Parting

Having decided how to deal with Fulgrim, the primarchs dispersed to attend to their own affairs. Rogal Dorn stopped Lin Fan and asked to speak with him alone.

Rogal Dorn's room was perfectly square. The table and bed were nothing more than two flattened stones. On the table stood an unfinished model of the Imperial Palace, and Rogal Dorn had even thoughtfully erected scaffolding around its incomplete sections.

Rogal Dorn carefully spread the blanket his grandfather had given him over the stone bed. Compared to his enormous primarch body, it was no bigger than a face towel.

"They say you know everything," Rogal Dorn said first.

"I know a little, I know a little," Lin Fan replied modestly.

"I only want to ask one question." Rogal Dorn's voice trembled slightly. He unconsciously gripped a corner of the little blanket. "I can't understand it. I can't understand why they would rebel."

Lin Fan froze and looked at Rogal Dorn's face.

That face, as unmoving as a massive fortress wall, had crumbled. A tear of confusion and sorrow hung upon his sharply carved features.

At that moment, Rogal Dorn was exactly like the Rogal Dorn who had just concluded the Siege of Terra. He had endured the rebels' suffocating, relentless assaults, witnessed the tragedy of brothers slaughtering one another, and personally sent his grievously wounded father onto the Golden Throne.

After doing all that, he had walked out of the palace and looked upon the devastated ruins, the terror in the eyes of the surviving conscripts, grieving for how all the former glory had vanished into smoke.

Watching the sky shrouded in gunpowder smoke and gazing into the universe still wracked by war, Rogal Dorn shed a tear and silently asked his brothers why they had done this.

"Why would they rebel?"