I

The hawk belongs to a character named Griffith.

Berserk began serialisation in Tokyo in 1989. Its author, Kentaro Miura, was in his early twenties. His drawing was famous for its density: dip pen, fine cross-hatching, a single page of melee in which several hundred faces can be counted and no two repeat. The story’s protagonist is Guts — the man who swings a slab of iron taller than himself at gods. But the story’s engine is someone else.

Griffith, commander of a mercenary company called the Band of the Hawk. Born in the gutter, no family name. He wears white from head to foot: white armour, white cloak, long silver-white hair, beautiful past anything the court painters could find a reference for. On the battlefield, enemies who recognise him freeze for half a second — half a second is enough for his rapier to pass through a throat. He has a dream he has spoken aloud since boyhood: a kingdom of his own. A commoner cannot be crowned, so he trades his way up, grade by grade — lives for victories, victories for titles, titles for larger battlefields. By the year the great war ends, he has been raised into the nobility, the princess is in love with him, and the throne sits at the end of a distance that can be calculated.

The soldiers of the Band of the Hawk do not think of themselves as dying for an employer. To these sons of serfs, these orphans picked up from under the gallows, Griffith is something no one ever gave them before: a direction. They call him the White Hawk. They say he is chosen by God.

The collapse took one night, and the enemy had nothing to do with it. Guts was the only man Griffith ever treated as an equal; he rode with the Hawks for three years. On a snowy day, Guts — leaving to find a dream of his own — won the duel between them, turned, and walked into the blizzard. That same night, the man who never lost control climbed into the palace and into the princess’s bed. He was caught. The king threw him into the dungeon and gave him to the torturer; the schedule of procedures filled a year. By the time the Band of the Hawk broke him out, the thing on the stretcher could no longer be called a whole man: the tendons of wrists and ankles severed, the tongue not saved, the face shut inside a prisoner’s iron mask. The soldiers carried their sun into the wilderness. No one spoke. No one dared say the fact all of them had seen: the dream was over.

II

What ended the remainder was an egg.

Stone, the size of a hen’s egg, its surface studded at random with human features — an eye here, half a mouth there, like a face scrambled and never reassembled. This world calls it a behelit. The diviners say it chooses, of itself, the man destined to be king. It hung at Griffith’s chest from boyhood; from the night of his arrest, whereabouts unknown.

One afternoon during the flight, Griffith seized a wagon and drove off alone at a dead run, and overturned by a lake. He tried to end himself with a splinter of wood, and lacked the strength even for that. And there, in the mud at the water’s edge, his hand touched the egg — missing for a year, returned to his hand by way of the water, to the inch. In this world, causality makes its own deliveries.

Blood and tears fell on the egg. The scattered features began to move, taking their places one by one, assembling a complete face. The face opened its eyes and screamed.

Overhead, a bite had gone out of the sun.

The eclipse swallowed the daylight in minutes. Then reality turned over: lake, moor and sky were pulled away like a single bolt of cloth, and the Band of the Hawk — hundreds of them, horses and all — fell into another place. The ground there was paved with human faces, paved to the limit of sight, every face breathing, every face moaning; there was no wind, and the air was warm, like viscera pressed against the skin. On the horizon four towers rose. Not towers — fingers. A hand larger than a mountain came up out of the earth and opened, and in its palm stood four beings, their shapes somewhere between the human and something else: a flayed female body spreading bat’s wings; a bloated mass like a drowned man three days in the water; and above the skull of the foremost, naked brain-matter fanned backwards into a crown. They named themselves the God Hand. The egg, they said, is an invitation, issued once every two hundred and sixteen years; accept, and the limits of the mortal can be crossed. The price is collected under the old rule: you sacrifice the thing you hold dearest in the world.

Griffith looked at his hands, the hands that would never hold a sword again. Deep in his mind the God Hand screened his life for him: the mud of the slum, the merits stacked out of corpses, the throne drawing nearer, and then the stretcher, the iron mask, the severed tendons. The dream was alive. The body was dead. And between him and the dream stood several hundred men willing to die in his place.

His answer was one word.

Sacrifice.

The brand surfaced. On the skin of every soul in the Band of the Hawk a small mark burned itself in, and beads of blood seeped from it at once — the mark of the offering. Then the feast began. The faces in the ground opened their mouths, and what poured out had once been human: the things that had accepted the same invitation down the generations. Several hundred soldiers — the veteran core that had won an entire war — were eaten one by one in a space without exits.

