The temporary tower rose high into the air.
It was constructed in the primitive, ancient style of Prospero. Even though this architectural design invariably forced Magnus to relive his pathetic past, he remained profoundly infatuated by it.
This structure served as the primary encampment for the Thousand Sons. Channeling the lingering raw energy of the warp, Magnus and his cabal of sorcerers anchored themselves here, continuously utilizing their psychic arts to buffer the relentless onslaught of the Necron legions.
For a fleeting second, Ahriman felt as though he had been thrust back into that golden, beautiful epoch—living and conducting research alongside his battle-brothers upon the surface of Prospero. Back then, he had even nurtured a dream of owning a prosperous vineyard, aspiring to become an exceptional winemaker.
He stepped into Magnus's personal chambers, finding the towering crimson giant standing immobile in the center of the room, idly leafing through a cascade of grimoires floating smoothly around his frame.
Registering Ahriman's arrival, Magnus gestured for him to be seated.
"Ahriman, I have not extended my forgiveness to you."
"The sentiment is entirely mutual, Magnus. I merely manifested here under the explicit summons of Tzeentch, despite my absolute lack of compliance with such a rushed strategic layout. The baseline reality has officially proven that this enterprise was entirely unfeasible."
"This remains an intrinsic component of Tzeentch's grand design."
"A component? That baseline proclamation is echoed across every single failure, Magnus. Has your consciousness genuinely failed to perceive the pattern?"
Ahriman was thoroughly dissatisfied; when it came to strategic calculations of this magnitude, his gene-father was invariably completely unreliable.
"Magnus—or rather, father—why do you consistently engineer these exact scenarios? You mustered a historical gathering of our Thousand Sons brothers, only to plunge them into this tactical quagmire. You nurtured the ambition to maroon those Tyranid fleets and liquidate them in detail, but did your calculations account for the Space Wolves manifesting on this grid? Did you estimate that the Necrons would occupy these coordinates?"
Magnus completely ignored Ahriman's interrogation, smoothly redirecting his focus to query his other subordinates: "What is the precise baseline of our brothers who have yet to return to the perimeter? We must execute our translocation ritual while the warp still maintains a sufficient operational threshold to project into realspace."
"Slightly over a hundred sorcerers remain cut off, My Lord. They are currently locked in a war of attrition with the Necrons within the ruins of the Sorcerer's City."
"Magnus, do not pile one error upon another."
"Ahriman, my patience regarding your insolence is strictly finite. The adversaries confronting us at this present juncture eclipse our standard parameters; we must focus our absolute attention on managing them. Desist from these recriminations immediately."
"If only you had possessed the capacity to articulate those precise syllables during the Burning of Prospero."
Magnus's psychic energy instantly flared, physically seizing Ahriman by the throat. This topic was his absolute reverse scale—and a profoundly painful memory that every surviving son of the XV Legion refused to recall.
"Father, do you truly fail to perceive the reality? You possess a vast repository of absolute knowledge, yet you have never commanded the baseline wisdom to match it."
"And what of your record, Ahriman? The absolute annihilation that my wretched brother Leman Russ failed to deliver to my legion, you successfully engineered with your Rubric. I have expended ten millennia systematically wiping up the collateral damage of your failures. What have you contributed?"
The father and son lapsed into a tense, suffocating silence before Magnus violently cast Ahriman aside.
"I harbor no desire to tolerate internal friction while we stand on the precipice of extraction, Ahriman. The Tyranid Swarm is actively advancing upon our coordinates. Locate the remainder of your battle-brothers, and we shall return to the Immaterium together. That arrogant mechanical carcass assumes he commands every variable on the board; he possesses absolutely no conception of the true, unadulterated power of the warp."
Magnus delivered a solitary, final decree: "Ahriman, I will not tolerate a structural reenactment of Prospero."
Ahriman offered no reply, silently turning on his heel to exit the chambers.
Standing upon the high parapets of the tower, he swept his gaze downward to take in the absolute scope of the conflict below.
Tzeentch's daemonic legions were locked in a frenzied melee with the Necrons. Due to the proximity of the Necrons' noctilith technology, the warp attributes that the daemons relied so heavily upon were being systematically suppressed and throttled.
Had the psychic arrays and the newly constructed sorcerous spires deployed by the Thousand Sons lacked a baseline of power that comfortably transcended standard parameters, these warp-born legions would have been dissolved into nothingness long ago.
