The cold, deep-blue barrier slowly sealed shut, swallowing Angron and his vanguard fleet and utterly erasing the brief passage Lorgar had torn open. All that remained was the scorching, dazzling smear of golden blood on the Bridge of the Law of Faith, and the Primarch's heavy, labored breathing.
Yet the danger did not recede with the barrier's closure. Instead, it descended abruptly in another, more direct and more unsettling form.
Lorgar had only just forced down his roiling blood and the searing pain in his soul through sheer will, barely managing to straighten with a hand braced against the edge of the control console, when the tactical star chart and the main observation window simultaneously flashed glaring threat alerts.
It was not just the Law of Faith. Sensors aboard every ship in the Combined Fleet were screaming.
Lorgar raised his head. His golden eyes, slightly dulled by the overuse of psychic energy but still keen, pierced the observation window and fixed on the shadow slowly "emerging" from the deeper Void behind and to the side of the deep-blue barrier.
It was not a Ship in any conventional sense.
It looked more like the carcass of a living space leviathan, forcibly modified and encased in heavy machinery—or rather, a hybrid that had not yet fully died.
Its main body was an immense mass of sickly gray-white flesh, resembling a giant whale or some deep-sea worm.
But countless rusted, angular metal structures had been crudely welded and riveted onto that body, or had grown from it, constantly leaking dark-green coolant or fluorescent fluid.
Turrets, armor plates, energy conduits, antenna arrays like thickets of thorns, and strange organs resembling biological gills or excretory vents that continually opened and closed, belching steam.
In some areas, exposed bundles of enormous muscle or chitinous bones were