There was no light in the depths of the Warp.
The Shadow of the Emperor slowly emerged in that barren, maddened region. The flagship, once torn open by Lorgar's power and burned full of holes by golden psychic energy, had returned.
Warp tides churned around it, as though an invisible hand were cradling the hull, stitching it back together and dragging it once more into those eternal shadows.
Corax's reconstruction began in the ashes.
The moment Lorgar's knife-hand strike had shattered him, his consciousness had splintered into a thousand fragments, scattered throughout the Warp.
Now those fragments sensed a force pulling at them. The first thing Corax felt was bone-the sharp pain of his skeleton being rebuilt, as though someone were driving iron nails into his spine one by one.
Then muscle fibers grew like vines from nothingness, winding around the skeleton, squeezing, tightening, and filling it out inch by inch.
Finally, a layer of black carapace adhered to his skin, connecting tendons and nerves. The entire process felt like a dismembered soul being forced back into a freshly forged vessel, one that still bore the scars of Lorgar's golden psychic energy.
Those burns were etched deep into his soul. Every breath carried that lingering pain.
Corax opened his eyes again on the bridge of the Shadow of the Emperor.
The first thing he saw was the torn ceiling overhead. Exposed conduits pulsed like bare blood vessels in the faint light of the Warp.
He slowly rose from the floor, his joints grinding like rusted hinges being forced open.
He looked down at himself. His body had recovered, and dark brown Chaos energy had filled the cracks in his carapace.
The Warp had stitched this shell back together for him, but Corax could still feel the remnants of Lorgar's power