‘If your father has the power of a god, does that not make Him one, whether He believed Himself to be so or not?’ he said. ‘The Emperor protects us. It is evident in the actions of His holy saints, who are the will of the Emperor made manifest, and the Legion of the Damned, who appear at battle’s forlorn hope, and in the Emperor’s Tarot, whose readings guide ordinary men day to day.’

Guilliman thought back again to his meeting with his father. He did not like to revisit the memory; it was as if the memory forced itself on him rather than he actively sought to recall it. The thing in the cradle of the ancient machines, fed by loathsome technology. And then the golden light, and then the pain…

Guilliman’s lips pressed thin. The display had been a form of control. The pain had been a form of control. He was tired of being used.

‘He is not a god,’ he said.

‘He is to me. He is to trillions. Why will you not accept the truth?’

‘To me, He was a father.’ A distant, uncaring, heartless, manipulative father, he thought. ‘And a lord. I have died for Him once, and would again. That does not give Him divinity.’

Coldness. That was the defining sensation of his meeting with the Emperor. Infinite, terrible coldness.

He had approached the meeting with dread, fearing what he would find. Would his father be dead? Would He be insane? Would they even be able to talk? When he had been admitted to the throne room and approached the Golden Throne, he had done so as he had approached his foster father Konor’s funeral, willing it all to be right, drowning in certain grief. Between the time of the Emperor’s ascension to the throne and Guilliman’s own death, the Emperor had spoken to no one. How could anything have persisted for ten thousand years, he had thought. There was the wizened corpse surrounded by banks of groaning machinery, His sword upon His knee. Sorrow suffused everything. The sacrifice required to keep the Emperor alive sickened the primarch. If He were alive. He appeared dead. Guilliman had expected nothing.

But He spoke.

With words of light and fire, the Emperor had conferred with His returned primarch, the last of His finest creations.

A creation. Not a son.

The living Emperor had been an artful being, as skilled at hiding His thoughts as He was at reading those of others. What remained of Him was powerful beyond comprehension, but it lacked the subtlety He had had whilst He walked among men. Speaking with the Emperor had been like conversing with a star. The Emperor’s words burned him.

What hurt most deeply was what went unsaid.