Horus Heresy - Ascension: The surviving Loyalists teleported back to the Imperial dungeons beneath the Imperial Palace. Here Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra who was himself an extremely powerful psyker, had briefly taken the Emperor's place on the Golden Throne, thus keeping the Warp Gate to the Webway that the Emperor had been building for the benefit of humanity safely closed from an assault by the daemons of the Realm of Chaos. Dorn found Malcador sitting wasted, psychic energy lashing across his shriveled body, tortured by the psychic bombardments of the collapsing Imperial Webway. He was almost dead when the Tech-priests made the exchange -- disengaging Malcador from the strange machine even as they moved to modify it to support the Emperor's crippled life functions indefinitely. As Malcador was removed from the device, the last flicker of life left him and the dust of his corpse blew across the stone floor. Yet Malcador managed to prove one final time his loyalty and love for the Emperor, for despite his ordeal and agony, he still managed to gather what remained of his wasted power, and willingly forsook it to feed the Emperor and allow his master to survive.This sacrifice restored the Master of Mankind's consciousness so that he could deliver his final instructions to His servants before being interred in the device as the Tech-priests of the Mechanicum worked furiously to modify the Golden Throne to the Emperor's specifications. Malcador's final sacrifice allowed the Emperor to awake from His coma briefly and give His servants their final orders before being interred silently for the next 10,000 standard years within the modified life support systems of the Golden Throne. The Emperor spoke His final words to his followers. He urged them to continue the fight to free humanity from the Forces of Chaos and the machinations of the Ruinous Powers as well as the ignorance that continued to assail it. And then the Master of Mankind spoke no more, His body entombed within the life-support mechanisms of the Golden Throne, his spirit caught between the Warp and a crippled, decaying body for millennia. Unable to complete the Webway project that the Golden Throne had originally been intended to create and maintain, the Emperor now chose to use its psychic augmentation mechanisms both to maintain His shattered body's life support functions and to project His mind into the Immaterium where He would create and maintain the Astronomican navigation beacon to hold the Imperium together. The Emperor would also battle the Chaos Gods on their own plane, always seeking to protect Mankind from their corruption and depredations.The Imperium of Man had survived the Horus Heresy intact, but would evolve into the bastion of repression, ignorance and brutality the Emperor had long fought against without His direct, guiding hand upon it. In this, at least, the Chaos Gods had won a partial victory, for this state of affairs would ensure that their temptations would continue to corrupt the weaker members of the human race and prevent the final establishment of Order across the galaxy. Yet, for all its terrible and growing flaws over the next ten millennia, the Imperium would also offer humanity its best and perhaps only hope for survival in an uncaring and increasingly hostile universe.