Ohthere Wyrdmake fought at his side, his eagle-topped staff spinning around his body in a glowing arc, leaving glittering traceries on the retina with its impossible brightness. Like Ahriman, Wyrdmake had power, and the darkness was wary of him.

The Rune Priest saw him, and Ahriman forged a path towards him.

Lord Skarssen looked up at his approach, and the cold flint of his eyes was even colder. There was no hatred, no battle fury, simply the implacable will to destroy his foe. The methodical, clinical nature of Skarssen’s battle surprised Ahriman, but he had no time to dwell upon it.

“We need to reach my primarch,” he yelled over the barking gunfire and ripping sound of chainblades. “And then we need to get out of here.”

“Never!” shouted Skarssen. “The foe is yet to die. We leave when it is dead, and not before.”

Ahriman could see there was no use in arguing with the Wolf Lord; his course was set and nothing he could say would sway him. He nodded and turned back towards the battle, a writhing, heaving mass of dark tentacles and struggling warriors.

The Thousand Sons enjoyed the best of the fight, their heqa staffs and innate powers having a greater effect on the enemy than the Space Wolves’ guns and blades. The Astartes were holding, but against an unstoppable, numberless enemy, it would take more than simple determination to win.

“Very well,” he said. “You will fight at my side?”

“Wyrdmake will,” snarled Skarssen. “I fight with the warriors of my blood.”

Ahriman nodded. He had expected no more. Without another word, he set off towards the edge of the chasm, forging a path with blazing swipes of his staff and bursts of aether-fire from his gauntlets. Wyrdmake matched him step for step, two warriors of enormous strength fighting side by side with powers beyond the ken of mortal men.

A black snake lashed at Wyrdmake’s helmet, and Ahriman severed it. Another wrapped around Ahriman’s waist, and Wyrdmake burned it to ash with a gesture. Their thoughts were weapons as much as their staffs, but they were forced to fight for every step, destroying the tentacles with killing blows and violent impulses. Bred of different gene-fathers, they nevertheless fought as one, each warrior’s fighting style complementing the other. Where Ahriman fought with rigidly controlled discipline, each blow precisely measured and weighted, Ohthere fought with intuitive fluidity, invented on the move and owing more to innate ability than to any imposed training.

It was a combination that was lethally effective, with both warriors fighting as though they had trained with one another since birth. They fought through a dense thicket of black limbs to reach the edge of the chasm, the sinuous matter parting before their every blow. Only when Ahriman felt the faded symbols underfoot did he realise they had reached the edge.

The bodies of Thousand Sons and Space Wolves were being dragged into the pit, their limbs wrapped in glistening black ropes. Ahriman reached out with his aetheric senses, and turned as he felt the spiking, awesome presence of Magnus.

“The primarch!” cried Ahriman, looking deep into the heaving mass.

Magnus and Yatiri, locked together like lovers, were carried away by the tentacles, and drawn deeper into the beating heart of the mass.

The darkness closed around Magnus.

And he was gone.

IT WAS NOT unpleasant, not in the slightest.

Magnus felt the impotent rage of the seething enemy as it sought to twist him and overpower him the way it had overpowered Yatiri. The elder was gone, his mind a broken thing shattered by such exposure, his body degenerating with every passing second. Magnus had a mind crafted and honed by the greatest cognitive architect in the galaxy, and remained aloof from such brute displays.

He felt its manifestations writhing around his corporeal body, but shut himself off from physical sensations, turning his perceptions inwards as it bore him down into its depths. It amused him to see how its substance had been shaped, its form a reflection of the nightmares and legends of the Aghoru.

So simple and yet so dreadful.

What culture did not have a dread of slimy, wriggling things that lived in the dark? These creatures were shaped by the tortured mind of Yatiri, filtered through the lens of his darkest terrors and ancient legends. Magnus was fortunate indeed that the people of Aghoru had so limited a palette from which to paint its existence.

The inchoate energy pouring into the world had its source far below him, and he shrugged off Yatiri’s embrace with a thought. His flesh burned as hot as a forge, and he blasted the elder’s body to ash as he plunged into the chasm with the first words of the Enumerations on his lips.

His warriors used the Enumerations to rise to states of mind where they could function with optimum mental efficiency, but they were like stepping-stones across a tiny stream to a being such as Magnus. He had mastered them before he had left Terra for the first time, his father’s words of warning still ringing in his mind.

He had heeded the warning, enduring Amon’s tutorials and sermons regarding the power of the Great Ocean on Prospero, while knowing that greater power lay within his reach. Amon had been kind to him, and had accepted the knowledge of his growing obsolescence with good grace, for Magnus outstripped him in learning and power at an early age. Yet he too had warned of peering too deeply into the Ocean’s depths.

The desolation of Prospero was warning enough of the consequences of reaching too far and too heedlessly.

Only when the Emperor had brought the survivors of his Legion to Prospero had Magnus known he would have to disregard the warnings and delve further into the mysteries. His gene-sons were dying, their bodies mutating and turning against them as uncontrolled tides wrought ever more hideous changes in their flesh. Nor were such horrific transformations limited to their bodies. Their minds were like pulsing flares in the Great Ocean, drawing predators, hunters and malign creatures that sought to cross into the material universe.

Unchecked, his Legion would be dead within a generation.

The power to save them was there, just waiting to be used, and he had given long thought and contemplation to breaking his father’s first command. He had not done so heedlessly, but only after much introspection and an honest appraisal of his abilities. Magnus knew he was a superlative manipulator of the aether, but was he strong enough?

He knew the answer to that now, for he had saved his warriors. He had seized control of their destinies from the talons of a malevolent shadow in the Great Ocean that held their fates in its grasp. The Emperor knew of such creatures, and had bargained with them in ages past, but he had never dared face one. Magnus’ victory was not won without cost, and he reached up to touch the smooth skin where his right eye had once been, feeling the pain and vindication of that sacrifice once more.

This power was a pale echo of that, a degenerate pool of trapped energy that had stagnated in this backwater region of space. He could sense the billionfold pathways that spread out from this place, the infinite possibilities of space linked together by a web-like network of conceptual conduits burrowed through the angles between worlds. This region was corrupt, but there were regions of glittering gold in the ocean that threaded the galaxy, binding it as roads of stone had once bound the empires of the Romanii Emperors together.

To memorise the entire labyrinthine network was beyond even one as gifted as him, but in a moment of connection beyond the darkness, he imprinted a million paths, conduits and access points in his mind. He might not know the entire network, but he would remember enough to find other ways in and other paths. His father would be pleased to learn of this network, pleased enough to overlook Magnus’ transgression at least.