‘Who is not a fanatic in these benighted times?’ he said to himself. Guilliman pushed away the crumbling book, his patience tested by the author’s endless calls for the public immolation of his opponents. ‘Emperor save me from faith,’ he said, and rose from his seat.

He had been hoping to find a solution to the Imperium’s tortured dating system; he had instead found there was none. Something else, then, that required his personal attention. Already his powerful mind was working on a number of fixes.

Musing on his ideas, he washed book mould from his fingers in a silver salver set on its own table, and he checked the endless run of report screeds a final time. There was nothing that could not wait. He required a moment’s respite, and he went to find it in the armoured cloister encircling the library’s ground floor.

Outside the shelves, the tower’s base was a series of arches. In every archway a blast door waited to slam down. On the other side of the arches, a long gallery of armourglass looked out in every direction over the Macragge’s Honour. If Guilliman walked around the circumference of his library, he could see all the way to the massive prow and its adamantium ram. Either side on the flanks, stubby wings swept out, covered in sensor arrays and auguries. Almost directly below his spire were the main hangar decks of the vessel, while to the aft the sun-bright glow of the engines reflected around the cloister, although to see them directly he would have to walk a hundred metres.

Off to starboard, the Pit of Raukos turned. Guilliman had a notion the warp was angered by the traitor’s defeat, and so the pupil-less eye of Raukos glared the harder at him. Once upon a time, he would have dismissed such feelings as fancy, an artefact of the way the Terran mind processed visual information. Now he knew they were not. The galaxy was a far stranger place than either of his fathers had taught him.

At the thought of his fathers, the memory of the sights he had witnessed in the throne room a century ago intruded violently into his mind. Against the odds, something lingered on the Golden Throne. His last encounter with his true father had been a spear of light and pain whose psychic aftershocks troubled him still. The Emperor had lost His subtlety.

Guilliman pushed the memory aside before he could begin dwelling on it. Such ruminations never ended well. He wished he could speak with one of his brothers about what had transpired there on Terra, but they were all gone.

He sighed morosely. Seeking solitude had reminded him of how alone he was. He let his eyes drift over the void, emptied his mind and allowed his sorrow to slip away.