Terran Crusade - Before the Golden Throne: There were many routes to the Emperor's throne room. This gilded doorway stood at the end of a towering cathedrum processional. Its worn flagstones thronged with millions of desperate petitioners and pilgrims. Golden light filtered through immense stained glass windows that depicted the Emperor's greatest deeds. Innumerable candles burned in that cavernous space, filling the air with greasy smoke, and hymnals rang from the mouths of hunched cyber-cherubim. Incense billowed and bells tolled, while Ministorum Priests delivered wrathful sermons from servo-pulpits. Throngs of Tech-priests muttered and swayed in shadowed corners. Officers of the Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum spoke earnestly together, gesturing to dataslates held up by robed menials. Penitent nobles dangled in golden pain-cages, whimpering promised blandishments to the Custodian Guards who walked their patrol routes below.The doorway itself was beautifully worked in gold, bronze and precious stones, though it had the look of ancient, faded grandeur. It stood fifty Terran feet high within an arch of black marble, atop a flight of stone steps into which deep grooves had been worn by the passage of countless feet. The edges of each step were piled with petitioners' bones. Atop the steps stood twenty of the Adeptus Custodes. They were accompanied by a Martian Tech-priest, and led by a regal warrior in a high-plumed helm, golden armour and an ermine-trimmed cloak.Roboute Guilliman strode up the processional, through masses of pilgrims and petitioners who reached out quivering hands to touch his armour as he passed. With him walked Captain Cato Sicarius, Grand Master Aldrik Voldus, Shield-Captain Adronitus, and the mysterious Cypher and his Battle-Brothers, along with Belisarius Cawl, Katarinya Greyfax and Saint Celestine. This last figure was scarcely less adored by the crowds than Guilliman himself, and she turned aside before the steps to offer her blessings to all. Behind them marched the last Battle-Brothers of the Terran Crusade, footfalls crashing and weapons held at parade ground readiness. Despite all they had endured, the Space Marines and Grey Knights still made for a magnificent sight.Guilliman halted at the foot of the stairs, and looked up into the steely eyes of the Custodians. Their leader stepped forward, rapping his ornate spear thrice against the top step and announcing himself as Aquila Commander Kalim Varanor. In formal High Gothic, Varanor asked who came before the throne room of the Emperor of Mankind.Equally formal, Shield-Captain Adronitus announced the leaders of the Terran Crusade, one by one. Further words were exchanged, ancient forms repeated by rote, but lent gravitas by the arrival of a living Primarch. Guilliman's purpose was demanded and given: to gain an audience with his father, the Emperor. The air thickened with tension, millions of onlookers holding their collective breaths as the Aquila Commander held the gaze of the returned Primarch. Would Kalim Varanor suspect some treachery? Would he decry Guilliman as false, or demand further proof of his identity?The Aquila Commander looked to the Martian priest hunched at Guilliman's side. The robed figure inclined its head in assent, and Varanor announced his verdict. The Primarch would be permitted to pass, alone, into the throne room. All others would wait outside.At this, Cypher stiffened, his hands straying towards his holstered pistols. Guilliman had expected this moment, and had planned for it accordingly. The hooded Dark Angel and his men had upheld their end of the bargain, granting Guilliman his freedom on the Blackstone Fortress. Yet the Primarch was not fool enough to trust such an ominous figure blindly. He might not have recognised Cypher, but he knew the blade on the Dark Angel's back. The sight of it made him shudder with dread. He would not permit such a thing into his father's presence.Stepping aside, Guilliman commanded the Custodian Guards to apprehend Cypher and his warriors. Their presence was a riddle, one that could be solved once more pressing matters had been attended to.Cypher responded with the first show of emotion any there had seen from him. He snarled in anger, ripping his pistols from their holsters before hesitating for one crucial moment, visibly torn between attempting escape and making a doomed lunge for the doorway above. In that second, the Custodians closed in with their Guardian Spears levelled. Cypher and his followers found themselves surrounded in a ring of crackling blades. Slowly, his half-seen expression grim, Cypher holstered his weapons, and he and his brothers knelt in submission before their captors.Wrists bound with electrocuffs, they were led away by stern Custodians and locked away within a warded prison block that, for thousands of standard years, not a single inmate had escaped. In just a few short solar hours, however, Cypher would do just that, and in doing so leave no trace of his passing. For the moment, though, Guilliman knew only that the sinister figures were dealt with, and more pressing matters could be attended to. Face solemn, blade sheathed and helm tucked under one arm, the Primarch ascended to his father's throne room.At the top of the steps, the Custodian Guards parted to allow the Primarch passage. The Tech-priest stepped forward, however, emitting a blurt of binharic cant and bowing before Guilliman. With skittering haste, Archmagos Belisarius Cawl swayed up the steps behind the Primarch and came to his side. Guilliman waited, impatient, as the two Martian priests exchanged encoded binharic blurts, then Cawl turned to him and spoke cryptic words. Only the Custodes heard what was said, of secret pacts on Mars, and long works drawing at last to their conclusions, but -- as with so many dark secrets exchanged over the millennia upon these very steps -- they affected deafness and ignorance.Their exchange concluded, Cawl turned without comment and swept down the steps, his acolyte in tow. The Tech-priests vanished through the crowd and thence from Terra entirely, for they had matters of significant import to attend to upon the Red Planet.Guilliman was left standing alone before the ornate doorway, dwarfed by its