With the detonation of the Chaos Emperor-class Titan, a catastrophic chain reaction rippled outward. A titanic shockwave tore through the entirety of the Forge of Souls, its violent, uncontained discharge obliterating the god-machine itself and the expansive industrial sectors beneath its iron tread.
Directly beneath the material foundations of Vashtorr's personal forge-palace lay the Dissonance Engine, composed of the three sacred Relics of Caliban. The Arkifane had hidden the ancient apparatus deep within the sub-levels to gouge a breach into the Webway. Now, the unchecked sub-atomic backfire that tore the Titan asunder rent the very crust of the world, flaying open the earth and exposing the primordial machine to the scarred surface.
Jaghatai Khan fiercely desired to discern what had truly transpired with Hurkha, but more pressing demands claimed his immediate focus.
Vashtorr the Arkifane was already descending upon the exposed Dissonance Engine, hammer raised high. The Old One artifact pulsed with terrifying, volatile energy; bizarre, distorted light flickered erratically across its chassis as violent rhythmic tides of raw power rolled off its frame. Even a daemonic demigod of Vashtorr's caliber could not displace the device without physically anchoring it.
The Great Khan's eyes locked onto the esoteric machine emerging from the billowing smoke. Though the exact nature of the Dissonance Engine was unknown to him, he recognized the sheer desperation driving the daemon who had just conjured a Chaos Titan to its defense.
"Concentrate all remaining ordnance on that strange machinery!" the Khan roared over the vox.
Whatever had compelled Hurkha to sacrifice his own life, the daemonic entity had orchestrated the creation of the Titan; the beast was directly answerable for Hurkha's death. Jaghatai intended to erase the foul abomination and the cryptic device it so desperately coveted from existence. The warp-spawn would bleed for its transgressions. The Khan would grant no quarter.
The solitary surviving Falchion super-heavy tank destroyer elevated its dual volcano cannons. The monolithic weapons fired in sequence, separated by a mere half-second interval. Around them, the remaining White Scars legionaries directed every available scrap of heavy weaponry toward the exposed structure of the Dissonance Engine.
The dual macro-shells struck home. A devastating explosion bloomed, kicking up a dense shroud of atomic dust and pulverized iron.
Then, a localized reality-shrapnel hummed.
Hummmm.
The Dissonance Engine broke entirely from its algorithmic constraints. A colossal pillar of crystalline light stabbed outward, punching clean through the smoke before a blinding flash cascaded down from the void-vault of the Webway.
Crackle.
BOOM!
Blazing points of light, mimicking a meteor shower, tracked down the length of the energy beam and slammed into the fractured earth. Then, the pillar snapped out of existence.
For a fraction of a second, the battlefield fell completely silent save for a singular, world-ending thunderclap. Immediately after, the sensory capacity of every living soul present was blown out by deafening acoustic trauma. Through the static of his fading senses, the Khan could faintly discern the high-pitched, hysterical shrieks of a raging daemon.
The Great Shattering had begun.
The corrupt, warp-tainted crust of the world shuddered violently. Wyrmwood, hurtling through the trans-dimensional arteries of the Webway, experienced a sudden, violent deceleration. The tectonic plates buckled and ground against one another, and the planet's gravitational matrix failed entirely.
Everything not bolted to the core was hurled violently into the void.
Wyrmwood had only ever been bound together by the anomalous gravitational pull of the Ouroboros, one of the three Caliban relics. With the engine destabilized, the world was rapidly reverting to its natural state: a fragmented graveyard of scattered asteroids. The sudden release of spatial pressure tore through the surrounding Webway tunnels, puncturing the localized reality barriers.
Two Stormbirds, flanked by a squadron of Thunderhawk Transporters originally designated for Predator-class armor deployment, dove into the chaotic debris field alongside a dozen heavy landing craft.
The surface of Wyrmwood was sloughing off in continental fragments, looking exactly like a world subjected to a sustained bombardment from a Planet Killer. The atmospheric transport squadrons executed hard evasive burns among the floating mountain-sized shards of rock, desperate to extract the isolated pockets of White Scars legionaries scattered across the disintegrating landmasses.
