The ancient hall deep inside the Omniscient Mystery had been repaired enough to use, not enough to forget what had happened in it. The repair crews had sealed the structural damage and cleared the floor and replaced what the fighting had destroyed in the hall's fittings, but they could not yet restore the inscriptions in the metal plating underfoot, and in the places where they had not yet reached, the wall panels still carried the marks of weapons discharged at close range.
In the center of this space, beneath the largest Emperor statue the Blood Ravens had installed since taking possession of the hall, someone had placed banks of candles and incense burners in the hours after the battle. The incense had been burning long enough that its smoke had softened the edges of everything in the hall's upper air. The candles made the statue's face uncertain: features that seemed on the edge of clarity whenever the light moved, and then receded again when it settled.
Nolan knelt before it in a loose robe, without his power armor, both knees on the cold metal floor.
His eyes were closed. His face, with its bronze skin and the still-healing burn along the left side from Araghast's combi-flamer, held the particular stillness of a man who has not been sitting quietly for a few minutes but for a much longer time than that.
He had been here for hours.
The question he had come with was the one he had carried out of his quarters the previous night: whether what he was capable of was sufficient to move an entire fleet through a single Warp portal. He had opened portals large enough for individuals, for squads, for Titan-class units. He had never attempted anything at the scale of a Chapter fleet and its attendant vessels. He did not know if it was within him.
The answer, when it came, did not arrive as words.
A brief flame, pale and almost colorless, flickered somewhere between the statues: not in any one of them, not from any visible source, but in the space between them. It lasted perhaps a second. In the moment of it, the contents of his simulator storage page shifted, and several throne coins rose out of the interface and became present in the physical space before him, resting in his open palm as though they had always been there.
He opened his eyes and looked at them.
Then he looked at the statue, whose face had settled into its ordinary uncertainty.
A faint smile moved the corner of his mouth.
"In other words," he said quietly, to the statue and to whatever had sent the coins through it, "multiple throne coins spent together will expand the portal to whatever scale I need." He closed his fingers around the coins. "A pity. The Emperor really doesn't do business at a loss."
He exhaled once, pressed one hand to the cold floor, and stood.
The power armor was waiting in the corridor outside the hall. He did not put it on immediately. He walked to the hall's entrance in the robe, past the repair crew members who had stopped working when they heard the footsteps and were now very carefully looking at anything except the Primarch, and stepped through the door.
Gabriel and Orion were waiting outside, both in their armor. They had been waiting for some time: the posture of both men communicated the specific patience of people who had decided not to think about how long they had been standing. When they heard Nolan's footsteps on the hall's metal floor, they straightened.
Nolan looked at them.
"Get everyone ready," he said. "We're leaving."
The orders went out through the fleet in the hour that followed, passing from ship to ship through the Blood Ravens' command channels until every vessel in the flotilla had received them. Mortal crew reported to their stations. Astartes checked their assignments and confirmed readiness. The ships that had been holding spread positions across the Aurelia system began to move, adjusting their courses with the slow deliberateness of large vessels that are not in a hurry and do not need to be.
They gathered.
The formation they assembled was tight by any normal operational standard: vessels of different classes drawing closer than doctrine typically recommended, the distances between hulls reduced until the formation had the density of something that intended to pass through a single point rather than occupy a volume of space. It took time. The largest of the Blood Ravens' vessels required careful approach vectors. The mortal crew on the smaller ships watched the hulls of frigates and strike cruisers through their viewports at intervals they were not used to.
Then the Warp portal opened.
It began as a point of absence in the void ahead of the fleet: a dark circle that was not the darkness of space but a different quality of dark, the kind that the eye registers as the boundary of something rather than the presence of nothing. From that point it grew, slowly at first and then with increasing speed, expanding outward in all directions as the throne coins Nolan had spent translated into scale. It grew past the size he had opened before. It continued growing. The leading edge of it reached a diameter that encompassed the formation's width, and it held there, stable, wide enough to swallow every vessel in the fleet simultaneously.
The energy trails behind the Blood Ravens ships brightened as their drives pushed them toward it.
One by one, and then in clusters, and then as a fleet, they sailed into the dark and were gone.
Six months had passed at Triplex Phall since the Ark of Omen's destruction.
The Warp storm that had enveloped the forge world and its surrounding systems had dissipated in the weeks after the boarding action, leaving the outer system accessible again for the first time in months. The debris field where the Ark of Omen had been continued to drift in a long arc through the orbital lanes, the wreckage of a near-planetary vessel scattered across a volume of space that the Carcharodons salvage teams had been working through systematically ever since. The recovered materials had gone to Triplex Phall's forges: the Ark had contained a great deal that could be reworked into something with a less catastrophic purpose.
The Carcharodons fleet remained in low orbit.
