for a time at least.
And yet I could not envy him. In rare moments, I would catch a phenomenal degree of pain present in those steady blue eyes. I might catch him looking at the grotesquely over-militarised docks of Luna, or the battle-battered ships hanging in orbit above us, and see a shadow of astonishment passing across a front of patrician reserve.
‘You may find Terra… different to how you remember it, lord,’ I said to him before we made planetfall. Looking back at that, I cringe. Of course it would be different. He had already seen enough of the Imperium to know that, but of course I was extrapolating into a past I only knew from half-understood historical records. I envisioned the world he had come from as a paradise of accomplishment, and of course I might have been wrong about that. Perhaps his pain came from a different source. Perhaps I misinterpreted him entirely. After all, who was I to judge the mind of a primarch? He was as far above me as I was above the spine-roaches that we had allowed to infest the Throneworld’s sewers.
A little later, the Custodian Shield-Captain Adronitus led our delegation to the warship that would carry us back to Terra. I was honoured to travel with them, one of very few mortals who did so. I was surrounded by figures I found daunting to look at, let alone address – Space Marine lords, Mechanicus magi, Grey Knight commanders. I took my place among them, ignored by all, and silently watched what unfolded.
At that stage, the brutal assault on the Lion’s Gate had not even begun. Before we set off, I thought of the unrest on Terra, the terror in the skies and the visions in the night, and assumed then that we would finally see it all quelled. We passed swiftly from Luna’s orbit, escorted by many ships from the task force sent in haste. Tidings were passed in the strictest confidence to the Sanctum Imperialis and landing permits arranged for the Eternity Wall void port. It felt surreal even to be there. It felt surreal that any of it was happening at all.
Of course, the Lord Guilliman’s procession into the Palace is now a story well known and told many times by many souls. The Ecclesiarchy has issued more vids of this single event than they did over a thousand years previously. Everyone has heard tell of the enormous crowds of well-wishers lining the streets, crying out for joy and reaching out to grasp the hem of his cloak.
Well, it didn’t quite happen that way, at least not as I witnessed it. There were crowds indeed, against all our intentions, for somehow the rumour managed to scamper ahead of us. We came down inside the perimeter of the Outer Palace, far from the worst of the unrest, and so the primarch’s first sight of his subjects was the most favourable it could possibly have been – the scholiasts, the Palace guards, the priests and the ministers of state.
And yet, I could barely look at him during that terrible time. We could not hide just how desperate things had become. He could see for himself the unnatural storms raging in the atmosphere, and witness the darkened profile of the defunct Astronomican fortress. He could see the walls stuffed with defenders and the smouldering, half-derelict stretches of the city beyond the walls. Perhaps worst of all, even when we got him inside the intact precincts, to the holiest and the most immaculate of our citadels, he looked at them as if they were some kind of insult.
I watched it from a distance, my stomach churning to witness a great soul dragged into such a cesspit. I looked around me, at the grime-chocked aquilae, at the racks of guns defiling the angel-crowned parapets, at the piles upon piles of heavy defensive works and the squalor that crusted over it all, and the shame of it made me nearly sick.
This was the world we had made. This was the world he had fought for and preserved, and we had made it diseased.
By the time I was reunited with Jek I could not hide my disquiet. She looked at me with concern, and we retired to my chambers alone.
‘Did you speak to him again?’ she asked, desperate for news despite her anxiety on my behalf.
‘A little. Not much.’
‘Then you were right to go.’ She became animated, trying to make me feel better. ‘This is the start of