The Master of Mankind (Volume 41) (The Horus Heresy)

Product Information

Not wanting to appear vain and power-hungry like his brother Horus, Guilliman refused to declare himself the Emperor of Imperium Secundus, instead initially trying to convince his fellow Primarch Lion El'Jonson, who had arrived at Macragge with his Dark Angels Legion, to take the position despite being distrustful of El'Jonson's motives.

Master of Mankind Spoilers (Warning: Spoilers, obviously) Master of Mankind Spoilers (Warning: Spoilers, obviously)

Even the Techno-magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus came to marvel at the structure said to have been designed by Roboute Guilliman himself. According to the Ultramarines there was enough marble within the temple to build a mountain, and sufficient adamantium and shining plasteel to construct a sizable Imperial warfleet. Ultramar was to be restored to what it had been in the golden age of the Imperium, a miniature stellar empire comprising five hundred human-settled worlds. Once in full control of the Loyalist forces on Macragge, the primarch's strategic genius was unleashed, and the forces of Chaos were driven off of Macragge and then from most of Ultramar within approximately seven solar months. When Guilliman again objected to such an indicriminate use of force that would take much innocent life, the Lion instead commanded a more conventional Space Marine assault on Illyrium, and Curze was finally captured. Again at Guilliman's insistence, the Night Haunter was given a public trial to account for his treason. Others denied the phenomena, and pointed out the sheer scientific impossibility of change within the stasis field. Yet enough believed the stories to come and witness for themselves the miracle of the primarch, generation after generation. The Despoiler also learned that Cawl was one of a number of survivors of Cadia, now calling themselves the Celestinian Crusade, who had escaped into the Webway with the aid of the Aeldari Ynnari and were making their way to Macragge, the homeworld of the Ultramarines Chapter.Never again would one person, no matter how noble and unblemished their motives, wield the power of an entire Space Marine Legion. At the same time, Guilliman had been hard at work for decades on a new method for waging war that finally reached its fruition after the Horus Heresy.

The most memorable/philosophical/deep quote in 40k? The most memorable/philosophical/deep quote in 40k?

But before the crusade could begin, Guilliman would be forced to defend the homeworld of Mankind for the second time from the forces of Chaos during the Battle of Lion's Gate. As the first Warp Storms of the Noctis Aeterna broke over Holy Terra in the wake of the Great Rift's birth, its pollution-filled skies turned a roiling crimson. Left behind in the space where Davin had been a breach in the Ruinstorm became visible to the combined fleet. The path through led to Terra, but upon further study it became apparent that somehow Horus had foreseen that this route to the Throneworld would open and he had left behind a massive fleet of Traitor warships to prevent the passage of the Loyalist fleet through that route. Yvraine, Daughter of Shades, summons the Yncarne, the Avatar of Ynnead, Eldar God of the Dead, into being upon Craftworld Biel-Tan His mortal remains were preserved from the ravages of time by means of a stasis field that isolated the primarch from the time-stream of normal four-dimensional space-time. Everything encompassed by the field was trapped in time and could neither change nor decay. There were some in these years, however, who claimed the primarch's wounds did change. They said that Guilliman's body was slowly recovering and that his wounds showed mysterious signs of healing. This void battle was a form of dirty fighting between warships, too close for the neat calculations of ranged battery fire. Instead, it was an up close and personal slugfest.

Only then, at the last, did Yvraine call upon the power of her patron, Ynnead, the partially awakened Aeldari god of the dead. The alien god's power over life and death combined with Cawl's arcane technology to heal the primarch's wound and awaken him from his ten-thousand-year slumber. Fresh conquests were immediate, as the newly named Ultramarines rapidly expanded their range out from Macragge, identifying suitable targets for Compliance and singling out xenos holds for eradication. Interrupted only when called upon to join larger campaigns by the will of the Emperor, for nearly a century the 12th Expeditionary Fleet ranged as far to the galactic north as the dead expanse where the Dominion of Storms ended and as far to the galactic east and south as the point of Ultima Thule, where the stars paled and emptied out into the limitless darkness of the exo-galactic void. The text set appears below. Some hymnal editors omit the fourth stanza or resequence the stanza so that the fifth stanza as printed here comes last. Roboute Guilliman continued to serve with the Ultramarines Chapter, leading them and the Imperium as its Lord Commander for a hundred standard years after the Second Founding. It was said that during those years, Guilliman led several incursions alongside his brother primarchs against the remaining Chaos Space Marines.

