Far from the fighting inside the Will of Eternity, Qin Mo stood upon the command deck of the Celestial Engine and watched the Chaos withdrawal approach its final stage.
Most of Abaddon's surviving warships had already escaped through the Warp rift. The last cruisers were disappearing across its ragged boundary, leaving burning wrecks and expanding debris fields behind them. Only the two Blackstone Fortresses remained in realspace.
Their progress toward the rift came in uneven bursts. Ancient drive nodes and the additional thrusters grafted onto their hulls would ignite, accelerate the continent-sized structures for several seconds, and then shut down without warning. Each unexplained failure left them farther from the rift than they should have been and gave the Celestial Engine more time to fire.
Neither fortress had stopped fighting.
The Celestial Engine's two weapon-moons maintained separate firing solutions, one against each Blackstone Fortress. Crimson particle lances crossed the system while the ancient constructs answered with concentrated torrents of Warp energy. Whenever the weapons met, gravitic disturbances rolled through the surrounding void. Wreckage changed course. Auspex returns dissolved into static. Talon shields brightened across entire hemispheres as they absorbed energy that had escaped the primary impact zones.
The exchange had continued long enough for whole sections of the Blackstone Fortresses to glow from accumulated heat. The Celestial Engine had suffered in turn. Armor belts along its forward hemisphere had buckled, shield projectors had burned out, and several weapons districts were operating from isolated power networks.
Yet neither side had gained a decisive advantage. The Warp rift continued feeding the fortresses' defenses, while the Celestial Engine possessed too much redundancy to be crippled by a few successful strikes.
A secure communication alert appeared across Qin Mo's noospheric interface. The signal had been forced through the interference surrounding the Will of Eternity and arrived as a broken stream of positional data, armor telemetry, and visual fragments.
Two holographic projections flared into existence beside the main tactical display.
The first showed Grey standing inside the fortress's gravity chamber. His golden armor bore fresh bolt impacts and a dark scorch across one shoulder. Behind him, Lamenters in Terminator plate were reorganizing around the portal arches and tending to their wounded.
The second projection reconstructed the prisoner beneath Grey's gauntlet.
The Chaos Space Marine had been reduced to a torso and head. Three severed limbs lay across the surrounding landing, while the fourth arm had vanished into the chamber's central void, still clutching one of his twin power swords. His armor's emergency seals and transhuman physiology continued to keep him alive. The other blade lay beside the arm Phoros had cut from his shoulder.
Qin Mo studied the traitor's bloodless face, the trophies hanging from his belt, and the distinctive ornamentation worked into his black armor. Recognition followed immediately.
"Telemachon Lyras."
Grey glanced down at the prisoner. "You know him?"
"Enough." Qin Mo enlarged the image. "He is one of the Ezekarion, one of Abaddon's inner circle."
That explained why Phoros had deliberately kept the traitor alive. A commander of Lyras's rank might possess fleet dispositions, hidden strongholds, command ciphers, and knowledge gathered across ten thousand years of war. Even fragments extracted from him could be valuable.
For several seconds, Qin Mo considered ordering his capture.
The tactical objections accumulated faster than the potential benefits. The boarding force was still racing toward the fortress's core. Grey was Saal's closest protector, while Phoros needed every available Lamenter to secure their route and hold the portal network behind them. Assigning warriors to carry and restrain Lyras would weaken the mission at the moment it mattered most.
Teleporting him directly onto the Celestial Engine presented a different set of problems. His armor might contain hidden teleport homers, bound entities, scrapcode payloads, chemical weapons, or devices designed to activate upon capture. Talon containment systems could probably hold him once he had been stripped, scanned, and isolated, but the Celestial Engine was exchanging fire with two weapons built to kill Star Gods. The command deck was no place to discover how many surprises an Ezekarion carried beneath his armor.
Leaving him behind was equally unacceptable. His wounds had immobilized him, but they had not rendered him harmless. He could still communicate, observe, and direct defenders. If recovered by the Black Legion, augmetic reconstruction would eventually return him to service.
The information he might possess was valuable. Destroying the Will of Eternity before it reached the Warp rift was more valuable.
"How do you want us to deal with him?" Grey asked.
Qin Mo reached through the dimensional relay and established a direct link with Grey's Thunderborn-pattern armor.
