The vent in the ground rushed towards him, gaping like a maw, and Leman Russ fell from this world into some other place.

Syrtyr's Door had opened.

Winter footsteps make a particular sound. The crunch-squeak of air in compressing snow, the shush-slide of feet displacing delicate crystals. It is the sound of peace. It is the sound of death. Death to be out in inimical seasons when more sensible creatures sleep. Peace to be had in the emptiness of the world, where a man might be one and alone under the vaults of creation with nothing to trouble him. There are no boundaries between life and death in a landscape like that. They lose their divide. It is an easy landscape to learn from, equally easy to vanish in, to let the body cool and the soul rise. An easy landscape to give in to.

Russ knew the sound of winter footsteps as well as his heartbeats.

Whiteness faded to blue gloom. His mouth popped open, and he sucked in a gusting breath. Lungs that had burned now froze with painful air. His eyes were already open, for their moist surface was chilled by the cold. As if some enchantment were lifted, now they saw.

The footsteps were his. He was walking across a crisp snowfield, his feet plunging through the crusted surface to the powder beneath. Each step buried his legs to the knee. He slowed, and stopped.

The field of night lit the world a subtle blue. A billion ice crystals winked at a billion stars in cosmic flirtation.

Leman Russ turned around on the spot. Though he had heard his footsteps and felt his forward motion, there were no tracks leading to where he stood. Snow lay undisturbed on the flat plain. In every direction the hard blue-white horizons met the blue-black sky at an uncompromising edge. Cold bit at his shins like iron. Cold raked his lungs like claws. The stars were alien, the chill deeper than the deadliest Fenrisian night. Were it not for his primarch's body he would be dead already.

Russ had learned at the side of the Emperor. There were no gods, no real magic, no dream quests or visions. These things, where experienced, were manifestations of the warp filtered by the human consciousness. They were not in an objective sense real. There were the sciences of the mind, there were the sciences of the soul. This was the Imperial Truth as He taught it.

Before the Emperor, Russ had learned at the feet of gothi. He was raised with a belief in wights and ghosts, where kaboldr and imgr crept from the Underverse to add supernatural peril to a world already crammed with mortal dangers. In that belief system, such places as Russ now travelled were as real as the waking world, and far more deadly.