In the cold of the void, the Gray Shark opened its Geller field and slid forward into the warp translation point that had quietly formed off the garden world's bow. The transition took the ship without violence. Around its hull, the familiar wrongness of warp space pressed inward and was held at bay, and every mortal crew member and servant aboard bent their attention to the routines that kept the field stable and the vessel whole.
In a sealed compartment on the upper deck, three people stood in front of the Void Stone.
The artifact was the size of a human head. Its surface held a dull, lightless black that did not reflect the compartment's illumination so much as absorb it. Nothing about its exterior suggested it was anything other than a dense piece of worked material.
The wolf turned it over with his eyes from a short distance away and looked unimpressed.
"This is the ancient artifact?" He glanced sideways at the original Nolan. "I don't see what's remarkable about it."
"According to Kahurangi, it won't respond to ordinary Astartes contact at all." Nolan kept his voice even, scanning the other two as he spoke. "Only the mortal boy with the special bloodline can activate it, and when activated, anyone within its range will see their own warp nature through it, regardless of their species."
He let that land.
"If the three of us make contact ourselves, we may be able to find our own warp essence through it. It may not have obvious tactical value right now. The potential down the line is harder to calculate."
Lord Cypher raised one hand and rubbed his chin slowly, eyes on the artifact's surface at close range.
"Given the current situation," he said, "both you and the wolf have completed the full suite of augmentation surgeries. Which means the physiological ceiling is essentially reached. Future improvements to combat effectiveness will come through equipment, skill, and experience." He paused. "Or, if one has no concern for the success rate, one could attempt Cawl's Primaris procedures."
"What's the point of standing here theorizing about it?"
The wolf reached out and pressed his palm flat against the Void Stone.
Nolan's eyes opened slightly. Cypher exhaled through his nose and shook his head.
The compartment disappeared.
All three soul-consciousnesses were projected simultaneously into a space that had no walls and no floor and no light source, and yet was not dark. It simply was. A void that was also an interior, vast and immediate.
Nolan looked toward where the wolf had been standing.
The wolf was gone. In his place, occupying a space that was both enormous and precisely defined, was a great wolf rendered entirely in warp-substance: golden flames and blood-colored rivers, distinct from each other and yet constantly intertwining, flowing through the wolf-shape in currents that never resolved into stillness. It was immense and restless and recognizable.
As Nolan studied it, the dire wolf's head turned.
A pair of cyan eyes found him: one holding something that read as loyalty, the other as anger. Both were absolute. Both were fixed on him. A howl came from somewhere that had nothing to do with throat or lungs, ancient and worn with long use, and Nolan's perspective snapped away.
Cypher.
Cypher was also gone. What occupied his position was a silver ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, turning in slow continuous rotation with the patience of something that had been doing this since before the compartment, before the ship, before whatever the ship was sailing through. Its scale was difficult to fix; it was simultaneously close and enormous. On its body, scales of purple and blue had appeared among the silver, spreading outward from their origin points until they saturated the surrounding silver in patches that grew toward a third of the total.
Then the rotation completed one full cycle, and every heterochromatic scale was washed clean, and the cycle began again from nothing.
The ouroboros opened its eyes. There was nothing in them. Not hostility, not intelligence, not the absence of intelligence. Simply nothing, in the specific way that something very old and very patient contains nothing that resembles a feeling.
Nolan's perspective rose.
He saw himself.
A star, newly formed, standing in depths that had no coordinates. Around it, six satellites moved in their orbits, each a different color, each a different size, each carrying a different brightness. The purple was the faintest, barely present. The blood-red and the cyan burned brightest. The dark blue outshone the black by a margin. The green was stronger than the purple but not by much.
He was still trying to determine what the satellites represented when the raven came.
Black, enormous in the way that warp-things scale without following physical rules, it came from somewhere in the outer void at speed, crossed the distance in the time it took him to notice it, and drove itself into the black satellite.
The impact was not violent. The raven simply entered the satellite and the satellite received it.
What followed was gradual. The gravitational relationships across the whole small system shifted. The black satellite expanded, its brightness climbing past the dark blue, past the cyan, past the blood-red, until it held first position among all six without apparent effort.
"Gift from the Raven King."
The thought formed in the place where thoughts form when there is no body, slow and imprecise, the last thing his consciousness managed before the pull came.
It was not gentle. Something irresistible seized his soul-consciousness by whatever constituted its weight and hauled it back.
The compartment returned.
Nolan opened his eyes and breathed out once, sharp and involuntary. He was on his feet. His body had not moved. He activated the vibranium power armor in the same motion he used to close the distance to the wolf, and put a vibranium fist into him before he had fully processed being back.
The impact was solid and the sound of it rang off the compartment's walls.
The wolf's expression went dark immediately. He turned his head with the particular slowness of someone working very hard to measure their response.
"Are you out of your mind?"
"Would I have bothered you if you hadn't done that?" Nolan let the edge stay in his voice.
Lord Cypher settled his arms across his chest and watched them.
"Less of this," he said. "If you need to work it out, use the training deck. You'll be brothers again afterward, same as always." He let a brief pause do its work. "And you both took something from that experience. You don't have to share it. It's your path; no one else can walk it for you."
He looked at neither of them in particular.
"My situation is somewhat different. Corax left something inside the Void Stone. Whatever it is, I suspect only I or another Primarch could locate and activate it." A slight pause. "My control over shadow-step, and over shadow-power more broadly, is going to improve. That is my read of what I saw."
Nolan did not respond immediately.
He stepped, and was behind the wolf without crossing the intervening space, arriving in silence.
The wolf's teeth showed. His expression said something clear and unfriendly about the demonstration.
But he did not say anything.