The instant Lorgar leaped through the breach in the warship, the cold and deathly stillness of the Void enveloped him completely.
But that silence lasted only a moment before giving way to the hellish sight of the Planet below and its violent energy turbulence.
Like a blazing golden meteor, he pierced the thin, scorching atmosphere, trailing intertwined psychic flames and holy light as he plunged straight toward the crumbling, wailing desert Planet.
On the Planet's surface, Saladin's will had long since awakened, and Lorgar's approach drove it into a fury. Before Lorgar had even cleared the upper atmosphere, the attacks came.
The boundless sea of dark-golden sand below seemed to churn beneath an invisible giant hand. Billions of tons of sand defied gravity and the laws of physics, surging upward like waterfalls in reverse, like countless furious Tentacles erupting from the earth to impale Lorgar as he fell from the sky!
Each sandy tentacle was dozens of meters thick and stretched tens of thousands of meters into the sky. Their tips were sharp as spears, their surfaces coursing with Saladin's dark-golden psychic radiance as they stirred deadly energy turbulence, intent on piercing Lorgar through!
Yet they failed to come within even a hundred meters of him.
Humm—
A low, pure resonance, imbued with a force of absolute repulsion, emanated from the enormous Golden Cross behind Lorgar.
The pure-white purification Force Field was no longer merely light. It became a ring of faintly rippling, intangible waves visible to the naked eye, spreading steadily outward with Lorgar at its center.
The instant those violently surging sandy Tentacles touched the purification Force Field, they were like ice crystals striking the blazing surface of a star.
The profane bonds and animating energy within the sand that formed the Tentacles, saturated with Saladin's psychic energy,