The primarch often spoke of those times. Felix struggled to see Guilliman as wistful – he was too matter-of-fact a being for that – but it was plain that he harboured nostalgic tendencies. The fourth theoretical worried Felix because it suggested that the primarch was perhaps lonely. If he were, then he was all too human.

Seeing Guilliman as a man perturbed Felix. The Imperium needed someone above humanity to lead them, not a man with a man’s faults.

In Felix’s theorising, Guilliman had made Felix an Ultramarine earlier than he had with any of his other equerries because Felix remembered. It could have been that Felix was intended to perform important duties within the Ultramarines at some later date, but they were the most glorious of Chapters, and that line of reasoning skirted dangerously close to arrogance. Felix was a humble man.

The lonely demigod. The thought made Felix’s spine shiver.

His somewhat maudlin thoughts passed as the lighter he was aboard approached the Rudense’s small port hangar. The ship passed through the atmospheric field and into a space busy with servitors. Felix was seized by an impatience to disembark before the lighter had even settled into its landing gear.

Felix could recite the Rudense’s specifications without thinking. He knew exactly how to use it in battle; it was a ship to fire the heart of any who appreciated the art of void war. But its utility and grace could not explain the deep significance it held for him. Felix loved the Rudense because it had been his home. Before Guilliman had called upon Felix, the Rudense had been his to command, and the men aboard it were as close to family as he would ever know.

As soon as the lighter’s landing lumens changed to green, Felix was out of the door and heading into the ship towards the barracks. Though Guilliman prized Felix for his memories of the times before, the ones he had of the Rudense were most precious. He had not been back to Laphis. If he were honest, he had no desire to. He had heard it had become a shrine world and its wide prairies encrusted with cathedra and temples to the Emperor, who the people of this time worshipped as a god. The thought of seeing his home so changed by a foreign ideology saddened him.

Perhaps he was like the primarch: homesick for something that no longer existed.

Everyone needed something stable in their lives, some shared purpose and origin. Let the primarch turn to him. Felix would turn to his brothers. He had that, for a few more weeks at least.