Editing End Times (Warhammer 40,000) (section)

==Part 1(ish, organisation subject to [[Tzeentch|change]])==
When the rumors came from Cadia of the 14th Black Crusade, everyone assumed Abaddon would be stopped once again. When the messages from Cadia stopped completely, everyone started to worry.
When the Golden Throne broke down, everyone started to panic.

'Everyone,' of course, could be a surprisingly small number of people. In this case, only the High Lords of Terra and the Adeptus Custodes understood the full gravity of the terror facing them. Thankfully the Astronomican still functioned, although it flickered and wavered as though obscured by a powerful warp storm; which was, indeed, the cover story. How long it would hold, however, was anyone's guess; and when it went out, so would any chance for survival of humanity.

“It's happened, then. He's... passed,” said the Master of the Administratum, his mouth dry and his voice trembling. “Throne, what can we do?”

His fellow Lords flinched; seeing powerful a man to be reduced to near gibbering terror in the face of this catastrophe only reminded them of the horror and despair welling within their own hearts. The final report from the Custodes had arrived, and with it the knowledge that no life signs could be detected in what was left of the Emperor of Mankind.

“I... that is, we... we aren't sure He's....” the Mistress of the Astra Telepathica couldn't bring herself to say “dead.”

“Gone,” said the Master of the Astronomicon, finishing what his fellow Lord could not. “We believe that if He were truly gone, the Astronomican wouldn't function at all. Envoy, could you elaborate?”

The Paternoval Envoy cleared his throat. The third and final Psyker within the ranks of the rulers of the Imperium, he was simply an ambassador from the true master of the Navis Nobilitas. “Without the Emperor's presence, my Lord believes, the beacon could not work. Where he is, or rather where his soul is, we simply do not know. But we do not think he's gone.”

After some minutes of heavy silence at these words of faint, impossible hope, an agent of the Inquisition entered the room and proceeded to the Lord High Inquisitor's side, wielding a dataslate. She handed it to her master, bowed, and left without saying a word. Entering his personal cypher key, the Lord Inquisitor read the dataslate and paled, looking as if he would pass out. He rallied, however, and set the dataslate down with a sharp rap against the metal desk in front of him.

“My fellow High Lords, I have grave news, news which has been verified to the fourth degree by the Inquisition. Given the gravity of events here on Terra, we cannot wait for a fifth degree of verification, and I do not think we could get it, in any case; not for this. The leader of the newest Black Crusade is not, as we suspected, Abaddon the Despoiler. Instead, this last and greatest Crusade is led by Horus Lupercal, and the other Traitor Primarchs follow him.”

There are over fifty billion humans on Terra, and census takers had long since given up obtaining an accurate count. At any given second, hundreds of newborns were taking their first breath, and hundreds of others losing their last. The sheer psychic brilliance of all those souls living and dying made Terra shine like a sun within the maelstrom of the warp, and the Astronomican focused that brightness into a beacon that the Navigators used to fly all FTL-capable Imperial ships through the dreadful Warp. For something to outshine that brightness would be inconceivable to most every Psyker in the Galaxy, who all felt the gentle light even if they could not see into the Warp itself.
And yet this was a time of inconceivable events; roughly one hour after the last life-signs faded from the broken corpse of the God-Emperor of Mankind, Holy Terra shone with a brilliance greater than it had for tens of thousands of years, a supernova within the Warp, for one brief moment clearing all but the densest Warp storms within hundreds of thousands of light years. On worlds throughout the Imperium latent Psykers experienced a brief and terrifying moment of pure potency, yet none lost their souls to the denizens of the Warp. Navigators became insensate and their ships had to drop out of Warp-space or drift. In the meeting chamber of the High Lords of Terra, the three psykers present were flung from their chairs and fell, unconscious.
And yet, despite this flair of power, despite all it caused and disrupted, no one died from it directly. Only where other lethal circumstances occurred did a single human perish as a result of this immense Psychic event.