Event · M41–M42
Return of Guilliman
The Return of Guilliman is the revival of Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines, on Macragge at the close of the forty-first millennium. Guilliman had been gravely wounded by Fulgrim during the Horus Heresy and was afterwards preserved in a stasis sarcophagus, which the Ultramarines kept on Macragge for some ten thousand years. His revival is recorded as the work of the Adeptus Mechanicus Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, with the Ultramarines Chapter under Marneus Calgar in attendance. It came as the Imperium was reeling from the fall of Cadia and the opening of the Great Rift, which divided the galaxy and isolated Terra from many of its worlds. Once restored, Guilliman travelled from Macragge to Terra, where he met the surviving authorities of the Imperium, among them the Adeptus Custodes and the High Lords of Terra. He is recorded as taking up the offices of Lord Commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent, and as beginning a sweeping review of its administration, its military organisation and the strategic condition of its worlds. Accounts differ over how far he was accepted by every faction, and the Ecclesiarchy, the Inquisition and the Mechanicus each responded in their own way to the return of a figure from the Heresy era. The most immediate consequence was the Indomitus Crusade, launched to reunite the halves of the Imperium and to relieve worlds cut off by the Rift. Guilliman’s presence also shaped the Ultramarines’ standing among the Adeptus Astartes and set the Imperium on a course of reorganisation that continued into the forty-second millennium. On the Orrery map the event is anchored to Macragge, the seat of Ultramar, and to Terra, and on the timeline it sits at the boundary between the Cadian collapse and the Indomitus Crusade.
See where Return of Guilliman occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.