The celestial body that continuously emitted something painful to the Warp was slowly disintegrating in the weightless void. The aura leaking from beneath it steadily contaminated the High Heavens.
From a Psychic perspective, the once-radiant High Heavens had become utterly black in Pluto's projection. Like a leak of deadly radioactive fluid, filthy currents eroded the Warp that had once shimmered with light.
Never before had such a blasphemous thing appeared within the High Heavens.
It was like a subterranean dweller seeing the sun with his own eyes for the first time, or someone born without a sense of smell catching the fermented stench of blood mixed with excrement for the first time. It was a physiological revulsion and terror—you had never seen such an existence, yet the soul in your marrow trembled at the sight of it.
That black, chaotic existence... that blasphemous, ravenous rift... it was a tumor upon the world, proof that fate itself was imperfect. A gap, a flaw, something vile and repulsive.
The beings that had been watching that region quietly turned their gazes away, trembling instinctively.
Guilliman knelt on one knee atop the altar. Blue-glowing blood still dripped endlessly through the hand clamped over his right eye.
This was also his first time "looking directly."
Shock spread through the primarch, only to turn hysterical moments later. He somewhat understood why that other old thing had been so shameless—because that existence—that black, blasphemous existence—
It far exceeded their imagination. Even though Guilliman had estimated it beforehand, facing it directly was still agony.
But even so... Guilliman straightened with a gasp. Even with such a powerful trump card on the other side, The Emperor had never intended for this game to produce a winner from the very beginning.
The Emperor's first move had aimed for mutual