The second overlapped with another, birthed at the same moment. The Delphos vanished, and the Veritas Ferrum. The huge maw at its prow loosed a monstrous scream. In the Vyssini, the Blood Angels staggered. Sanguinius winced. He stood firm against the sound in his skull. He heard the voice of Madail, and the voice of the monster the daemon had created. The resurrected, corrupted machine-spirit of the Veritas Ferrum raged against its end. The howl went on and on, and the ship swelled. The skin of its hull cracked opened, bursting with the pressure of the conflagration within. Violet unlight speared the void. The Veritas Ferrum flew apart. Wreckage of mouths and eyes and bones raced ahead of the expanding ball of inchoate warp energy, and the scream went on.

At the centre of the explosion, the void was torn, and the immaterium reclaimed its own. An implosion began. Its energy ball reversed its growth, shrinking in a single moment to a point. It caught the fleeing rubble of the ship, and pulled it all in. In its absolute violence, the implosion unleashed the second shockwave on the aether. It collided with the first. In their intersection, they reduced the daemonic fleet and the swarm of bones to dust.

The scream faded as the revenant ships returned to oblivion. Deprived of the force that animated them, their bonds broken, they lost substance. They became ragged phantoms sailing through the uniform void of grey. Then they were shadows. Then echoes. Then only memories in the minds of those who had seen them.

The destruction of Davin and its works rushed outwards from the system, further and further, carried by the agony of the warp, transforming the materium at speeds far greater than light.

Sanguinius looked out through the viewing block of the ­Vyssini, and he saw the wound before he heard the new cry. With the necrosphere gone, the Ruinstorm was visible again, and it was in agony. The aurora of madness still twisted across the galaxy, but there was a gap. A chasm of untainted void broke up the storm, as if a break had been blasted through a firestorm. Or a spear thrust through the body of a great beast.

Sanguinius tightened his hold on the Spear of Telesto, feeling the muscle memory of his strike. The blow he had struck on Pyrrhan, slicing through the knots of fate, had been a lie. His blow on the Veritas Ferrum had been an act of truth. It reached just as far.

Davin had died as the forces linked to it tried to shape his path and the Imperium’s. The convulsion of power and destinies had cracked open the barrier of the Ruinstorm.