"Imperial Regent Guilliman?"
Hearing this unfamiliar and baffling title, Jaghatai Khan froze in uncharacteristic hesitation.
What had become of the Imperium?
Guilliman had assumed the regency?
What was his intent? Did he mean to supplant their Father upon the throne?
"Tell me, which of my brothers still endure?!"
The Khan had no time to ponder the bizarre provenance of the vox-signal, yet a cascade of grim possibilities immediately flooded his mind.
The response from the vox-array was swift, its delivery precise and mechanically detached.
"Analysis complete. Query parameters cross-referenced with Imperial Loyalist Primarch designations."
"Active Primarch assets currently operating within Imperial boundaries: Roboute Guilliman, Lion El'Jonson, Vulkan."
Hearing that the Lord of the First was active caused the Khan's expression to subtly shift, but it was the mention of Vulkan that drew a deeply complex, conflicted look across his features.
Once, whisperings and dangerous rumors had circulated through the shadows of the Imperium. They spoke of Guilliman, the Lion, and Sanguinius engaging in a precarious, desperate enterprise during the dark days of the Heresy, an act of such severe consequence that it bordered on absolute sacrilege. Hearing the title of Imperial Regent now, Jaghatai could not help but wonder if those ancient heresies had finally borne fruit, particularly with the Lion standing at Guilliman's flank.
Yet, upon hearing Vulkan's name, the Great Khan let out a silent, slow breath.
Whatever else might transpire, the Lord of Drakes would never covet worldly authority. A Primarch who had historically hesitated to even command his own Legion would never seek to dominate the fractured remnants of the Imperium. This title of Imperial Regent undoubtedly carried a far more intricate truth than simple usurpation.
With his suspicions momentarily pacified, Jaghatai redirected his keen focus back through the reinforced viewing panes of the Stormbird, locking his gaze onto the monolithic leviathan dominating the void outside.
"Then identify yourself. If you possess information of this magnitude, you must be bound to the Imperium. Declare your designation."
"This vessel operates under the tactical command of the sub-fleet attached to the titan class dreadnought Void Sword. Automated unit designation: 0113."
"Higher security clearance is mandatory to access comprehensive data vaults regarding this vessel and its respective fleet elements."
"Query: Did the recent localized spatial anomaly correlate directly with your current operational parameters?"
The cold, synthesized vocoder processed the answers to the Khan's questions with absolute, algorithmic monotony. Yet, the sheer depth of the data it handled left Jaghatai deeply unsettled.
This level of true, cognitive autonomy could never have been birthed by the tech-dogma of the Adeptus Mechanicus's eccentric tech-priesthood. For a Primarch to be denied data based on a lack of systemic authorization was a chilling absurdity.
The escalating anomalies forced a dark, terrible thought to take root in the Khan's mind.
Was Guilliman utilizing Abominable Intelligence?
What were the Lion and Vulkan doing to permit this? This was nothing less than a direct violation of the Emperor's ultimate edict! How could they dare commit such treason?
Suppressing the volatile storm of emotions raging within his chest, Jaghatai held his voice steady. "We recently intercepted a localized planetoid heavily corrupted by the powers of Chaos within the Webway, and subsequently engaged hostiles of a daemonic nature."
As the Khan's report concluded, a rapid succession of analytical telemetry data, foreign to his understanding, chimed through the vox-array.
"Data processing complete. Target profiling verified. Corrupted planetoid, Webway coordinates, daemonic entities. Cross-referencing current historical archives: probability that the primary entity encountered is the daemon-smith Vashtorr stands at 99.85%."
"Query: Can you confirm the total termination of the daemonic demigod Vashtorr?"
The Khan blinked, momentarily disoriented by the bizarre terminology.
The daemonic demigod Vashtorr?
"The planetoid itself was utterly shattered," the Khan replied, refusing to obfuscate the facts despite his confusion. "We gave him a devastating strike; it may well have driven him back into the Warp. However, the malignant energies of the Immaterium are currently surging beneath us."
"Data profile logged and acknowledged."
"Detecting structural closure of the Webway breach. Routing localized data telemetry to the primary oversight intelligence, Axion. Data stream integrated."
Without warning, the massive warship ahead opened its colossal ventral bay doors, revealing an expansive, cavernous interior hangar. A swarm of unconventionally designed, heavy-duty transport craft launched from the belly of the beast, vectoring rapidly toward the battered White Scars fleet elements.
