The Return of the Emperor (or, How CC:WoC Will (probably) End)

"Ready?" Trajan Valoris asked.

I was not ready, in any sense of the word. In fact, between the Chaos Worshippers who'd somehow managed to annex HOLY TERRA ITSELF under my unwilling leadership, the High Lords of Terra looking like they weren't sure if they should be trying to come up with some kind of plan to assassinate me or screaming in abject horror, murdering the Protectorate-aligned Astartes escorts I'd assigned to them, and getting off-world with all possible haste, and the fact that the God Emperor of Mankind, a godlike being who'd probably annihilate my soul the moment He got up from the Golden Throne, was mere seconds away from being revived and doing exactly that, the only thing I was ready to do was do some screaming and fleeing of my own.

But then again, doing that would most certainly shatter my stupidly overblown reputation and lead to the Custodes, Primarchs, and Astartes around me all murdering me on the spot and sending my screaming soul straight into Emeli's clutches. At least if the Emperor was the one who struck me down my soul would (hopefully) be annihilated along with my body, with my consciousness relegated to the relative peace and quiet of eternal oblivion.

I nodded.

The Panacea injector's needle pierced the Emperor of Mankind's healed skin, slid into his brain stem, and a strange sense of deja-vu washed over me as I found myself wondering how it had come to this.

For a long, long second, dead silence reigned. And then...

The Emperor's chest shifted as He sucked in a long, deep inhale. For the first time in ten thousand years, the Master of Mankind's chest rose and fell. His eyes opened, locking on me, and His arms shifted for the first time in decades, hauling His now-fully healed form off the Golden Throne. Behind me, The Lion, Vulkan, and Guilliman sucked in a breath, and everyone else fell to their knees. I almost kneeled myself, but the smile he was wearing had frozen me in place.

I had many expectations regarding what the Emperor would greet me with, most of them involving holy hellfire melting my body and shredding my soul. But absolutely none of them involved Him greeting me with a pleased smile.

"I must admit... ten millennia ago, if someone told me that my life would ultimately be saved by a Warmaster of Chaos who'd stayed loyal to the Imperium even after gaining that title, I would have struck them dead on the spot."

And then the atrophied legs of the oddly nondescript-looking human in front of me, otherwise known as the Carrion Lord, Master of Mankind, and God-Emperor of the Imperium, promptly gave out on Him as He fell on his face.

The room promptly exploded into motion. Trajan Valoris moved to the Emperor's side in an attempt to assist, the three Primarchs behind me attempted to do the same, tripped over several Astartes who'd had the misfortune of being in the way, and promptly wound up in an impromptu dogpile with their gene-sons and gene-sons-in-law. And me? I was still standing there, reeling from what the Emperor had said, shock and horror warring with each other in my head.

"Oh throne..." I moaned silently to myself in the back of my mind. "I've fooled Him on Terra too."