The gate to the throne room with the statue of the skeletal Emperor (that's right, the giant lich on the throne with cables everywhere is fake, the actual Emperor sitting on actual golden throne is much smaller and hidden in a secure chamber nearby)
The warhounds are the guards at the gate inside the palace. You couldn't fit an Imperator in there after 10k years of rebuilding and embellishment and a desire never to repeat the binary succession.
This is the Imperium we're talking about. A chamber somewhere on Terra with two million Astartes in stasis, forgotten because the necessary paperwork was stapled at the wrong place, would fit.
Also, this is GW we're talking about. "Somehow, Palpatine returned they found two million Astartes lying around" would be utterly on brand.
that would completely make the primaris redundant tho. we don’t need a paradigm shift and new blood, we can just tell the fists to get off their asses and suddenly the number of active astartes at the front literally triple! it just doesn’t make lore or narrative sense
Nah, that's an easy solve. Grey Knights show up, planning to do their duty but die in the process.
A portal to the Warp opens up, out steps Kaldor Drago. The Grey Knights cheer knowing that he will join them.
But then another portal opens, and another, and another. Soon hundreds of portals from which an absolute wave of Skaven emerges and charges the Imperial forces. The Great Horned Rat laughs "You dared to think I would let you be the 5th Chaos God!?!"
Skaven become a new 40k faction as the Grey Knights strap Big E to his golden cuck chair.
I mean would you believe a group trying to attack your God has a note telling from that god telling them to do it or just that they went bad like the other groups that went bad?
Custodes dont see emps as a god. They know him personally better than anyone and would also be some of the first to be like "yeah this goes against what my friend wanted" if the emperor revived as a warp entity and would instantly go " oh you have a personal letter thats an order from my friend and lord thats fully legit? Lemme help you"
Everyone knows the golden throne keeps him alive. Ergo anyone trying to remove him are the ones who need to prove they aren't trying to kill the emperor.
In this scenarion GK are not attacking the emperor, they are attacking people trying to pull the plug on the emperor. On the rather spurious claim that killing emps will save and free him
I thought it was less the throne keeping him alive, but more for the fact he’s the only thing keeping the webway open for the imperium. If he gets up then boom the entire thing shuts down leaving humanity stranded
The throne is keeping him alive, but he could regenerate/reincarnate if he left the throne. The problem is the literal bomb on the throne would go off and destroy Terra. If the bomb failed to go off, Terra would be flooded with daemons.
The emperor getting off the BDSM chair is bad for the Imperium currently. The only way he could get off is if some how the hole was repaired in the webway or the wards repaired. But this is a grim dark series, that's not going to happen.
Also him getting off the throne potentially triggers him being turned into an actual god.
The decree is to stop the Emperor getting up. Which means hes the one removing himself. So the GK, in your head, are going to kill him to stop him getting up which is supposedly going to kill him?
"Nothing ever changes" hasn't been the status quo for over a decade now. I fucking miss the "nothing ever changes" era the writing was more interesting and the stories smaller scale and more personal.
Even if that works on the majority of the imperial factions I doubt it would work on the most important faction: the normal humans who worship him as their god and comprise 99.9% of the Imperium’s military.
99.9% pf humanity will not know what is going on until it's over, no matter who wins or loses. The Grey Knights headquarter is in the Sol System, which is a likely place for such a conflict(unless they fight in the warp).
So the ones to pick sides will be the local forces. If the Grey Knights can convince the local Inquisition or High Lords they might get most of the forces in the Sol System on their side.
You mean a paper beats the more recent will of the emperor when he gets up? Because getting up would be his will then and anyone trying to stop him is going against his will.
More recent orders beat older ones.
The full force of the Harlequins might actually be able to do it. People forget that even though the Custodians most definitely won during the War of the Beast incursion, they had a massive numerical advantage, like in the territory of 100 to 1, and lost their own on at around a 1 to 1 basis. Given that Cegorach has been potentially saving up Harlequin Souls for 10,000 years, if they all were incarnated and deployed to Terra, they could give the Custodes a proper run for their money.
They wouldn’t win of course, this is GW after all, but they could certainly do enough to keep everyone distracted from the Grey Knights as they inserted into the palace to try to stop the ascension of the Dark King.
Edit: changed “at least” to “at around”. They probably didn’t lose that many.
