Death had come. For ten thousand years he had slept, his body preserved in stasis upon his home world of Macragge, until a century ago when Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, aided by the alien aeldari and a saint said to be the personification of the Emperor’s will, had awoken him to a galaxy tormented by war.

Traitors from Horus’ time had emerged from the Eye of Terror, a wound in reality where the warp bled into realspace. By destroying ancient alien technology, their leader – Abaddon the Despoiler, one-time lieutenant of Horus – had caused the Eye of Terror to spread across the galaxy as the Cicatrix Maledictum, a great warp rift that had cut the Imperium in two.

To Guilliman, the dire state of the Imperium was a horrifying surprise. He awoke from death to find himself fighting a war he thought he had won a hundred centuries before. There was no hope in this world. There was no promise. The Emperor’s plans had failed completely, and suffering was the lot of all men. The galaxy was worse than ever before. Only during the long dark times of Old Night had humanity stood so close to the brink. He was all that remained of the old dream, the last feeble light in descending night.

Since then he had led. He had fought. He had bled. But he had not slept. He could not, even had he the desire to – the Imperium was dying. In sleep’s place, he retreated to his private quarters, to the Chamber of Reflection, and meditated there when he was weary.

Death had disturbed his being in several ways. Sleep was one casualty.

Since his resurrection, he did not feel the need to sleep often. His personal physicians could not tell him if this was a genuine physical change or a psychological effect of his traumatic awakening. Both the mind and body of a primarch were so far beyond understanding that any medicae was next to useless. Only Archmagos Cawl, that insane polymath, might begin to comprehend how his body functioned.

Whatever the cause of his sleeplessness, after ten thousand years in stasis, Roboute Guilliman thought he had slept enough.

Fulgrim’s poisoned blade had come close to ending him. Were it not for the actions of his men hurrying him into a stasis hold, Guilliman would have died. As it was, his absence had been costly to the Imperium. So much had been lost because of his miscalculation. He had vowed never to underestimate his twisted brothers again.

What happened in the aftermath of Thessala had become myth. Like so much of Guilliman’s life history, the truth of his death was shrouded in the impenetrable embellishment of repeated telling; he had found no less than twenty-six divergent versions of the event in the Ultramarines librariums alone.