immensity. A single, booming chime rang through the cathedrum processional, and a collective sigh of wonder and fear escaped the pilgrims gathered there as the doorway cracked open. Slowly, silently, the tall doors swung inwards to reveal only darkness and drifting mists beyond. The vapours twined about Guilliman's limbs like serpents, and spilled down the steps behind him amidst the faint echo of sorrowful, ghostly voices. Noble features set in an implacable mask, Guilliman took a slow, deep breath and stepped into the Emperor's throne room.As silently as they had opened, the doors swept closed behind him, and Roboute Guilliman was lost to sight.Solar hours passed, during which the warriors of the Terran Crusade stood silently to attention before the throne room doors. Awed murmuring amongst the crowds turned to fervent prayer, and more than one petitioner ventured forward to present Captain Cato Sicarius, Grand Master Aldrik Voldus and their brothers with meagre devotional offerings and words of thanks. Saint Celestine and Inquisitor Greyfax chose this moment to depart, the former to spread her blessings, and the latter to report to her Ordo Hereticus superiors for the first time in many standard centuries.The Imperial Palace had no natural cycles of night and day, the sky of Terra long lost amidst a miasma of artificial light and swirling pollutant clouds. Instead, the electrosconces and lumenchandeliers dimmed low at the tap of Lamp-servitors' wands. The petitioners huddled around parchment fires, still intoning prayers for the Primarch as they forced down the bowls of nutrient gruel brought to them by Ministorum Alms-servitors. Many lay down upon piles of threadbare surplices to sleep, while the Ultramarines kept their tireless vigil at the base of the steps as they waited for their gene-sire to return to them.Only when the day cycle dawned again with soaring hymns and a swelling glare of lumen-light did the doors finally swing open. Glowing mist spilled from within, silver now like the cold shimmer of moonlight on bones, and from the cold radiance stepped Roboute Guilliman.The Primarch's expression was unreadable as he strode down the steps to rejoin his warriors. The crowds cried out in awe and dread, begging the Primarch for enlightenment. Instead, Guilliman gathered his warriors around him, and bade Aquila Commander Varanor to attend him also. Guilliman demanded an immediate assembly of the High Lords of Terra, stating that he intended to resume his seat upon that august council. Roboute Guilliman would become the Lord Commander of the Imperium of Mankind once more. Of his meeting with the Emperor, Guilliman would say only that he had received all the enlightenment that he required.There was much now to be done, for the threat of Chaos grew greater by the solar hour. But Guilliman knew what must be done, and he would not shy from doing it.In the solar days that followed, the Primarch became the centre of a whirlwind of activity. He addressed the High Lords in the Senatorum Imperialis, claiming the Emperor's personal mandate as he forcibly removed several of them from office and replaced them with individuals of his own choosing. Guilliman warned the High Lords of an encroaching darkness, a terrible Warp phenomenon that was even now manifesting itself across the galaxy from end to end. The war against the Dark Gods was entering a new phase, more desperate and doom-laden than ever before in human history. The Great Rift was opening.The ever-growing flood of astropathic distress calls reaching Terra supported the Primarch's warnings. Cadia had been only the beginning. From the ravaged Fenris Sector and Ork-infested Armageddon, to the systems of Attila and Balor -- all felt the grasping claws of Chaos. New Warp rifts were splitting the void in terrifying number, while existing Warp phenomena roiled outwards like the pyroclastic clouds of volcanic eruptions. Witch-lights swam between the stars, and monstrous things moved behind the veil of reality, all gnashing fangs and glaring eyes.Whole sectors of the Imperium were going dark, while others reported the onslaught of rabid Greenskin hordes, aggressive Tau fleets or deathless Necron hosts, seemingly driven to conquest in the face of the expanding Warp Storm fronts. Heretic Chaos Cults and rogue psykers rose up in their billions, and every Imperial world now seemed set to burn in the fires of unending galactic war.For all these disturbing omens and disastrous losses, Guilliman urged Humanity's leaders not to give up hope. The Emperor of the Imperium was not blind to their plight, and neither was its restored Lord Commander.New armies would be raised, in breathtaking numbers. From Belisarius Cawl's forges on Mars, Guilliman planned to bring forth new and terrible weapons whose fury even the worshippers of the Chaos Gods would be unable to withstand. Fresh fleets would be built, grand war engines consecrated in the Emperor's holy name. The manufactoria would labour like never before, and every single servant of the Emperor would do their part. The Imperium faced total war on a galactic scale; with Warp Storms spreading and intensifying, no world was safe. Yet Humanity would not drown in this tide of warfare, but instead would ride upon the crest of a bloody wave to triumph once more against the darkness.Roboute Guilliman vowed that he would not cower behind Terra's walls and wait for Mankind's oppressors to bring death to his door. He would stride out amongst the stars and meet the enemy in the Emperor's name, as he always had. The Imperium would unite as one in the face of mutual annihilation, and take the battle to the mutant, the Traitor, the alien and the Heretic. So commanded Roboute Guilliman and thus, even as the Warp Storms raged and the Astronomican itself strove to pierce their ever-blackening clouds, vast armies and armadas were raised in numbers not seen since the Great Crusade that had founded the Imperium ten millennia before. A dark new age called from amidst the fires of endless war, and the Imperium of Man would answer.The long-feared Time of Ending had indeed come to claim Mankind. But Roboute Guilliman, the Avenging Son, was ready to move the stars themselves to ensure that, perhaps, it birthed a new beginning...