The air in the hidden chamber was thick with the dust of ages and the faint scent of ozone, remnants of wards far older than the Imperium itself. Thalon Merion, Captain of the Ultramarines and veteran of a hundred campaigns, stepped forward with steady resolve—but even his gene-forged will trembled.
Before him sat a figure carved from myth and suffering: Sanguinius.
It was not the radiant, untouchable icon of Imperial murals. This was the Angel as few had ever seen him—diminished, yes, but terrifying in his raw truth. One wing was broken, feathers ragged and darkened. His once-pristine features were marked by scars that looked etched by ancient gods, and his armor, clearly the remnants of his sacred panoply, was dull and cracked, heavy with the weight of eons. And yet, there was no denying the presence—like gravity given form. A spiritual weight that pulled at the soul.
Thalon had faced daemons. He had defied the Warp's temptations. But before the seated figure of Sanguinius, he felt something deeper than awe. He felt reverence—and sorrow.
He moved to kneel, but something within him paused. Not out of arrogance, but instinct. The Angel did not need worship. He needed truth.
"My lord," Thalon said, his voice low, almost hoarse. "Is it truly you?"
Sanguinius met his gaze, not as a god gazes upon mortals, but as a man seeing an old dream. His eyes held no anger—only weariness. And something else: understanding.
"I was him once," the Primarch said. His voice, though quiet, carried like thunder in the still air. "I may be again. But not today." A faint smile touched his lips, distant and pained. "Today… I am just a man who remembers too much."
The words struck Thalon deeper than any blade. The illusion of invincibility shattered, and what remained was somehow greater: a father of legends, brought low, yet unbroken.
Thalon went to one knee fully, not in submission, but in solidarity. "Then we shall remember with you, my lord. And help you rise."
Days later, within a subterranean command chamber beneath a ruined cathedral, the highest echelons of the Imperium gathered: Chapter Masters, Inquisitors, Mechanicus archmagi, and regimental commanders. They sat around a long war table marked by the scars of recent conflict.
At its head sat Sanguinius. Robed, his broken wing still bound in sacred cloth, he looked less like a warlord and more like a sage. But none in the room doubted his authority.
"The question has been asked," he said, voice calm but commanding. "You want to know if my brothers yet live."
Silence answered him. Eyes across the chamber were wide with tension—and hope.
"I felt them," he continued. "Not their location. Not their strength. But the echo of their souls. Like distant stars, faint… scattered. But not gone."
A murmur rippled through the chamber.
"Guilliman," he said. "His light remains strong. A steady presence, though distant. Dorn… harder to see, but I feel the shape of his will. Russ, the Lion… even Corax. They are not dead. At least, not all."
"And the others?" someone dared ask.
Sanguinius lowered his gaze. "Some are dimmer. And some... silent. That silence is more terrible than death."
A hush fell over the room.
"I do not know why I was sealed. Whether it was the Emperor's mercy… or a last-ditch containment. I only know that the prison was not just of stone and stasis—it was of spirit."
He looked around the table. "Perhaps others slumber still, held beneath the crust of forgotten worlds. Perhaps they fight battles unseen in realms beyond our sight. But I believe they can return."
Thalon, standing beside the table, finally spoke. "Then we must find them. If even one can be restored…"
Sanguinius nodded. "Then we may yet have a chance."
The air above the blighted continents of Veridia Gamma hung heavy, not with the usual choking miasma of organic decay and sporulating horror, but with an unnatural, unsettling absence. For weeks, the void above had been a storm of bio-ships and drifting mycetic spores, the ground a churning mass of chitin and gnashing teeth. Now, silence.
Vox traffic from the last remaining planetary scout elements crackled through the command centre of Battle Group Solar, bringing news so bizarre, so counter-intuitive, it was initially dismissed as sensor ghosting or psychological warfare.
"Confirmation, Command," the scout captain's voice was strained, laced with disbelief. "Echoes indicate Category Gamma retreat vectors. All major bio-forms disengaging. Swarm cohesion dissolving."
More reports flooded in. Augurs painted a picture of Hive Ships accelerating away from the system at speeds that seemed reckless, even for the ravenous fleet. On the ground, vast digestion pools lay abandoned, their contents left to stagnate under the alien sky. The grotesque, pulsating forms of mycetic spores, which normally served as mobile hives and delivery systems, drifted listlessly, their purpose aborted, and began to rot visibly in the thin atmosphere – a sight previously unimaginable.
A heavy silence fell over the command deck as the scale of the event sank in. The Tyranids. The all-consuming, relentless tide. They were leaving.
Chaplain Uriel Ventris, currently attached to Battle Group Solar, watched the data slates with a frown etched deep onto his noble brow. Relief was a dangerous emotion in this galaxy; it often preceded a far greater terror. Why would the Hive Mind, a force driven by instinct and hunger alone, abandon a system ripe for consumption?
From a side console, Magos Explorator Valerius, a Techmarine whose augmetic eyes whirred as he processed streams of esoteric data, finally offered a theory. His vox-filtered voice was devoid of emotion, but the implications were seismic.