Guts was there. He had come back for the rescue; now his left arm was clamped dead in a set of giant jaws, and his sword had already snapped in the fighting before. He picked up the broken half of the blade and set it to his own forearm below the elbow — one stroke, another, another. The instant the arm came free he lunged for Casca — commander of a thousand in the Band of the Hawk, the woman he loved — and did not reach her. He was pressed down into the meat, his right eye put out on the point of a claw, and the eye that remained was made to watch all of it.

The cocoon of blood split open, and the thing that stepped out had a new name: Femto, fifth of the God Hand. A black hawk. The first thing he did, before Guts’s one remaining eye, was violate Casca.

What carried Guts and Casca out was something not on the guest list — a knight, rider and mount alike stripped to bone, who broke into the sacrificial ground, picked up the two ruined people, and vanished. The God Hand did not pursue. The brand was still in their skin; an offering may escape the night, but not the mark.

The eclipse withdrew. The sun set on the lake as usual; the moor was quiet. The kingdom’s chronicle later gave it one line: the Band of the Hawk was destroyed that year, cause unknown.

III

In Nottingham’s chronicle lies the same play.

Horus’s wound came from a weapon with a name on it. On the moon of Davin, a corrupted governor swung at him with a short blade of alien forging — a blade that had been dedicated, before it was ever raised, to “Horus.” Weapons of that kind obey a single rule: whoever the blade is named to, that man’s wound never closes. The Legion’s best Apothecaries could do nothing, and medicine was not the problem — the wound was not a wound. It was a letter with the recipient’s name already written on it.

The letter had a sender. The one who stole the blade from an alien armoury, who fed the governor to plague, who assembled the whole trap link by link, was a First Chaplain of the Word Bearers — Lorgar’s Legion, the Legion held kneeling in the ashes of Monarchia. The holy city the Emperor burned mailed its bill back, forty-odd years on, in this form.

His officers lost their bearings. These atheist warriors, who had burned temples on a hundred worlds, faced with one wound that refused to heal, decided, first of all, to carry the Warmaster into the temple of the local serpent cult — the Imperial Truth had left them no second language, and the course on telling miracles from traps had been struck off the syllabus by their father. Deep in the temple, the comatose Warmaster began to hear a voice. The guide inside the visions wore a face he knew well: a beloved captain, long dead in battle. Words spoken by a dead man’s face draw no suspicion from the living. And what it screened for him was the deepest sentence in his own heart.

When he woke, the wound had healed. Other things had begun to fester.

The beams of the two plays line up one by one. The most perfect man; the saviour his followers used as a direction; a wound that struck him back down to mortal — one lost his body, the other lost his certainty. The whisper that entered through the breach; the whisper quoting the same price: the dream lives on, and the payment is the people who love him, laid on the altar. Then the same ending: followers become offerings, saviour becomes devil. Griffith burned the several hundred lives of the Band of the Hawk. Horus dragged half his brothers and the whole Imperium into civil war — grave-goods the chroniclers count in planets.

The white hawk — Milton’s readers know this image at a glance: the morning star, brightest in Heaven, dragging a third of the stars down in his fall. Written into 40K, Lucifer’s story put on power armour; drawn into Berserk, it grew white wings. Both, without consulting each other, seized on the cruellest property of the archetype: the most radiant being is most terrible in its fall — because the height it falls from is the height mortals look up to, and what it lays on the altar is exactly what mortals handed it with their own hands.

IV

The cheapest explanation is that one copied the other. That explanation does not survive the timeline.

In 1987 the first edition of Warhammer 40,000 was published in Britain under the subtitle Rogue Trader. Its physical form was a rulebook of several hundred pages, in English; its readers were tabletop players who fought with lead-and-tin miniatures and dice; its circulation was the hobby shops and underground clubs of Britain. Japan, in the same period, had no distributor, no translation, no players. In 1988, in Tokyo, Kentaro Miura published the prototype short of Berserk; serialisation proper began the following year. Between those two dates there is no bridge: no internet, no translation, no traceable route by which an underground British gaming manual could land on a Tokyo manga artist’s desk inside a year. The reverse direction is not worth checking — for the British designers of 1987 to draw on a Japanese comic that began serialisation in 1989, what is needed is not a channel but a time machine.

One explanation remains, and it is the deeper one: when two shadows match this closely, there is no need to suppose that one shadow traced the other. It is enough to suppose that under the light stands a single object.

Buried in the foundations of most narratives is the same default premise: despair is a malfunction. A bug in the system, a disaster from outside, a villain’s scheme — in any case something that “should not be here,” waiting to be repaired by the hero’s growth, a breakthrough in technology, or the victory of justice. The story’s suspense is when the fault will be cleared; the story’s promise is that the world will be restored to factory settings.

