The Webway—once the pinnacle of the Old Ones' engineering—was a realm now mastered only by the Eldar in the long wake of their species' demise. Within this galactic tapestry woven from shimmering threads of psychotropic light, Cawl and his companions continued their pilgrimage. Guided by the enigmatic Eldar warriors, they were shielded from the labyrinth's madness, provided the xenos had no intent to lead them into a waiting trap.
Even though the commanders of both species had exchanged brittle gestures of goodwill, a vast chasm of suspicion still separated the humans from the Eldar. Alexei and his Aiur Guard positioned themselves within that gap, serving as a buffer between the zealous Black Templars and the cold, graceful warriors of the Ynnari.
Archmagos Cawl, his multi-legged mechanical carriage clicking rhythmically against the psychoplastic floor, approached Hyladri. "I remain curious about your motives, Shadowseer. How did you anticipate our arrival on Klyssus with such precision?"
Hyladri hesitated for a fraction of a second, her mask reflecting the swirling colors of the Webway. "Because... the threads of fate demanded it."
"I despise that," Cawl grumbled, his vox-grille emitting a series of binary expletives. "Always this talk of destiny and divine prophecy. Can you xenos not speak in a language rooted in observable data?"
"Your endeavor requires the hand of Death to succeed," Yvraine explained, stepping forward as she overheard the exchange. "The Armor of Fate alone cannot bridge the gap between the living and the lost."
Cawl halted his mobile server-frame. "Clarify your meaning, Emissary."
Yvraine turned, her hand moving to the bone-white hilt of the sword at her waist. As she drew the blade, the Astartes in the Imperial retinue reacted instantly, bolters snapping up to firing positions. The Ynnari warriors did not flinch, their own weapons leveling in a tense standoff. Alexei, caught in the middle of the sudden escalation, raised his hands in a gesture for peace.
Yvraine held the blade toward Cawl. "This is a Cronesword—forged from the finger-bone of the goddess Morai-Heg. It possesses the sovereign power to sever the cord of life or knit it back together." She sheathed the weapon and continued walking. Cawl followed, the tension slowly bleeding out of the corridor as the two leaders moved ahead of the main group to speak in private.
"To fully resurrect the Primarch," Yvraine whispered, "the Cronesword is required to end the stasis-state that has frozen him in the final second of his death. Only then will your Armor of Fate be able to restore his soul to the vessel."
"What?" Cawl's processors whirred in shock. "Even if I accepted such a metaphysical impossibility, I guarantee that if you proposed 'ending' his life to an Ultramarine, we would all be executed before you finished the sentence."
"Indeed. That is why we require your cooperation. You provide the logic; we provide the miracle."
"Damn it, you xenos are all touched by a special kind of madness," Cawl muttered, turning back toward his Skitarii. He was already calculating how to prevent a fratricidal war the moment they reached the shrine-room. He had to succeed; failure meant the final collapse of the galaxy.
Suddenly, Hyladri stopped Cawl. "The warriors who wear the gold and white... where do they hail from?" the Shadowseer asked, her voice tinged with a rare curiosity. She wanted to know the truth of the man who was a void in her visions.
Cawl paused. He was equally fascinated. The powered armor worn by Alexei's troops was a marvel of miniaturization—sophisticated enough for mortals to use, yet seemingly affordable for mass deployment. According to his records, Governor Alexei hailed from a remote, unremarkable Hive World.
How does a backwater world produce technology that rivals the Dark Age of Technology? Cawl wondered. He recalled the ripples in space he had witnessed earlier—a form of dimensional displacement he couldn't quite categorize.
"It seems I must visit this 'Aiur' when this business is concluded," Cawl mused to himself, suspecting it might be a forgotten cache of STC remnants. However, lost in his own logic, he forgot to answer the Shadowseer.
Taking his silence for a refusal, Hyladri turned away, her eyes narrowing behind her mask. The column fell back into a brooding silence as they neared the exit to the Ultramar sub-sector.
Meanwhile, the realm of Ultramar was under a siege of unprecedented scale. Abaddon, occupied with the expansion of the Great Rift on the other side of the galaxy, had delegated the conquest of the Five Hundred Worlds to a new Chaos Alliance.
As the Warmaster of the Black Crusade, Abaddon's influence had unified disparate warbands of the Black Legion, the Iron Warriors, the Night Lords, and other traitorous factions into a single, jagged spear aimed directly at the heart of Macragge.
Fortunately, the Ultramarines' Chapter intelligence had caught wind of the mobilization. Almost every fleet and successor chapter began a desperate return to the home system, but the warp-storms caused by the Fall of Cadia had turned the journey into a nightmare. Ultramar was now a lonely island of light in an ocean of encroaching shadow.
On Laphis, a shrine-world on the fringes of the Macragge system, the invasion was already in its bloody final stages. The Ultramarines and their auxiliaries clung to fortified bastions, contesting every inch of holy ground.
On the Atheron mountain range, a squad of Chaos Astartes scavenged through the ruins, searching for any Imperial holdouts. Their leader, a scarred veteran wielding a jagged harpoon-spear, scanned the horizon. Suddenly, his sensors spiked.
The air in a nearby clearing began to ripple with emerald energy. As the vortex expanded, a torrent of high-velocity fire erupted from the rift. In an instant, the front line of Chaos Marines was shredded, their armor no match for the supersonic spikes and plasma fire. The survivors scrambled behind boulders, vox-casters screaming for reinforcements.
The Imperial retinue and the Ynnari stepped through the gate, emerging onto the snowy hillside. Marshal Amalrich led the charge, the Black Templars and the Scythes of the Emperor pressing forward with an unstoppable momentum. A hail of bolter shells and advanced projectiles ensured the traitors could not even raise their heads.
The skirmish was over in minutes. Cawl walked through the field of fresh corpses, his gaze moving to the valley below where the flickering lights of war illuminated the dark. A distant Imperial bunker was being swarmed by a massive horde of cultists and traitor engines.
"It seems we have arrived in the middle of a slaughter," Alexei noted, checking his weapon's charge. Yvraine and the Visarch moved to his side, their eyes cold and focused.
Most of the Ynnari host had detached within the Webway to perform other maneuvers under Hyladri's direction; a massive xenos army appearing on an Ultramarine world would only invite immediate extermination. Only the core leaders and a small guard remained.
Cawl gestured toward the valley. "The objective is the capital. But first, we must clear our path."