Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-24332685-20140111015135/@comment-6078851-20140728141410

the emperor may be more powerful than the chaos gods individually, but if the gods were to put aside their natural animosity towards each other for a concentrated campaign against emps then he wouldn't stand a chance (and i mean a truly concentrated campaign, and not a paltry black crusade that has a bunch of temparary, and frail, alliances. of course because of the very nature of chaos such a concentrated alliance is unlikely in the extreme).

the emperor is significantly more powerful these days than he was pre-corpse, but he is still tethered to, and recieving a power boost from, the golden throne. so when it fails then emps will lose the power boost.

it's also very probable that emps will simply die: while he is unlike any human to ever exist the fact is that he was still born as a corporeal entity, and as such he could/should still be subject to permament death. and while it's possible (but not very) that he may reincarnate, there's a higher chance that the collective souls that merged to form the soul of emps will, upon his death, fragment back into the individual souls that created it in the first place. it could be that that's the reason he fears letting himself die: there has never been a human like emps, and when he dies (which the shaman would have thought would have been impossible) and if his soul does fragment back to its constituent parts, then there will never again be a human like emps.

the chaos gods did exist before humanity, at least most of them did, but i think it wasn't so much that they weren't powerful back in the day but rather humanity was just starting out as a sentient species, and so the chaos gods didn't really have a vested interest. and why would they when there was plenty of emotions, death, and disease, from many interplanetary species far more advanced than a species, confined to a single world, that had just not long ago (relatively) climbed down out of the trees.