Wolf Nolan heard Cypher's question and went still for a half-second.
Then he stood. The broken dark red power armor's servo-systems lifted him from the snow with the effortful certainty of damaged machinery completing its function through sheer habit, and he turned his head back and forth slowly, taking in the terrain with narrowed cyan eyes. The dried blood in his hair made a crust that cracked slightly with the movement.
His grin arrived before he had fully finished looking.
"Brothers," he said, and his voice had something in it that had not been in it since before the Eye of Terror, "if I am reading this correctly, and I am reading this correctly, this is Fenris." He turned back to face them with the expression of someone who has just received extremely good news from a direction they did not expect. "We're actually home."
Nolan had pulled the skull helmet off after landing. The residual warp static from the transit had done something to his hair that the cold air was not going to fix quickly. He breathed in through his nose, once, slowly, with the specific focus of someone who is using a sensory tool that most people do not have access to at the level he does.
"He's not wrong," he said, to himself as much as to either of them. "The air is unmistakably Fenris." He looked at the overcast sky, then back at the crater that was not in this sky because this was not the Eye of Terror. He turned it over. "The question is how. Magnus, or Tzeentch redirecting us when the portal was torn. Or..." He paused. "The Emperor's guidance is a possibility that cannot be entirely dismissed. A directed warp transit to a specific destination, disguised as a disruption."
Cypher said nothing, which was his way of acknowledging that the question was open.
"In any case, does it matter?" Wolf Nolan had already moved on from the philosophical dimension of the situation and was looking at the surrounding terrain with the focused attention of someone calculating travel routes. "We've arrived somewhere. As long as you both still have your storage space: pull out a Thunderhawk, and we fly to the Fang in comfort. First stop: the old wolves. After that, if everyone is still ambulatory, I'll take you out to the frozen sea to hunt something genuinely large." He said this with the manner of someone proposing a perfectly reasonable afternoon's activity. "It will be good for morale."
"Are you," Cypher said, "on a holiday."
"I'm suggesting efficient transport and a culturally enriching experience."
The storage space question settled the debate by default. Cypher opened the Space-Time Crystal's pocket dimension and reviewed the inventory: spare power armor in various configurations, multiple weapons and ammunition stocks, several items of specific purpose that were not a Thunderhawk. A hoverbike had been in there once. A Land Speeder had been in there at one point. Both were gone, given away or lost in engagements that had required those particular resources. What remained was thoroughly useful for combat and thoroughly insufficient for aerial transport across a continent.
Nolan checked his own simulator storage. Heavy ground vehicles of several types, fully functional, ideal for moving large quantities of materiel across hostile terrain. Nothing with wings.
"Future project," he said, and returned the inventory to storage. "Every terrain type should have a corresponding vehicle ready. I will address this systematically when we have time." He looked at the terrain around them: the snowfield extending in several directions, the pale sun marking the skyline through cloud cover, the wind direction. "We determine course from terrain and sun. We walk."
Wolf Nolan accepted this with good grace and took point.
Fenris did not give its terrain up easily to visitors. The snowfields that looked navigable revealed crevices under the surface. The wind that seemed manageable intensified by increments until walking into it required conscious effort. The temperatures that were merely very cold at midday dropped toward ranges that mortal flesh could not survive as the pale sun moved across its arc.
None of this affected the three of them in any way that mattered. Power armor handled extremes that would have been lethal to unaugmented humans, and all three of them were operating considerably above the threshold of unaugmented humans.
What Fenris gave them in exchange was the landscape itself, which was the particular kind of beautiful that is inseparable from the danger that produced it. The mountains at the horizon were impossible in scale. The sky between cloud breaks showed stars even in daylight, because Fenris's atmosphere had a quality that did not fully filter that out. The ice had colors that did not occur elsewhere: deep greens and blues that the cold and the specific mineral content of Fenris's frozen water produced over centuries.
Wolf Nolan noticed all of it. He walked with his head higher than he had held it since the moment Cypher's time field collapsed in the Eye of Terror, and the set of his shoulders and the length of his stride said something about a person returning to a context that fit them at a fundamental level.
He dealt with the hunting efficiently. Fenrisian elk were large and fast, but not faster than a Space Wolf who knew the terrain and the prey, and their flesh on a fire provided the kind of food that tasted like it was worth the effort of obtaining. He insisted on doing it personally and he did it well and Nolan found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the activity of sitting beside a fire on Fenris while Wolf Nolan argued with Cypher about the correct method of cooking the larger cuts was a form of rest that he had not known he needed.
The wolves arrived on the second day.
A Fenrisian Wolf pack was large even by the standards of things that were described as large on Fenris: the lead wolf standing close to the shoulder height of a Space Marine, the pack behind it numbering enough to produce a significant thermal signature on any auspex that might have been tracking. They came from downwind and stopped at a distance that indicated they had made a decision before approaching.
Wolf Nolan went out to meet them.
