Coldness. That was the defining sensation of his meeting with the Emperor. Infinite, terrible coldness.

(...) The sacrifice required to keep the Emperor alive sickened the primarch. If He were alive. He appeared dead. Guilliman had expected nothing.

But He spoke.

With words of light and fire, the Emperor had conferred with His returned primarch, the last of his finest creations.

A creation. Not a son.

The living Emperor had been an artful being, as skilled at hiding His thoughts as He was at reading those of others. What remained of Him was powerful beyond comprehension, but it lacked the sublety he had had whilst He walked among men. Speaking with the Emperor had been like conversing with a star. The Emperor's words burned him.

What hurt most deeply was what went unsaid.

The Emperor greeted Guilliman not as a father receives a son, but as a craftsmen who rediscovers a favourite tool that he thought lost. He behaved like a prisoner locked in an iron cage who is passed a rasp.

Guilliman had no illusions. He was not the man who brought the rasp; he was the rasp.

While the Emperor had walked abroad, He had cloaked His manipulations in love. He had let His primarchs call Him father, He had let them call themselves His sons. He had rarely spoken those words Himself, Guilliman now realised, and when He had He had done so without sincerity. Buffeted by the full might of the Emperor's will unclothed in flesh, a cloak had been ripped from Guilliman's eyes.

The Emperor had allowed them to love Him, and to believe He loved them in return. he had not. His primarchs were weapons, that was all.

Though his power was immense, perhaps greater than it had been before He ascended, the Emperor's humanity was all but gone. He could no longer mask His thoughts with a human face. The Emperor's light was blinding, all encompassing, but finally - finally - Guilliman had seen it as a whole. The being he had thought of as a father could hide nothing from him.

The Emperor did not love His sons. They were things. Guilliman, all his brothers, were nothing but a means to an end.

And then, that thing, that terrible, awful thing upon the Throne, saw him.

‘My son,’ it said.

‘Thirteen,’ it said.

‘Lord of Ultramar.’

‘Saviour.’

‘Hope.’

‘Failure.’

‘Disappointment.’

‘Liar.’

‘Thief.’

‘Betrayer.’

‘Guilliman.’

(...)

‘Roboute Guilliman.’ The raging tempest spoke his name, and it was as the violence a dying sun rains upon its worlds. ‘Guilliman. Guilliman. Guilliman.’

The name echoed down the wind of eternity, never ceasing, never reaching its intended point. The sensation of many minds reached out to Guilliman, violating his senses as they tried to commune, but then one mind seemed to come from the many, a raw, unbounded power, and gave wordless commands to go out and save what they built together. To destroy what they made. To save his brothers, to kill them. Contradictory impulses, all impossible to disobey, all the same, all different.

(...)

‘Father!’ he cried.

Thoughts battered him.

‘A son.’

‘Not a son.’

‘A thing.’

‘A name.’

‘Not a name.’

‘A number. A tool. A product.’

(...)

‘Please, father!’ he begged.

‘Father, not a father. Thing, thing, thing,’ the minds said.

‘Apotheosis.’

‘Victory.’

‘Defeat.’

‘Choose,’ it said.

‘Fate.’

‘Future.’

‘Past.’

‘Renewal. Despair. Decay.’

And then, there seemed to be focusing, as of a great will exerting itself, not for the final time, but nearly for the final time. A sense of strength failing. A sense of ending. Far away, he heard arcane machines whine and screech, close to collapse, and the clamour of screams of dying psykers that underpinned everything in that horrific room rising higher in pitch and intensity.

‘Guilliman.’ The voices overlaid, overlapped, became almost one, and Guilliman had a fleeting memory of a sad face that had seen too much, and a burden it could barely countenance. ‘Guilliman, hear me.

‘My last loyal son, my pride, my greatest triumph.’

How those words burned him, worse than the poisons of Mortarion, worse than the sting of failure. They were not a lie, not entirely. It was worse than that.

They were conditional.

‘My last tool. My last hope.’

A final drawing in of power, a thought expelled like a dying breath.

‘Guilliman…’