Suddenly, a sharp bursts of static cut through the vox-frequency, replaced an instant later by a voice that remained starkly, flawlessly vivid in Jaghatai's centuries-old memories.
"Jaghatai! My brother... you have been lost to us for twelve millennia."
Hearing that precise voice, Jaghatai stood utterly frozen in shock.
It was Guilliman. The avenging son's tone was thick with an uncharacteristic, trembling weight of emotion.
"What did you say?!"
Thoom!
A heavy, reverberating metallic impact echoed through the reinforced hull of the Stormbird.
Inside the cockpit, the pilot's tense, anxious voice crackled over the internal comms. "Khan! Our flight systems have been overridden. We are being pulled off course by unknown automated tether-drones. Do we engage the hostiles?"
"Do not fire! In the Emperor's name, do not engage!"
Before the Khan could issue a single command, Guilliman's frantic voice cut over the main vox-channel, having intercepted the pilot's query through the automated relay.
Though he could not fathom why the normalmente stoic Lord of Ultramar sounded so desperate, Jaghatai raised a hand toward the cockpit's internal pict-capture unit, signaling his warriors to stand down and remain passive.
It was entirely obvious that their current localized assets stood zero chance against a void-faring titan of this scale. The previous order to prepare for a desperate boarding action had been a final, suicidal gamble born of absolute necessity.
As the Khan and Guilliman conducted their long-range, instantaneous communication across the stars via the complex processing nodes of the iron automata, Unit 0113 maintained its strict operational directives.
Scores of Heavy Combat Drones systematically hauled the stranded White Scars vessels from the edge of the collapsing void-fracture, reeling them safely into the armored belly of the ship. Once the system confirmed that all surviving assets had been successfully secured, the flagship executed a sweeping turn, accelerating rapidly away from the unstable warp-rift.
Further out in the dark, the massive silhouettes of the Heart of the Forge and the Void Sword had successfully rendezvoused within the designated sector coordinates.
The ship's Super-Mass Projectors thrummed with immense power, sending cascading rings of volatile energy crackling across the hull of the Void Sword. Slowly, the colossal framework of the dreadnought was pulled into alignment with the massive launch trajectory rails.
A blinding, cataclysmic burst of kinetic and localized gravitic energy erupted into the void. In a fraction of a microsecond, the Void Sword vanished, transformed into a massive spear of blinding light that tore through space at a terrifying velocity, plunged directly toward the ruptured spatial coordinates.
Axion cared little for what lay hidden within the labyrinthine passages of the Webway. To the cold calculus of the machine, that did not matter.
This was the only active daemonic demigod currently manifested within predictable parameters, and Axion had no intention of letting a prime combat testing variable slip away. To prevent losing the target's trajectory once the Webway walls inevitably sealed themselves, Axion had made a calculated tactical decision: ram the Void Sword straight through the structural spatial layer, forcefully piercing the closing Webway gates once more.
Deep within the shifting, unholy tides of the Immaterium, Vashtorr the Arkifane was fighting a desperate battle for survival.
Following the devastating detonation of the Dissonance Engine by the White Scars, the structural integrity of the Key-artifacts had entered a state of violent, volatile degradation. The Plagueheart, the Ouroboros, and the Tuchulcha engine were all threatening to violently tear themselves free from his cosmic design.
Vashtorr was forced to expend every ounce of his metaphysical power to restrain the three artifacts, the very components essential to his ascension to true godhood. Yet, even this act of containment was pushing his formidable intellect to its absolute limits.
The Forge of Souls was the literal, warp-born manifestation of his divine essence. Any catastrophic damage dealt to the physical structure of the Forge mirrored itself with agonizing precision upon his very soul.
And that was the true horror of his situation.
The central foundations of the Forge had been repeatedly pounded by the devastating magma-blasts of Volcano Cannons mounted on Falchion super-heavy tank destroyers, followed immediately by the catastrophic overload of an Emperor-class Titan, and finally subjected to the agonizing energy backlash of the collapsing Dissonance Engine. The entire realm lay in absolute, smoldering ruin.
The devastating feedback had severely fractured the Arkifane's spiritual core, leaving his divine essence flickering, dimming, and dangerously close to fading into the void.
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