The Sigillite's Last Errand

The Throne Hold

When the Emperor left the Golden Throne to engage Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit, He could not leave the Throne unmanned — the Astronomican beacon depended on a psyker of equivalent grade sustaining it. Malcador the Sigillite, oldest of the Emperor's human servants and possibly a perpetual himself, took the Throne for the hours the Emperor was away.

Malcador was already old by mortal standards. The Throne consumed him. He died still seated when the Emperor returned, and the body — by Custodes record — looked as if it had aged tens of millennia in those few hours.

What He Was Doing Before

In the months before the Siege closed on Terra, Malcador had been doing something. He was assembling agents. He was placing perpetuals — Vulkan among them, by some readings — in positions where their long lives might be useful after the Heresy ended. He was establishing what would later become the Holy Orders of the Inquisition. He was preparing instructions, sealed letters, contingencies.

No single Imperial archive contains the full record of his preparations. Parts of it surface, in fragmentary form, every century or two.

I have not been preparing for what comes. I have been preparing for after what comes.

— Malcador the Sigillite, attributed pre-Siege

The Question

The question Imperial scholars cannot resolve: did Malcador know he was going to die when he took the Throne? Was the Throne Hold a sacrifice he had been planning for centuries, or an emergency he stepped into because no other option existed? If the former, what was the larger project the sacrifice was part of?

A minority Inquisitorial reading suggests Malcador's preparations are still running — that perpetuals across the galaxy are following instructions sealed before the Heresy and that the Imperium's long-term shape is, in some sense, still his design.

The Sigillite's Final Disappearance

Malcador the Sigillite — Regent of Terra during the Heresy, founder of what would become the Imperial bureaucracy, and the Emperor's closest confidant — disappeared in 014.M31 during the closing weeks of the Siege of Terra. His disappearance was not death. It was a documented departure: he left the Imperial Palace with the Emperor's specific authorisation, by Custodian-witnessed exit, on an errand whose nature has not been recorded in any surviving Imperial source.

The disappearance has been the subject of seventeen separate Imperial investigations across the post-Heresy era. The investigations have produced consistent results: Malcador left the Palace, was not at the Palace when the Throne was occupied, and did not return. He has not been documented at any subsequent location in Imperial-controlled space. The Custodes' working classification remains "departed on Imperial business; status unrecorded." The classification has not changed in ten thousand years.

What He Was Doing Before

Malcador's documented work in the months before his disappearance gives the clearest available evidence for the errand's nature. He had been, by surviving administrative correspondence, conducting an unusual consolidation of the Emperor's psychic-archive — gathering specific texts, specific maps, specific personnel-files into a single secured location within the Palace. The consolidation was not standard archival practice. The texts were not catalogued. The personnel-files were not the obvious wartime-priority files (battle orders, supply manifests) but were instead unusual selections: certain Adeptus Astra Telepathica candidates, certain Mechanicus genetors, certain Imperial Army company commanders with no particular distinction in their service records.

What the consolidation had in common, by post-investigation Inquisitorial analysis, was that every file Malcador gathered related to an individual who would, in the post-Heresy era, develop into a significant Imperial Cult or Imperial military figure. The consolidation appears to have been a roster of future Imperial leadership. The roster has not been recovered. The location Malcador stored it in was, by Custodian record, secure even by Palace standards.

The Knights-Errant

Malcador's Knights-Errant programme — the cadre of individual Astartes-rank operatives he had assembled across the Heresy to conduct off-record investigations — continued operating after his disappearance for an additional decade. The Knights' final operational records, partial-recovered by the Sebastian Thor administration in early M36, indicate that they had been operating under standing instructions from Malcador that they were to continue their work until the work was completed, and that they had no means of knowing when the work was completed except by the absence of further Malcador-directives.

The Knights ceased operations in 025.M31, ten years after Malcador's departure. The cessation was not coordinated; individual Knights stopped their investigations at different times, by different criteria, with no central authority confirming completion. Some of the Knights' final reports — the documents they filed before going dormant — contain marginal annotations indicating personal opinions that Malcador's errand had succeeded. Other reports contain opposite indications. The Imperium has never resolved which class of report was correct.

The Modern Question

The Sigillite's Last Errand remains one of the Imperial Cult's officially-classified-as-unresolved questions. Sebastian Thor's administration concluded its formal investigation in 040.M36 with the finding that "the Sigillite departed on the Emperor's instruction; the instruction's content cannot be reconstructed; further investigation will be reopened if new evidence emerges." The new evidence has, by formal Inquisitorial accounting, not emerged.

The informal positions are several. The Adepta Sororitas's classified hagiographic literature speculates that Malcador's errand was to establish the foundations of the Adepta Sororitas itself — to identify the women who would eventually form the Brides of the Emperor and to ensure their gene-lines would survive the Heresy. The Mechanicus's Inner Sect literature speculates that he was sent to verify the integrity of the Void Dragon's binding beneath Mars. The Custodes' classified internal literature speculates that his errand concerned a recovery operation in the warp that has not yet completed. None of the speculations has been Imperially endorsed.

The Sigillite departed on the Emperor's instruction. The instruction's content cannot be reconstructed.

— Sebastian Thor, formal investigation closing, 040.M36