Scale of captured battlefield

Trazyn stepped back to look at his work.
After two centuries, it was nearly finished – at least, as far as anything on Solemnace was finished. There were always new relics to acquire. Anachronistic items and reproductions – stand-ins for artefacts or persons – to be replaced once the genuine specimen was found.
But barring replacements and future renovations, the Horus Heresy gallery was ready for visitors. At least, if Trazyn decided to have any once enough of his kind awoke to see his work.
Or awoke with minds intact enough to understand it.
He’d left the largest display for last – and it was a masterpiece. Larger than any other in the gallery.
Isstvan V had provided a rare opportunity to collect specimens. Regrettably unable to make the battle itself, even decades later there had been artefacts lying around unrecovered. Unusual for Astartes battlefields, but Isstvan V had been unusual in many ways – including the number of Space Marines missing in action.
Well, missing to the Imperium. Not to Trazyn. He knew exactly where they were. Knew the posture and pose of each soldier and the direction of their eyeline. Even now, he stepped into the display to adjust a ceramite-plated finger. The Salamanders, after all, practised good weapons discipline. An Astartes like this one, with his back against a wall, shouting to his brothers to throw him another magazine, would not have a finger on the trigger.
One small part in a tableau that measured sixteen leagues square. But the details were so very important to communicating authenticity – particularly if one had to cut corners here and there. Trazyn was, after all, a practical being. If he became hung up on every piece being authentic, he would never finish anything.
In general, Trazyn had not been much interested in humans. He collected them, of course, he collected everything. But he considered them on the same level as orks, or various kinds of carnivorous algae. Their spread across the cosmos had destroyed so many more interesting civilizations, and since the rise of the Emperor their culture had an utter sameness that bored him. If Trazyn cared about the mere ability to propagate and spread, he’d spend his eternity collecting bacteria. Just because a thing was successful and ubiquitous did not make it fascinating – it just made it common.
But the Heresy changed all that. Before it was all colonisation and settlement. This, this was history, this was drama. Betrayal. Struggle. Brother fighting brother across the gulf of the stars. Empires rising and falling, heroes and rebels.
He’d collected so much that he’d begun to worry he’d gone overboard. Especially since it hadn’t stopped. Centuries out from the Siege of Terra, and he’d continued snatching up human artefacts wherever he could. Now he not only had specimens, and spare specimens, but spares of spares.

The Infinite and the Divine