While he waited for reinforcements to answer his summons, Lyras turned the fragments of information into a simple, daring plan.
The Blackstone Fortress's internal sensors offered only intermittent returns, but they had shown him enough. More than a hundred hostile Adeptus Astartes were advancing toward the fortress's core, most of them encased in Tactical Dreadnought armour. Their formation had already torn through tens of thousands of mortal defenders and several armored units without losing momentum.
It did not matter how many warriors the Warmaster eventually dispatched to reinforce him, nor how many defenders could be diverted from the fortress's other approaches. Lyras intended to commit only thirty battle-brothers to the initial assault.
Against more than a hundred Terminators, thirty ordinary Astartes appeared woefully insufficient. Three hundred might not have changed the result. The chamber Lyras had selected offered narrow firing lanes, but no defensible position from which a conventional force could halt that much armored mass. Additional warriors would only crowd the portals, obstruct one another's fire, and die without improving his chances.
The thirty were not expected to win. Their task was to force the enemy formation to turn, return fire, and tighten around the one individual Lyras needed to reach. They would purchase a few seconds with their lives.
Lyras would spend those seconds himself.
The first Black Legion detachment arrived through a portal less than four minutes later. Its warriors bore chipped black plate edged in tarnished brass, their armor scarred by earlier fighting inside the fortress. The sergeant surveyed the chamber, studied the firing positions Lyras had marked, and then looked toward him.
"You want us to hold this junction?"
"I want you to hold their attention," Lyras replied. "Advance as soon as the xenos reaches the upper landing. Keep the Terminators facing you."
The sergeant's helm turned toward the long stairway descending through the chamber. "For how long?"
"As long as you remain alive."
No protest followed. The sergeant merely transmitted the assigned positions to his warriors. The Black Legion did not require promises of survival before obeying an order from the Warmaster's chosen agents.
Lyras withdrew from them and reviewed the plan once more. He had seen an Eldar walking among the Lamenters, carrying a luminous object fashioned from wraithbone. The artifact had brightened before every change in direction, its psychic glow responding to some distant signal within the fortress. It was not merely a relic. It was their wayfinder.
Without it, the intruders would be reduced to searching a structure whose passages could redirect themselves, whose portals linked chambers separated by hundreds of kilometers, and whose internal gravity could turn a wall into a floor without warning. They would still possess formidable weapons, but they would no longer know where to aim them. The fortress could carry them into the Warp long before they found their objective by chance.
His objective was therefore precise: kill the Eldar and destroy the wraithbone device.
Lyras moved ahead through the junction to prepare the ambush. The chamber was built around several overlapping gravity planes, allowing him to approach the central landing along a route that would appear to his targets as a sheer wall. Portal membranes concealed the Black Legion's firing positions until the instant the warriors emerged. A narrow maintenance ledge provided Lyras with cover from auspex sweeps and a direct path to the Eldar once the firefight began.
He tested each transition himself, noting where gravity would seize his body and how much momentum it would add. Then he crouched behind the rippling surface of a dormant portal and waited.
The first shot would be aimed at the xenos. If it killed him, the battle was already won. If it failed, his protectors would close around him and concentrate on the thirty warriors advancing from the opposite side of the chamber.
Lyras would use the reaction either way.
....
Meanwhile, the Lamenters pressed deeper into the Blackstone Fortress.
The passage through which they advanced resembled a colossal artery cut through black metal. Obsidian ribs curved overhead at regular intervals, each one broad enough to support a fortress gate. Between them, crimson conduits carried pulses of light into the distance, brightening and fading in a slow rhythm that suggested machinery under immense strain.
The corridor had not turned, narrowed, or branched for more than three hours. Rangefinders could not identify its endpoint. Whenever the Lamenters sent servo-skulls or mapping probes ahead, the devices continued until interference swallowed their signals, yet the same black ribs and red conduits remained visible through their final transmissions.
Their armor logs confirmed that the force had advanced dozens of kilometers.
Behind them lay the evidence of their progress: wrecked gun emplacements, split armored vehicles, shattered daemon engines, and heaps of mortal auxiliaries whose bodies had been ground into the deck beneath Terminator boots.
