The first mention of the God Emperor comes from the Apocrypha of Jiredia. While I do not have access to the original, I have in-my possession a very thorough and respectable translation written by Marcus Leon (a pupil of Malcador the Sigillite). On the twenty third page of the third volume, we see this:
Lord Bracken amassed his forces along the walls. One hundred score men clad in leather and steel and chain watched. Poison ran through their veins, the sort that only madmen dream of. Organs were huge and twisted, held back by the dam of reinforced bone. Their fathers were laboratories and their mothers madness. Most wicked of all were Lord Blacken's three: Nygui, the Sorceress, who lent her blood to his cause; Kyburn, tall and bronze, a wizard in his own right; Errstrel the Huntsman, who wore a cloak of human hide and rode a chariot of bleached bone.
The one hundred score men appear to be genetically enhanced. It would be easy to dismiss them as mutants, but the line, "Their fathers were laboratories" disagrees. Furthermore, Kyburn is described as a "tall and bronze" psyker. Based on these details, I believe that Kyburn was in-truth the God Emperor of Mankind. Either he had a hand in creating the one hundred score men, or he took inspiration from them.
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In the ravines, the air was filled with a sullen, wet heat. Nygui rose, covered in a greasy sheen of sweat, and looked back to see a dim imprint of her body on the cot. She ran a hand through her hair. It was a tangled black mop, just as unpleasant as the rest of her. Moist heat like this had a way of doing that.
Nygui threw on a loose robe and stepped outside.
Sunlight, strained yellow through the jungle canopy, hit her. She felt lightheaded. The way Bracken's Boys were leaning on the trees, she imagined they felt the same way. Bracken had gone too long without winning a fight. So long as his Boys were free to loot and pillage as they saw fit, they would stay loyal. Sieges, especially prolonged ones, weren't good. They forced the Boys to maintain a sort of stoic, unflinching discipline. Exactly the thing they didn't have.
Through a gap in the trees, she saw Nexus. It was a heap of red-grey slums, meeting at odd angles, leaning precariously, looking liable to fall to pieces at any moment. The mess was ringed in by a great marble wall dotted with turret posts. Then, in a much larger ring, one too large to see from where Nygui was, where the Boys. They'd poisoned the river, torn apart the roads, collapsed the tunnels, and now they were just waiting for Nexus to fall. It was taking too long.
She went to find Bracken, but thought better of it. Hunched over in his scrapmetal throne, picking at his scabs, Bracken didn't listen to her anymore. He didn't listen to
anyone anymore, except for Kyburn. Running a hand through her hair, Nygui set off to find him.
When she had first met Kyburn, nearly six months ago, Nygui had fantasized about him. He had that lean muscular look, with hard-plate abs and biceps just powerful enough to show beneath his clothes. Every movement was utterly and perfectly controlled. Tall, dark, and handsome. Except, there was something wrong with his eyes. They didn't emote when the rest of his face did. Kyhurn could smile or weep, but his eyes would bear into Nygui with a calm so cold it burned.
He was sitting on a stump with ramrod straight posture, polishing a sword. "Good morning," he said. He smiled, a flash of perfect white teeth.
"Ky, we need to talk about Bracken."
"What about him?"
Nygui sucked in a sharp breathe through her teeth. "He's going to lose. That means we're going to lose."
"And what makes you say that?"
"What makes me say that?" She spread her arms. "
This makes me say that! Nexus is still there! We were supposed to be done a month ago and
we're still here!"
Kyburn set the sword down, giving her his full attention. "We have water. They don't. This has dragged on too long, but the farce is almost done with. Corpses can't man walls."
"Filtering arenethen isn't impossible and we don't know what they have in there. If they can filter out the river - "
"They can't," Kyburn said.
"If they can filter out the river, it means that we're all going to die."
"Do you really believe that?"
"Yes."
"I'm serious, Nygui. Do you believe that they could be filtering it?"
"Yes, I believe that they could be filtering the water."
Sighing, Kyburn stood up. "We can talk to Bracken."
"
Thank you."
Bracken looked old.
His jawline was shaded in with stubble with a week-long binge. Layered purple-red bags hung beneath his sunken eyes. All that was left of his hair was a grey fringe at the back of his head, shadowed beneath the rusted crown he wore. Seeing Kyburn, he shifted forward on his throne. "My eye into the unseen," he said. "How are you, Ky?"
"Excellent, my lord. And yourself?"
