He found the speed of her departure suspicious.

Eleven

Eleven

Road To The Underverse

A century, a day; how long did the fleet of the Space Wolves cleave its way through the troubled empyrean before it re-emerged? Time liquefied in the warp, running out through faults in creation, leaving a man's soul drowning for lack of minutes, seconds, and hours. It could have been a year or a decade or a thousand years when the translation warning was broadcast across the fleet. The Vlka Fenryka had no fondness for flight. They did not trust countdowns and failsafes. The klaxon sounded in enough time for them to mutter their charms against maleficarum, before the ship crashed out of the empyrean back into the material universe.

The ships bucked. Alarms squealed from multiple systems. Reactors beat irregularly, like hearts undergoing arrest. The warp did not want to let its playthings go. The machineries of humanity said otherwise, rending at the membrane between somewhere and nowhere, and pushing out the ships in violent rebirth.

The warp rift flared with indigo flames. Space split. The rift formed like a tear in flesh unevenly ripped by a predator's teeth. Sprays of solidifying corposant geysered thousands of kilometres across space, unlight added a malevolent star to the heavens that was too slow in dying.

As wolf ships of Fenris, rigged for ice but encountering open water, the fleet went from one sea to another in disarray, almost foundering on the change of cosmic texture. Real space dragged at their keels. Disturbance patterning turned their Geller fields into plasma storms of unnatural colour. Blue witch-fire clung to tower, spire and gun barrel. Engine stacks guttered. Smaller ships tumbled uncontrollably end over end.

Niddhoggur's reactor went offline after it regained real space. The vast ship drifted dangerously across the path of its sisters, necessitating frantic evasion. The fleet scattered like an outmatched wolf pack. The warp rift shut reluctantly, leaving the fleet adrift across sudden darkness. The Wolf's Eye lit hulls facing the system's centre with angry white light. All else was hidden by the hard black shadow only found in the airless void, the killing black, colder than the worst of winters.

The Vlka Fenryka remained adrift. Had an enemy come across the fleet during those helpless minutes they would have found the Wolves easy prey.

Engines stuttered. Ships recovered. They returned to formation slowly. The void was not the Vlka Fenryka's favoured hunting ground.

Once properly arrayed, they trekked inwards to the system core, where Fenris neared the end of its orbital track, and the beginning of the end of the Season of Fire.

Fenris turned beneath the ships' keels in the blazing light of the Great Year's summer.

'Bring us home!' the primarch ordered. 'Take us into the Aett.'

There was an energy to the command deck. The Legion was pleased to return to their den.