Silent King Szarekh stepped onto the silver-gray deck of the Apocalypse's bridge, its cold metallic texture utterly different from the living metal beneath his feet.
His hollow eye sockets swept over everyone on the bridge: Inquisitor Dracus and the Imperial soldiers burned with deep hatred and vigilance; the Space Marines gripped their weapons tightly, their power armor humming as it prepared for battle; Sanguinius and Horus watched him with blade-sharp gazes, carrying scrutiny and a faint, imperceptible pressure; and there was the venomous psychic fluctuation from the C'tan shard in Pandora's arms, one that nearly seemed ready to devour him—the towering hatred of millions of years of enslavement.
Yet none of those gazes caused the Silent King's core processor to fluctuate in the slightest.
His most urgent objective at that moment was the soul fragment in the container in his hand, faint as a dying candle in the wind.
Ignoring all hostility, he walked straight toward the throne area at the heart of the bridge.
Kesha sat upon the main throne, her presence as deep as the sea. Liang Bing stood beside her, glaring viciously at Kesha, her face full of defiance.
"Queen Kesha, Queen Liang Bing," the Silent King said in a cold, direct synthetic voice, reiterating, "this conflict was not of my own will. I had explicitly ordered Salas to halt the Pariah Nexus project, but he defied my command and insisted on activating it. The essence of the Pariah Nexus is the use of Blackstone Technology to construct a powerful anti-psychic field. Its original purpose was to repair the torn Warp rifts within the Milky Way and stabilize the structure of reality."
Liang Bing snorted. "Blackstone Technology? It's just a two-sided toy. It can suppress the Warp, but when activated in certain ways, it can also become