Author's Note: For those interested, there are now eight advance chapters on P-atreon (remove the spaces and dash): p-atreon/ SkySage24.
Isha was afraid of him.
The Emperor had seen the fear flickered in her eyes when he revealed the Webway Project.
There was a mixture of terror in her voice as she asked him whether or not he intended to exterminate all the Eldar within the Webway.
And though it pained him to admit it, the Emperor could not tell her she was wrong.
He did not wish to hurt Isha. It was why he had forged the contract with her in the first place.
But when it came to a choice between mankind and the Eldar…humanity would always come first.
No matter what.
But if other paths were possible to pursue…well. George was willing to try them.
Truth be told, he had been taken aback by Isha's fear and the knowledge she had almost desperately offered him. Piercing the Webway with the Golden Throne was…difficult, to say the least.
He had not yet even begun to make any real inroads, and would likely not do so for centuries to come. The Great Crusade was as much about gathering the necessary knowledge and components to begin penetrating the Webway's defences as it was about reuniting mankind.
Isha, however, seemed to have seriously overestimated his progress and, there was no other way to put it, panicked. Perhaps she thought he had inherited a far greater understanding of the Webway from the Old One that had created him than he actually had. Perhaps she assumed he had learned something from the Dragon.
In any case, she seemed to have thought he was already on the verge of a breakthrough rather than centuries away.
George could not help but feel a tinge of shame and guilt at taking advantage of her fear. Part of him whispered that he should reassure and clarify, put her fears to rest.
But if she realized just how behind the curve he was, she might decide not to share the knowledge of subspace and warp tunnelling she had.
And that was unacceptable. He needed to know. Even if neither avenue ultimately panned out, then what he learned would still likely be useful when it came to the Webway.
This knowledge could help him save humanity, and that was an advantage the Emperor was not willing to sacrifice, even if it did mean taking advantage of a…friend's fears.
There was no other way.
It was all for the best in any case. Ideally, one of these two ideas that Isha proposed would work out, and there would be no need for conflict between them.
Pushing away his guilt, the Emperor focused on the task in front of him.
Crafting wraithbone.
Now that Isha had finally demonstrated the process to him, the Emperor could not help but be in awe.
There were certain fundamental principles in common with the making of dreamstones, enough that the Emperor was confident he could have worked them out on his own in a few years.
But still, the process was also very different at the same time. It was beautiful and sublime in a way that is difficult to describe in human languages.
Taking the raw energies of the Warp, purifying and stabilizing them, and then weaving that power into solid form…it was simply extraordinary.
But above all, it was scientific. It was also artistic, but it was a process that could be mastered through careful study and hard work.
There would be no need for him to go on any journey of self-discovery and reach some deep personal realization to master bonesinging, and for that the Emperor was grateful.
For this, he simply had to be a scientist, artisan and weaver all things which he had been in previous lives.
Never quite in this way, but close enough.
So it was that the Emperor patiently plucked strands of power from the Immaterium, shaping them and then weaving them together.
Even his enhanced mind needed to put considerable focus on the task, though it would no doubt become easier with time. But for the moment, the Emperor spared no effort, concentrating.
He could see where he had been going wrong with the auramite, as he drew another strand of energy forth. He hadn't realized how delicate the process was. He had treated it as a matter of forging, of acting as a blacksmith to melt something down and reforge it.
But bonesinging wasn't like that. To excise the corruption of Chaos and stabilize the energies of the Sea required far more precision. Apply too much force, to try to melt it down, would stabilize it, but the result was too rigid and inflexible. Auramite was as strong and durable as adamantium and capable of withstanding considerable psychic pressure, but it wasn't much more than that.
Wraithbone was every bit as strong, but far more flexible. It could be shaped to any purpose, made into whatever was required for the task at hand.
It was simply extraordinary.
What he could have done with wraithbone if he had cracked its secrets at the height of the Golden Age! It was still beyond valuable and there were many, many things he could do with it, but if only he still had the full resources and technology he had back then. If only he could still afford to focus his efforts solely on studying and bury himself in his research for years as he once had, and not have to divide his attention between so many other tasks…
If only.
At last, he finished the work of pulling the wraithbone together. Floating between his hands was an ingot of shining gold, that seemed almost crystalline yet…wasn't.
It was warm and full of power and light. More than that it was full of potential.
Isha appraised it, her eyes looking it at through all dimensions. "May I?" She asked.
"Of course."
Tapered fingers plucked the golden ingot from between his palms, and Isha turned it over several times, studying it carefully.
"Well done," She said. "Your work with the dreamstones has been paying off. This is the sort of craftsmanship most bonesingers would need years of effort to reach. You have achieved it in half a day."