Chapter Master Malakim Phoros led from the vanguard. He advanced with his power spear held low, studying each change in the crimson light while his warriors maintained layered fields of fire around him.
Near the rear of the main formation walked Grey and Saal. The position had been chosen because it placed more than a hundred Lamenters between the Eldar guide and any frontal attack. Grey remained within two steps of Saal at all times, his attention divided between the surrounding corridor and the tactical reports feeding through his armor. His responsibility was uncomplicated: whatever reached Saal had to pass through him first.
Saal carried a pale wraithbone wayfinder in both hands. Its curved surface had been grown rather than machined, and faint veins of light moved beneath it whenever he adjusted its orientation. Since their arrival inside the fortress, it had continued to point them along the same unbroken passage. There had been no need for Saal to issue directions because there had been nowhere else to go.
Grey studied the glow for several seconds. "How much farther?"
"The wayfinder cannot express the answer as a distance," Saal replied. His long fingers tilted the relic by a fraction. The internal light shifted, then steadied. "The resonance is strengthening. We are closer than we were."
Grey opened the latest tactical report from outside the fortress. Blackstone interference reduced the transmission to broken bursts, but the dimensional relay aboard the Celestial Engine had forced enough data through to establish the wider situation.
"Enemy fleets throughout the system have begun withdrawing," he said. "This fortress has altered course toward the Warp rift. It is moving more slowly than the other vessels, but the projected path is clear."
Saal did not look away from the wayfinder. "You have told me this three times."
"The projected time before entry has shortened after every update." Grey paused. "If that relic possesses some dormant function capable of taking us directly to the core, now would be an excellent time to discover it."
"It does not."
Saal's expression tightened, but he offered no further retort. The light beneath the wraithbone continued to strengthen as the force advanced.
"At our current pace, the fortress may carry us into the Immaterium before we reach the core," Grey said.
Phoros's voice cut across the command channel from the head of the formation. "We will not enter the Warp aboard it."
The severity of the reply made Grey look toward the distant vanguard. He understood what unprotected Warp travel did to ships and crews, but he had never relied upon a Gellar field and had no desire to begin aboard an enemy fortress.
"The Black Legion still needs protection from the Warp," Grey said. "Even traitors cannot bargain with everything waiting there."
"They need protection," Phoros answered. "That does not mean they will provide it to us. The fortress may possess a functional Gellar field, or the traitors may rely upon warded sanctums and daemonic bindings. They could lower protection around the sections we occupy while keeping their own secure."
"We still have time," Saal said.
Phoros answered at once. "Explain."
Saal looked past the wayfinder to the crimson veins running through the corridor walls. "The fortress is delaying its own translation. The rift has been within its reach for some time. Its course corrections are shallow, and its drive pulses keep bleeding away momentum before it can cross."
Grey's gaze narrowed. "Deliberately?"
"Yes. If it intended only to escape, it would already be gone."
No one answered. The possibility that the fortress was waiting for something made reaching the core more urgent, and the formation marched on.
Several minutes later, the wraithbone wayfinder brightened sharply. Its pale glow spread across Saal's hands and cast narrow shadows over the joints of Grey's gauntlets. At the same moment, the corridor finally changed.
The floor inclined upward.
After hours of level passage, even that simple alteration drew the attention of every warrior able to see it through his visor. The red conduits converged along the rising deck, their pulses accelerating as if something beyond the crest were drawing power from them.
Saal stepped onto the slope without hesitation. Phoros studied the change through his armor's inertial sensors, ordered two squads to cover the rear, and continued upward. Grey followed Saal while the rest of the formation climbed behind them.
At the top, the corridor opened into a chamber hundreds of meters across.
Dozens of portal-arches occupied terraces arranged around a vast central void. Each arch enclosed a wavering field through which another passage could be seen. Some appeared upright. Others opened onto corridors whose floors ran vertically relative to the chamber. One opened onto what appeared to be a ceiling covered in dust and debris; nothing fell because, beyond the portal, that ceiling was locally down.