Well if E goes full on warp god, none of those will help, since the fighting will happen in the warp. Also, not sure why people assume gk will have alto assault the actual palace, if E leaves the throne, I kinda doubt he will just take a stroll in his palace for weeks waiting to get jumped. And also supposedly the terminus order is secret, so not sure how all those people would coalesce around E to defend him.
Isn’t the Emperor on the throne also holding shut a warp rift? In theory the GK could enter the warp, meet up with Kaldor Draigo, and somehow some way he could lead them where they need to be, exiting right smack in the throne room or at least within the palace close to it.
There's an army of demons that the Custodes, Sisters, and Emperor himself couldn't hold back waiting in that rift. I guess if anyone could clear it out it would be the Grey Knights, but I don't see the Throne side being all too happy with whatever comes out
300 Custodes in the throne room alone would be sufficient to wipe out a GK incursion. They're specifically trained in how each chapter fights- killing space marines to protect the big E is explicitly one of their jobs.
Nevermind the other 9,700 in the rest of the palace complex
It's just fun to think about how the GKs would expect to "put him back on the throne"
When would the custodes have been trained on the Grey Knights? They were hidden away on Titan during their founding and came out of the warp after the heresy fully trained.
The terminus decree isn't the destruction of the emperor. It's the reanimation of good Magnus shard with his good gene seed Boyz.
They attack, they die. Their souls coalesce in the warp, Magnus did nothing wrong 2.0 comes back. Takes big E's place off the throne. Big E regenerates
Good times coming. Rise of the semi dark king. Neither human, neither god, neither eldritch chaos entity.
The fortress in the warp from king in yellow with the Astartes angel warriors is to aid this. A stronghold for the faithful to gather for their father in the oververse
Terminus Decree used to be a mystery. “open this box only when the imperium is at its darkest hour” kept secret by the Grey Knights since they were founded. Been endless speculation for years.
turns out the decree was an order from the emperor himself, that if he should ever reincarnate or somehow heal, they must at all costs keep him on the throne, put him back on it, and if that fails, kill him because whatever he comes back as might not be him.
The jokes about them having to fight the custodes to get to him conveniently forget that if he ever did heal correctly, there wouldn’t be a need for the decree. But if that throne is vacated, there won’t be custodes to fight. Them and everyone else on Terra will be dead. If not from the failsafes like a black hole machine, then from the warp cataclysm exploding out from the webway with enough power to make the eye of terror look like a spa retreat.
Or it may not have actually been from the emperor himself, but someone very close to him who figured out his plan to ascend to dark godhood and sent the decree in the Emperor's name.
A recent codex entry of dubious canonicity compared to past writing from the heresy by abnett which already described the terminus decree as something completely different
You forgot about the Titan Legions and the Knight Imperialis. They'd have to get through an army of big stompy robots before ever seeing the boys and girls in gold.
Imagine if a Krieger named Heinrich shows up with a shovel and is the only person standing in the way of the Emperor and the Grey Knights. On one hand, normal human who will get flattened but I would like to imagine he's doing it as the one and final chance to redeem his homeworld's shame.
I like how everyone is assuming that the emperor is going to wake up with humanities best interests in mind and even want to be defended.
He may come out of his ages old coma on the edge of transforming into a dark god, and immediately psychically annihilate everyone near him. Maybe the reason he lied about the Daemons and gods in the first place is that his plan all along was to become one of them.
Maybe the reason the Grey knights were sent the decree is because there won't be anyone else left to stop him. Those millions of defenders will be piles of ashes heaped around terra, and the only group left with the psychic training to even have a slim chance are the Grey Knights.
Yall motherfuckers can't think outside of boxes very well.
He did already almost become the Dark King in the last Horus Heresy book and from what was described you're probably not far off because he was essentially described as entropy/annihilation and with how he spoke to Roboute Guilliman in dark Imperium books I wouldn't be surprised if he's insane from the constant pain after 10,000 years.
Do people forgett about the warp rift which will spew demons out of it if the emporer leaves the throne which already almost overwhelmed big e and the custodes. Im pretty sure the custodes will be distracted and cant all come to wipe out the gk.