"Has it been that long?" The Emperor asked in surprise, before realizing that, yes it had.
He had been so utterly absorbed in the process that he had completely lost track of time.
"It has been, yes," Isha nodded. "That said, there are still flaws to iron out," She traced a finger across the ingot, letting her power flow into it.
It wasn't much power by either of their other standards, though still comparable to the output of a Beta-Class psyker.
The energy flowed into the ingot, which sparkled with emerald light…and then a large amount of the energy simply bled off and faded back into the Warp, much to the Emperor's displeasure.
The Lord of Terra stared at the ingot in annoyance as Isha handed it back to him.
"What did I do wrong?" He wondered. The ingot should have absorbed and stored all the energy seamlessly.
"You are still affected by your methods of creating auramite," Isha answered, plucking another ingot from the table. This was seemingly identical to the one the Emperor had just created, save that it lacked the crystalline sheen. "It is an impressive substance, a remarkable attempt at recreating wraithbone, but it cannot store psychic energy. You are focusing too much on the aspect of ensuring that the wraithbone can resist the power of the Sea when you should seek to achieve a perfect balance between the ability to both resist and absorb power."
The Emperor nodded in disgruntlement. It made sense, as much as he didn't like it.
"You don't need to focus so much on the density of the substance," Isha continued. "The right molecular structure will ensure that the wraithbone is perfectly capable of resisting all malevolent psychic energies while still being able to absorb them when needed. If necessary, you can alter the wraithbone to be more suited to one task over the other, but you must master the baseline first."
George absorbed her words, feeling once more like a child learning from his teachers.
It had embarrassed him not long ago, but now, he only felt the thrill of learning as he had so many years ago, discovering new things and learning at the feet of his masters, when he had still been cycling through lives as a mortal.
He hadn't felt this way since before the Cybernetic Revolt and the Augment Wars when humanity's dominance over the stars had seemed unshakeable and inevitable. When the universe had still seemed so grand and beautiful and the mystery of it had been alluring rather than a cause for caution.
But to his regret, the Emperor had to push his eagerness aside for now. He was sorely tempted to concentrate all his attention on learning bonesinging and exploring it to the fullest extent, but he was no longer Professor George Adams.
He was the Emperor of Mankind, and his Imperium demanded his attention.
"There are other matters that require my attention now, I'm afraid," He said with great reluctance. "If we could divide our focus?"
Isha inclined her head in agreement before she shimmed for a brief moment and then there were two of her standing across the laboratory table from him as if they had always been there.
The Emperor's doppelganger sprang into existence not a moment later, and two of the avatars resumed the work of bonesinging.
The other two avatars left the lab, walking back out into the great hall that housed the Golden Throne.
But as he looked at his creation, the Emperor could not help but tense.
Before, it had always been a source of hope and pride. When he had finally unearthed it from where he had buried it before the Age of Strife, and found it in still more or less pristine condition, he had been beyond relieved.
But now he could see what he had been blind to. He could see the heavy weight of destiny around the throne, and the futures connected to it.
Particularly that future.
The image of his death haunted him still, burned into his mind more vividly than anything had been since Molech.
And the Chaos God that had erupted from his corpse, that beautiful but terrible monster…it had shaken him to his core.
Many times he had been warned by both friend and foe that the path he was taking would not lead him to a place he enjoyed. Every time, he had dismissed those warnings.
Yes, he would pay a heavy price for pursuing the Golden Path, and his regrets at the end would no doubt be immeasurable.
But it would all be worth it for the cause of humanity's salvation and ascension.
It had to be.
Isha had convinced him he did not have to be so…extreme in his methods. That there was still a place for diplomacy, that it was better to wrap his iron fist in a silk glove.
But even she had not made him doubt the validity of his cause and path.
Until now.
Now, she had shown him that hidden fate around the Golden Throne, and it scared the Emperor more than anything had in aeons.
He still didn't understand what the future had seen. Even Old One warp-constructs could die, he knew this, but his death could not and should not have spawned a Chaos God! It was simply ridiculous.
Was it a consequence of what he had done at Molech? Had he tapped into something he had not meant to, altered his nature in ways that he had not intended?
The thought was deeply troubling, but something he would have to pursue.
And there was also the question of why he had not been able to see the aura of dread fate around the Throne before Isha had shown it to him. How could he have been so blind?
Part of the Emperor wanted to simply brush off the whole thing as an illusion she had conjured, but that was merely the part of him that was in denial.
He had been a seer for tens of thousands of years, and he knew a vision of the future when he saw one.
If only he could unravel what that vision meant.