The negotiation, if it could be called that, was conducted in terms that the other two found essentially opaque: a series of postures and sounds and pauses that lasted perhaps ten minutes, at the end of which the lead wolf's ears came forward and the rest of the pack settled from alert to watchful. Wolf Nolan turned back with an expression that managed to be simultaneously casual and extremely pleased with itself.
"They'll guide us," he said. "The Fang is three days in the direction they're heading. These ones know the safe path through the lower passes."
"Did you just negotiate an alliance with a wolf pack," Nolan said.
"I established a working relationship based on mutual interest and demonstrated capability. Which is exactly what we do with people." Wolf Nolan looked at him with some patience. "The fundamentals are the same. The language is different."
The wolves led them efficiently, the pack moving around the three of them in a loose formation that was part guidance and part something else: the Fenrisian Wolves had apparently decided, in the logic that Fenrisian Wolves used for these decisions, that what was moving through their territory with them was worth accompanying. Wolf Nolan walked at the center of the formation with the settled ease of someone in their element.
They encountered the trial candidates on a high snowfield two days later.
The youths were undergoing something that they would not yet have known to describe as selection: a series of tests administered by the frozen terrain and the prey that lived in it, observed from a careful distance by two Space Wolf Astartes who had the look of warriors who had done this many times and knew exactly what they were watching for. The candidates did not see the approaching group until the wolves did, and the wolves had stopped moving fifty meters out.
The two instructors noticed the wolves stopping.
They turned.
Their expressions went through several stages in the space of approximately three seconds.
"Kneel," Cypher said quietly, beside Nolan, and he was correct: both Space Wolves were already dropping to one knee before the sentence was finished, their eyes on Nolan with the specific quality of people who have been told something their whole lives and are now looking at the reality of it.
"Up," Nolan said. "We do not need that."
Wolf Nolan had already stepped forward and caught both Space Wolves by their pauldrons, pulling them upright with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who has done this particular social navigation before. He said something to them that was quiet enough that Nolan did not hear it, and both of them stared at him with the confusion that the three identical faces apparently always produced in people who had not been briefed.
Then one of them grabbed Wolf Nolan around the armor in an embrace that, had Wolf Nolan been structurally less robust, would have been an issue.
The other one followed immediately.
Wolf Nolan accepted this with the resigned dignity of someone who understands that some social situations have their own momentum and resisting it is less efficient than participating. He patted both of them on the pauldrons and said something that got a short laugh from both.
The Thunderhawk was called.
Nolan said a quiet farewell to the wolf pack, which acknowledged the exchange in its own way before turning back toward the lower terrain. Wolf Nolan watched them go for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
The Fang announced itself before it was visible: a mass that occupied too much of the skyline to be terrain, a construction that the passage of ten thousand years had not diminished in any meaningful way. It had grown from the rock of Fenris rather than been built upon it, the two so integrated by now that the distinction was academic. The Thunderhawk set down at the entry processional and the three of them stepped out into the cold air of Fenris at altitude.
The Dreadnought at the entrance was very old.
That was not a precise description for something so thoroughly ancient: the chassis carried the evidence of engagements conducted across ten millennia, repairs stacked upon repairs, the original configuration visible only in outline underneath everything that had been added or replaced or reinforced. The power claw at the end of one arm was the weapon of a warrior who had made it famous, and the facing optics registered the three approaching figures with the specific quality of a mind that was doing something more complex than a targeting system when it looked at you.
Wolf Nolan and Cypher stopped at the appropriate distance and bowed, the gesture unhurried and complete.
Nolan was still moving forward when the power claw rose.
It did not threaten. It blocked: a very large piece of ceramite machinery positioned horizontally across his path with the specific quality of a polite but absolute refusal.
"Respected Primarch." The voice that came from inside the Dreadnought chassis was the oldest voice Nolan had heard from any living thing in the current age of the galaxy. It carried the weight of witnessing across its syntax. "An old man who has not yet managed to die cannot accept that kind of courtesy from you. We are of the same lineage, in the end. You and our gene-father are brothers."
The optics moved to Wolf Nolan.
"As for you," Bjorn the Fell-Handed said. "I thought I recognized something. You were the wolf cub who encountered the Wolf King, were you not? You are still alive." A pause that lasted exactly as long as a very old mind needed to complete an observation it found genuinely surprising. "And why do you and the one beside you look so much like this Primarch?"
Cypher stepped forward and spoke quietly, covering the necessary ground without elaboration: the three identities, the Emperor's instrument, the connection between them, enough context for an ancient mind to file the information correctly.
Bjorn was silent for a time.
When he spoke again, there was something in the voice that the mechanical chassis could not entirely suppress: the specific quality of someone who has lived long enough to watch the ground they stood on change beneath their feet into something they no longer recognize.
"One grows old," he said, "and one finds that the ideas one held no longer fit the world that exists. Perhaps even the old certainties, the great truths that were declared at the beginning, will be set aside. Perhaps they already have been." He let the thought rest. "But that is a matter for another evening, and there is a great deal of that evening ahead." The power claw lowered. "Come with me, Lord Primarch, and you two boys with him. Fenris opens its doors to you."