Every Thunderborn suit contained an emergency command lattice through which Qin Mo could reinforce damaged systems or seize control if the wearer became unconscious. Beneath that lattice ran a much narrower network of phase-conductive living metal. He had designed it as a medium through which a limited portion of his C'tan power could be projected at a distance.
It was not powerful enough to destroy a fortress.
It was more than powerful enough to kill one Space Marine.
"Hold him still," Qin Mo said.
Grey shifted his weight and pinned Lyras's breastplate beneath one armored boot.
Grey felt the armor override engage. His right arm rose before he consciously commanded it, servos locking his open palm toward Lyras. A warning rune flashed across his visor as an unfamiliar current entered the phase-conductive lattice.
Blue-white arcs spread over the gauntlet. They did not draw power from Grey's micro-fusion cores. The suit could measure the heat they produced and the electromagnetic disturbance surrounding them, but it could not identify their source.
Lyras twisted his head toward the gathering light. Whatever composure had survived his defeat vanished from his face.
The discharge struck him at point-blank range.
For an instant, the gravity chamber became brighter than a plasma furnace. Thermal warnings filled every Lamenter visor. Saal recoiled and raised one sleeve across his face while nearby Terminators turned their armor toward the blast. The air around Grey's outstretched hand ionized into a blue corona, filling the chamber with ozone and the sharp crack of expanding gas.
Lyras's corrupted armor vaporized. The energy consumed ceramite, flesh, bone, augmetics, and every relic fixed to his war-plate in the same fraction of a second. A cloud of incandescent particles expanded above the blackstone floor, then broke apart further until even Grey's enhanced sensors could detect no recoverable biological material.
When the light faded, only a shallow, glassy scar remained where the traitor's torso had lain.
Nothing material remained for the Black Legion to recover.
Grey lowered his arm and flexed the fingers of his gauntlet. The phase-conductive lattice was already cooling, though several armor subsystems continued insisting that the discharge should have overloaded them.
"A warning before you borrow one of my limbs would be useful," he said.
"I told you to hold him still."
"That was an instruction, not a warning."
"You survived." Qin Mo severed the control link. "Continue the mission."
Grey turned toward Phoros. The Chapter Master had watched the execution without comment. Saal looked from the scorched floor to Grey's gauntlet, then tightened his grip upon the wraithbone wayfinder.
Phoros raised his power spear. "The prisoner is no longer our concern. Reform and advance."
The Lamenters obeyed. Two squads remained behind to secure the portal chamber and cover the removal of the wounded. The rest followed Saal through the arch indicated by the wayfinder, with Grey and Phoros close behind him.
The farther they advanced, the brighter the wraithbone device became. Pale light ran through its branching grooves and spread across Saal's hands. It was responding not merely to proximity, but to the concentration of psychic and structural pathways around the fortress's central nexus.
That brought Grey back to a question the urgency of the boarding action had allowed them to postpone.
"Once we reach the core, what exactly are we destroying?" he asked. "You said the device would disrupt the fortress's consciousness. That is not the same as blowing up a reactor."
"Correct," Saal replied. "A Talisman of Vaul has no single reactor waiting for you to shoot it."
He lifted the wayfinder between them.
"Its higher functions are distributed through the blackstone, but they converge at several focal nodes. Shield control, weapon coordination, self-repair, navigation, and the patterned will guiding them all must exchange information somewhere. This device will identify one of those points."
Grey looked at the second wraithbone mechanism secured beneath Saal's robes. "And then?"
"I insert one key into the node. It will unfold through the local pathways and impose a pacification pattern upon the fortress's higher functions."
"Pacification."
"Your language lacks a precise word for persuading an ancient weapon to stop thinking long enough for someone else to kill it."
Grey considered that. "Disruption will do."
"Crude, but acceptable."
Phoros joined the channel. "Will you need to remain beside the device once it is active?"
"No. The key must remain. I do not."
Grey's stance eased by a fraction. He had already been calculating how to establish a defensive perimeter around Saal and hold it while the Aeldari worked. Protecting him during a prolonged ritual inside the heart of the fortress would have forced the Lamenters to defend a fixed position against every surviving enemy aboard.
"So we insert the device, confirm that it is operating, and withdraw," Grey said.
"Then your metal planet finishes the task," Saal replied. "It was built to shatter stars, was it not?"
"Among other things."
The wayfinder surged before either could say more. Its pale light expanded into a three-dimensional projection that filled the passage ahead.
