The Blood Ravens departed aboard their Strike Cruiser without looking back. Axion, leading the battered remnants of his detachment, returned to Ultramar.
Intelligence from the front lines had already begun to circulate. Countless fleets had witnessed the ripple of emerald energy emanating from the depths of the sub-sector. In its wake, the ubiquitous black obelisks, the Necron pylons, had suddenly lost power, lapsing into a deathly stillness. Though it took only days for the Necrons to restore a portion of the pylons' network, that brief hiatus provided a desperate reprieve for every surviving Imperial force in the sector.
The Astropaths of the Segmentum's Departmento Munitorum were on the verge of psychic collapse. The Empyrean was flooded with a cacophony of pleas for reinforcements, evacuation orders, rally points, and desperate attempts to locate lost regiments. The Warp had become a churning tempest of human desperation.
As the Necron constructs roared back to life, the Warp fell silent once more under their stifling influence. However, the radius of the "null-zone" had shrunk significantly. Imperial vessels found they could now transition from the Warp closer to the sector's edge, rather than being forced into real-space prematurely and spending weeks burning sub-light engines to reach their destinations.
Roboute Guilliman sat in his sanctum, the soul-crystal Axion had returned clutched in his hand, his mind racing. Aeldari prophecies were invariably riddles, yet this latest transmission emphasized a singular, chilling warning: a "Shadow Over the Stars" was rapidly approaching.
The Lord Regent's irritation grew. If this "Shadow" did not refer to the Necrons' localized suppression fields, then what new horror did it portend? Guilliman leaned back, exhaling a heavy sigh. The burden of the Imperium was a crushing weight that never eased.
He stood and turned toward the statue of the Emperor behind him, mentally replaying every scrap of intelligence he had received in recent months, searching for the variable he had missed.
Meanwhile, aboard the Ark Mechanicus, Axion was hunting for Belisarius Cawl to demand the location of the missing production line.
Immediately upon his return, Axion had boarded Cawl's flagship. He intended to utilize the specialized assembly line again to replenish his losses. Yet, when he followed his internal logs to the manufactorum sector, the production line was gone. Without its molecular disintegrators, the Necron alloys he had salvaged were impossible to process.
Cawl, for his part, dared not tell Axion the truth. After seeing the combat effectiveness of the Armored Wardens Axion had forged, Cawl had reported the development to Guilliman. Out of caution, the Primarch had ordered Cawl to prevent Axion from further contact with such volatile, lost technologies.
Unwilling to let such an efficient ancient tool go to waste, Cawl had surreptitiously modified the line and shipped it via a merchant flotilla to a Forge World under his personal jurisdiction. His intent was to use it for the rapid mass-production of new Redemptor Dreadnoughts. Shortly after the flotilla's arrival, the Forge World's output had indeed skyrocketed. Cawl had publically attributed this to local Tech-Priests optimizing their processes after "studying" the machinery, even going so far as to commend the local Mechanicus for their "ingenuity."
However, shortly before Axion's return, rumors reached the Ark that an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos had been summoned to that very Forge World. Civil unrest had followed. Under Cawl's urgent prompting, the planetary PDF had located the production line, but it was found in a landing zone, reduced to a heap of scrap alongside the transport convoy intended to move it.
Faced with such a nonsensical loss, Cawl was speechless. He could only hope that Axion would simply forget about his obsession with that specific Standard Template sequence.
Axion, after being rebuffed by Cawl several times, ceased asking. He slaved his consciousness directly into the ship's logic-stacks. Navigating through mountains of maintenance logs, he quickly located the records for the dismantling and transit of the production line. When he cross-referenced the transport logs showing its total destruction, he scoured every related file for confirmation.
Once he verified the machinery was truly unsalvageable, he abandoned the pursuit. Axion did not know why Cawl had moved it, but dwelling on a destroyed asset was inefficient.
The Machine Spirit of the Ark Mechanicus had naturally detected the intruder within its systems. However, after Axion performed a clean wipe of his access logs, the Machine Spirit held no memory of the encounter.
With that matter closed, Axion turned to his next objective: collecting his payment from Guilliman. The Primarch had promised to secure ancient historical data from the Aeldari on his behalf.
The Aeldari had complied without much protest. To them, the fact that Guilliman had slept for ten millennia while the Imperium fell into ruinous stagnation was no secret; they had been watching from the shadows the entire time. They assumed the Primarch merely sought specific historical benchmarks to guide his reforms.
In response, the Aeldari provided a "history" of the galaxy viewed through their own xenocentric lens, highly curated and laden with their own biases. Guilliman had not specified a time period, and the Aeldari saw an opportunity to manipulate the Primarch's judgment in their favor.
These various coincidences culminated in the soul-crystal now in Guilliman's hand. However, its contents were neither what Axion desired nor what Guilliman needed. It was a xenos record of human activity, a document no one in the Imperium would ever truly trust. Had the Aeldari known that the Lord Regent would view their carefully crafted "history" as little more than apocryphal xenos folklore, they might have regretted the effort.
Yet, buried within the lies, there were fragments of truth.
Just as Axion boarded the Dawn of Fire with his remaining automata, the ship suddenly began its transition for departure. A message from the far side of the Great Rift, the Imperium Nihilus, had sent a shockwave of excitement through the Primarch's command staff.
The existence of a second Primarch, the Lord of the First Legion, Lion El'Jonson, had been confirmed.
The source of the report left no room for doubt. Commander Dante, the Chapter Master of the Blood Angels and the most beloved son of Sanguinius, had met him face-to-face. The Lion was on Baal.
For some time, rumors had drifted through the darkness of Imperium Nihilus of a "Hooded Giant," an "Avenging Knight," or an "Emperor's Avatar" wandering the stars and delivering justice. Such legends were common in a galaxy of superstition; there were even tales of a hooded blademaster wielding dual pistols stalking the Imperial frontiers. Without direct witnesses, no one took such myths seriously.
Guilliman had largely ignored these tales. But Dante's word was iron. Since the Devastation of Baal, Dante had remained on the Blood Angels' homeworld to oversee the recovery of the sector. He would not have sent such a message unless it was absolute.
Upon meeting Guilliman previously, Dante had felt a flicker of hope he thought long dead. Now, that hope was a roaring fire. He had witnessed the Lion's return, and in the depths of his soul, the ancient warrior began to wonder if his own gene-father, the Great Angel, might one day return to hear the prayers of ten thousand years.
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