The Eye of Terror was not a recent wound.
It predated the Great Rift by tens of thousands of years, predated the Imperium itself, predated every living thing that now tried to navigate around it or ignore its existence. Its origin was the ancient catastrophe that had ended the Eldar civilization and given birth to the Chaos God Slaanesh from the psychic weight of a species' collective destruction: the moment when the Warp had ruptured through the boundary between realities and found a point of permanent intersection with the physical universe. That intersection had never closed. The Eye of Terror was what it had left.
What existed there now was a region of space where the rules that governed the rest of the galaxy applied inconsistently or not at all. The Warp inside the Eye was not separated from real space by the usual veil. It pressed through. The worlds within it occupied a territory where the distinction between the physical and the empyrean had been worn so thin that the two had effectively merged, and the consequence was the most densely active Chaos presence in the known galaxy. For ten thousand years, traitor legions and Chaos warbands had called it home, and the energy it emitted continuously was not diminishing.
This was where Wolf Nolan was, and this was where they were going.
The agri-world operation concluded faster than Nolan had estimated, which was not unusual when the Carcharodons were given room and an adequate objective.
Tyberos had identified the Ork Warboss commanding the occupation force within the first hour of the ground engagement. He had spent the second hour arranging the tactical conditions necessary to reach him, which primarily consisted of deploying two additional Carcharodons companies through the Thunderhawk formations Reditus was coordinating from orbit and directing the orbital bombardment to suppress the Ork concentrations between Tyberos's position and the Warboss's. By the third hour the Warboss was dead, and without the specific individual brute-force authority that keeps an Ork warband coherent, the greenskin force on the agri-world's lowlands dissolved into the kind of disorganized aggression that heavy vehicles and sustained bolter fire could address at reasonable cost.
The Carcharodons Astra surrounded what remained of the Ork force and did not hurry. Orbital bombardment from above and armored columns from the flanks narrowed the space available to the greenskins until there was no more space available.
When it was finished, the agri-world's surviving population had a planet. It would need years of work to recover to full production capacity. That was their problem and their time; the fleet had done its part.
Nolan met with Cypher in the Nicor's command rooms while the fleet was completing its withdrawal from orbit.
The planning session was brief because the shape of the problem was simple and the variables were limited.
The Legion fleet could not go into the Eye of Terror. The reasons were not one but several, each sufficient on its own. For any ship with a mortal crew, the Eye represented a corruption risk that no Gellar field could fully address: the Warp inside the Eye was not the Warp of transit, manageable with adequate shielding, but something more direct and persistent. Gellar fields were designed for warp travel, not for sustained operation inside a region where the boundary between the Warp and real space had essentially ceased to exist. Crew mortality rates in extended Eye operations were a known problem. Astartes were more resistant, but not immune.
Beyond the practical risk, there was the strategic one. Cypher had spent years navigating the Eye and understanding its politics. A Primarch entering the Eye of Terror would not go unnoticed. The Chaos Gods had demonstrated consistent interest in Nolan specifically. The last time he had entered a Chaos-adjacent theater of operations without adequate planning, the consequences had cascaded in ways that took months to address. Taking the full fleet into the Eye risked everything the Legion had accumulated in a single engagement where the operational environment was fundamentally hostile.
The exit strategy was simpler: Nolan's Warp portal capability, opened from within. This was the advantage of a Primarch who had already demonstrated he could generate transit points at will and at significant scale. The entry problem Cypher could handle through the Webway, which provided an approach route that sidestepped the direct Warp exposure of the Eye's outer approaches.
The fleet would continue its Eastern Fringe operations under the command structure already established. The rescue team would be small.
Cypher, three Fallen, Nolan's full Terminator Guard, a Librarian detachment from the Blood Ravens Great Company for psychic support, and a Raven Guard combat team for the kind of rapid movement and silent positioning that any extraction from a contested environment would require. Approximately one hundred warriors total.
Before the team began its weapons checks, Nolan called the Legion's senior officers to the Nicor's ancient hall.
Gabriel, Orion, Tyberos, Kahurangi, Reditus in the Armiger chassis: they stood in the hall and waited while Nolan looked at each of them in sequence.
"I will be gone," he said, "for an undetermined period. The last time I was gone for an undetermined period, you very nearly solved the problem by creating a larger one." He let that land without elaboration. "The fleet operates according to the Eastern Fringe plan. The command structure is as established. Each Great Company's captain commands their own operations within that structure. That is all."
He paused.
"I do not want to return to factions. If I return to factions, the next disappearance will be voluntary and significantly longer." He waited a moment to let that be understood as the joke it was, or as the statement of intent it also was. "The Emperor watches over all of you. I will be back."
Gabriel gave the response for the Blood Ravens, which was formal and short.
Tyberos gave the response for the Carcharodons, which was quieter and briefer, and meant the same thing.
The others confirmed.
Nolan turned and walked to where Cypher was waiting.
The Webway portal that opened on the ancient hall's metal floor a few minutes later was wider than the one Cypher had arrived through: five meters in diameter, its mirror-surface reflecting the hall back in the same distorted way, stable under the Webway crystal's navigation lock. The Terminator Guards were already in formation behind it, the Blood Ravens Librarians in a secondary line, the Raven Guard dispersed in a pattern that would collapse into ordered movement the moment they were through.
