| abstract
| - Before expanding the Great Crusade to the stars beyond the Sol Sector in the late 30th Millennium, the Emperor of Mankind first ordered the construction of the Astronomican on Terra. The purpose of this colossal endeavour was that the entire device was to serve as a focus through which the Emperor could direct his fathomless psychic energies to generate a partly self-sustaining navigational beacon for the commerical and military starships of the Imperium. The psychic navigational beam generated by the Astronomican was able to cut through the Warp across the galaxy and those attuned to its frequencies and modulations, the sanctioned human mutants known as Navigators, were able to use it as a beacon and pole star when plotting journeys through the Immaterium. In addition to this invaluable beacon among the stars, the forging of the Imperium during the Great Crusade would not have been possible without the creation and skills of the Astra Telepathica. This special corps of inter-stellar telepathic communicators was created by the Emperor during the final months of the Unification Wars, as the Emperor had foreseen the absolute future need for a means to communicate across the depths of space if a new interstellar human empire was to be created. As a psyker Himself, the Emperor favoured the use of psychic talents in others, and was well aware of the dangers inherent in any contact with the Warp. The Age of Strife on Old Earth had been afflicted by many "witch-kings" and daemon-possessed psykers whose existence embodied those dangers, some of whom the Emperor had personally slain. However, He was able to identify those psykers strong enough to resist the temptations of the Warp. These men and women were then employed in a variety of special roles in the newborn Imperium. Amongst these so-called "Sanctioned Psykers" were the Astropaths, "astro-telepaths," capable of telepathically communicating with others of their kind over vast inter-stellar distances through phantasmal visions, empathic transmission and oenological vision allegory rather than words. This was an essential talent for the success of the Imperium due to the vast distances that seprated its inhabited worlds. The only practical means for the Imperium to maintain any semblance of unity across interstellar distances was to make use of Astropaths, but such communication could prove as temperamental as the Warp itself. Located on ancient Terra, the City of Sight was built within a section of the Emperor's own Imperial Palace in the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains. There was no trace that anyone lived in that forsaken part of the palace. Potential Sanctioned Psykers spent many years within its bleak towers, learning how to harness their abilities for the betterment of Mankind. Where other regions of the palace were celebrations of the Unity wrought by the extension of the Emperor's rule over all of Terra, the builders of the City of Sight seemed to have gone out of their way to craft something calculated to weigh on the soul. Beyond the domain of the astro-telepaths, the architecture of the palace was raised up in glorification of Mankind’s achievements, its statuary fashioned to remind the grateful populace of Terra of all that had been rebuilt in the wake of the terrible, world-spanning wars that had almost dragged the species down into extinction. But none of this could be found in the City of Sight.
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