Shadow of the Throne, Primarch's Office.
Nimrod leaned back against the Throne, his gaze sweeping over Phall's four Magi.
Phall's loyalists had suffered a brutal purge. Only the four Magi before him remained.
"Lord Nimrod, your descendants told us that you would forgive our crimes."
"On Phall's behalf, we surrender to you unconditionally."
"We will obey all your orders and atone for the crimes we have committed."
Nimrod gave a slight nod. "I accept your surrender—"
He abruptly rose to his feet and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window.
Light and shadow flickered within his obsidian-like eyes as his gaze pierced the void and turned toward the surging kaleidoscopic radiance.
Amid the churning Aether tides drifted a gigantic heap of corpses, like a pearl formed from sorrow.
His gaze passed over the Space Hulk and fixed upon the masses of shadow emerging from the Warp rift.
Razor wings blotted out the sky as they circled a midnight-blue warship.
A familiar evil presence seeped faintly from within the vessel. It existed in both reality and the Warp, compressed within the Voidship by some peculiar force.
Be'lakor.
[Hmm—those Space Sharks have been searching the eastern galaxy for traces of the Relic Fragment.
It fell into the hands of the Night Lords and was used as a medium to enter reality.
But how did he descend and remain in reality?]
Nimrod frowned slightly. Though the boundary between reality and the Warp had grown increasingly blurred with the rise of Chaos, allowing Daemons such as Kairos to gradually enter reality, such arrivals had all required long-term schemes or massive sacrifices.
Yet aside from the worlds centered around Saramas, most worlds in the Ghoul Stars were sparsely populated, with only several hundred thousand inhabitants at most.
[*Be'lakor descended into reality so quickly, and Alpharius did not