Their weapon arrays had not changed their orientation in six months. Every weapon system aboard every Carcharodons warship was maintained in a state of active readiness, pointed at the forge world below, and no amount of communication from the surface had altered this. Triplex Phall's Magi had sent delegations. The delegations had been received and had returned without any change in the weapon arrays. The orbital defense platforms had shifted to a mutual-defense configuration early in the standoff: watching the Carcharodons ships while also watching the outer system, covering both threats because they could not be certain which one would materialize first.
The fleet had, over the course of those six months, sorted itself into three distinct factions.
The first and loudest was Tyberos.
The Carcharodons' Chapter Master had made his position clear in the immediate aftermath of the boarding action's conclusion and had not shifted from it: if the Primarch did not return, Triplex Phall would answer for it. He had framed this as a statement of fact rather than a threat, and everyone who had dealt with Tyberos at any length understood the distinction. A threat could be negotiated. A statement of fact was a description of what was going to happen. In the months since, his temperament had not improved. The salvage operations gave his warriors occupation, but occupation was not the same as purpose, and Tyberos was not a patient man in the best circumstances.
Reditus was what stood between Triplex Phall and an orbital bombardment.
The Armiger chassis moved constantly between the forge world's surface facilities and the fleet's command ship, conducting a sustained campaign of persuasion that drew on every instrument available: appeals to strategic sense, invocations of Nolan's standing orders, careful arguments about the value of a compliant forge world to everything the Primarch had been working toward. Reditus was not, by nature, a diplomat. He had learned to be one because the alternative was watching something irreplaceable get destroyed by someone who was not wrong to be angry.
The Terminator Guards, the veterans of the Lamenters and Black Templars who had served beside Nolan for long enough to trust their own judgment about his capabilities, stood with Reditus. They had seen the Warp portals open. They knew what Nolan was capable of. They found the idea that a random Warp displacement was going to be the end of him genuinely difficult to hold with any conviction.
The Raven Guard occupied a position that resisted simple description.
They had divided along lines that the Raven Guard's internal culture did not traditionally acknowledge as divisions. A portion of them had sided with Tyberos's position: if the Primarch truly could not return, someone owed an accounting for why the situation had been permitted to reach this point. The two Company Champions who led this group were not radicals by temperament. They were soldiers with a soldiers' insistence on clear answers to straightforward questions.
The majority of the Raven Guard, operating with the particular patience that their Chapter's history with Primarch absences had produced, had been doing something else entirely.
They had dispersed.
Quietly, without fanfare, using the Knight World in the adjacent system as an operational hub, the Raven Guard had rebuilt their intelligence network across the Far Eastern reaches: contacts re-established, signals intercepts resumed, assets placed in positions they would need to occupy regardless of what happened with the standoff in orbit. They were Raven Guard. They had served under Corax, who had vanished. They had learned that the appropriate response to a Primarch's absence was not to stop working.
They would not intervene in a conflict between the Carcharodons and Triplex Phall if it came to one. They had made this clear. If open war broke out between the two, however, the Raven Guard had privately concluded that they would become a third force in the engagement: striking both sides until the shooting stopped, because the alternative was watching two assets the Imperium needed destroy each other in orbit above a forge world it also needed.
This was the state of things when Tyberos, maintaining his established habit of conducting his arguments through open communication channels, was in the middle of a particularly unproductive exchange with Reditus's channel.
The psychic disturbance reached the outer system sensors first.
It was not the quality of disturbance associated with a Warp storm or an uncontrolled emergence. It was something more deliberate: a controlled dilation, a point of absence that opened with the specific character of an intentional gate rather than an eruption. The fleet sensors registered it simultaneously. The orbital defense platforms swung their arrays toward it. The Carcharodons ships, by reflex trained into them across centuries of deployment, shifted their targeting toward the new signature without abandoning the forge world entirely.
The gate continued to expand.
It opened near the debris field of the Ark of Omen, in the space between the drifting hull sections, growing to a scale that none of the sensor operators on any of the ships around it had previously recorded from a Warp transit event. The debris field's salvage crews pulled their boats clear of it and watched.
Then the first hull emerged from the darkness inside it.
Then another. A strike cruiser following a Cobra-class destroyer, with frigates spreading out behind them. Then more vessels, a Chapter fleet pulling through the gate in the close formation of ships that had entered it the same way, the pale red of their hull markings catching the forge world's reflected light as they cleared the portal's edge and spread into formation.
The gate held open behind them until the last vessel had passed through.
Then it closed.
From the Carcharodons command ship, from Triplex Phall's orbital stations, from every vessel and platform and salvage boat in the Aurelia system, the all-channel broadcast arrived simultaneously: a deep voice that most of the people listening to it had not heard in six months, and which was immediately recognizable to all of them.
"This is Nolan. I am returning to realspace with the Blood Ravens Chapter." A pause, brief and deliberate. "You have been waiting a long time. I am back."
On the Carcharodons command ship, the weapon arrays that had been pointed at Triplex Phall for six months began, slowly and without any issued order that anyone could later recall, to rotate away from the forge world below.
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