The crux of it was that Felix had already been admitted formally into the Ultramarines, though he had no company of his own to command officially. Guilliman’s earlier equerries had gone on to do great deeds as captains and masters of many Chapters, but only after leaving Guilliman’s personal service and receiving orders of assignment. That path was not open to Felix. His swift induction to the primarch’s own Chapter had been… odd.

There were a number of reasons why Guilliman had chosen Primaris warriors as equerries over more experienced Space Marines.

The first, Felix surmised, was that the primarch wanted to show that the Primaris represented the new Space Marine paradigm. The second – and this was no theoretical, as the primarch had told him so – was that the Primaris Space Marines lacked political experience. Guilliman placed great import on non-combat skills. To him, statesmanship was as important as warcraft.

Archmagos Cawl’s prolonged hypno-indoctrination had given the Primaris Space Marines none of that, so the primarch appointed many of their number into important but non-crucial roles as aides to various adepta, or as assistants to established Space Marine officers, and that included those he took as his own equerry. Guilliman changed the holders of these offices frequently to help disseminate the experience that the Primaris Space Marines gained in his direct service. He took on only those who showed exceptional promise, and afterwards they were given permanent positions of grave responsibility. Felix was honoured to have been so chosen, and he strove daily to live up to the primarch’s faith in him.

Thirdly, Felix reasoned, the primarch wanted to observe his new warriors at close hand. The Primaris Space Marines had been created at Guilliman’s behest, but they were creatures made by Cawl. If he were Roboute Guilliman, Felix would not have trusted the archmagos either.

None of this was what worried Felix. It was logical, rational and completely in line with the primarch’s preference for long-term planning. But there was a fourth reason in Felix’s hypothesising, and it was this last one that troubled him.

Felix had been born on Laphis not long after the end of the Great Heresy War. He remembered his childhood better than any of his peers appeared to, and that meant he recalled the Imperium as had been long ago, when there was still hope. He remembered old Ultramar, the Imperial Truth and the rekindling of optimism as the threat of Horus receded. He had been thirteen years old and ready to join the Legion as a neophyte when Cawl’s representatives had come calling, bearing the highest seals of all, and Felix had had one future taken away and this nightmare substituted in its stead. But he had kept all of his past, through millennia of stasis. He had forgotten nothing.

The past was what Guilliman wanted from him.