The image did not reproduce the Blackstone Fortress as a conventional map. Corridors appeared according to connection rather than physical distance. Portal arches separated by hundreds of kilometers overlapped as neighboring points, while passages beside one another in realspace drifted apart because no direct route linked them.
Their position burned as a small golden mark near the projection's edge. Deeper inside the network, several luminous pathways converged upon a single white point surrounded by Aeldari runes.
Saal stopped walking. For the first time since entering the fortress, satisfaction broke through his controlled expression.
"There."
Grey's cybernetic eye reduced the projection's brightness and enlarged the symbols. "What does it say?"
"The closest translation is 'focus point' or 'primary convergence.'" Saal indicated the white marker. "For our purposes, that is the core."
Phoros transmitted the new route to every surviving squad. The formation changed immediately. Terminators carrying storm shields moved to the front, while assault cannons and plasma weapons covered the rear approaches.
Saal rotated the wayfinder. The projection contracted into a narrow line leading toward the next portal.
"This way."
The route folded an enormous distance into three portal crossings and one descending passage. Each transition altered the local gravity and forced the Terminators to recalibrate their armor, but the wayfinder no longer hesitated. Its connection to the fortress's internal network had become too strong for the surrounding interference to conceal.
The final passage ended at a circular chamber built around a suspended blackstone spindle.
The structure was hundreds of meters tall and held in place by concentric rings that did not touch it. Crimson energy entered through conduits in the floor, climbed the spindle, and separated into branching currents that vanished into the surrounding walls. Every pulse coincided with a distant weapons discharge or drive ignition.
The core was not a power source. It was a routing nexus, the point at which the fortress decided where its power and attention would be directed.
No defenders remained inside the chamber. The fortress itself supplied the resistance. Gravity changed direction twice in rapid succession. Portal apertures began closing behind the boarding force, and the crimson currents within the spindle accelerated until static crawled across the Lamenters' armor.
Saal stepped toward the nexus.
A discharge of violet energy struck the floor in front of him. Grey moved between Saal and the spindle, taking the next arc across his armor. His shields flared, and warning glyphs spread through his visor, but he held position.
"Do it," Grey said.
Saal pressed the wraithbone key against the blackstone. There was no visible socket. The device softened beneath his hands and extended pale filaments into microscopic seams within the surface. More branches unfolded, spreading across the spindle like roots searching through soil.
For several seconds, the fortress pushed back. Crimson light flooded the chamber. Saal's jaw tightened, and blood appeared beneath one nostril as he forced the key's pacification pattern deeper into the nexus.
Then the first pale line reached the spindle's center.
White light spread through the blackstone pathways. Wherever it passed, the crimson currents dimmed. The chamber's shifting gravity stabilized. Portal arches froze in their current positions, and the pressure interfering with Talon's dimensional lock weakened sharply.
Saal released the key. It remained fused to the spindle, its branching structure continuing to spread.
"Now," he said.
....
A short while later...
Dimensional apertures opened across the receiving apron at the rear of the Celestial Engine's command deck.
Lamenters emerged in disciplined groups, weapons still raised and armor blackened by hours of fighting. The wounded came next, supported between their brothers or carried upon armored stretchers. Grey, Phoros, and Saal appeared in the final aperture before it folded shut behind them.
Medicae drones moved among the returning warriors before the last of them had cleared the apertures. They sprayed sealant across damaged joints, scanned for internal bleeding, and marked the most serious casualties for immediate transmission to surgical chambers.
Saal reached the nearest console and braced both hands against it. His breathing came quickly, though he tried to conceal the extent of his exhaustion. The projection of the two Blackstone Fortresses rotated above him.
He pointed toward the Will of Eternity.
"The key is active. Its higher functions are locked in conflict with the pacification pattern." He drew another breath. "Destroy it before the fortress adapts or tears the device free."
Qin Mo looked toward the tactical display.
The effect was already visible.
Until that moment, the two Blackstone Fortresses had continued exchanging fire with the Celestial Engine's weapon-moons. Warp-vortex discharges met crimson particle lances between the opposing structures, releasing pulses that distorted sensors and drove sheets of light across Talon's defensive fields.
The Will of Eternity began to falter.
Its protective Warp envelope lost cohesion in sections. Instead of forming one continuous storm around the fortress, the energy separated into ragged bands that no longer covered the entire hull. Weapon apertures opened and closed without firing. Its vortex cannon began to charge, fired prematurely, and scattered an unfocused burst harmlessly across the void.
