One minute before Horus received word that the Fourth Legion's regiment had lost control of the Xenos Empire's capital world.
A meteor plunged through the atmosphere toward the surface.
The regiment left behind on the capital world was constructing a military fortress in preparation for colonizing the world afterward.
The Regimental Commander, who had much in common with Perturabo, was planning how to make the fortress look more aesthetically pleasing.
His adjutant hurried over and pointed at the sky.
The Regimental Commander looked up and saw the rapidly falling meteor.
"Just a meteor." The Regimental Commander patted his adjutant on the chest, then lowered his head to continue his design.
When the Regimental Commander looked up again, using buildings and conspicuous terrain as references to consider the fortress's scale, he suddenly realized that the meteor in the sky had vanished.
When he had first seen it, the meteor had still been high, high in the sky. Yet in the blink of an eye, it was gone.
The Regimental Commander narrowed his eyes and tried to find the meteor elsewhere in the sky.
As his gaze swept back and forth across the heavens, his vision was suddenly filled by a colossal silver humanoid creature.
The swinging Scythe was the last thing the Regimental Commander saw.
At the same time, after recovering from their shock, half the Astartes on the other side of the capital world discovered that they had been sent into dimensional space.
This automatic emergency teleportation could only have activated because more than half of a regiment's Astartes had been killed or wounded in far too short a time.
No one knew what had happened.
Except for the xenos on the planet.
At the fortress site chosen by the Regimental Commander, the xenos gathered, their twisted limbs bent as