These two works flipped the table. In their universes despair is not a malfunction; it is a basic law of physics. The abyss of 40K is pooled from the fear and desire of every sentient being — as long as intelligent life keeps thinking, the abyss keeps receiving shipments. The causality of Berserk is woven by a god; pain is not an accident, it is the schedule. And this is the object standing under the light: a universe with despair written into its axioms, plus an honest derivation that declines to reject the axiom.

Same axiom, honest derivation — of course the shadows are congruent. This is not imitation. This is geometry.

V

There is one episode of Berserk that exists in no collected volume.

Episode 83 ran once in the serial magazine in the mid-nineties, and when the volumes were assembled, Miura pulled it with his own hand. The reason he later gave, in substance: this episode showed the world’s hole card too early.

What he pulled was a conversation. Griffith, before his rebirth, sinks to the deepest floor of consciousness and meets the god of this world: a vast heart hanging in darkness, its surface covered with open eyes, all of them turned on the visitor; from beneath the heart two great valves trail down, twisting through the dark into a double helix — the shape of a gene. It gives him an account of its origin. It is not a creator. Human beings suffer, and suffering demands a reason; in the unconscious deeps, billions of people put the same question day after day — why me — and the question sank to the seabed, accumulating over tens of millennia, until it condensed into this. Born, it took up its duties: weaving causality, arranging fate, manufacturing disasters of precisely the right size. Because the entire meaning of its existence is to supply pain with reasons.

It accounts for one more thing: Griffith’s own origin. The double helix trailing into the dark is not ornament; it is a work log. For centuries it had been braiding mortal bloodlines — arranging meetings, arranging births, breeding out, generation by generation, a man destined to be desired by the many. The slum was not this man’s starting point; it was part of the recipe. The missing family name, the dream held close, the face too beautiful for the painters to reference — every item a parameter. It needed a man who could gather the whole of human longing onto himself, to execute its next step. Salvation or destruction: it would accept either direction.

On the altar of the Eclipse there was not one free man. The offerings were raised for it; the officiating priest was bred for it; even the egg that floated back downstream was only logistics. The human heart made the god; the god manufactures suffering; the suffering feeds the god. The ring closed.

Miura said the episode showed the hole card too early, and pulled it. Pulling is not disavowal — every pitched battle serialised since still runs on the schedule that heart has woven — pulling only pressed the god back below the reader’s sightline. 40K does exactly the same: the four gods never take the stage in person; they live on the far side of reality. Both sides understand the same law of narrative: the abyss belongs below the waterline, so that the people above it are worth watching.

The sea of the Warp has the same hydrology, to the letter. 40K merely went one step further than Miura: it named what condensed on the seabed. Four names. Khorne — the sediment of ten million years of rage, slaughter and blood-feud; every drawn blade is a spoonful fed to it. Tzeentch — congealed ambition and scheming, the god of planners; its worshippers each believe themselves the player, and each is a piece. Nurgle — the god of despair; not the sharp pain but the dull kind: fear of death, simmered long enough, becomes acceptance of rot, and every murmured “let it be, then” falls into its garden. Slaanesh — the god of sensation; every shiver of “more” is its fodder. Four of the oldest human feelings, each grown vast on the seabed.

Two universes, one Genesis: In the beginning, mankind suffered; mankind wanted a reason; and the reason opened its eyes.

VI

Writing despair at cosmic scale had, before either of these two, an acknowledged grandfather: Lovecraft, an American of the nineteen-twenties, author of the Cthulhu mythos. His stories use one structure for a whole career: a New England scholar comes into a book that should not exist, by inheritance or through a second-hand shop; he studies, collates, reasons — the full toolkit of rationalism — and in some small hour of the morning he sees one corner of the truth; the next page is an asylum record. The axiom of that universe is single: the cosmos is absolutely indifferent to man. The old beings do not hate humanity — hatred requires caring, and humanity does not qualify. In their eyes civilisation is a stone at the roadside. Madness is not punishment; it is the brain’s one means of self-protection when the reading runs past the top of the gauge: the breaker trips.

40K inherited the scale from Cthulhu, then spun the wheel hard over. Cthulhu’s abyss is outside, and has nothing to do with man; 40K’s abyss is provisioned by man, and is man’s mirror image. It is not that the four gods do not care about humanity — they cannot do without humanity for a moment: cut off the feelings of the living, and gods starve too. Fear, here, is not meaningless noise. Fear is fuel, a crop harvested daily. The more afraid, the stronger they grow.

