Long after he had reached this conclusion, he had seen the miracles of the Emperor with his own eyes. The first time, in that glorious moment, he had wept.

But he could fault his hope.

There was no rational explanation for hope. The Emperor was powerful, but the enemy was more powerful still. The galaxy was beset like at no other time. For every miracle Frater Mathieu had witnessed, he had seen ten thousand sorrows. How, he wondered in the dark watches of the night, could the Emperor save them?

Yet still his faith kept his hope alive. Nothing could extinguish it. Not reason, nor experience. It was irrational. He should have been wailing out the cry of the end times, but he did not. Provided he did his part, he had a sincere belief all would be well.

Is hope foolish? he asked himself. He looked upon the serried ranks of Imperial might, and he thought perhaps it was not.

He prayed he could bring the mercy of hope to the primarch also.

A fanfare brayed, brassy and short in the Macraggian way. The horde of priests fell as silent as the assembled soldiery. Roboute Guilliman emerged from the carved face of the hill into stillness. He ascended steps up to a pulpit fashioned in the form of a giant crouching aquila – the double-headed eagle that was the badge of the Imperium – and surveyed the army before him.

The primarch was imperious, commanding, his face an ideal of nobility. Mathieu smiled in the depths of his hood. From Guilliman’s expression, no one could guess how much the parade of priests irritated the primarch, but he took no pains to hide that from Mathieu, so the priest had been genuinely surprised when the primarch had accepted Mathieu’s idea for the Procession of Faith.

The priest was shrewd and a fine judge of character. Already, he had formed an opinion of Roboute Guilliman as a man who was guided by principle above all else; but one of those principles was pragmatism, and that often trumped the others.

If the primarch is willing to grit his teeth and allow the Ecclesiarchy to trumpet his divinity, thought Mathieu, he will change his opinion eventually.

Mathieu was a complex, patient creature. He did not care what Guilliman did, nor how he did it. The faithful part of himself deemed whatever the primarch did to be right, even while the reasoning part of him picked apart his motivations. It didn’t matter to Mathieu why the primarch did what he did now; what mattered was where what he did led him to eventually. The priest knew, absolutely, that one day Roboute Guilliman would see the light and accept his own divinity.

There, faith again. He smiled at the thought.

Mathieu tensed, suddenly alert. Guilliman was about to speak.