Guilliman Wept

   Guilliman entered the Throneroom, flanked by a pair of Sisters of Silence. Contrary to the first visit he paid his Father, the room was... smaller. Roboute’s Father seemed smaller, too. His armor looked less regal than it had before Guilliman had entered, yet looked no different at all. His Father... his Father was so... human, now. No towering monolith of dry bone and tattered flesh, filled with ten thousand tubes, sat upon an immense throne of gold and finery. No, He was an old, tired man. Withered to the bone, naught but a thin veneer of skin covering him. Four medical tubes connected to him; one embedded in his throat, just below the Adam's Apple, another in the crook of his arm, a third in his belly, and a fourth ran up his gown.
   "Son." The Man spoke, and His voice did not burn with the radiation of starlight like it had during the first encounter. Instead the burning was found in the penumbra of flesh and sponge tissues that surrounded Guilliman’s hearts, as though their surfaces were super heated metal embedded in his chest. Tears burned his eyes.
   "Father." Roboute replied. "Magnus has come back to Terra. Russ finally found him in the warp." Guilliman's beard had gone gray in the ten thousand years since his resurrection, but the hints of gold still speckled throughout caught the firelight of the braziers in a manner that could have been pleasing, given another circumstance.
   "Bring him in. Leave. The Sisters may stay." His Father’s curt response chilled Roboute’s divine bones. 
   Guilliman wanted to protest, for his throat scar burned like it never had before. His foreboding and grief nearly overcame him, but he quelled the fears.
   As he left, he nodded to Magnus, and the aging red fleshed cyclops nodding back. Russ hugged him, bloody tears streaming from beneath his eyepatch.
   Guilliman looked over his brothers. Russ, Corvus, Vulkan, Khan, the Lion, and Dorn stood tall, but Roboute could feel their pain. He could see the way that age and millennia of war weighed upon their souls.
   After a few minutes of silence, the sisters emerged, one cradling the body of his Father.