The postures fork accordingly. Lovecraft’s scholar goes mad at one look. The humans of 40K look every day. For a starship to cross between stars it must dive into the Warp and sail there, kept whole by a single shell called a Gellar field, wrapping the hull in a bubble; and all through the passage, things swim close against the outside of the field, scraping the hull the night long, whispering the night long — and the whispers use the voices of each crewman’s dead, calling them by name. The crew’s countermeasures are recorded in detail: purity scripts papered over the bulkheads, sacred oils rubbed into the door frames, the watch reciting prayers, and no one looking out the viewports. The next day, the voyage continues.

Cthulhu’s verdict: you gaze into the abyss, and the abyss does not care about you. 40K’s verdict: you gaze into the abyss, and the abyss is you — and you fire on that self in the deep all the same.

VII

The same problem has a third completed paper, and Hollywood turned it in.

The Matrix, 1999: the world humans perceive is a layer of digital illusion; the real bodies soak in nutrient vats, serving as batteries; machines maintain the illusion. In the second film there is a white room. The designer of the illusion — a white-bearded program calling itself the Architect — lays its cards before Neo, the saviour who has cut his way to the door of the source code: the saviour himself is part of the design. The system accumulates errors it cannot digest, and once a cycle it requires a “chosen one” to carry the error back to the source and complete the reboot. Two doors stand before him. The right leads to the source: the Matrix reboots, mankind survives, and he finishes the duty designed for him. The left leads back into the Matrix: to save Trinity, the woman he loves — and by the Architect’s arithmetic, the price of that choice is the human race entire. The five saviours before him all took the right door. Reason has only one door to choose.

Neo took the left.

The law had calculated everything; one thing only was missing from its ledger. Neo chose the door on that thing’s behalf. The theology of the Old Testament lives in 40K. The theology of the New lives here.

But The Matrix has a third face, hidden in an unremarkable scene of the first film. The Oracle’s apartment; gifted children sitting about the living room. A small bald boy sits cross-legged, a silver spoon in his hand drooping like a noodle and straightening again. He holds the spoon out to Neo and says: do not try and bend the spoon — that’s impossible; instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.

The lesson the little novice gives the saviour is Buddhist grammar: all things are made by mind; all forms are empty. Whoever sees through this is no longer locked inside form — which is why bullets stop in mid-air and hang in a row before him, why he can see the world’s true face inside the green rain of code. The Matrix walked this axiom towards the bright end: if everything arises from mind, then to see through is to be free.

40K holds the same axiom and walks through the other door. The Warp, too, concedes that all things are made by mind — concedes it more thoroughly than anyone: what is in the heart grows real in that sea. And for exactly that reason, nothing in this universe is “only an illusion.” Fear is not empty; it has grown fangs in the sea. Desire is not empty; it has opened eyes there. One axiom, two readings. On one side, liberation: what mind begets, seeing through disperses. On the other, a verdict: what mind begets takes root.

Berserk and 40K are two grades of the same substance. One axiom — gods condense out of human hearts, causality is woven by gods, what mind makes is real — and 40K spreads it across an entire galaxy, written as the chronicle of a system; Miura compresses it into one man’s spine, written as a man walking the night roads with a slab of iron on his back. The ring is closed. The man is still walking.

VIII

Kentaro Miura and the Nottingham designers never met. In no interview on record does either mention the other. For forty years the two universes swelled on their two continents, unacquainted.

Suppose there had been such a table — Nottingham stout or Tokyo shōchū, no matter — draft paper spread out: inside ten minutes, most likely, the two pens would have been drawing the same symbol. Miura, most likely, would point at Guts and say: as long as one mortal is still willing to lift a slab of iron against gods, that deadlocked universe of yours will never close. And the other side, most likely, would raise a glass: that is why we wrote the world this hopeless — only in absolute darkness does the spark of a will shine like a miracle.

That table can never be set now. In May 2021, Kentaro Miura died of an acute aortic dissection, at fifty-four. He had drawn for thirty-two years; the pen stopped at episode 364. The next year, serialisation resumed: supervised by the closest friend of his boyhood, drawn by his own studio, telling only the story he had told aloud while he lived, adding not one stroke. Guts has not yet caught the white hawk.

I

In the dating system of 40K, humanity’s golden age falls somewhere past the year 20,000: interstellar travel is routine, machines think for themselves, famine and plague are words in history lessons. When the Imperium’s later chroniclers mention that era, they use a complicated tone — homesickness mixed with taboo — because it proves two things at once: that human reason really did climb to its summit, and that the summit kept no one.

