Like I said, being dead sucks.
No body, no sensations...just a soul floating like a snowflake in a hurricane of more souls called the Warp.
And yet, I was not a normal man. Not even by the strange standards of 40k, which let pretty normal humans fight abominations like a Great Daemon, and sometimes even win.
I glanced with my dimensional vision at the Transcendant C'tan who manged to frown at my strange dead-but-still-around state. Then I grabbed the nearest block of blackstone and moved inside it, or the other way around. Soul movement is not like...whatever. I guess there are tiers of being dead, and tiers of divinity as well.
I stepped through death and reached the lowest rung of divinity, which wasn't much better than before. I could still only control my own tesseracts and their contents, but instead of moving them inside or out, I was moving myself. Okay, there was also another hermetic core unfolding inside my soul, but doing something with space, beside the suns and time like the first two.
I guess that made me the first true Space Marine, right?
The blackstone block must have massed multiple megatonnes, but it felt like clay in my mental hands. So I crafted a clay giant, to smash the mollusk harder.
With a Necron Pylon growing green in my hand, like a club. The size of an orbital elevator, but still a club.
I was still pissed of having died too early, and not draining enough time and knowledge from Tzeentch.
"I dare you, break into a thousand little snails now, so I can boil you for my soup in smaller bits!" I dared the Dark God, my words shouted from a Castigator-sized clay golem.
Uhhh. This was exactly the vision the Eldar Farseer had about the Breath of the Gods...
Did I care? Not yet. Tzeentch died hard, even if constrained by Necron Pylons, fired upon by Blackstone Forts and gored from the inside by the Fulgurite Lance wielded by the other Vulkan.
I should also probably care about the paradox I have created, but if the Imperium could have two Emperors, it could have two Primarchs as well. Or maybe send them to different Imperial Courts?
Anyway. Smash and smash. Eventually, Tzeentch did attempt to split and run away with several octopuses bodies, but Zath and I have planned for that as well.
The C'tan have already won a War in Heaven against even stronger Warp Gods. The Reality Cage locked the fleeing fragments and then cooked them in solar flares and Cosmic Fire, leaving only French cuisine for a hungry wolf or five.
While the wolves ate the remains of a well-cooked Warp God, my disembodied soul floated towards the remains of my old body.
The Terminator battleplate had been crushed into a mangled state by Tzeentch's mollusk mouth, and a single item was still intact. The Null Box with the Emperor's Warrant inside.
And not only the Warrant, but also a drop of my own blood, floating inside the null field of the strange box.
I entered the box easily, and floated around for a minute, ignoring how big the thing was on the inside. Then I poked the blood drop and reversed the feeling I got when poking Vulkan's frozen body when impaled by the Fulgurite.
Trazyn the Infinite was indeed a genius, pointing me to such an easy resurrection method. My blood, my genes, my soul.
I suspected I was only a test subject for another, more important body to resurrect. Like, for example, his own Necrontyr body, if a drop of his blood could be recovered from the sea of time.
On the other hand, being dead sucked. And not in the good, pleasant way.
I should have expected the pain, but again. Pain was better than death.
It took 18 years of accelerated growth, before I stretched my new teenager body and entered my parade armor to return to the battle. I think an hour had passed for the army, as they were still mourning and lamenting my death. Someone must have seen the mangled armor and guessed wrong about my Fate. Or correctly, but not to the final conclusion.
"Guys, this is very touching and all, but there are still books to loot and daemons to kill." I spoke in my command voice, making my sons cheer and my daughters sob in real tears.
"You were dead. I saw you die. " Primarch Vulkan noted with a logical voice.
"You were also dead." I countered with a careless voice, just as Sister Stern arrived on golden wings and stabbed me with her flaming sword, right in the heart.
I could have dodged, or done something. But I figured people would be suspicious. This was the Warp, after all.
Everyone stared in confusion as the Emperor's Sword entered my body without breaking the armor, leaving only a drop of blood dripping from my chestplate.
"Idiot! You should have dodged. The Emperor's Sword can kill anything." Ephrael wailed and hugged me tight.
I nodded wisely and turned my head to wink at Trazyn. The next second, the Necron army of skeleton Immortals and Trazyn himself vanished, along with a third of the books from the Hidden Library.
"You died too soon, human. Missed the best part of the fight. There was a huge golem..." Mnemorach began to complain, before stopping and changing his mask face from contempt to awe.
