The meditation chamber was dark and silent. Its only light came from the smoldering incense in the brazier and the blue glow flickering in the eye sockets of the pale skulls. Through this ritual, he could sense the distant heartbeat gently pulsing within the Vast Ocean.
Mogtrakka could feel the violent psychic emotions of the twin gods surrounding him, their roars entering the chamber through the opening and closing jaws of the skulls around him.
Farther away, hundreds of millions of souls sent forth hollow voices through the mist of the Vast Ocean.
Some were mournful, some angry, and some sought comfort.
Yet every soul carried a profound sense of grief.
It was a burden that death could not end, and a heavy weight pressing upon the shoulders of every living thing in the galaxy, whether at one end of the endless cycle or the other.
Mogtrakka had known this long ago.
The truth about the void and the galaxy.
Yet as he grew older, expressing that knowledge and those truths became increasingly difficult.
Orks appeared immortal in principle, but nothing was truly eternal. The long years had inflicted indelible damage upon his mind and soul, forcing him to use puppet doubles to disperse his psychic strength.
Lately, his dreams had become ever more frequent. He often dreamed of the wars of that ancient age—cruel wars, fanatical wars, and the mighty figures who had passed away.
But he could no longer remember their names or titles. He only felt a voice urging him to return to that battlefield, a battlefield swept to its end by the torrent of time.
He seemed increasingly out of place in this new age.
Only he knew this. The tens of thousands of years that had passed had made him more and more melancholic.
The