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The Imperium had underestimated the ambition of the Despoiler.
That was the conclusion Archmagos Belisarius Cawl reached on Eriad VI, standing among the ruins of a Blackstone site that should not have existed.
He pulled up old data archives. Cross-referenced them against the planets shattered during previous Black Crusades. Laid that against what he was seeing now, here, on Eriad VI. The pattern that erged was not subtle.
A terrifying thought took shape in his mind.
"A mad idea," the Archmagos murmured. "He is a madman."
"He has always been a madman." The voice was lodious, unhurried. "Borrowing the power of the gods to achieve his own ends. Pragmatically."
A figure stepped out of the shadows.
A Harlequin Shadowseer of the Aeldari.
"Now you understand the purpose of these ruins, Cawl."
He nodded. The thought still lood over him, heavy enough that it stripped away any impulse to object to this xenos woman's presence.
"The Blackstone pylons," he said. "The immaterial realm..."
"One controls the other's dance." Fury-red blood across the Shadowseer's mask. "Without these stones, the dancers beco slaves to a lody of pure chaos. The galaxy breaks apart. It is reborn in madness."
"Can it be stopped?" Cawl cut straight to it.
He had no patience for fatalism. He valued solutions. Operational fault tolerance. asurable outcos. If this could not be stopped, then the great figure he had spent 10,000 years preparing — the one still sleeping in a stasis pod — would wake to nothing but wreckage.
The Shadowseer went still. Her form drifted like a ghost unbound by gravity, alighting with impossible delicacy on the broken base of a shattered obelisk. She tilted her head, studying his half-flesh, half-machine bulk with quiet attention.
"Cadia is both the end and the beginning."
Standard riddle-opener.
Cawl's exhaust fans buzzed with irritation. Input variables too vague. Logical deduction: impossible.
Before he could voice a rebuttal, she delivered the next line.
"But on Cadia, you will witness the return of the Lunar Wolf, Cawl. The First-Found Son of the Master of Mankind."
Lunar Wolf. First-Found Son.
The instant those two phrases entered his mory banks, the secondary cogitator core responsible for historical archive retrieval froze for a full 2 seconds.
The Sixteenth Legion. The Luna Wolves.
The one nad Warmaster on Ullanor. The one who blew the horn of rebellion on Isstvan III. The Arch-Traitor.
Horus Lupercal.
Every chanical joint in Cawl's body let out faint crackling pops as his processors overheated.
"This does not conform to objective fact." His optical sensors locked onto the masked figure, tone hard. "He was utterly obliterated by the Omnissiah during the Siege of Terra. The Lunar Wolf has no precondition for return."
That was ironclad truth. Acknowledged by the entire upper echelon of the Imperium. Acknowledged even by the traitors and heretics who had served him.
The Shadowseer paid no attention to the argunt.
She simply drew out her cadence, reciting the unfinished script as if to herself alone.
"Brothers shall et at last. Father and son shall see each other at last. The fates of loyalty and betrayal shall be rewritten in the mud of Cadia."
A pause.
"He is no reflection. Nor a wraith. He is a pure vessel. Go. Bear witness to this drama that even the threads of fate could not weave."
Torrents of deductive data crashed against those four utterly illogical lines, colliding wildly inside Cawl's main brain.
The Archmagos was genuinely furious.
Pure intellectual curiosity, t with arrogant mockery. These Aeldari xenos, always drowning in obscure rhetoric, always packaging vital strategic intelligence into this kind of inefficient poetry.
"Stop confounding with riddles!"
His massive fra pitched forward. Multiple heavy chadendrites slamd against the bedrock, sparks scattering across the stone.
His vocalizer distorted from overload, erupting into a shrill tallic roar.
"Since you know the future, answer directly! Where is the variable? What are the paraters? I need specific coordinates and the window of intervention!"
The echoes rolled through the Blackstone cavern.
No response.
The pedestal was empty. The faint ripples of folded space had already dissipated.
The Shadowseer was gone. She left no answers. Only a proposition more maddening than the collapse of the entire Blackstone network: Horus is not dead.
Cawl stood motionless for a long mont.
Coolant cycled through his pipes, flowing across logic circuits that had nearly burned out, drawing the temperature back down.
Anger solves nothing.
"Pack up the equipnt." He severed the connections to the surrounding probes. "Disassemble all analytical terminals. Full loading in 10 minutes."