The Master of Mankind - Aaron Dembski Bowden

It was a development greeted by the XIII Legion with great rejoicing and pride in the honour that Roboute Guilliman paid them in accepting their fealty. So began a period of rebuilding and consolidation across Ultramar, as Marneus Calgar and his Chapter led their peoples' efforts to shore up the battered defences of their realm. It was a period of repose and recovery that was to be all too swiftly ended. The numeric strength of the Ultramarines Legion, in excess of 250,000 Astartes, would be an achievement that would not be surpassed, though in secrecy the late expansion of the Word Bearers, who originally numbered approximately 100,000 Astartes, would come to rival them by some assessments, while the wilder claims as to the strength of the Alpha Legion also have them run closer than official records would indicate.

The XIII Legion's cruisers and battleships ran abeam of the enemy fleet for repeated exchange of broadsides, offering targets too big and powerful to ignore, while the rest of the Ultramarines fleet used calculated Lance strikes from safer range. The armada then divided its assault potential, doing its utmost to destroy Lorgar's flagship Fidelitas Lex, and attempted to take the World Eaters' flagship Conqueror in a boarding action. After decades of intense fighting, stability was restored. To prevent a single commander having as many superhuman Astartes at his command as Horus had, Guilliman reformulated the sizes of all of the Loyalist Space Marine Legions into thousand-man Chapters, breaking apart the 9 original Loyalist First Founding Legions into the much smaller Second Founding Chapters.

Master of Mankind] A Custodes almost kills two [Excerpt: Master of Mankind] A Custodes almost kills two

During the battle that erupted at Davin's Temple of the Serpent Lodge, the place where Horus had been corrupted by Chaos, Guilliman and El'Jonson finally managed to put aside their lingering emnity and fight together as brothers should, defeating a massive Soul Grinder. As with the society Roboute Guilliman had built on Macragge, the XIII Legion under his mastery would be as ruthlessly even-handed as it was efficient, with the needs of the individual sublimated to the greater whole, but the life of the individual never spent wantonly or without purpose; for the doctrine stated that each Legionary lost weakened those who remained. Primarch Guilliman and his Terran Crusade forces are assaulted by Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons in a voidship graveyard on Luna. For even before the Emperor's arrival, Roboute Guilliman, it is said, had dwelt much on the ancient histories contained from his world's deposed aristocracy, and the fragments he found there telling of the ancient domains of Mankind, and he had begun to dream of new horizons and new worlds to conquer, of a domain "beyond the seas of night" or to use the ancient scholarly form found in the text -- "Ultramar". Before that plan could come to pass, the Dark Gods of Chaos intervened. They snatched up the nascent primarchs and scattered them through the Warp, so that each came to rest upon a different one of Humanity's far-flung worlds. Some say that it was at this time that the Ruinous Powers left their mark upon the Emperor's gene-sons, and that this is why fully half of the primarchs betrayed their father and the Imperium during the Horus Heresy.

Saint Celestine swept down upon Cadia in its darkest hour, her miracles instilling faith in its ragged protectors. Inquisitor Katarinya Greyfax, long a prisoner of the Necron Lord Trazyn the Infinite, was released from captivity to lend her prodigious will and talents to the cause. It is said that when the Emperor saw what His lost son had wrought, He was indeed pleased, and that He met with Roboute Guilliman without the dissembling that had been needed with those primarchs He had found of more savage timbre. It is further more recorded that once Guilliman learned the truth of his origins, he immediately swore his fealty to the Emperor, who he knew was his true father, for he had already theorised correctly the purpose for which he had not been born so much as deliberately created. With the Legionaries of the Word Bearers already on the surface, the ship's human population fled in the vessel's final minutes. And still the great vessel fought -- rolling, turning, raging. The Ultramarines cruisers that drifted past burned as badly as the warship they were killing. Their hurt feelings over His seeming abandonment of the Great Crusade to pursue a secret project whose purpose He chose not to reveal to His sons laid the seeds of jealousy and resentment that would ultimately blossom into the corruption that begat the Horus Heresy.