As the century since his rebirth wound on, the numbers of historitors grew from four, to eight, to sixteen, until now the Logos Historica Verita numbered five hundred operatives and a thousand support staff. Utilising long dead academic arts, they attempted the impossible: the construction of a reliable history of the Imperium. Against great odds, small cells of the Logos searched out ancient records. At their presentation of the primarch’s seal, forbidden vaults were opened and emptied, their contents copied and dispatched to Guilliman’s crusade wherever it was.

The Logos’ work was a torturous, dangerous affair. Warzones engulfed half the galaxy, and his historitor teams sometimes disappeared into them without trace. Often, they were opposed. Still Guilliman would not be stopped.

Every man needed a pastime. Even a primarch.

He was reading a book new to his collection. Ancient leather, friable to the point of disintegration, bound a partisan work on the Chronostrife of Terra. Guilliman digested the work with a frowning countenance.

Flickering screed passed over multiple data-slates around his desk. Dust motes danced in the light of two small hololiths either side of him. To an undiscerning eye, the primarch appeared to be ignoring them, but every iota of data that passed over them was processed by his superior mind while he read the book. There was nothing that needed his direct input, but he watched everything, annotating reports and answering the shifting stream of queries with quick scratches of a quill on an autotablet set at his right hand. The movements were so small, swift and deft that they were easily missed. His mind had such a capacity, he could organise the actions of a thousand groups working towards different aims, all while most of his attention was taken up by a book in the impenetrable dialect of an Imperial sect.

He did not like what he read.

One of thousands of secret conflicts conducted by rival factions in the Imperium, the Chronostrife was a bitter, ongoing internal war within the Ordo Chronos over the Imperium’s dating system. What he read made him despair. Not even his father’s calendar had survived the millennia intact.

During the Great Crusade and the Heresy, the standard dating system had provided some idea of the order of events over time, but like everything else the Emperor had created, the calendar had become degraded by both dogmatic adherence and thoughtless revisionism. Various rival dating systems had evolved from the Imperial Standard, making a true chronicle of the galaxy almost impossible to construct. By the five main factional variants, Guilliman calculated the current year to be anywhere between early M41 and a millennium later, and that was leaving out the numerous lesser, more heretical interpretations.

There was much useful information in the book, but it was written in a torturous, overly embroidered style. The author’s viewpoint transcended fanaticism.