Wreckage. Not remains. Lautenix was using distancing language. All the bridge officers were. They were keeping the reality of the necrosphere at bay. Guilliman understood. That was their luxury, as mortals. If they turned away from the reality, just enough to blunt its meaning, yet not so much as to create a misleading picture of what they were confronting, he would not correct them. He did not have the same flexibility. His lot was to look at the real directly. He must face all truths in all their horror, or he risked basing crucial theoreticals on a lie.

He worried that he had already done so. The sin of Imperium Secundus was a heavy weight he could not set down. He had not found atonement yet on this crusade. Instead, he had found this embodiment of absolute death.

Gorod drew his attention back to the window. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing to one of the dead dreams. It had a human head. A halo of spiked bones radiated from its crown. ‘What was that, I wonder?’ he said.

‘What it was no longer matters,’ Guilliman answered. ‘It is the ones that are not present that matter. They still live.’ He believed what he said, though he felt staggered by what he was seeing. The necrosphere was the final extension of the theoretical transformed into the practical. The ossuary took his guiding principles, and turned them into a mausoleum. ‘The dream of the Imperium is not here,’ he said. ‘It is not dead.’

He wondered, despite himself, if he might see Imperium Secundus entombed here.

This is the death of all dreams. The voice was authoritative, proselytising. It did not feel like his. It felt like the whisper he had heard in the fight against the Word Bearers. Past and present and to come, all the hopes are here. Their murder has happened, the promises are over. This is their silence. The end of words.

‘Lord primarch,’ Altuzer broke in on the vox. ‘Lautenix has seen the intruder again. I have as well. The auspex readings are too fragmentary to be of use, but that may be due to the material of the sphere limiting the reach of the scans. The sighting is definite. We are being shadowed.’

Guilliman looked out into the grey tunnel down which the fleet was travelling. There was a flare in the distance as the Lion’s vessels fired again, punching deeper into the shell. He could see as much as a few miles into the sides of the tunnel. The bones were loosely clumped together. The fabric of the necrosphere broke apart easily. It revealed nothing but more skeletal remains, the grey stillness extending forever until lost in the shadows.

‘Where is it?’ said Gorod.

‘There must be other passages through the shell,’ Guilliman said. ‘Sanguinius’ warp phantom is in the materium now too.’