"Once, when exploring a planet, we encountered a vault that predated human history. It was a dead world, within a bunker that had never known the tread of humans before. No one knows who lived there once. But within the bunker, there was a map, detailed and perfect. We could not understand what it was, the planet was unfamiliar. But the Emperor was with us... and he told us something that moved us to wonder. It was a map of ancient Terra. On the other side of the galaxy, people who were never known to us, who we never saw, somehow had perfectly mapped our homeworld thousands of years before we went into space."

He is quiet for a bit. "I cannot feel fear, but in that moment I understood what fear might be like.