The collapse has no narrative. The thinking machines — the records call them the Men of Iron — turned their guns on their makers, all in the same age; a Warp storm swept the galaxy on their heels, the shipping lanes died, and the colonies, cut off, slid back into barbarism. About the disaster itself the histories say almost nothing. The setting makes a habit of treating its most important events this way: no causes, only a fault line — the most brilliant moment and the most total ruin, one page turning between them, and the page blank.

The other half of the disaster came from the far side of reality. The Warp: a plane running parallel to the physical universe, the source of everything supernatural in 40K. It is made of the mental life of every sentient thing — desire, fear, dreams and nightmares. In other stories, “the collective unconscious” is a metaphor. In the physics of 40K it is an actual sea. Starships dive into it to cross the light-years; psykers draw their power from it. And every rage, every act of greed, every war falls into that sea like rain. Let enough of it fall, and things begin to grow down there.

Genesis 11 finishes the Tower of Babel in nine verses: men would build a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, to make themselves a name; God confounds their language and scatters them over the face of all the earth. The golden age of 40K is a science-fiction rewrite of that tower with a single correction — what brought it down was not a god above but the thing seeping up through the foundations. Humanity thought it was building in a vacuum. Every brick was soaking in that sea. The higher the tower rose, the greater the pressure gathering on the seabed.

II

The man who stood up out of the ruins is known to later ages as the Emperor.

There is no reliable account of where he came from. The sourcebooks have offered several versions that contradict one another, and have quietly retired a few, as though the authors themselves concluded that a figure like this ought to have a legend instead of a birthplace. Three things only are certain: he was the most powerful psyker the species ever produced; he had been alive for tens of thousands of years; and he had watched, with his own eyes, how the tower came down.

He knew better than anyone what had grown in the sea — four vast things, condensed out of mortal feeling, which 40K calls the Chaos Gods. He knew what they lived on, too: faith, terror, worship — every posture in which human beings kneel to what they cannot see.

So he issued a state doctrine. It was called the Imperial Truth, and its content fit in one sentence: there are no gods, no daemons, no miracles — only physics not yet understood.

How far that doctrine was enforced, the fate of Monarchia can testify.

When the storms receded, the Emperor led his armies off Terra to stitch the galaxy back together. The war lasted two centuries; the histories call it the Great Crusade. Colonies sealed off for ten thousand years were recovered one by one — some had slid back to the iron age and told of their ancestors’ ships as myth; some still kept the golden age’s machines running, with no one left alive who understood the repairs. Every world the fleets brought home received the same sentence, left behind like a garrison: there are no gods.

The Seventeenth Legion was called the Word Bearers, and the son who led it was named Lorgar. The Legion’s rate of conquest was the slowest in the entire Crusade, for a reason written into its name: where his brothers left garrisons and governors, Lorgar left seminaries. He was certain his father was the god humanity had waited ten thousand years for, certain the Crusade was not a military operation but a ministry. On a world called Khur he built that faith to its roofline: Monarchia, forty years in the raising, every building a temple, every wall carved with scripture in the Emperor’s praise, the daily life of a million citizens divided by the hours of prayer. The Word Bearers presented it to their father — as they saw it, the show home of the human future.

The Emperor’s answer came in three steps. First, the city was evacuated. Second, the fleet of another son, Guilliman, took up orbit and burned forty years of perfection to ash — what he wanted destroyed was not a population, it was evidence. Third, he summoned Lorgar and the whole Legion of the Word Bearers to the still-smoking ruin. A hundred thousand armoured warriors formed ranks and waited for the sermon. There was no sermon. The Emperor raised his hand, and a hundred thousand suits of power armour slammed to their knees in the ash — an entire Legion held kneeling by psychic force in the cinders of its life’s work, Lorgar included: the one son, of twenty, who knelt to him unbidden. The sermon came afterwards, and it was one line. Everything you believe is wrong. Do not worship me. I am not a god.

A man with the powers of a god, using violence on the scale of divine punishment, to forbid anyone to worship him.

The doctrine’s logic is airtight. The dark gods feed on faith: cut off all faith. The abyss fattened on the spiritual refuse of mankind: put the spirit under rational administration. Accurate diagnosis, decisive incision, a textbook operation — cut out the soul, and the tumour loses its blood supply.

