The mud hands came from everywhere at once.
The Eye of Terror's ground had been absorbing Chaos energy for longer than any living thing in the current age of the galaxy could measure, and whatever Magnus was directing through that accumulated saturation had sufficient grip on the terrain to produce results. They erupted from the surface in front of the retreating Wulfen: vast, formless hands of earth and condensed psychic matter, each one large enough to close around a Space Marine in Terminator plate. They appeared in the path of every evacuation vector simultaneously, with the precision of something that had already run the tactical calculation and decided that leaving no viable escape route was more efficient than pursuing fleeing targets.
Several Wulfen who had been distracted by the sight of their commander caught in the sorcerous chains did not react fast enough. The hands caught them mid-stride and closed.
Wolf Nolan heard the sounds. He did not look away from the chains wrapped around his own limbs.
The roar that came out of him after was not a formed sound. It came from somewhere below conscious thought, from the part of a Space Wolf that does not answer to reason and does not try to. His eyes, which had been cyan when this engagement started, were the color of arterial blood now. The Frost Fang's chain-teeth were cycling on their own, spinning without his thumb on the trigger, and the blade ran with a heat haze that was not thermal. Behind his back, the sound the weapon made when the Khorne-essence in it recognized sustained battle-rage was something between a hum and a voice, and it was getting louder.
The chains stretched against his arms as his strength built toward a peak he could feel approaching but hadn't reached.
Then the hand came from the air.
It was red and enormous, each finger ending in a point that carried visible psychic energy wound around it like thread. It pressed down on the blood-soaked mass of his hair and closed, and the grip that followed was not merely physical. It carried weight in dimensions that the chains around his limbs did not, and under it, Wolf Nolan became perfectly still.
He was lifted.
The Daemon Prince who raised him was nine meters of red skin and compact, impossible mass, moving with the unhurried ease of something that had been operating at this scale for ten thousand years and no longer needed to think about the practical details of it. The twin blue wings that extended from his back were each larger than a Thunderhawk. Two horns twisted from his forehead in the spiral geometry of something that had chosen its shape deliberately. And at the center of his face, the single eye that Tzeentch's favor had left him burned with a psychic light that was not the light of any natural source.
He held Wolf Nolan at eye level and looked at him with the expression of something that has been waiting for this moment for a very long time and intends to enjoy it.
"You were calling for help," Magnus said. His voice resonated in the Eye's ambient field rather than through any normal mechanism of air and sound. "Here I am."
Wolf Nolan looked back at him with the specific quality of fury that does not require expression to be communicated.
"Angry," Magnus observed. "Distressed. Watching your brothers die when you cannot reach them." His tone was the tone of someone conducting a performance review. "I find myself wondering whether you felt the same. When you burned Prospero. When your wolves tore through my sons who had no warning and no chance to explain themselves. When the libraries I had spent five centuries building were ashes before I understood what was happening." He turned Wolf Nolan slightly, as if examining him from a different angle. "I have always wondered about that."
Wolf Nolan's jaw was set. He did not give Magnus the dignity of a response.
"I like this," Magnus said, almost quietly. "This refusal. Even here. Even like this." Something shifted in his expression toward the genuine. "I am going to take your soul out of that body and seal it inside the wolves that survived this engagement. I want it close to me. After ten thousand years of this hatred, I want it where I can look at it." He paused. "And before I do that, I want you to watch every last one of your brothers die. Because you asked me to come here, after all. Indirectly. But you asked."
"I know what you are," he continued, his eye moving over Wolf Nolan with the surgical attention of a psyker who sees things that physical examination cannot reveal. "Not the real Leman Russ. A fragment, peeled loose somehow, shaped itself into something close enough to whole that I can almost mistake it. Almost." He tilted his head. "Unlucky. For you. But a fragment this coherent, this saturated with the wolf's original nature: it will make an adequate medium for what I am going to give your Primarch brother as a gift."
The surviving eye focused on nothing visible for a moment: the unfocused expression of a being consulting psychic sight that operates on a different time than the present moment.
"Yes," Magnus said, apparently satisfied with what he had seen. "There is only one final winner here. I have already watched it happen." He began to smile.
The Webway portal opened at a distance.
Magnus registered it through his psychic senses before it was physically visible, and his eye snapped back to the present with the abruptness of something that has been interrupted in a moment of anticipated pleasure. The portal was several kilometers away, across the barren ground: a circle of dimensional distortion five meters wide, its mirror-surface resolving into the chaos-tinted air of the Eye of Terror.
Through it came a figure in pale gold power armor with wings of metal folded along the back and a Warscythe in one hand and a hammer in the other. Moving at a pace that communicated nothing about the distance he had covered getting here.
Behind him came dark green armor and a white hood, and the White Tiger Sword across the pauldron, and the measured readiness of someone who has been in a very large number of complicated situations and has developed theories about how to navigate them.