This structural resilience had also caught the Necrons off guard, though it appeared to have piqued the Silent King's curiosity significantly.
Driven by a clinical fascination with these organic strains, alongside a distinct desire to observe their final, desperate death throes, the Silent King had deliberately withheld his ultimate strategic armaments.
Magnus was perfectly aware of his adversary's tactical arrogance, and he intended to exploit this exact conceit to forge a path toward strategic salvation.
Until the true Tyranid Swarm made planetfall.
"This is—"
Ahriman was the first asset on the grid to register the return of these adversaries.
While attempting to locate the sorcerers scattered across the heavily compromised sectors of the Sorcerer's City, he suddenly felt his localized psychic casting being severely throttled and suppressed.
This specific sensation bore absolutely no structural similarity to the deadening aura of the blackstone obelisks.
The Shadow in the Warp projected by the Tyranid Swarm operated much like an absolute wall of hyper-dense acoustic noise. The infinite, maddening shrieks and psychic static bleeding from the absolute depths of the hive mind were sufficient to drive standard psykers into instant insanity—a threshold that challenged even an apex sorcerer of Ahriman's caliber.
"Such a devastatingly dense Shadow in the Warp... how? Did the fleet units we previously marooned manage to cross the perimeter already? How could their operational transit scale to this velocity?"
Ahriman understood that he had to convey this critical tactical update to his battle-brothers imminently.
"Am I correct in assuming that your designation is Ahriman?"
Who—
Ahriman fixed his gaze onto the man who had slowly descended to hover directly before his position, his arms casually crossed. The existential signature radiating from this entity was fundamentally distinct from anything he had previously encountered.
Based on that specific aura, Ahriman could deduce with absolute certainty that this man was explicitly not human; he was an entity far more bizarre than even the denizens of Chaos.
"I am indeed Ahriman of the Thousand Sons. And your identity is?"
"High Commander of Hive Fleet Aether and Hive Fleet Chronos. You may call me Adam."
"Are you referring to Hive Fleet Astraeus? Are 'Aether' and 'Chronos' the internal designations you biomorphs utilize within your own hierarchy? This is the absolute first instance I have heard of the Swarm applying individual names to its fleet splinters."
Adam looked somewhat amused by the data.
"Hive Fleet Astraeus? Is that the designation the Imperium of Man assigned to our vanguard? Ah. The memories we harvested and consumed did contain that specific sequence, but I honestly never calculated that it was intended to reference us."
Perceiving that his interlocutor lacked an immediate intent to initiate hostilities, Ahriman surreptitiously channeled his psychic reserves, readying his arts with immense caution.
"Might I inquire... are you a hyper-evolved human mimic engineered by the Tyranid Hive Mind, or something else entirely? I have encountered certain whispers regarding your profile within the warp."
Adam remained remarkably candid.
"I was once a baseline human. Subsequently, my essence was fully embraced and integrated by the Great Devourer. At this present juncture, I operate as a functional extension of the Tyranid Swarm."
"Betraying humanity—no, effectively betraying the galactic ecosystem in its entirety... does your consciousness truly harbor no trace of profound unrest over that choice?"
"An asset who has explicitly betrayed the Imperium of Man commands absolutely no moral leverage to criticize my alignment. Furthermore, the absolute baseline of biological existence is reciprocal predation. Humanity spends every waking microsecond preying upon its own kind; I fail to see a logical issue with this paradigm."
"Do you genuinely buy into that rationalization yourself?"
Confronted with Ahriman's blatant sarcasm, Adam didn't display a shred of annoyance.
"Whether you evaluate the Imperium of Man, the forces of Chaos, the Necron dynasties, or the T'au Empire... every single one of these factions functions exclusively as a meat-grinder that systematically utilizes its baseline populace as fuel for its war machine. You cannot reasonably expect an organism to preserve absolute moral purity within such a universe. Are you any different, Ahriman? Search your own record—are the 'good deeds' you have orchestrated across the millennia truly less heinous than my own metrics?"
Ahriman extended his gauntlet, his psychic arts violently locking down the entirety of the spatial coordinates surrounding Adam's frame.
"From what source did you harvest that data?!"
"Including the absolute catalog of your gene-father's catastrophic failures? Are those variables not essentially common knowledge across the cosmos by now?"
With a casual, effortless shrug of his shoulders, Adam completely shattered Ahriman's psychic stasis field.
"I find your operational profile highly commendable, Ahriman. What do you say—would you care to transition your talents to the Swarm and operate under my command?"