Nine for the Peacock," They spoke in unison as their faces were projected across the great wings of the throne. "Let our silence be broken and let the Void hear that we yet live. May the gods protect us and empower us against the evil which seeks to creep forth from the bones of our ancestors. May the Ten Guardians bless us to continue forward and may the One-Who-Is-All guide our swords in the name of the Holy and the Just! This we pray!"
"This we pray," Responded the entirety of the room.
The theology of the Faith, the dominant religion on Hiber'Cale was a confusing mix of Abrahamic, Shinto and Greco-Roman beliefs which I maintain could induce a fatal migraine to try to understand but I aped it fairly well. It was after all a religion with 'screw chaos' as their founding principle so I could respect that much, the fact that the entire population was more or less deafened to anything short of picking up a Daemon Weapon was an added bonus in my own opinion.
I doubted that my creator would mind, if he did I already had a thesis laying around as to how my own brothers were flouting the Truth on their homeworlds (with modular segments depending on the order in which I was found) just in case. It was still rather imperfect but I had not found the time to hire a monk to tutor me.
The king rose while I went over my practical spiritual concerns and regarded the room.
He did not look a day over twenty-four in Terran years as he smiled at the masses and stretched out his arms.
"My leal friends!" He greeted. "It is as if yesterday that I ascended to the throne of our great kingdom and look at me now! Clearly ruling truly does age one!"
I could hear both the genuine and the forced laughter in the audience at the king's jibe.
"I must thank the gods my friends!" He proceeded. "For I have been blessed with ruling in a truly wonderous era, one which I only wish that our own mothers and fathers might have lived to see!"
He wielded the crowd's mood like a conductor, building them up to a high before beginning to twist them to his desired course.
"Two years of good harvest! Three years of peace! Three years of our boys and girls looking to the skies without fear of Mountain Dragons or the forests without fear Ur-Beasts! We must count our blessings for such alone!" He continued.
I need to make a point of not mentioning that to the Imperium if I can help it, I noted mentally. 'Deathworld' has a much worse connotation than 'Feudal World'. It is hardly their business if we have elephant-sized wolves, bears that are best engaged with tactical warheads and actual dragons.
"But there is more, my dear friends," King Gaerys' smile widened. "For the gods have blessed us with a champion of a singular nature! A new Galtine, another Lord of Dawn!"
And that answers the question of the king's view on the Children.
My hearts skipped a beat.
He was going off script.
'This guy is a good doctor, support him'. That was supposed to be it in the broad strokes!
"Lord Antur!" He pointed down to the kneeling Lord of Ailbe as the projectors switched to our kneeling party. "Raise your head, lord of one of my dearest subject. You have taken into your house this new Galtine!"
To his credit, Lord Antur looked up with every drop of dignity one would expect of a high lord.
"I am honored by your words, Your Grace. My house has indeed been blessed so," the old man threw me under the bus.
"It is the work of the gods," The twin priests spoke as one. "They have returned our legend to once and for all purge Four Pillars of the Void from the world."
I was getting the distinct impression that my plans were about to begin moving at a breakneck speed.
"This man, this lord among the Seekers," The king pointed to the contingent of Seekers in the crowds (who were by now almost as pale as their silver tabards save for those who styled themselves my 'knights'). "Has done as the rumors suggest! My own men have seen the City-Like-Woods! The blight which has long harbored the evils of the Void in our land! It is no more my friends! For this man led an army of brave souls into its depths and called forth one the Guardians to serve at his side and cut out the voids black heart!"
My eyes drifted accusingly down to my sword.
Hiring a theological tutor had just skipped to first place on my list.
He really needs to stop, I thought with mild panic. This is drifting farther away from support and more into begging for every other player to come and take a literal stab at me.
I should have seen it coming in retrospect, Gaerys was notable for being a devote follower of the Faith as well as for being a capable administrator.
"I once shared your concern over his strength!" The king continued with a theatrical show of shame and anger. "I thought these tales some child's sweet whispers! Yet not a night in my home and this Seeker engaged with the most feared killers of all! Three! Three of the mighty Fear Gorta snuck into the heart of great Wygalois and were struck down, mere minutes from where my sweet queen slept from where your heir slept!"
Their were shouts and gasps as one of the councilors lifted the shattered head to the cameras and images of the ruins apartments flashed onto the screen.
The crowd seemed entirely too captivated in the exaggerated retelling for my taste and I felt entirely too many eyes drilling into me.
I have acidic spit! I recalled. Perhaps I might be able to spit a hole into the floor and escape through it!
My plan had been to conquer the world through subtlety, as some impressive but seemingly unimportant Oathmaster who swayed things from the shadows.
"And furthermore! He is a healer, let the visage granted to both myself and my dear queen stand testament to that fact," The king continued. "This and more can be said of Galtine of the House Ailbe. This is why I call you today my dearest of friends and subjects. For the Purifier of the White Forest stands wronged!"
He shook his head with emphasized force, letting his augmentations and their chains catch with his hair to emphasize his distress.
"Wronged, for we do nothing! The gods call on us to strike the Void but others squabble! We are given the means to seals the gates of hell and our neighbours try to silence he who would guide us! For Seekers of other lands are not lauded as tradition demands! But broken and subsumed to base greed!" He concluded.
In retrospect, telling him in private about the Fear Gorta and who hired them might have been a poor idea.
Then the very ground of the chamber began to shake as I realized how seriously the king had been won to the idea.
The king straightened himself as the horn-like implants began to shine on the screens and the Immram took hold of its sword and straightened up.
"But we are not so shameful," He thundered to the crowd's roaring approval. "We are Gwyar! We will stand against the Void alongside this Galtine! We remember the words of the first to stand against the evil incarnate!"
The king held up his hand as the Immram brandished the titan-sized Moraltach.
"We bring the dawn!" He shouted.
"The dawn! The dawn! The dawn!" The crowd shouted back.
I desperately wanted to facepalm.