A Tech-Priest responsible for logistics slid forward. "Archmagos, our original plan called for two more months of investigation into the deeper ruins—"
"Plan rescinded."
Cawl turned his massive body around. His treads ground gravel to dust as he moved toward the surface elevator.
Cadia was the endpoint. The Blackstone Fortress and Abaddon's fleet were assembling there.
If there was even a 1-in-a-million chance the Aeldari woman's ravings were true, if the Warmaster who had left an eternal wound across all of humanity was truly active on Cadia, then the scale of this battle had already exceeded anything conventional Astra Militarum and Astartes forces could handle.
---
The Archmagos's fleet arrived at Cadia.
He had missed the first wave of the Chaos Warmaster's assault. He had not fought shoulder to shoulder with the Imperial defenders. But the Castellan of Cadia welcod his arrival all the sa.
To Creed, every Imperial reinforcent that reached Cadia now was support for the planet and its people. He was grateful for all of it.
Creed received the Archmagos in the war council chamber.
Cawl had not forgotten why he ca. He laid out the conclusions he had drawn from the Blackstone ruins on Eriad VI before the assembled officers.
The Blackstone pylons standing on Cadia were not relics. They were anchors. If Abaddon destroyed them, a Great Rift would tear across the galaxy and split the Imperium of Man in two.
Shock moved through the room. Then fear. More than one officer quietly questioned whether the Archmagos could be trusted.
"Can you guarantee that everything you say is true, Magos?"
Creed's voice was level. His eyes were not.
"I swear by the Omnissiah. I, Belisarius Cawl, speak no falsehood."
"The pylons of Cadia, and other structures like them, once bound the galaxy together. Without them, the tides of the Empyrean will consu everything. Abaddon has spent over 10,000 years destroying pylon worlds, tearing apart the stitches that hold reality in place."
Cawl laid out his evidence. Over the passing millennia, the darkness had intensified. Warp storms had grown rampant. The Despoiler's obsession with Cadia, his Black Crusades long dismissed as failures, if those failures had cost the Imperium a heavy price, the strategic complexity behind them had exceeded everyone's imagination. Every crusade had been a step. Every defeat, a calculated sacrifice.
Creed and his officers sat with that for a long mont. The thought that ford in their minds was not a comfortable one.
But Cawl offered them sothing to hold onto, or perhaps it was a benevolent deception. He told them that hidden within Cadia's pylons lay the key to defeating the Chaos Warmaster. If he could study them, unlock what was inside, the Imperium would triumph over the Despoiler once more.
Creed listened. He deliberated. Then he gave his answer.
He granted the request. The Archmagos would have access to the Blackstone pylons. The Imperial Fists' Phalanx and a significant complent of elite ground forces would be dispatched to guard them.
The timing was fortunate. The Chaos fleet had withdrawn far from Cadia to regroup, buying them the window they needed. But Creed held onto one doubt he could not shake. According to frontline reports, Abaddon's surface offensive had been thwarted, and yet the Chaos fleet had pulled back to an inexplicably distant position.
That was not how the Despoiler operated. It was not the behavior of a military commander pressing an advantage. It was the behavior of sothing that had encountered a threat it was not prepared for. Sothing on this planet had filled Abaddon with extre wariness.
Perhaps even fear.
The thought sent a chill through Creed's chest. It also, quietly, lit sothing that felt almost like hope.
The eting was declared over. The officers perford the sign of the Aquila and withdrew one by one.
Cawl moved along the main corridor toward the temporary research zone the chanicus had been allocated.
At a corner, golden light poured unobstructed across the steel walls.
The Living Saint Celestine stood blocking the center of the passage.
"Praise the Omnissiah." Cawl halted, multiple chanical voices layering over each other. "Honored Living Saint. What guidance do you offer?"
"His Highness awaits you, Archmagos." Celestine's voice was soft.
The temperature of his main processor surged past the red line in less than a tenth of a second.
The half of Cawl's face where flesh still clung twitched, once, beyond his control.
Data streams collided inside the logic gates. On Eriad VI, the Shadowseer's ravings were being confird.
"Location." The tone of his vocalizer had changed. Sothing in it, faint and unmistakable, carried the urgency of a human being.
Celestine turned to lead the way. "Please follow , Magos."
➤ Next: Cawl's Invitation — The Conversation
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