Nolan checked the Warscythe and the Forgebreaker in his hands.
Cypher had the White Tiger Sword across his pauldron, the bandage-wrapped Lion Sword at his back, and the patience of someone who had entered the Webway more times than he had been keeping count of. He stepped to Nolan's side.
They went through first.
The planet was red.
Not dramatically red, not the red of something that had been designed to appear threatening: just the particular burnt-ochre red of ancient stone that had been exposed to the Eye of Terror's ambient radiation across what might have been thousands of years or might have been much longer. The sky above the jagged boulder fields carried the bruised colors of a region where the barrier between real space and the Warp had thinned to the point of irrelevance.
Wolf Nolan leaned against a boulder that was large enough to give cover and cold enough to have been here long before anything had last lived on this ground.
He had been sitting in this position for some time. The evidence of what had happened previously was distributed across his power armor in a way that made a reasonably detailed account possible: the cracks in the ceramite of his left gauntlet, running from the wrist seal to the second knuckle, were the kind that occurred when something very powerful had been absorbed at close range. The fused score marks across the right side of his breastplate were the kind that psychic energy left when it had been at maximum output. The fact that he was conscious and moving represented a regenerative effort that had been working for somewhere between a day and two.
He pressed his cracked ceramite palm to the half of his face that had been worst affected by the previous engagement, feeling the surface that had healed back to something resembling its original condition, and drew a slow breath through his teeth.
The wolves of Fenris lived to fight. That was not a poetic statement about their culture; it was a functional description of their biology, their conditioning, and the choices that had led them to every place they had ever been. Wolf Nolan had ended the previous confrontation with Magnus the Red not because he had won, but because he had kept moving and kept attacking and kept absorbing punishment until the operational cost of continuing the direct engagement had exceeded what he was willing to pay in that moment. He would engage again. The question was when.
A shape emerged from behind the next boulder along, moving on all fours.
The Wulfen was tall even on four limbs: the frame of a Space Marine transformed further toward something older, the armor it wore cracked along the joints where the mutation had pushed against the ceramite's tolerances. It moved with the careful quiet of something that understood the acoustics of the environment and was managing its sound profile accordingly. It came within two meters of Wolf Nolan and stopped, sniffing the air in short bursts, and then produced a low sound from somewhere in its chest that was almost a word.
"I won't die for now," Wolf Nolan said, his voice kept below the sound of the wind across the boulders. "Has the red Ogryn caught up to us yet?"
The Wulfen's response was minimal: a slow shake of its head, a glance over the boulder's edge.
"Good." Wolf Nolan straightened, checking the condition of his weapons by touch without looking at them. "Tell the brothers to get moving as soon as they're able. He likes to play cat and mouse. Fine. We'll play it out." He paused, and something in his expression shifted toward the dry self-awareness of someone who has gotten themselves into a situation and can see exactly how it happened. "Not what I expected when I took a group out to have a look at the edges of the Crystal Labyrinth. Should have known the Architect was watching."
He settled his weight against the boulder.
"The chainaxe stays sheathed," he said, and his voice had a finality in it that was not directed at the Wulfen but at the option he was refusing. "Even here. Even if we're down to the last one standing. That's a road we don't go back from." A moment's silence. "If the Architect of Fate is already nudging every piece on this board, then drawing on Khorne's interest to balance it is exactly the catastrophe she wants to watch."
He looked at the Wulfen.
"We keep moving. Sooner or later, when this is over and I'm in a better position than this, I intend to bring something very large to the Crystal Labyrinth and see how the palace looks from the inside while it's on fire." He said it with the specific calm of a man making a note for future reference. "But that is later."
He began to push himself to his feet.
The psychic disruption reached them before the visual did.
It came as a pressure change in the Eye's ambient field, the kind of distortion produced when a significant quantity of Chaos energy is being actively directed in one place simultaneously. Wolf Nolan's hand moved to his C'tan phase sword before the source of the disturbance became visible. The Wulfen dropped low and turned, scanning the perimeter.
Then the Rubric Marines appeared.
They came from three directions at once, emerging from behind the boulder field's terrain with the unhurried precision of soldiers who know their quarry cannot escape and therefore have no need of haste. The animated armor of the Thousand Sons: dust inside ceramite, guided by the echo of psychic will, bearing force staves and heavy bolters with equal mechanical steadiness. The light the Eye cast across their scarlet and gold plate gave them a quality that was somewhere between statue and monument.
Behind them and between them and closing the final approach vectors came the cultists: Chaos worshippers who had been in the Eye long enough that the question of what they had once been was no longer meaningful, bearing Chaos blades whose edges caught the light wrongly. And on the flanks, spreading outward along the rocky terrain in a line that extended the encirclement to its full radius, the Tzaangors came: beastmen with the horned heads and the clawed hands and the sharp, forward-facing beaks of things that had been shaped by Tzeentch's attention across more generations than any individual of them could account for.
Within a kilometer in every direction, the ground was no longer empty.
Wolf Nolan looked at the circle closing in around him and the remnants of the Thirteenth Company, and his expression settled into the particular focused stillness of someone who has been in a great many worse situations than this and has not died in any of them yet.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~