The Rout remembered their youthful voyages upon Fends' seas. A source of good-natured debate on Fenris was whether winter sailing or summer sailing was worst. The voyage through the warp was a summer voyage. Towering waves, the sweltering heat, the deadly upheaval of land and water, all felt like it was going on outside the plasteel hulls of their refuges. Upon Fenris, the Rout were masters of their own destiny, their own will pitted against the best efforts of their planet to kill them. There a man's skill as much as his wyrd dictated whether or not he would die in the hot oceans of summer or upon the iron-hard ice of winter. Aboard a void ship they were at the mercy of others. They crouched in their smoky dens, chanting the cantrips they had learned upon ships of wood into echoing halls of plasteel. Every threshold gained new warding eyes and thickets of protective runes. Though only the Navigators could see the things clawing at the outside of the Geller fields, every thinking being on board those vessels could sense them.

Corridors quaked. Hasty repairs were undone by violent shivers running the lengths of the ships. Metal shrieked with the stress. Subsonic noise from the straining warp engines stuttered through the fabric of vessels, worsening the atmosphere. The integrity generators struggled, and cabling feeding the fields gave out in showers of sparks, necessitating hurried replacement.

The warp warned them that they were not welcome.

Leman Russ had his fleet push on regardless.

Three times during their voyage, Russ attempted to speak with Kva about what must be done upon Fenris. Every time, Kva rebuked his primarch.

'Not now, my lord!' he would say. 'We sail the Sea of Souls. The Underverse is watching. We cannot speak of such things until we are safely home, where Morkai may guard our souls. Be patient.'

Each time, Russ growled and stalked off, dissatisfied. He tried to speak with other Rune Priests but they backed away on seeing him coming, body language submissive but resolute. Even the kaerl-gothi avoided him, and so he took to his quarters, and there brooded upon what must be done, until he grew sick of the smell of them and their closeness, and went to the Wolfs Hall where he brooded some more.

Leman Russ sat alone in the Wolf's Hall. He drank wine from a goblet, for the hard intoxication mjod gifted was unpalatable to him at that time. Wine could not dull his senses in the same pleasurable way, or raise his war-spirit for the murder-make, but there was a sophistication in good wine that he craved. The taste evoked lost summers and far-off lands. Wine was a sorrowful drink. It completed his mood.

So he drank a drink that could not affect him, and idly named to himself the chemical compounds his keen hunters senses discerned in the liquid.