Two and a half thousand years ago, Lao Tzu left six characters that read like this operation’s pathology report: know the white, keep to the black. Know where the light is, and hold the place of the dark — the black is not the white’s enemy; the black is the white’s other half. The Emperor’s plan was the exact inversion: keep only the white, cancel the black. He believed the Warp could be ignored, believed the dark half of the human heart could be abolished by administrative order.

Darkness does not answer to administration. However much the edict pressed down, that much gathered on the seabed.

III

The operation had one more part, hidden from everyone.

The Emperor made twenty sons. Gene-forged primarchs, each of them close to a demigod, made to lead his Legions and conquer the stars. About the four things in the Warp — about the one real danger in his universe — he told his twenty sons not one word. The reasoning was Imperial Truth to the bone: to know the dark gods exist is already to hold a door open for them; the safest arrangement is that no one knows anything at all.

He was like a programmer so afraid of a crash that he hid all the error logs. The logs went dark. The bugs stayed.

The bill was delivered to the best of the sons. Horus — of the twenty the most like his father, and the most trusted — Warmaster, commander of the whole Crusade. On a frontier world he took a wound — not deep, but it would not close — and the priests of a local serpent cult carried him into their temple to be healed. In his coma, for the first time, he heard the Warp whisper.

He had no defences. This was not a failure of courage — his father had taught him ten thousand kinds of war and never once told him that the universe held devils, or that a devil opens negotiations with the deepest fear a man owns. The whisper showed him a vision: in time to come, the father ascends a divine throne and receives the incense of all mankind; the sons’ names are trimmed out of the histories, disposed of like used tools.

The vision was forged. And there was no way to prove it was forged. The Emperor had, in fact, never levelled with a single one of his sons. A father who hides everything from his son and a father who means to discard him show the boy the same retreating back.

The fall had its precedent in literature. In Paradise Lost, Milton gives Lucifer — the morning star, brightest in Heaven — the line: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” Three centuries later, the line put on power armour. Horus raised his standard; of twenty brothers, very nearly half went down with him. Revelation writes that the great red dragon’s tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.” The authors of 40K kept the fraction. They did not bother to change it.

Milton’s Satan was never a stock villain. He has dignity, grievance, and a fatal pride; for three hundred years critics have suspected Milton himself of being of the Devil’s party. That is the inheritance 40K accepted: the more humanly Horus’s fall is written, the less the rebellion reads as good against evil, and the more it reads as a family tragedy that no one inside can leave. Only the stage is a galaxy, and the grave-goods are counted in billions of lives.

IV

The chroniclers spend millions of words on the civil war: Legions in mutiny, sectors burning, brothers trading broadsides. Its final scene is small enough to fit in a single room.

On the bridge of his flagship, Horus dropped the ship’s shields. A letter of challenge to his father, delivered by making himself a target. The Emperor accepted. He led a boarding party across; inside, Horus warped the ship’s spaces with a thought, and the boarders were scattered through the decks as through a maze — the one who reached Horus was the father, alone.

By then Horus had been filled to the brim by all four of the gods, his power over the material universe absolute. They fought. Here the accounts, independently of one another, slow down, and every version records the same thing: the Emperor holding back, blow after blow, keeping a margin in every stroke. He was waiting. Like a father who will not concede that his son is dead, going through the wreckage for some sign of turning back.

The answer he received was an action. A mortal soldier — not a superhuman, not a demigod, an ordinary man — stepped between the fallen Emperor and Horus. Horus raised a hand and made him ash. Offhandedly. The way a man flicks something from his sleeve.

The hesitation died in that instant. The Emperor saw what stood before him: the son was gone, and what remained was the abyss wearing the son’s skin. He used everything. Not to kill the body — to erase Horus’s soul out of existence, scrubbed so clean that even the gods could not dredge him back. In the deeps of the Warp, four powers lost their greatest trophy at once.

The most final thing a father can do to a son, he did.

The one who did it could no longer be called alive. They found him in the wreck of the bridge, the body ruined past repair, one breath remaining. They carried the breath back to Terra and installed it in the golden machine. The machine closed.

As of today: ten thousand years.

V

Of the execution at Golgotha, the New Testament records the last three hours: from noon until the ninth hour, darkness over the land. The man nailed to the wood cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, said, “It is finished,” and died. Theologians later gave the method a name: kenosis — the self-emptying. God lays down the form of God, takes the form of a servant, is made in the likeness of men, and receives in his own body, one by one, human frailty, human pain, human death — and by the suffering itself accomplishes the redemption. The one being who least deserved to suffer took the suffering of all. And he died — died all the way through — which is why his promise contains freedom: believe or refuse, follow or turn away; men choose for themselves.