On the Celestial Engine's display, shield-coherence readings fell sector by sector. Targeting systems immediately marked the exposed regions.
Qin Mo issued the order.
"Both satellites, concentrate fire on the Will of Eternity. Strike the existing breaches and continue until no coherent structure remains."
The first weapon-moon completed its rotation. Heat radiators sealed. Power flowed from banks distributed across its armored interior into the particle-lance arrays. The second satellite shifted out of its previous firing corridor and aligned on the opposite side of the target.
The surviving Blackstone Fortress fired upon the Celestial Engine in an attempt to interrupt them. Its vortex discharge struck the artificial planetoid's forward shields, turning a section of the defensive field white. Several projectors failed, but the central structure held.
The Will of Eternity had no such protection left.
Both weapon-moons fired.
Crimson beams crossed the void from different angles and converged upon the fortress. The first lance struck a region already weakened during the earlier duel. It cut along one radial arm, vaporizing exterior batteries and opening the internal galleries to space.
The second struck the central body.
Without the Warp envelope to disperse the impact, the beam penetrated deep into the blackstone structure. Energy spread through the pathways Saal's device had paralyzed. Internal systems attempted to reroute it, but the commands arrived too late or contradicted one another.
The fortress's central mass broke apart.
Several radial arms detached and rotated away, trailing molten blackstone and fragments of Chaos-built machinery. The remaining sections folded inward as internal gravitic fields failed. Secondary explosions rippled through the wreckage where reactors, ammunition stores, and grafted Warp mechanisms ruptured in succession.
The particle lances continued firing until the central structure ceased to exist.
At last, the weapon-moons ended their discharge. Armored shutters opened over their radiators, and heat bled into space as their arrays entered cooldown. The crimson illumination that had filled the system faded, leaving an expanding cloud of glowing debris where the Will of Eternity had been.
The ancient fortress was gone.
"Excellent," Qin Mo said.
His living-metal face showed no change, but satisfaction softened the metallic resonance of his voice. One of the two weapons capable of matching the Celestial Engine had been eliminated, and the surviving fortress now faced both satellites alone.
Saal remained silent. His fingers tightened around the second wraithbone key beneath his robes. The Will of Eternity had been corrupted, enslaved, and turned against Cadia, but it had still been a weapon surviving from an age his people remembered only through myth. Its destruction brought relief rather than triumph.
There was no time to mourn it.
The remaining Blackstone Fortress stopped retreating.
Its failing drives cut out completely, and the structure rotated until its vortex cannon faced the Celestial Engine. Whether the action represented ancient hatred, damaged targeting logic, or the last command of its Chaos crew no longer mattered. It had chosen or been forced to continue the fight.
The two weapon-moons separated and attacked from different vectors. The fortress's Warp envelope concentrated against the first lance, thinning across the opposite hemisphere. The second beam struck the exposed side before its defenses could redistribute. Entire weapons districts vanished, and fractures spread through one of the eight radial arms.
Its vortex cannon could threaten one target at a time. It could not suppress both satellites while also maintaining the shield surrounding its hull. Every firing cycle forced it to surrender another portion of its defenses.
Saal withdrew the remaining wraithbone device. "I can board it and repeat the process."
"No," Qin Mo said. "The tactical advantage is ours. I am not risking another company when conventional fire will finish the job."
Phoros looked across the rows of wounded Lamenters being carried from the command deck. "Agreed."
Saal returned the device beneath his robes.
There was no longer any reason to use it.
....
Aboard the last remaining Blackstone Fortress...
The Dark Mechanicum priesthood responsible for the fortress had exhausted every procedure they understood and several they had invented during the battle.
The command chamber shook whenever another particle lance struck the outer structure. Dust and chips of blackstone fell from surfaces that had survived millions of years without visible decay. Chaos-built consoles flickered beneath emergency illumination, while cracked hololithic projectors displayed incomplete sections of the fortress surrounded by damage runes.
The propulsion system remained the most urgent failure.
The priests had restarted the original drive nodes hundreds of times. They had isolated control pathways, replaced relay banks, purged entire cogitator stacks, and flooded the network with command codes recovered from Abaddon's oldest archives. Each attempt produced the same result.
Power reached the engines. Fuel pressure stabilized. Ignition began.
Then the control pathways fell silent, and the drives ceased to recognize the commands directing them toward the Warp rift.