Magnus released Wolf Nolan.
Not with care. Wolf Nolan dropped toward the ground without Magnus giving any apparent thought to where he landed. The Daemon Prince's attention had committed entirely to the new arrivals, with the specific intensity of ten thousand years of anticipated reunion crystallizing into the present moment. His free hand moved, and into it came the grimoire: a tome the size of a mortal man, its covers constructed of material that was not metal or leather or anything with a recognizable classification, its pages holding the accumulated sorcery of the most powerful psyker the Imperium had ever produced.
It opened.
The sky changed color.
The psychic barrage that launched from the grimoire's opening pages was not a single attack: it was a cascade of simultaneous effects deployed across the full width of the engagement zone. Warpfire and lightning. Hexes designed to slow, to weaken, to confuse. Constructs of pure Chaos energy moving at angles that were not constrained by any straightforward geometric logic. All of it directed at the Webway portal and the two figures advancing from it.
And the Rubricae, every one of them, pivoted in unison from the Wulfen they had been pursuing and moved toward the new engagement vector.
The Ten Rings separated from Nolan's power armor before the barrage had fully resolved.
All ten, detaching from their positions on his forearms and rising simultaneously above the Webway portal in a formation that spread and overlapped and began to spin. What they produced in the next seconds was not simply a barrier: it was a layered spiral of metal moving at velocity that anything attempting to pass through it encountered not once but continuously, the rings cycling through each other's paths in the specific pattern that maximized coverage across the portal's full diameter. The first wave of the psychic barrage hit the spiral and was disrupted: individual ring surfaces deflecting, absorbing, redirecting. It was not perfect interception. But it was sufficient.
Through the portal, in the intervals the rings created, the Terminator Guards came.
Dozens of them: Lamenters and Black Templars in the heavy plate, storm bolters and assault cannons and specialized heavy weapons, stepping through into the Eye of Terror with the complete absence of hesitation that characterized warriors who had been selected specifically for situations where hesitation was the most dangerous available option. They spread from the portal's mouth into a covering formation and opened fire at the Rubricae with everything they had.
Nolan was already closing the distance to Magnus.
The skull helmet's brow flared as he activated the Psychic Ray: the Mind Stone's energy channeled through Reditus's inscribed conversion runes into a focused beam that crossed the kilometers between them in an instant and struck Magnus's chest at full intensity. The Daemon Prince absorbed it with a visible effort and answered with a directional psychic bolt that Nolan stepped around using the vibranium wings' propulsion mode, shortening the approach at maximum rate.
On the other side of Magnus's position, Cypher was running.
The White Tiger Sword was in his right hand now, drawn and carrying whatever quality Jaghatai Khan had placed in the blade. With his left hand, he reached inside his breastplate, found the Space-Time Crystal, and pressed it.
The pain of activating it at this scale crossed his face immediately. Whatever the maximum operational capacity of the Crystal was designed to be, Cypher was demanding something significantly beyond it, and the instrument was complying at cost. The invisible field it generated expanded outward from his position in a sphere that kept expanding: five meters, twenty, fifty, a kilometer, reaching Magnus's position and passing over it and continuing outward.
Within its radius, time did not stop. It became the wrong speed.
The psychic barrage that had been moving through the air froze mid-arc: bolts of Warpfire hanging suspended in positions they had occupied between one moment and the next, lightning arcs caught mid-branch, every Chaos construct paused inside transparent permanence like objects embedded in crystal. The Rubricae advancing on the Terminator Guard slowed to a pace that made their movements clearly readable. And Magnus, who had been raising the grimoire for a second, larger working, found his arm completing that motion over a span of time that was not what he had intended.
The chains around Wolf Nolan slowed with everything else.
He felt the difference immediately: the grip that had been perfectly matched to his maximum effort was now a fractional count behind it, yielding a fraction of a centimeter with each pull that had not been yielding anything before. He ground his teeth and drove everything he had into both arms simultaneously.
The chains gave.
Wolf Nolan's feet hit the ground. The Frost Fang was in his hand before he had fully registered that he was moving, and he was moving before he had processed where he was moving to.
The answer to that question was never in doubt. Magnus was slowed, surrounded by his own frozen sorcery, with the grimoire arrested mid-page-turn. He was still nine meters of ten-thousand-year Daemon Prince with a single burning eye and the most powerful psychic capabilities in the known galaxy. He was not helpless. He was, briefly, slightly less than he had been.
That window was closing.
From three directions simultaneously, converging on a point that was Magnus's location on the barren red ground of the unnamed Eye of Terror planet: pale gold Starfire Glory diving from low altitude with the Warscythe forward, dark green plate charging with the White Tiger Sword drawn, and cracked dark red power armor accelerating with the Frost Fang raised.
The Crimson King's single eye opened very wide.
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