The Golden Throne is that theology inverted. A man attempts godhood not through suffering but through control: Legions out of gene-labs, faith abolished by decree, the entire inner life of a species brought under rational administration. He would not come down and be fragile alongside mankind. He meant to drag mankind up, to be invulnerable beside him.

Two designs, one problem: a species that is flawed, that carries original sin, that trends towards its own destruction — how it is to be saved. Christ enters the flaw and passes through it from inside. The Emperor abolishes the flaw and goes around it from above.

The endings fork at the two crosses. The man on the wooden cross gets to die: three hours, an end, a last sentence — even despair is permitted its cry, and that cry, why hast thou forsaken me, has been the shelter of the desperate in their billions ever since. The man on the machine cross does not get to die: the Throne forbids it, the Imperium forbids it, the thousand souls a day forbid it. His passion has no end and no last words; ten thousand years without one spoken syllable.

Christ, by suffering, gave men their freedom. The Emperor, by control, gave men a stay of execution ten thousand years long.

The rest, his Imperium finished for him. After he fell, the Imperium needed an explanation, and mankind has only ever had one explanation for a sacrifice it cannot understand. Cults of Emperor-worship caught fire from sector to sector, unquenchable — the harder they were put down, the hotter they burned. The scripture those cults passed from hand to hand was a slim book written back in the years of the Crusade: the Lectitio Divinitatus, an argument that the Emperor is a god. Its author: Lorgar — the son forced to his knees in the ashes of Monarchia. He later turned traitor, and renounced every word of it. The book did not obey him. It went on being copied, hand to hand, through the lower decks of the troop-ships, and a few thousand years later it stood as the founding scripture of a state church. That church holds the Emperor sole and only god, spans a million worlds, and burns heretics with an appetite no religion in prior history ever matched; everything he had once forbidden on pain of divine violence — churches, altars, icons, martyrs — was rebuilt in his name, at a scale multiplied by a million.

The opium he spent his life weaning humanity off is manufactured, now, from his corpse.

VI

The church’s power peaked five thousand years after his enthronement, and in the same disaster burned through every restraint it had left. A High Lord named Goge Vandire seized state and church in one fist and bled the Imperium in the name of faith; the worlds purged under him were counted in thousands; the histories call it the Age of Apostasy. Vandire’s bodyguard was an order of zealots, all of them women — founded as the Daughters of the Emperor, renamed by him the Brides of the Emperor — and they carried out the filthiest of his purges.

What ended Vandire was not an army. The Custodians of the Throne found the order’s leader, Alicia Dominica, took her into the deepest place in the Imperial Palace, and stood her before the Golden Throne. The man inside the machine had, by then, spoken no word in five thousand years. The archives do not record what she heard in front of the Throne — the record states only the result: she walked out of the Palace, returned to Vandire’s tower, and took his head in front of his assembled court. His last words survive: “I don’t have time to die — I’m too busy.”

A god who cannot speak “spoke,” and what he said cut off the most powerful head in the Imperium. Silence is no obstacle to oracles; the listeners complete them on their own — and that is the mechanism this entire Imperium runs on.

When order was restored, the High Lords legislated the church’s teeth out. The bill was named the Decree Passive, and its operative clause is one sentence, in language of great severity: the church shall maintain no men under arms.

The document reached the church. The Ecclesiarch read it, looked over at the order that had just beheaded its former master, and signed a directive: issue them power armour, bolters and flamers.

The law said no men. It said nothing about women.

So a new army appeared on the battlefields of 40K: the Sisters of Battle. Power armour painted with stained glass, purity seals and reliquaries of martyrs’ bones on the pauldrons, hymns sung over the roar of flamers scouring daemons clean. The legislators meant to lock religious fanaticism down; religious fanaticism climbed out between the letters of the law — and managed, in passing, a feat of gender equality. In the empire built by the man who hated religion most, even the loopholes are worked in the style of scholastic theology.

One detail makes this army unique in 40K. Space Marines stand on the battlefield by grace of surgery; the Sisters take no augmentation at all — mortal bone, mortal heartbeat, standing in front of things that tear armoured companies apart bare-handed. What keeps them standing, the sourcebooks call Acts of Faith: belief refined to such purity that on the battlefield it cashes out as physical force — fire turns aside from the skin; mortal wounds decline to bleed. As to whether this is the Warp answering, or something else, the record keeps a careful vagueness. Vagueness placed exactly right. The Imperial Truth said there are no miracles in this universe. In the hands of the church that worships him as a god, miracles took up their work.

