More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And the holy fields of Geller did break, and daemons run amok amid the ships of the Emperor’s servants,
The psychic realm can be understood as a science, it doesn’t need your obtuse mumblings. Not that science is well favoured in this age,’ she added mildly. ‘Faith is more powerful than rationality.’ ‘Tens of thousands of years of human stupidity tells us that is so. It doesn’t mean faith is right,’
‘The sword he bears burns with the wounding fires of the Anathema. The death it carries allows no rebirth, only an end. The sword is the creation of the being I will not name. It is a weapon that could kill me. It could kill you.’
‘Seven this and three that, he’s obsessed! As if numbers excuse him of his connection to the warp. Numbers! The lengths Mortarion goes to distance himself from sorcery are laughable. The primarchs were creatures of our world before any of them fell, and he is now an arch-sorcerer. He is a liar, and, and, he insults me! I am an artist!’
‘It was my job to know,’ he said. ‘I was made to plan. Each of my brothers was given a set of talents, derived from the Emperor Himself. Individually our talents overlapped – redundancy, I suppose, as should be incorporated into any system.
I think perhaps only poor Konrad knew, for he too had the power to see the future.’
‘I learned long ago that governance as much as war is a balance sheet whose figures are scribed in blood,’ he said.
‘The Emperor made us to be good at breaking worlds. Some of my weaker brothers never rose above this purpose,’ said Guilliman.
The touch of Nurgle spread in many ways. Oftentimes, the cure was as bad as the disease.
‘We are either blessed, or we run pell-mell into the arms of damnation. Let us pray we are doing the right thing,’ she said,
But it was only after his awakening and his exposure to the Cicatrix Maledictum that he truly understood what the Emperor had been trying to do, that these things were not his father’s true enemies, but rather the source was. Revealing the truth of daemonkind would have strengthened them enormously, for men would never have been able to put them from their thoughts, and that made them strong. The Emperor had been trying to save humanity from the horror of its own mind.
Squatumous was the first to be cast back into the warp. He was surrounded on three sides by the Custodian Guard and Guilliman’s soldier sons. Riddled so thoroughly with bolt-rounds that there were more of his guts outside his body than within, he became weak. The Sisters of Silence moved in for the kill. Alarmed at their approach, for their killing him would bring the true death, Squatumous let out a mighty fart, and decapitated himself with his own sword.
‘I face you at last, my brother,’ said Guilliman. Mortarion chuckled. ‘You make it sound as if you have brought me to heel, and will beat me in combat! After ten thousand years, you remain pompous. Look about you. I have you. I have won.’ ‘You have not won yet.’ ‘If this is not a victory,’ said Mortarion, ‘then I should probably consult one of your tedious manuals to better acquaint myself with the meaning of the term.’
Mathieu had never suspected the primarch might harbour such depths of rage. Guilliman had always been described as such a bland fellow, a competent genius untroubled by the miseries of unbounded humours.
‘He is not my father,’ Guilliman said. ‘He created me, but I assure you, priest, that He was no father. King Konor of Macragge was my father.’
Ten thousand years after Lorgar Aurelian set pen to paper to create this tract, Guilliman began to read it. Rejoice, for I bring you glorious news. God walks among us. So ran the first two lines of the Lectitio Divinitatus.