Stairways connected the terraces, but they did not share a single gravitational orientation. A flight that rose normally from one landing crossed a faint distortion in the air and continued along what had appeared, moments earlier, to be a wall. Loose fragments lay in different directions on neighboring surfaces. Chains hanging from the arches pointed toward several separate centers of gravity.
The architecture was not shapeless or irrational. Each component had a clear orientation within its own field. The difficulty came from moving between them.
The Lamenters' armor reacted immediately. Inertial warnings flashed across their displays. Stabilizers compensated, then corrected again as local gravity shifted beneath each step. The warriors could function through the disorientation, but their suits weighed hundreds of kilograms, and a mistaken transition could send that mass falling sideways across the chamber.
"Trust your plate's reference marker, not your inner ear," Phoros ordered. "Mag-lock at every boundary. Maintain contact with the warrior behind you."
The formation slowed as the first Terminators crossed onto the chamber's altered gravity planes. Boots locked to blackstone. Hands closed around railings or the edges of steps. Once a warrior's armor recalibrated, he advanced, allowing the next brother to follow.
Grey experienced a moment of nausea when the floor rotated beneath him without appearing to move. His suit told him that down had shifted ninety degrees. His body insisted that he was walking along a wall. He ignored the disagreement and followed the reference line projected across his visor.
Saal adapted more easily. Eldar reflexes and an instinctive sensitivity to the chamber's active fields allowed him to cross each boundary with little more than a change in posture. He bent his knees before one transition, stepped through, and let the new gravity settle him onto the adjoining staircase without engaging a magnetic lock.
The wayfinder's glow narrowed into a concentrated ray. It pointed toward an arch on the chamber's central landing, its light steady for the first time since the boarding force had entered the fortress.
"There," Saal said.
He took the lead, with Grey close behind and Phoros moving up from the vanguard to join them. The Terminators followed as quickly as their mass and the changing gravity allowed.
Saal reached the final staircase and glanced back. Every gravity boundary had forced the Lamenters' armor to recalibrate, stretching the formation across several landings despite their discipline. Grey remained only a few steps below him. Phoros was close behind. The nearest Terminator squad, however, was still negotiating the previous transition.
A bolt pistol cracked from one of the portal arches.
Saal ducked at the muzzle flash. The shell passed close enough for its wake to whip his hair across his face before striking the pauldron of a Lamenter who had just reached the top of the stairs. The mass-reactive charge detonated against the yellow plate with a hard flash and a spray of ceramite fragments. The armor held, but the impact twisted the warrior half around and tore one boot free of the landing. His squadmate seized his gorget before the altered gravity could drag him over the edge.
Weapons rose across the Lamenters' formation. Targeting runes flooded their helm displays.
Thirty Black Legion Astartes emerged from five portal-arches, their black-and-brass armor stark against the pale energy membranes behind them. No mortal auxiliaries accompanied them. They advanced in disciplined groups, bolters firing in overlapping bursts as they moved toward the central landing.
The chamber filled with detonations. Bolt shells struck stairs, railings, armor, and portal frames. Fragments from each impact fell in different directions as they crossed neighboring gravity fields. Some dropped toward the central void. Others scattered sideways or rattled upward across what appeared to be the ceiling.
"Anchor formation," Phoros ordered. "Return fire by squad. Protect the guide."
The Lamenters obeyed before he finished speaking. Terminators locked their boots to the stairs and formed armored firing blocks around each landing. Storm bolters answered the ambush with a continuous roar, forcing the Black Legion to divide their attention between advance and cover.
Grey reached Saal and dragged him behind the nearest Terminator. The warrior turned his broad shoulder toward the incoming fire, interposing his armored bulk while Saal crouched behind him with the wayfinder pressed against his chest.
More Lamenters climbed into the chamber. Every warrior who completed a gravity transition added another gun to the return fire. The Black Legion continued advancing despite their losses, closing the distance because withdrawal had never been part of their orders.
Then Saal saw the true attack.
Lyras emerged from a portal on the adjoining gravity plane, moving along a surface that appeared vertical to everyone on the central landing. A power blade burned in each hand. He crossed the boundary at a run, allowed the new gravity to pull him sideways, and landed behind the Lamenters' foremost firing line with more speed than his armored mass should have permitted.