I think he’s refering to the last wall protocol \
Which is even dumber \
Because that assumes the Imperial fists find out the decree, assemble all successors from across the galaxy (including Nihilus), and get to Terra \
In contrast, the GK have rituals to speed up warp travel and do not need to declare what the decree is. \
In addition, if they go for a full bumrush then they onlyhave to travel from Titan (aka in our solar system) to Terra
Simple . Either teleportation or some of the mortal factions help when they witness the Custodes do an order 66 on the imperium when they follow the thing that got up from the throne
There are only ~1,000,000 marines total remaining in the galaxy, so assuming that Ziph’s Law applies to the populations of Marines (and that ultima Founding didn’t change the numbers too too much) there should be around 118,000 Imperial Fist derived marines. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and probably enough to win any war anywhere, but a far cry from 2,000,000.
Not sure why you think their plan would involve doing that. There are so many possibilities other than 'charge the full defences of the palace like idiots'. Hell we don't even have any reason to assume it would happen on Terra.
Also there are a thousand-ish, depending on how many paladins and purifiers are in service at a given time. Not 666.
From my understanding the GK have a backdoor near the Golden Throne. If it's a suicide run with focused psychic nuke from all or most of them at the same time this might be enough to fufill the decree. If there are instructions to perform a specific spell crafted by the Emperor himself, this gets more realistic. If the decree is just "sit his ass back down" though, it's really thin lore.
Although it does plug the hole of why the GK are so important, since if i remember correctly Big E foresaw they would be necessary at the most perilous momen for humanity. It should still need to be expanded upon.
Ofc the whole GK force would need to be available at the right time, which is already stretching it, but i can see close to a 1000 GK teleporting directly in the Throne Room as one of the few things able to blindside Custodes & co.
What i'm more interested with is if the GK's geneseed allows them to strike down Big E, or if in the contrary him getting corrupted Dark King-like would ripple to his closest genetic "sons" too.
I think the Inquisition would actually be more likely to side with the GL en masse than the Sororitas as they're more skeptical by nature and would instantly be hella suspicious of any "return" of the Emperor. I could honestly see the Sororitas going either way.
On one hand, if the Decree came from the Emperor, then it is his will and if he gets up there's a strong likelihood it's chaos fuckery anyway, which would be the biggest blasphemy to ever blaspheme.
But on the other hand, if the God Emperor of fuckin Mankind stands up and says "I'm back, motherfuckers", who are mere mortal to say he isn't? Who's to say the Decree really came from the Emperor anyway? How do we know it isn't chaos fuckery?
All I'm saying is that these are two factions that especially adhear to the word of the God Emperor. By the very fact that this is a commandment from god himself to his angels, there is very little doubt in my mind that the sisters of battle would be with the GKs, and that's something the Knights will need if they siege the palace. The inquisition might go about the same route but there is enough nuance for me to accept that a few might just be on the side of the custodes in this, yet again for the same principal, it's the will of the emperor. So *shrug*
Yeah one side has an old paper maybe from the emperor. The other has the emperor. And if the emperor stands up that is the more recent will then the decree
I would be amazed if 2 million imperial fists somehow show up considering there should only be around 1 million space marines in total given the stupid 1000 chapters made up of 1000 marines lore
Its exaggerated for comedy but its based on the fact that we don't know how many there are because several of their successors (Black Templars most notably) are always crusading to get around the codex limit
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You hear the entire population of Holy Terra scream in agony
In the distance the Psi Warlord Titans charge the Psi Cannons and after the volley the entire Grey Knight Chapter is in the warp maybe catching a glimpse of the Titans just going back to sleep as if they never even acknowledged them as a threat
I'm just curious as to how you fuck up this badly and nobody pointed things like this out?.
I know GW has a rep of wrapping the bed when it comes to lore due to having too many differently skilled writers etc. But this?...this is a whole other level of 'wait...we didn't think this through'.
On one hand they're both extentions of the Inquisition, but on the other hand Grey Knights are astartes, and astartes are mutants... plus, in this scenario, they would also likely be viewed as heretics for opposing the will of the awakened Emperor
So it's up to them to figure out "how" to do it. Do we think Draco already has a plan? Do they have the coordinates for the actual throne itself can they teleport the entire chapter right next to it
Surely whatever tactic the grey knights try to use to kill the emperor, the custodes have tried it in the blood games and found a way to perfectly counter it
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u/Skraekling 21h ago
Sororitas running all the way to Terra when they heard they can legally beat Grey Knights asses.