He shrugged his already slumped shoulders. "The heat will kill me if the bugs don't first. I'm getting sick of this jungle."
"So is Nygui. She has a proposal for you, my lord." Kyburn bowed and slipped away.
Of course he would abandon her. Kyburn liked to play the careful middle ground. He delegated instead of making decisions and never showed any of his strength around Bracken.
"We should leave," Nygui said. "Find another city. It isn't worth it to stay at Nexus. They could be filtering their water somehow or they could have some underground reserve we don't know about. It's the only way they could've lasted this long."
"Well, it certainly wouldn't be worth it to abandon Nexus either," said Bracken. "Third months and who knows who many lives wasted. We must stay and force an outcome."
"This
is the outcome."
Bracken's eyes narrowed.
"We should leave while we still can. There will always be other battles."
"Not like this one."
Nygui stormed after Kyburn. "Why didn't you help me? Why?"
"I tried reasoning with him-"
"Bullgak."
Kyburn stopped in his tracks. There was an edge in his voice. "I'm not a liar."
"I know for a fact you didn't fething 'reason with him'. The time for 'reasoning with him' would've been when I was there, trying to actually fething reason with him."
"You're panicking."
"It's not that I'm panicking," she said. "It's that I'm the only one actually taking this seriously. The Boys will start cracking in a few days. By next week, the ones who haven't deserted will have overthrown Bracken. And when he falls, we go down with him."
"I've been talking with them and addressing their concerns. Nygui, I respect you, but you tend to panic. The current situation is fine."
"Don't try to convince me that I'm the crazy one. I saw what you did with Bracken. I see the way you put your talons in people."
Sharp blue eyes bore into Nygui. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Errstrel the Huntsman arrived to the pounding of drums and the roaring of engines. Tree by tree, the jungle fell before them. Choking diesel fumes and the sharp tang of ozone caught in Nygui's throat. He had left with thirty men, his hunters, and returned with a hundred more. They were slaves, his pilots, mechanics, technicians. Wizards who practiced a metal sort of magic. For the cranes, tanks, and drills he brought back, he would need them more than anything else.
The machines brought the jungle to life. Ever tree was shaking as the canopy came alive with whispery rustling. Bracken's Boys, naked in the heat, tore back treestumps with relentless efficiency to rip a path to Nexus. First came the drills, long spiraling things tipped with diamond like glass. At the butt of each drill was a little cockpit with six spindly legs carrying it along in a precarious lopsided way. Behind the drills were the fuel trucks. Some were flaming neon orange with white warning triangles. Others were decked out in yellow-black hazard stripes. One of the trucks was pastel blue, except for a little warning sticker on the side with a picture of a construction worker burning alive.
The Huntsman was loyal to Lord Bracken's cause, but not his methods. He would fight the siege as Bracken commanded - but he would not fight by waiting for the enemy to blink first. Instead, he would suicide bomb the walls, then storm what was left of them with his hunters and drills. Bracken tolerated insubordination from Errstrel, but no one else. Not even Kyburn could disobey like Errstrel could.
Errstrel never spoke to Nygui, save for the night before a battle. He would always ask the same thing. That night was no exception.
"My lady," he said. His voice was a rasp, stretched thin by the diesel fumes in the air. "Do the omens bode well?"
Her answer was always the same too. "I'll need to meditate."
With a grunt, Errstrel would slip out through the tent doors to go meditate himself. Then, Nygui would track him down some hours later and tell him about the omens. She almost liked him. Errstrel was ugly, brutish, deeply psychotic, but he was easy to get along with.
Nygui folded her legs, rested her hands on her knees, and closed her eyes. One by one, she let each overtensed muscle relax. Her head sunk into her pillow. She took in a slow breath through her nose, tilting her chin back. Then she let it linger. After a moment, her chest fell and she exhaled from her mouth. She blinked her eyes. With a guilty glance to the door, Nygui wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. Again, she went through the motions, this time slower. A hair prickled at the back of her neck, she flinched, and she started over again.
Some hours later, Nygui was still in her tent. There was a feeling like there was a joint she needed to pop or some bunched up muscle that needed to relax. Her own biorhythm - heart beating, blood coursing, guts flowing - needled at the back of her mind whenever she came too close to peace. What would she say? That, after openly advocating retreat, she had lost her gift? No, she was just blocked off. Nygui sighed. Even if it took the whole night, she would find what the gods and spirits had to say.
