Alone

Horus was completely gone—his body, his soul, his Warp essence.

Everything had vanished utterly beneath the flames. Perhaps he had regained his sanity at the end, but he no longer had eyes with which to show his remorse.

The Emperor was covered in wounds. He coughed blood and could not move. He had won the duel and completed the final step of the ascension ritual.

All the suffering accumulated within the Ascension Throne surged toward the Emperor. This pain mingled within his heart, filling him with waves of despair.

The Four Gods were celebrating the imminent arrival of a new friend in the Eternal Game.

"Yay! Time to pop the champagne!" Slaanesh shook a bottle of liquor brewed from extreme pleasure and gleefully splashed it over Terra.

But humanity was not the only force involved in Terra's tangled situation. Cegorach watched from the edge of the Solar System, having gathered every troupe in preparation to intervene should the Emperor lose control.

Tzeentch had long noticed Cegorach's preparations, but he knew the Laughing God was merely wasting his efforts.

Back then, the Aeldari Empire had indulged itself for more than ten thousand years to nurture Slaanesh, allowing Slaanesh's heart to beat for the first time. The Emperor's ascension as the fifth god was hardly some simple decision made on a whim.

The Horus Heresy had lasted only seven years, and the Great Crusade merely a little over two hundred. For the Primarchs, these fires of war, catastrophic enough to burn cities to ash, did not even compare to a fraction of the War of the Men of Iron.

All the energy needed to ascend to godhood had been fully prepared during the rule of the Finalizers and the Age of Strife. The Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy were merely indispensable