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"That was also me. I was bored being dead." I joked lightly, but the Eldar Solitare didn't return with his own joke.
"...I knew it!" I hear Menelau mutter behind me, sounding a bit angry and disappointed. Was I supposed to stay dead?
"The Soul Stones are ours, as agreed?" Mnemorach asked in a more respectful voice. Something must have spooked my jovial friend, but right now it was a bad time to ask what.
I scanned the library and produced a pile of dead Eldar resting in their soul cages, right in front of the Solitaire.
There must have been trillions of stones, as the pile was taller than a mountain. Tzeentch must have killed plenty of Eldar for the last 60 million years.
Mnemorach's mask returned to a polite bland face, then he glanced up at the Eldar Blackstone Fortress, only to vanish in flash of blue light, along with all the stones.
However, the human Solitaries were left behind, as the Eldar departed with their loot.
A single Norn Emissary emerged from the library, walking slowly as to present itself as a non-threat.
"Emissary of the Omnissiah, we are glad for this victory. Let your Emperor know, we are willing to join the Divine Compact, on certain terms." the creature spoke in fluent Gothic, while looking left and right for escape avenues. Futile in my presence, but at least it showed a decent amount of fear.
"You stay away from my bloodline, and I won't enter the Warp to terminate your Mind. The Emperor will have his terms as well, but these are mine. Feel free to refuse." I proposed with a calm voice. Then burned the Emissary to ash. It only took a slight flex of my new powers, so why not? The Hive Mind got my warning, no need to preserve the messenger.
Zath appeared at my side and grunted something like 'pact, friends, and allies', but I just scratched his wolf head while searching for Canis. My wolf was gone already, having entered the Eye of Judgement deeper inside the Warp.
Kairos, the Twin Angel was gone as well, leaving only the Primarchs. Sadly, none of them had fled, giving me no reason to execute the traitor.
Then a beam of golden light fell beside me, and a Grey Knights Brotherhood, all sporting golden wings and glowing weapons appeared by magic.
"Ordo Malleus claims jurisdiction over the unholy books in this Chaos Library, in the name of the Sanctus Imperator. Everyone, disperse and don't come back." the Grey Knights' Master spoke with rabid conviction.
I could take them, but they were only the tip of the furious Imperial Faith. I would need to fight trillions of zealots just to keep the books, and I didn't even have psyker powers. I had a few millions of books already, and could visit Trazyn to read billions more.
"There was a Necron Lord before, he grabbed some books." I ratted out Trazyn with a sneaky voice. My Necron friend would be happy if some Grey Knights came to visit.
"Pef Lancefire. We were warned about you. Go back to the dark fringes of the galaxy, and live your life in peace. Your Warmaster rank is thus revoked." the Grey Knight proclaimed as a glowing sigil of an eagle appeared in his hand.
I felt the compulsion of the Golden Throne, if it was still called that, flow through the sigil into my soul. I guess I was still human, and the Emperor of Mankind still had some influence over me.
"I should go home, that's true. But live in peace? Nah, in this universe, there is only war." I countered with a careless shrug, then grabbed my holy wife and returned to my ship, and then recovered the army and ordered the fleet around.
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"...Did he just resist the Emperor's Truth?" a new recruit asked the Brotherhood Master in an astonished voice.
"His daughter stomped you into the floor a thousand times, Brother Darius. Start warding the damned books before they run away!" the Grey Knight Master answered in an abrupt tone.
Damned Lancefires and the Blacksouls! But the Sovereign of Humanity had ordered them to be polite, and treat Pef Lancefire as a visiting alien god. It will take time until the light of the Imperium Sanctus reached past Nocturne, where the Dead Zone split the galaxy in half 666 years ago.
And yet, here in the Warp, it had been only hours since that event. They had to secure the Hidden Library before the Black Wolf came barging in, like it always did.
He even knew his True Name, Leman Russ, but rituals invoking the name didn't stop the monster like it did with normal Great Daemons.
And if the Holy Sovereign knew what the damned wolf was searching for, He didn't say.
Reciting the Aurelian Psalm of Saint Lorgar Urizen, the Grey Knight Master began indexing the cursed books, sentencing most for obliteration in the holy pyre, and selecting some as training manuals for the inevitably stupid new recruits. Being possesed by a daemon was indeed a great training experience, for those that survived.