Beyond Raukos was the smallest part of the Cicatrix Maledictum. The Great Rift was a broad band of energies stretched across space from one side of the galaxy to the other. It divided the Imperium neatly in two, shrouding the dense yolk of stars at the heart of the galaxy completely. The light was painful to observe. Though it appeared to be a natural stellar phenomenon, to look into it for any length of time showed a man things that he would rather not see.

What Guilliman saw was a tragedy, the latest play in a war millions of years in the fighting. The last ten millennia, though an age in the lifetime of mankind, was a heartbeat of time, a single summer’s campaign. The magnitude of the war against Chaos, the empires lost and the peoples damned, awed the primarch. He had learned these things from the aeldari, though they were unwilling to tell him the complete story. But he knew far more than he had, of the War in Heaven, and of the conflicts between the ancient races.

Against this all-devouring cosmic evil that had consumed species after species and brought man’s first stellar empire low, Guilliman’s father had set Himself. The scale of His self-appointed task was yet another thing the Emperor had not deigned to share with His sons.

We constantly battle the sins of the fathers, thought Guilliman. That is no less true on an eternal scale than it is within the history of a single world. We suffer because of those that have gone before.

Guilliman looked upon the ruins of the Emperor’s dream in despondency. He would never give in to his feelings, and he would never show them to another, but they were there nonetheless. Even after the Emperor had fallen silent following the Heresy, there had been the promise of something better, the possibility of realising his dream for him. But Guilliman had been pursuing the wrong dream. The Imperium had been the means to an end, not the end in itself.

He could never have foreseen this future, where pain and ignorance were the universal lot of ordinary citizens. Superstition had overtaken reason. There was no hope, only blind faith in the Emperor, trillions of souls united in frantic pleas for salvation, and now the lion’s share of that desperate expectation was his to bear. The eyes of all mankind looked to him. He would never complain. But in these moments when he stopped, when the need for strategy and planning slackened for a second, the despair was there, waiting for him to give in and drown.

‘I will not give in.’ He spoke to the Pit of Raukos through gritted teeth. ‘I will never, ever, stop until this is set right. I defy you, as my father defied you.’

Father. The word caught on his lips. The habit of ten thousand years was hard to break.