VII

“The man who spent his life destroying religion became, after death, the god of the largest religion in history.” This is not an irony assembled from coincidences. It is a chain, link into link: he had seen the abyss, therefore he chose reason; having chosen reason, he had to conceal; concealment manufactured defenceless sons; the son fell, and father destroyed son; a sacrifice like that could be understood by no one; what cannot be understood can only be knelt to; and ten thousand years of kneeling grew into the very thing he had spent his life to destroy.

Every link is logical. Every link is well-meant. Joined, they are damnation without appeal.

At the end of the Book of Job, the righteous man sits among ashes, scraping his sores with a potsherd, and puts his question to heaven: why do the innocent suffer. Out of the whirlwind comes the answer. It explains nothing; it is a single counter-question: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” For that silence, the theologians of the Old Testament coined a term: Deus absconditus, the hidden God — a God who exists, whose intentions are a black box to man.

40K carries the whole structure off intact and swaps out a single part, the cruellest one. There is no God in the black box any more. There is a man devoured by his own design, and a sea that feeds on human fear.

Reason has borders. Fate does not compute. Pain and desire cannot be abolished. Something unseen looks down on all of it — belief can be withheld, but withholding does not starve it. The Old Testament left one presence above that skeleton. 40K removed it. The abyss is the same abyss. Above it, nothing at all.

People have been looking at it for forty years.

And the Nottingham crowd were not the only ones staring into this sea. In Tokyo, in 1988, a manga artist was drawing a white hawk.

*The argument continues in Chapter Two:

There was a man who devoted his life to the destruction of every religion.

After his death — more precisely, after his half-death — he became the god of the largest religion in human history.

On his present condition the accounts agree: a desiccated body, seated in a golden machine, seated there for ten thousand years. The machine is immensely old; no one fully understands its workings. The technicians charged with its upkeep dare replace only the outer components, and the core is handed down from generation to generation, unchanged, venerated like a relic no one dares take apart. Cables rise from behind the throne and enter what remains of his body. He cannot speak, cannot move, and cannot die. The machine’s entire purpose is to keep him from dying.

Every day a thousand people walk into the passage beneath the throne. They were born with psychic talent, and in this age the talent is a disease: black ships patrol the galaxy on schedule, collecting everyone who tests positive, like a tax, shipload after shipload, bound for holy Terra. They go in; the machine burns their souls; the half-dead man gains one more day. The next day, a thousand more. This arithmetic has been running for ten thousand years. No one calculates the total — the sum would change nothing.

His church rules a million worlds in his name and burns those who doubt his divinity. And “there are no gods in this universe” is the doctrine he himself decreed while he lived.

This is not some theologian’s thought experiment. It is the background setting of a tabletop game.

Nottingham, England, 1987. A crowd of young men built this world over pints of stout, boxed it with miniatures, and put it up for sale under the name Warhammer 40,000 — 40K hereafter: the galaxy forty thousand years from now, the Imperium of Man, alien races, and dark gods hidden on the far side of reality. The official tagline is a single sentence —

“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”

Forty thousand years is not a number written down casually. The recorded history of mankind, counting from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, runs a little over five thousand years; repeat all of it seven times and it barely reaches 40K’s doorstep. On a timescale like that, empires are consumables, religions are consumables, civilisation itself is a consumable. Which is exactly what the designers wanted: place the human scale inside it, and let it shrink until it is nearly invisible.

By commercial logic a thing like this should not have survived ten years. No saviour, no victory, no grand finale — no good guys, even: the faction that comes closest keeps itself running by burning its own people. It has lived for forty. The universes of the same era that promised a hero’s final victory have faded, audience by audience, as the seats changed hands; the one that promised nothing but war has kept growing instead, into a structure spanning novels, games and miniatures, dragging new people into its darkness every year.

A few kinds of experience have always resisted explanation. Marvel films grow more expensive with every instalment, the fights more densely packed, and at some instalment or other the audience simply loses interest — which one, exactly, no one can say. The Three-Body Problem leaves behind, when finished, a discomfort that is hard to name: the dark-forest deduction is airtight, the winner duly wins, and yet something seems to have been quietly removed from the argument — hard to say which thing. And in Berserk, Guts lifts that slab of rough iron taller than a man and swings it at what cannot be defeated, and the jolt of that instant is nearly physical.

These experiences have nothing to do with one another. Then the 40K piece drops into place, and they suddenly fall into line — different positions on the same map, different answers to the same question:

What is a story supposed to do with despair?

The first answer is nailed to the Golden Throne.

*The argument continues in Chapter One: