There were but a handful alive now who remembered the Great Heresy War. The teeming multitudes of the Imperium had no inkling of the dream Horus’ betrayal had killed. Few beings lived that would have noted the changes the Avenging Son of Ultramar had undergone. His patrician’s face was lined, more with cares than with years, and sunken in on itself a touch, especially around the cheeks. He was still handsome, if not beautiful, for all the Emperor’s sons had been made to be perfect in thought and form. But though his features had a fineness a sculptor would struggle to capture, his was an eroded handsomeness, worn at the edges like a mountain’s crags. His golden hair had thinned a little, and at the temples were a few strands of grey. Pale brown circles gathered under his eyes when he grew tired, and there was tightness in his jaw, a legacy of the internal pain he had borne since his resurrection.

Part of this discomfort – and it was constantly with him – was physical, an ineradicable effect of Fulgrim’s poisons. But there was also a sense of an absence in his gene-forged body that made itself known often as a dull ache. Guilliman called it emotional pain. After all he had seen in this new age, he remained loath to name it spiritual in nature. He was too enamoured of reason to truly believe his soul had been injured.

In contrast to the upper levels, the lower decks of the palace spire were full of activity. Human servants bustled to and fro. Servitors clumped by bearing heavy burdens. A pair of tech-priests broke off their conversations and bowed as he strode past them. Men clad in a variation of Ultramar’s Praecental Guard uniform stood to attention as he approached his arming chamber doors. The doors hissed open, and he passed within.

‘Arming chamber’ did no justice to Guilliman’s collection of weaponry. Part museum, part armoury, it was a complex in its own right. The Grand Hall of Armament was its centrepiece, housing not only his personal wargear but xenos trophies and ancient designs of human weaponry. A huge window filled one wall. The central panels were taken up by a stained glass map of the old Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, commissioned by the primarch at the ship’s refit. A mezzanine crammed with more devices of war ran around the three sides of the room not occupied by the window.

An honour guard of empty suits lined the central aisle, examples of every sort of power armour worn by the Ultramarines in their long history. There were three dozen of them all told, with many variants of every mark, from lightweight scout armours to enormous prototype Terminator suits constructed at the height of the Great Crusade.