"Behind us!" Saal shouted.
A Lamenter began to turn his storm bolter. Lyras caught the weapon with one blade and drove the other through the vulnerable joint beneath the warrior's pauldron. The power field sheared through armor, cabling, and bone. The severed arm fell away with the storm bolter still firing, its final shells exploding against the stairs.
Lyras did not remain to finish the wounded warrior. He pivoted immediately toward Saal.
Their gazes met across the landing. Lyras's bare face held no triumph and no frenzy, only a focused hatred that made his intention unmistakable. He knew what the wayfinder was. Every warrior he had sacrificed existed solely to bring him within striking distance of it.
Phoros and Grey moved together. Grey attacked from Saal's right with his chainsword while Phoros drove his power spear down the center. Lyras slipped beneath the spearhead, turned his left blade against the chainsword's teeth, and used the contact to twist past both attacks.
He planted one boot against the edge of the landing. The sole crossed a gravity boundary, and the altered pull lifted his body into a fast lateral rotation. He used the acceleration rather than fighting it, bringing one power blade around toward Saal's neck while the second guarded his body from Phoros.
Saal saw the cut. Eldar perception gave him time to understand its angle, its speed, and the precise point where the field-wreathed edge would pass through his throat. His body still could not move quickly enough to escape it.
Grey triggered bullet-time.
The roar of bolters stretched into a low vibration. Muzzle flashes remained open like fixed cones of light. Armor fragments drifted through the air slowly enough for individual edges to become visible.
Grey crossed the landing in three steps. His chainsword passed through Lyras's sword arm above the elbow, severing it in the middle of the killing stroke.
Ordinary time crashed back into place.
The detached limb spun past Saal, its power blade carving a glowing line across the railing before both arm and weapon disappeared over the edge. Lyras's remaining sword was still raised to defend against Phoros, leaving the rest of him exposed.
Phoros exploited the opening without hesitation.
The first strike of his power spear removed Lyras's remaining arm at the shoulder. The return stroke passed through one knee joint. A final downward cut severed the other leg above the greave. Each attack targeted an armor seam, preserving the torso and head while eliminating every means of resistance.
Lyras struck the landing on his side. His mutilated armor sealed what wounds it could, while his transhuman physiology forced rapid clots across the rest. The process kept him alive. It did nothing to help him understand what had happened.
His brain still expected the first attack to land. Motor impulses continued commanding fingers no longer attached to him and legs already lying several meters away. For two heartbeats, his body seemed convinced it was still turning through the air toward Saal.
Then pain and gravity reached him together.
He rolled onto his back, dazed, and saw the wraithbone wayfinder still glowing in Saal's hands. Its beam remained fixed on the same portal.
Around them, the diversion was ending.
The last Black Legion warriors continued fighting with grim discipline, but the Lamenters now understood the ambush. Phoros forbade pursuit through the portal-arches and ordered his squads to seal the exits instead. Terminators established interlocking fields of fire across every gravity plane, trapping the traitors between the central landing and the arches from which they had emerged.
Storm-bolter volleys broke armor apart one warrior at a time. Black Legionnaires who tried to close for melee met thunder hammers, power fists, and armored bodies three times their number. Those who attempted to withdraw found Lamenters already covering the portals. Within minutes, the last traitor fell beneath converging fire.
Lyras could do nothing but watch. Every life he had spent, every firing position he had chosen, and every second his warriors had purchased had led only to the removal of his limbs and the survival of his target.
The plan had failed.
Grey let his chainsword fall silent and approached him. Phoros had already turned back toward the surviving squads, reorganizing the formation and ordering the wounded removed from the exposed landing. Saal stood nearby, checking the wayfinder for damage.
Lyras tried to raise his head. Grey's gauntlet came down and pinned it against the blackstone floor. The pressure was controlled, but the implication was not. One movement of Grey's arm would be enough to crush the traitor's skull.
"The message I send next will decide your fate," Grey said coldly.
He opened a comm-link to Qin Mo, stationed on the bridge of the Celestial Engine.
.....
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