The ground was coming up.
Nolan registered this as the first coherent data point after consciousness returned, and consciousness returned fast because the situation demanded it. His eyes opened to freezing air and a horizon that was not below him where horizons were supposed to be, but above him, which meant he was falling face-down toward a surface that was white and hard and approaching at a rate that the power armor's altitude sensor was reporting in terms that implied urgency.
He pushed.
The internal systems of the vibranium power armor responded to the command the way systems respond when significant portions of them have stopped working: partially, and with effort. The vibranium wings behind the power backpack deployed. One of them deployed to full extension. The other made it approximately halfway before whatever had failed in the drive mechanism prevented further extension, and stayed there.
The asymmetric surface area produced an asymmetric effect.
Nolan managed to reduce the fall rate by roughly half and simultaneously introduced a rotation into his descent that he had not intended and that made maintaining any body position a problem. He gave up on the wings almost immediately and pulled them as flat as they would go against the backpack, then wrapped both arms around his head, curled his knees toward his chest, and let the Ten Rings distribute themselves along the underside of the falling mass as a deceleration surface.
The impact was what it was.
He went through the surface snow and through the frozen ground beneath it for several meters before the accumulated resistance brought him to rest, and the sound the impact made was audible from a significant distance in a way that suggested the silence of the surrounding terrain had not been expecting company.
A moment of quiet.
Golden blood ran from his nose and mouth down the inside of the skull helmet, finding the gaps between the faceplate and the chin ring. The armor's medical system registered multiple internal pressure injuries and began the process it was designed for: a small reservoir of medical compound found the injection port at the back of the neck, and a fraction of the reserve was delivered into his bloodstream.
Nolan lay in the bottom of a crater he had made, staring up at the shaft of gray sky visible above him, and breathed for a moment.
Then he breathed more deliberately, which was different, because the first was involuntary and the second was a decision.
"When I return," he said, to no one, into the inside of the helmet, "I am instructing Reditus to design a passive kinetic dampening system for high-altitude uncontrolled landings. Alien technology if necessary." He exhaled. "Dying to random Warp portal destinations is not how this ends."
He put both hands against the crater wall and pushed himself upright.
The armor was heavier than it should have been. The servos that made it manageable under normal conditions were not all managing at their normal capacity, and the joints that had been frozen by Vashtorr and then subjected to the simultaneous thermal event of three hundred melta bombs and a Hellfire detonation were registering stiffness in the mechanical sense, not the biological one. He could move. The movement required more effort than it usually did.
He climbed out of the crater.
The terrain that greeted him was white and empty in every direction.
Snow-covered ground that rolled gently in undulations that went all the way to the horizon, where the sky met the land in a seamless gray line. No structures. No vegetation visible above the snowpack. No light sources beyond the uniform overcast above, which produced a flat illumination that came from everywhere and cast no shadows. Nothing moving.
The temperature was the kind of temperature that registers as a system warning even through a power armor's thermal regulation, which meant the ambient air was very cold indeed.
"Fenris," Nolan said. "Or something that wants me to think so."
He opened the simulator's storage interface and retrieved Forgebreaker. The familiar weight of the thunder hammer settled into his grip, and something about the contact clarified the situation: he was here, wherever here was, and the portal had closed behind him, and the medical compound was still working through his system, and the first requirement was information.
He looked across the white terrain, chose the direction that had the most gradual slope, and started walking.
The terrain cooperated for the first twenty minutes and then stopped cooperating.
The gentle undulations gave way to something more assertive: massive formations of ice that had accumulated into shapes that bore only passing resemblance to anything geological. Columns of frozen material thirty meters high, irregular in profile, packed closely enough in some areas that the passage between them required both hands on Forgebreaker's shaft to manage the geometry. Nolan climbed. He squeezed between things. He jumped when jumping was faster than routing around.
The blizzard arrived without announcement.
One moment visibility was limited by overcast. The next, visibility was limited by the fact that the air had become snow. Snowflakes the size of a palm hit the vibranium shell with sounds like small impacts, each one individually distinct and collectively producing a constant soft percussion that covered every other sound. The horizon vanished. The ice formations became visible only at arm's reach, which turned the navigation problem from challenging to severe.
Nolan's beast senses solved the problem the way they solved most problems: by operating on information that the ordinary sensory registers of an Astartes did not access. The magnetic field of this world ran in a specific direction, and his internal orientation was tied to it, and he walked in a straight line through the whiteout by following the pull rather than his eyes.
The blizzard continued.
Snowflakes that had accumulated on his gray hair and the folded wings of his power armor were icing at the contact points, adding weight to a suit that was already heavier than intended. He had been considering whether the storage interface held anything useful for weatherproofing when the smell reached him.
He stopped walking.
He stood still for a moment, his sense of smell working through the blizzard air, separating the component scents. Wind, ice, the mineral quality of a world without organic chemistry above a certain complexity. And something else. Something that had the specific quality of Warp presence in material space, the way that a badly corroded circuit has a quality distinct from a clean one: the material is the same but the process of corruption has changed it into something that registers differently.
Two distinct signatures.
He tilted his head and processed the difference between them. The sharper, metallic one, hot underneath the cold: Khorne's Bloodletters. The slower, pervasive one, organic in a way that cold air should not smell organic: Nurgle's Plaguebearers. Both types present, which implied either a mixed warband or two separate daemonic incursions converging on the same point.
Neither was a welcome discovery. Both required immediate handling.
He opened the storage interface and found a white wolfskin cloak, unfolding it and drawing it back over the power armor and his gray head in one motion. The white against the white of the blizzard was not perfect concealment but it was considerably better than pale gold vibranium against snow.
He closed his hand on Forgebreaker.
The smell was coming from a direction approximately forty degrees to his left of current travel, and the intensity of it put the source at a distance he could cover in three minutes of normal movement. The damaged power armor made normal movement unavailable, but Shadow Step did not depend on servo assistance.
He moved into the first shadow available to him, which was the shadow of an ice formation to his immediate left, and the world folded around him for a fraction of a second, and he was somewhere else, closer, in a different shadow.
He began closing the distance.