"Analysis of Warp echoes and biological energy signatures during disengagement... suggests proactive avoidance," Valerius stated flatly. "They are not destroyed. They are not sated. They are fleeing." He paused, the pause amplifying the weight of his next words. "They fear something. Something... Warp-born. Not a predator. A contagion."
A chill rippled through the bridge crew. The Shadow in the Warp, the psychic null unique to the Tyranid fleets that stifled astropathic communication and blinded navigators, feared this?
Sister Elara of the Adepta Sororitas, a Sancrosanct carrying the rare gift of psychic sensitivity and trained to interpret the tumultuous currents of the Warp, closed her eyes, a tremor running through her frame. When she spoke, her voice was hushed, full of dreadful certainty.
"The Magos Explorator is correct. The psychic void left by the Hive Mind's retreat is being filled by something else... something profoundly disturbing. The warp signature left behind by Fulgrim still burns across the psychic wind. The Hive Mind recoils from it."
Fulgrim. The Phoenician. Traitor-Primarch, Daemon Prince of Slaanesh. His recent, devastating incursion elsewhere in Segmentum Pacificus had left scars on reality itself. The whispers of his passage, of his twisted perfection and soul-rending sorrow, had reached even this distant front. That his psychic residue, the sheer wrongness of his presence, could repel the Tyranids was a terrifying testament to the depth of his corruption.
A figure moved from the shadows at the edge of the command bridge – tall, radiant even in the dim light, his presence a beacon of hope and sorrow. Sanguinius, the resurrected Great Angel, stood with a contemplative air, his gaze fixed on the retreating void-whales on the main display. He had faced the Tyranids before, countless ages ago, and he knew their relentless nature intimately. His voice, though melodic, carried the weight of millennia of conflict.
"The Shadow in the Warp blinds the spiritual sight, chokes the psychic pathways," Sanguinius mused, his golden halo casting ephemeral light. "It is an absence, a hunger made manifest. Yet, it seems the Shadow in the Warp fears the true shadows." His eyes, pools of mournful gold, seemed to look beyond the data, into the heart of reality itself. "The things that dwell in the deepest dark, the things that feast on the very soul... Perhaps even the Great Devourer finds such fare... unpalatable."
The temporary reprieve felt less like salvation and more like the drawing of a fearful breath before a plunge into colder, deeper waters. The Tyranids were gone, yes. But what had scared them away?
Later, in a secluded chamber far from the clamour of the command deck, Commander Volkov, the ranking Imperial Navy officer of the Battle Group, faced Captain Thalon Merion of the Ultramarines. Thalon had arrived as part of the strike force that rescued Aurora's Folly, and his leadership had proven steady in the wake of impossible revelations.
Volkov, a veteran hardened by decades of void warfare, cut to the chase. "They're gone. Just... left. By the Emperor, I've never seen anything like it." He looked at Aang, who stood nearby, his expression a mix of relief, confusion, and weary preparedness. "Is this the end of it? Has your war followed us here?"
Aang's eyes, usually bright and alert, held a distant, troubled look. He didn't offer false comfort. "This isn't the end. It's only the crack in the dam."
He didn't elaborate, but Volkov saw the understanding dawn in Aang's gaze, a knowing that went beyond tactical analysis. Aang felt the Warp. He felt it growing unstable again, not just due to the lingering, noxious residue of Fulgrim's passage, but because the very fabric of reality remembered. Remembered the impossible return of the Great Angels, of Sanguinius and others. Remembered the sheer, raw power they represented, power that resonated across dimensions, leaving ripples that destabilized the fragile veil between the Materium and the Empyrean. The return of Primarchs, loyalist or traitor, was a cataclysmic event, and its consequences were only just beginning to unfold. The Tyranids, sensitive to the discordant hum of the galaxy, were merely the first to recoil from the growing storm.
Deep in the cold, lightless void between stars, hidden behind veils of psychic static and reality deviations, the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim knelt.
He was before the throne of his patron, a monstrous, ever-shifting edifice constructed from impossible angles, adorned with countless staring eyes, draped in psychic silk spun from mortal despair, and lined with row upon row of glistening, razor-sharp teeth. The will of Slaanesh pulsed around him, a symphony of forbidden sensations, demanded perfection, and exquisite agony.
Fulgrim, the once-beautiful Phoenician, now a serpentine horror of muscle, daemon-flesh, and shimmering scales, bowed his magnificent head. He had returned from his latest foray, a confrontation with one of his hated brothers. He had not achieved the desired outcome.
He whispered into the hungry void, his voice a sibilant caress, laced with a perverse satisfaction that transcended defeat.
"I failed to kill him. His light... it endures, infuriatingly so." A shudder, not of despair, but of anticipated pleasure, ran through his form. "But I tasted his sorrow. The depth of his grief, the agony of his return to a broken galaxy... Yes. And it was... delicious."
The unseen throne pulsed in silent agreement. The Tyranids were a momentary disruption, a mere pestilent hunger. The true feast was just beginning. The Great Game had new, powerful pieces on the board, and the Prince of Pleasure intended to savour every moment of their despair. The galaxy held its breath, unaware that the brief silence was merely the prelude to a symphony of pain composed by gods and performed by Primarchs.