Colossal boulders, broken away from the mantle, drifted and collided at random in the zero-gravity vacuum. The two Stormbirds relied on their massive, heavily armored prows to spearhead the rescue formation. Their twin-linked heavy bolters maintained a relentless, cyclical roar, chewing drifting debris into harmless gravel before it could cross their flight paths. Smaller fragments struck their fuselages, but the dense ceramite plating of the heavy craft shrugged off the impacts without losing momentum.
Jaghatai Khan surveyed the floating ruins of the world around him. He cast a cold glance toward the massive, receding tectonic shelf carrying the burning remnants of the Forge of Souls, hesitated for a single heartbeat, and then vaulted into the void toward a closer debris cluster.
Stormseers on sleek Scimitar jetbikes intercepted the Primarch mid-leap. Securing the Khan, they delivered him safely into the hold of the leading Stormbird. No sooner had the Khan cleared the assault ramp than he began issuing a stream of absolute directives over the tactical net, ordering a comprehensive sweeping sweep for any surviving battle-brothers.
Yet, the available transport capacity was critically insufficient for the number of legionaries left stranded.
Acting on the Khan's explicit commands, the crew of the remaining Falchion tank destroyer scrambled from the hatch. They offered a final, grim salute to their mechanical charges before dropping active plasma warheads into the crew compartments and setting the override chronometers.
The heavy armor would not be salvaged. The precious internal bays of the transporters had to be cleared for personnel. To maximize space, Rhino APCs that would typically occupy the interior holds were moved outside, mag-clamped as external payloads beneath the wings and bellies of the Thunderhawks and Stormbirds.
The Khan would leave none of his loyal sons behind.
On a floating shelf of earth spanning several square kilometers, the remaining jetbike reconnaissance elements and Stormseers maintained a frantic ferry system, retrieving isolated legionaries from smaller, tumbling rocks and depositing them at the primary extraction zone.
Once the interior passenger compartments of the gunships were entirely packed with power-armored bodies, the remaining Scars began filing into the externally slung Rhinos. The Stormbirds, built for heavy logistic hauling, carried entire combat companies within their bellies while dragging six separate Rhino chassis from their undercarriage hardpoints. The final, overflow elements of the Legion were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the smaller interceptors and attack craft.
Every hull groaned under the structural strain of the over-allocation. The Khan ordered the immediate abandonment of the remaining jetbikes and heavy wargear. No one could predict how quickly the Webway pocket would finish collapsing; no matter how deeply a son of Chogoris prized his mount, the survival of the Legion left no room for sentiment.
With a rapid tally of the survivors completed, the White Scars fleet fired their sub-light thrusters and broke away from the dying sector on the Khan's command.
The death-throes of Wyrmwood had ripped open the underlying structure of the Webway channel, and from the jagged tears, the raw, malignant purple of the Immaterium was beginning to bleed into the corridor. They had to outrun the encroaching psychic tide. Without the protection of functioning Geller fields, even a glancing brush with the unshielded Warp would mean total annihilation.
As the pilots pushed their overloaded, sluggish craft into a desperate burn against the pulling gravity wells, the Khan opened an encrypted, localized vox-channel. He required an accounting of Hurkha's final moments.
Through the grim explanation of a surviving Stormseer, the harrowing truth finally came to light.
The psychic guidance Hurkha had followed from the campaign's inception was a falsehood. It was an intricate, malicious trap orchestrated by the Lord of Change. The Greater Daemon of Tzeentch had manipulated the warp-currents to misdirect Hurkha's psychic senses, even going so far as to project a false aspect of the Emperor Himself to deliver a fraudulent revelation.
They had been steered into this precise nexus of the Webway by a daemon's hand, solely to act as a wrench thrown into the gears of a rival daemon's machinations.
When the Chaos Titan had stepped forth, the architect of the deception had shed its disguise. Laughing in mockery, the Changer of Ways revealed its true, shifting form amidst a swirling cloud of iridescent, paradoxical runes. The entity taunted Hurkha, showing him a psychic premonition where Jaghatai Khan fell beneath the iron heel of the god-machine, and the remaining White Scars were systematically butchered to the last man.
In an agony of desperation and fury, Hurkha had cursed the daemon's insidious duplicity. Harnessing the entirety of his psychic reserves, he unleashed a kinetic backlash that broke the entity's psychic shackles.
Whatever the cost to his soul, he had to save his Primarch.
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