Macragge, the heart of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.
Guilliman was already waiting in the plaza by the time Sanguinius's Thunderhawk gunship touched down.
"Sanguinius," Guilliman said as he stepped forward, a flicker of surprise in his ice-blue eyes. "I recall you saying it would take at least a year or two after returning to Terra. It's only been six months."
"Plans have changed," Sanguinius replied, his voice far lower than usual.
His pristine white wings tucked in tightly against his back. An emotion Guilliman had never seen before flickered within his amber-gold eyes, immediately tipping the Lord of Macragge off that something was dreadfully wrong.
With a swift gesture, Guilliman dismissed his Honour Guard and guided his brother into the inner sanctum of the Fortress of Hera.
The two Primarchs strode in silence down corridors carved with the martial history of the Ultramarines, finally stepping into Guilliman's private strategium. The heavy doors hissed shut behind them, instantly sealing the room within a dampening field.
"What happened?" Guilliman turned to look his brother dead in the eye. "You're heavily unsettled. That's... rare for you."
Sanguinius took a long, steadying breath. Rather than taking a seat, he stepped up to the holographic hololith projection, turning his back to Guilliman. The very tips of his pinions trembled, betraying the immense restraint he was exercising.
"I spoke with Father," Sanguinius said softly.
"And?"
Sanguinius slowly turned back around, a distinctly bitter smile twisting his features. "And... Father told me he never dispatched a Custodian Tribune named Demetrian Titus to Aurelian IV."
The air in the strategium froze. Genuine, unadulterated shock cracked Guilliman's normally stoic composure.
"...What?"
"I'm telling you that the Custodian Tribune who led that task force to purge the archenemy on Aurelian IV, the one who claimed to speak with the Emperor's authority... was a fake."
Guilliman took a half-step back, his hand instinctively dropping to rest on the hilt of his power sword. "Impossible," he said, his voice level but his cadence rapidly accelerating. "I reviewed the pict-captures and battlefield augury logs you brought back myself. That strike force... those Astartes, their gene-seed signatures, their tactical doctrines, their wargear... it was all authentic."
"At least on the surface," Sanguinius interrupted. "Their performance was flawless."
"And the Custodian? What did Constantin Valdor have to say about this?"
"There has never been a member of the Legio Custodes by the name of Titus," Sanguinius said, closing his eyes. "Father confirmed it personally, and Constantin Valdor verified it to my face. He isn't in the roll of names. He never was, and he isn't now."
Guilliman fell completely silent for a long moment. "So, we've been played."
"It's worse than that," Sanguinius replied. "An entirely unknown faction put on a perfect performance, right in front of us, wearing the faces we trust the most."
"To what end?" Guilliman's eyes darted rapidly, his superhuman mind already running through countless tactical permutations. "If they have the resources to fabricate a Custodian so perfectly that even a Primarch couldn't tell the difference, and the logistical might to deploy a mixed strike force of that caliber... why use it just to cleanse a warp infestation on Aurelian IV?"
"That is exactly what confused Father as well," Sanguinius noted. "It was an apparently righteous intervention. A win-win scenario across the board. The archenemy was purged, and the Imperium avoided catastrophic losses. But the cost? The cost is that a completely unknown variable has played its hand, and we remain utterly blind to its true source."
"Leaving us strung along by the nose from start to finish," Guilliman finished grimly. "That level of manipulation... it terrifies me, brother."
The two demigods exchanged a solemn look, recognizing the exact same chilling vigilance reflected in each other's eyes.
"I have to go back," Sanguinius declared. "I'm going to tear Aurelian IV apart until I find a trail. I won't overlook a single thread, especially this so-called 'Crimson Dawn'."
"I'm coming with you." Guilliman set down his chalice with a sharp clink. "If a faction capable of flawlessly replicating Custodians and Astartes is lurking within Imperial borders, this has escalated far beyond a localized issue on Aurelian IV. This is an existential threat to the entire Imperium."
As the master of the Five Hundred Worlds, Guilliman understood the sheer terror of an uncontrolled variable better than anyone. In the darkest reaches of the galaxy, even the smallest unmapped anomaly could fester into a catastrophe capable of breaking the Imperium.
--
Forty-eight hours later, a massive joint armada hung in the void.
The Macragge's Honour and the Red Tear anchored the formation in high orbit over Macragge, backed by the combined might of the Ultramarines and Blood Angels. The grand total exceeded eighty voidcraft: three mighty battleships serving as flagships, fifteen line cruisers, and a sweeping screen of destroyers, frigates, and bulk transports.
Guilliman temporarily ceded the daily administration of Ultramar to his senatorial parliament. He routinely found their bureaucratic inefficiency maddening, but a crisis of this magnitude demanded his undivided attention. His personal distaste for delegation would just have to wait.
