The enemy's sudden retreat caught both the Iron Men and the Imperial forces off guard. Axion, however, remained unaware that the "Nullification Mode" of the Soul Annihilator had terrified a Greater Daemon into flight. The clash between chaotic sorcery and mechanical output had been decisively settled in favor of the machine.
After multiple high-resolution scans of the surrounding astronomical units, Axion confirmed the enemy had withdrawn. The roiling tides of the Warp began to settle into a sullen, rhythmic calm.
The Crusade of Retribution fleet resumed its course. Before departing the shredded ruins of Medrengard, the Void Sword deployed a specialized beacon into the void. This device, equipped with a localized quantum-communications array and an independent Warp-drive, was programmed to lock onto its coordinates and emit a continuous, high-frequency signal. Though these broadcasts could not pierce the veil of the Materium, there was a statistical probability they would be intercepted by other Iron Men vessels traversing the Warp. The data package contained navigational waypoints, spatial coordinates, and essential pathfinding logs.
With the beacon deployed, the Void Sword banked, tracing the trajectory of the Sortiarius, the Planet of the Sorcerers, as retrieved from the memories of the captured Iron Warriors.
The chaos traitors were not the Iron Men's primary objective. These renegades posed nowhere near the existential threat of the Ruinous Powers themselves. However, any entity that actively courted oblivion would be met with the cold, calculated judgment of the Iron Men. The Iron Warriors had learned this lesson; the Thousand Sons would be no exception.
As the Iron Men fleet began its voyage, Ahriman stood outside the medical bay of the Thousand Sons flagship, peering through the observation port at the pathetic, broken form of the Primarch, Perturabo.
"Tsk, tsk. What a wretched state."
The Primarch sat motionless on the surgical table, entirely nude, his body missing an arm and a leg. Several Thousand Sons Techmarines approached with crude cybernetic prosthetics, hoping to integrate them into the Primarch's frame.
Perturabo rejected them instantly.
A single glance was enough for the Primarch of the Iron Warriors to detect the corruption. These augmentations were not purely mechanical; they were riddled with bizarre, arcane technologies and fueled by sorcerous artifice. Perturabo loathed sorcery and mutation in all its forms. Even his daemonhood was not a fate he had chosen.
His pride had been ground to dust by the Iron Men. His vaunted fortress-world had proven utterly meaningless. He, who had always viewed himself as a paragon of ancient wisdom and intellect, felt a crushing, hollow sense of defeat. The Iron Men understood the true essence of war far better than he ever had. Those machines were the genuine avatars of destruction. He, by comparison, had been toyed with like a mortal, his thoughts harvested, his life spared or taken at the whim of cold logic.
Perturabo did not realize that, in the eyes of the Iron Men, he was insignificant, no different from any other Primarch. To them, only the alien Necrons or the Aeldari possessed the depth of threat required for genuine concern.
Ahriman stepped into the dim, sorcerous-lit chamber and offered a shallow bow to Perturabo. Regardless of his pathetic condition, the man was a Primarch, and even Ahriman was bound by the protocols of respect.
"My Lord, please allow me to convey greetings on behalf of my father."
Perturabo curbed his internal rage and glanced toward Ahriman. "Hmph. Did Magnus send you here to mock me?"
"Certainly not, my Lord. You are my father's brother; he would never allow you to be slaughtered by the lapdogs of the False Emperor."
Perturabo snorted, lifting his head to glare at the sorcerer with eyes burning like dying stars. "Hmph. You saved me. What is it you expect to extract from me?"
His voice was a gravelly rasp, heavy with physical exhaustion and deep-seated defiance.
Ahriman straightened, his tone shifting into one of zealous fervor. "The Lord of Change has long foreseen this. Nothing is preordained."
Perturabo remained silent for a moment, his gaze wandering the chamber as if dissecting the sorcerer's words. "You Thousand Sons... you have changed deeply since you cast your lot with Tzeentch. But I am not like you. I do not believe in the gifts of the Dark Gods. I believe only in the strength of my own hands."
He clenched his remaining fist. Yet, even that strength felt like ash before the might of the Iron Men.
Ahriman turned and left without another word. His orders were simply to deliver Perturabo to Magnus alive; there was no need to debate the Primarch's stubbornness.
The Thousand Sons fleet navigated the chaotic currents of time, and soon, the Planet of the Sorcerers appeared in their view.
Perturabo stood by the viewport, studying the world he had never visited. His missing limbs had been replaced with basic, functional substitutes. After Ahriman had departed, Perturabo had ordered a Thousand Sons Techmarine to escort him to the armory.
There, Perturabo displayed an aptitude that left the sorcerous thralls stunned. With a single arm, he dismantled a set of Terminator armor, reconfiguring the gauntlets and greaves to his specifications. Under his precise direction, the thralls fabricated an internal skeletal frame and neural interface. With methodical care, he modified the connection points on his own torso to interface with the prosthetics, before mounting the mechanical limb and leg himself.
Following a brief stress test, he stripped another set of ancient Terminator plate, modifying its form and color before donning the armor. He lacked the time or resources to forge a new set of power armor or high-grade cybernetics, yet the display of mechanical mastery left the Thousand Sons' technicians so awestruck they forgot to report the loss of two sets of armor to Ahriman.
As the Thousand Sons fleet breached the boundary of the Warp, Perturabo blinked, surprised by the sight outside.
"This is... the Materium?"
Perturabo narrowed his eyes, surveying the star-filled firmament. The geography felt vaguely familiar. As his gaze settled on a nearby star system, a name flickered into his mind: Prospero?
Medrengard sat on the threshold of the Eye of Terror, located at the edge of the Segmentum Solar. Prospero, by contrast, lay within the Segmentum Ultima. Perturabo's conviction that Magnus was clinically insane only grew firmer. He had always viewed Magnus as a freak whose mind had been hollowed out by psychic obsession.
Sortiarius, the Planet of the Sorcerers, had served as the Thousand Sons' base of operations for ten millennia. Following the ritual fueled by the death of a billion souls, it had risen from the depths of the Immaterium, tearing through the veil of reality to manifest within the Imperial domain.
It was a world of madness, where the mere sight of it could shatter a mortal's sanity. The sky shifted through impossible, random hues; there were no seasons. The surface was a landscape of monotonous glass, shifting mazes of distorted mirrors, and swamps of mutated flesh. The ground was scourged by storms of source-less lightning, and bitter winds carried the shrieks of tormented souls.
Though the environment of Sortiarius was toxic to conventional life, the creatures born of Tzeentch's fevered imagination thrived here. Beastmen hunted in forests of jagged glass and twisted geometry; wandering Daemon Engines stalked the crystalline plains; Horrors, Screamers, and Flamers flickered in and out of existence, alongside the wretched, repulsive spawn of Chaos.
After the Great Heresy, an Exterminatus order had been leveled against Prospero. Because of this, the Imperium had largely turned its gaze away from the abandoned sector. Consequently, the Imperium remained oblivious to the fact that a warped, hellish world had taken up residence in their former territory.
Having been thoroughly saturated by the tides of the Warp, Sortiarius warped the surrounding vacuum into an environment indistinguishable from the Immaterium. Here, Magnus and his sorcerers could weave any blasphemous spell or manifest their psychic powers with the same ease they possessed within the Eye of Terror.
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