Angron's breathing rasped heavily inside his sealed helmet like a broken bellows.
Curze stood motionless beside him. On his pale face, only his deep blue eyes burned in the shadows, fixed unwaveringly ahead.
Beneath their feet lay the wreckage of the Soul of the Yellow Sands' bridge deck. Broken ornaments, melted metal, and still-warm bodies—traitors and their own sons alike—littered the area.
But now, all these tangible, bloody traces of battle were being engulfed by something stranger and more ominous.
Saladin stood at the heart of that encroaching presence.
He was no longer purely biological. His body had become translucent, flowing with golden motes, as though the finest grains of sand had barely coalesced into his form.
Dark blood no longer flowed from his wounds. Instead, it became thin strands laced with gold dust, winding down from the corners of his mouth and through the cracks in his shattered armour. Even these turned to fine sand as they fell, merging with the golden domain spreading steadily beneath his feet.
Conventional attacks were useless.
Angron's great axe and Curze's claws could tear through adamantium. Bolts, melta, plasma...
Yet when these destructive energies struck Saladin's sandy body, or the silent Ancient Warriors formed from psychic sand standing beside him, they vanished like stones sinking into the sea.
An axe blade swept through, raising nothing but a cloud of sand before the shape immediately restored itself.
Energy blasts blew holes in the sandy bodies, but flowing sand surged in and sealed them instantly.
The laws of physics and the conservation of energy seemed to have been warped here, replaced by some deeper law.
Saladin did not even make any sweeping defensive movements.
He merely raised a hand slightly, and the enormous griffin beside him, formed entirely from flowing yellow sand, silently spread its