Editing Roboute Guilliman (section)

===[[Imperium Secundus|That episode he doesn't like to talk about]]===

{{Topquote|Did you fear I’d turned with Horus and become a threat to our father? Have you come to sanction me, like Russ’ wolf pack?"<br>"My dear Roboute, I did not think for a moment that you had turned. I thought you’d done much, much worse. I think we both know you have.|Emprah's [[Lion El'Jonson|First]] and Thirteenth sons have a nice and brotherly chat about the situation on hands.}}

After the Battle of Calth severely hurt his Legion, Guilliman had to contend with the Shadow Crusade as Lorgar and Angron went on a merry joyride through Ultramar, razing 26 worlds with their main fleet and who knows how many with the splinter fleets. Oh, and Guilliman got a severe kick in the bottom from Angron on [[Nuceria]] after trying to beat the everloving shit out of Lorgar. In the end, though, Guilliman [[just as planned|seemingly]] managed to get both the Word Bearers and World Eaters off his lawn. Ultramar was however cut off from the rest of the Imperium by Warp Storms preventing travel and astrotelepathic communication. After seeing off the Shadow Crusade, Guilliman acted on the assumption that due to being unable to know if the greater Imperium or the Emperor survived, he would need to act on the worst-case scenario that they had both fallen.

Consequently, if his father could not be saved at least His ideals would be, and so he set up a new government called [[Imperium Secundus]], a second Imperium of Man which would reject Horus's alliance with Chaos. Although potentially traitorous to an outside observer, Guilliman's motives at least ''were'' sincere, he made a big hoohah about not taking the throne himself since he would look like a Tyrant if he did. Fortunately/Unfortunately, [[Lion El'Jonson|The Lion]] arrived at Macragge and didn't like [[heresy|where it was heading]]. Neither brother trusted the other with the job of ruling the next Imperium, so [[Sanguinius]] got the job only to settle the matter between the two and was declared regent of the Imperium in the Emperor's absence, [[Fail|only for the whole thing to be abandoned when Guilliman learned to his horror that the Emperor wasn't dead and that his whole plan was little more than a pointless waste of time]]. It continues to be a source of shame to him even in the present time that he got [[troll|manoeuvred]] by Lorgar into creating the Imperium Secundus.

It's worth mentioning that there is a bit of historical precedence for it, given the whole "Imperium is Space Rome" thing. What is now known as the Byzantine Empire was the successor to Rome, that split off just before the Western half collapsed. Because of this, they were able to save a lot of the finer points of civilization that went to shit during the Medieval Era such as literacy, education and hygiene. It would take centuries for the rest of Europe to catch back up to them.

Despite his fuckup, Guilliman managed to lead over one hundred thousand Ultramarines to Terra with the [[Dark Angels]] and the [[Space Wolves]], intent on helping the [[Blood Angels]], [[Imperial Fists]], and [[White Scars]] defending Terra. Horus, learning about this and knowing that he could not sustain the assault on the planet anymore once the bulk of the loyalist forces came into the fight, lowered the void shields upon the ''Vengeful Spirit'' in an all-or-nothing gambit to win the war by killing the Emprah in a duel. Alas, Guilliman and his reinforcements arrived too late to stop the traitors (who despite the death of Horus still held space around the planet) from retreating to their ships and fleeing Terra. This and his own feeling that said lateness could have been prevented had he made for Terra sooner only motivated him harder to kick the Scouring off, where those traitors that wouldn't or couldn't make their way to the Eye of Terror were hunted down and cleansed, planet by planet. Guilliman also pushed for his reforms in that time, which led to considerable [[skub|divergences of opinions]]; but in the end everyone seemingly agreed and went "Okay, let's do this Codex thing!" (only for several chapters to begin [[Black Templars| either partially or completely]] [[Space Wolves|ignoring said Codex]] [[Dark Angels|or only giving the idea lip service]] when Guilliman had his attention elsewhere. Not much later, Guilliman [[Battle of Thessala|got himself stabbed in the neck]] by [[Fulgrim]] in an absurdly one-sided duel; the resulting poisoning had him sitting on a stasis throne for the better part of 10,000 years (<s>I know; somehow the poison was more of a big deal than the actual stab wound in his fucking neck</s> neck wounds can be healed even in unaugmented humans, eldritch warp poison can be a lot trickier).