Additional thrusters had been installed along the fortress's rearward arms. Void tugs had been mag-locked to the hull and ordered to push at maximum output. Independent reactors supplied each unit, preventing the ancient structure from cutting their power.
It made no difference. The moment those machines were connected to the fortress's control network, they failed as well. Thrusters that functioned perfectly during isolated tests shut down within seconds of accepting synchronized guidance.
The fortress was not suffering from broken engines. It refused to behave as though escape were its purpose.
A heretek magos stood at the central control dais, surrounded by streams of machine-speed data. His augmented limbs moved from console to console while mechadendrites tore open access panels and replaced components faster than the attending adepts could bless them.
"Restart aft clusters three through nine," he ordered. "Sever them from central guidance. Issue thrust commands locally."
"Local command rejected," an adept replied.
"Then erase the local mind and install another."
"Replacement cogitators have already been installed."
"Install them again!"
The fortress lurched. A particle lance struck one radial arm, passed through the collapsing Warp envelope, and tore away several kilometers of blackstone. The command chamber's artificial gravity failed for half a second. Loose tools, severed cables, and two servitors rose from the deck before slamming back down hard enough to break bone and machinery.
The tactical hololith showed the Celestial Engine's two satellites separating for another converging attack. The next discharge would arrive before the priests could complete another full diagnostic cycle.
Abaddon's fleet had already left the system. No reinforcements were coming. The surviving fortress possessed no escort screen, no functioning withdrawal drive, and no shield capable of enduring many more direct hits.
Some of the priests continued working. Others abandoned their consoles and began broadcasting prayers into the machine network. They called upon forbidden aspects of the Omnissiah, the masters of the Forge of Souls, and every entity whose name had ever produced a response from corrupted machinery.
Their invocations received nothing but static.
Then a faint metallic rustle came from the darkness behind the command dais.
One of the priests turned. Threat-recognition systems flooded his vision with warning glyphs, but the emotional dampeners implanted within his brain suppressed the panic before it could overwhelm his remaining flesh. He ordered his augmetic eyes to increase their sensitivity.
Something moved between two interface pylons.
A tall figure emerged slowly from the gloom. Its body was built around a skeletal metallic frame, but no clear boundary separated machine from flesh. Taut strands of muscle wrapped its limbs like bundled actuators. Cables ran through exposed ribs and vanished beneath thin membranes stretched over mechanical joints.
Its left hand gripped a forge hammer whose head glowed with lines resembling molten runes. Its right arm ended in long metal claws capable of closing with the precision of surgical tools or the force of industrial cutters. Two black horns rose from its skull-like head. Behind it, corrupted cogitator symbols rotated in a broken halo while their duplicates appeared across every damaged display in the chamber.
The figure possessed none of the uncontrolled movement common to newly manifested daemons. It walked with the measured economy of a craftsman approaching an unfinished mechanism.
Every unpowered console in the chamber activated as it passed. Servitors lowered their heads. Mechadendrites that had been thrashing through emergency repairs became still. Even the fortress's corrupted machine network ceased producing error messages.
The priest dropped to his knees. The adepts nearest him followed, fear giving way to reverence. The magos at the command dais tried to remain standing for several seconds longer before his own augmetic limbs folded beneath him.
The figure studied the damage displays. Its burning gaze moved from the failing propulsion systems to the fractured representation of the fortress.
"This construct is like a wild beast that cannot be tamed," it said.
The voice did not come from its mouth alone. It issued from every vox-grille, resonated through the priests' implants, and entered the propulsion network as a valid command at every level of authority.
"It is not yet perfect. It does not yet obey as a true machine should."
As the final word passed through the chamber, every propulsion node aboard the Blackstone Fortress activated.
Ancient drives, Chaos-built thrusters, and external void tugs ignited in a synchronized sequence. None shut down. Power remained stable. Guidance systems that had refused every previous command now accepted a single course without correction.
The sudden acceleration hurled unsecured servitors across the chamber and tore cables from their mountings. Outside, the immense fortress surged forward just as the Celestial Engine's weapon-moons began their next firing cycle.
A particle lance struck its trailing arm and sheared away a burning section of blackstone, but the remaining structure did not slow. Its engines drove it directly toward the open Warp rift.
Moments later, the eight-pointed silhouette crossed the threshold and vanished into the Immaterium.
.....
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