The fleet reached the edge of the star system forty-eight hours later.
The system had no name.
It lay on the eastern fringe of the Milky Way, enveloped in a slowly rotating cloud of dark matter.
The edges of those clouds gave off a faint, dark red glow, like a living carapace that covered the entire star region and breathed slowly.
Those dark red lights flickered slowly in the churning void, each flicker leaving fine cracks across the star chart as it gradually took shape.
Guilliman stood on the flagship's bridge, his gaze passing through the slowly rotating dark matter cloud to settle on the green storm gradually taking shape.
The storm was larger than he had expected.
The slowly gathering Ork warships were like driftwood caught in a whirlpool, their outlines gradually deforming, twisting, and merging within the storm.
The ships' hulls passed through one another, overlapping and joining together, their green metal shells reconfiguring themselves in ways that defied every prediction.
The churning green points of light slowly converged in the same direction, forming something larger and more complex than any Ork before it.
At the center of the storm, a slowly expanding green core pulsed like a heart, absorbing everything around it in ways that defied every prediction.
The Ork warships attempting to approach were slowly torn apart by the core's gravity, devoured, and converted into new energy.
The churning green points of light were slowly drawn into the core, compressed, and reshaped.
Magnus slowly emerged from a Warp projection, his single eye gradually lighting up amid the churning green storm.
That light spread in every direction, pushing the gradually forming pulses of psionic energy into more distant reaches.
His voice was quiet, but every word struck fine cracks into the slowly churning void. "It's more active