"Final translation parameters locked," a representative of the Navis Nobilite reported from the bridge of the Macragge's Honour, their voice heavily filtered through a bulky rebreather mask. "Target: the Aurelian System, Korianis Sector. Estimated transit time through the Empyrean: seventy-two standard hours."
"Translation authorized," Guilliman ordered.
"Authorized," Sanguinius echoed over the vox-link.
The colossal warp drives of the combined armada spun up in terrifying unison.
The very fabric of realspace tore apart, violently bleeding the sickly, iridescent light of the immaterium into the void as a portal yawned open. Ship by ship, the grand fleet plunged into the nightmare realm of the Warp.
Then, six hours into the translation, everything went wrong.
"My Lord!" The frantic hail from the navigator's sanctum cut through the bridge's low hum. The mutant's voice was laced with an uncharacteristic, naked terror. "Ahead of us... there are severe, anomalous fluctuations along the warp currents!"
Guilliman instantly summoned the augury telemetry to his command throne.
The hololith flared to life, showing the formerly stable warp route to the Korianis Sector completely drowned in chaotic, violent energy spikes. That wasn't some minor aetheric turbulence. This was...
"A localized warp storm," Sanguinius's voice crackled over the vox, confirming he was looking at the exact same data on the Red Tear. "Moderate intensity, but the span... it perfectly chokes off all three major warp lanes leading into the Korianis Sector."
"Can we divert?" Guilliman asked.
"A diversion would add an incalculable amount of time to our transit and force us through unmapped warp shoals," the Navigator wheezed back. "The risk of catastrophic failure is extreme. I strongly advise against attempting a forced translation."
Guilliman went silent, his stern gaze shifting to Sanguinius on the primary vox-screen.
"It seems," Sanguinius murmured, "that fate does not want us to return."
"I don't believe in fate," Guilliman replied coolly. "I believe in raw data and statistical probability. And the odds of a localized storm manifesting here and now are so infinitesimally small they barely exist."
"Right at the exact moment we decide to march back to Aurelian IV," Sanguinius mused aloud. "Right across the only stable lanes into the sector. A moderate storm, just strong enough to stop us... It's too neat of a coincidence. It's profoundly disturbing."
"Are you suggesting..."
"I don't know what to think anymore," Sanguinius sighed, shaking his head. "But I'm beginning to suspect that whatever truly transpired on Aurelian IV is far, far more complicated than we could have ever imagined."
The two brothers locked eyes through the static-laced screen, each feeling the heavy weight of the other's grim resignation.
Finally, Guilliman made the call.
"Bring us about. We're turning back," Guilliman ordered. "Warp storms don't last forever. The moment it breaks, we will try again... and we'll bring an even bigger fleet."
Sanguinius offered a slow, deliberate nod... though his expression only darkened with a tangled web of unanswered questions.
--
Deep within the Immaterium.
Lucian Sanctus quietly studied a shimmering hololithic projection woven from pure emotional energy.
To his ascended senses, the raging warp storm currently choking off the borders of the Korianis Sector wasn't just a weather anomaly; it was a breathtakingly complex tapestry of psychic weaving.
"Moderate intensity. As long as I keep pumping massive reserves of raw energy into it, this blockade should hold for... roughly twenty-seven years," he murmured to himself. With a mere flick of his consciousness, he siphoned a fresh stream of power directly into the storm's structural anchor nodes. The tempest's fury instantly spiked by another three percent.
Taking on the Four Chaos Gods directly in his current state was nothing short of a suicide run.
But leveraging his hoarded emotional energy and the raw sustenance siphoned from Aurelian IV to aggressively churn the Immaterium in one highly localized quadrant? Fabricating a persistent, localized warp storm?
That was well within his wheelhouse.
It was practically child's play, especially with Tzeentch and Nurgle totally fixated on Veritas—the ancient god he'd so masterfully framed. A little localized turbulence on the galactic fringes wouldn't even register on the Ruinous Powers' radar.
"Time... that's all I need," Lucian breathed. His vast, sprawling consciousness gently brushed over Aurelian IV. Down on the terrestrial surface, sweeping, quiet reforms were rapidly taking root under Paul's heavy-handed leadership.
Waves of raw emotional resonance cascaded upward from the planetary populace. Hope. Joy. Contentment. Unbreakable resolve. It was like pure, unadulterated ambrosia, nourishing his divine essence and steadily birthing new facets of his Authority. He could literally feel the edges of his domain expanding, his power creeping upward, inch by painstaking inch.
"Just give me a few more decades," he whispered. "A few decades to gorge myself on the unfiltered emotional output of twenty billion souls... and I'll shatter that ceiling."
He would finally ascend, crossing the threshold into true minor godhood.
Once he crossed that line, he'd gain the Authority to actively manipulate realspace. More importantly, he'd finally have the power to mask his movements, letting him operate right under the collective noses of the Four Chaos Gods.
He just needed these twenty-seven years of isolation to evolve into the ultimate wildcard.
--
Goal = 550 Powerstones.
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