"Let's meet again for the first time."

​It was a devastatingly simple sentence, yet it bore a weight heavier than any armor he had ever worn. They were the parting words of the only soul who had ever made the vast, chaotic galaxy feel like home. She had conquered his heart with the same absolute certainty with which he brought worlds into compliance. With her, the crushing burden of his station vanished; every moment they shared felt untarnished, as vibrant and breathless as their very first meeting.

​But time is the one enemy a Primarch cannot defeat by force of arms. Her body yielded to the years, though her essence remained perfectly preserved within the flawless vaults of his memory. He did not simply remember her, he relived her absence every day. Those final words became a desperate spark of hope that kept the suffocating dark of his grief at bay.

​A millennium turned to dust. The day of his deliverance arrived without warning, bathed in the golden light of Macragge. He was walking through a crowded plaza, his mind calculating a thousand different planetary logistics, when a fracture in reality seemed to occur. High above the sea of faces, silhouetted against the glowing atmosphere on the edge of a stone balustrade, sat a woman. When she looked down, the eyes that met his were the exact, heart-shattering shade he had mourned for a thousand years. There was no reverence or fear in those eyes, only curiosity.