After a few seconds of distraction, the faint flicker of emotion the news had stirred on Lorgar's face swiftly faded, cooling in an instant like a branding iron plunged into ice water.
Lorgar regained his usual, almost rocklike calm and gravity.
Beneath that calm, however, a torrent of thought was analyzing everything at unprecedented speed.
Calas Typhon was dead.
That fact was like a pebble dropped into a deep pool, sending complex and dangerous ripples through the picture of the future he had constructed as a "transmigrator."
First, this was unquestionably good news. In Lorgar's fragments of memory from another time and space, filled with suffering and warnings, Calas Typhon was one of the key figures who had driven his Primarch, Mortarion, into Grandfather Nurgle's embrace, ultimately joining him there.
His death meant that an important, deeply symbolic "signpost" on the road to the decaying Garden of Nurgle, to betrayal and eternal putrefaction, had been uprooted ahead of time.
This greatly reduced the likelihood that, at some decisive dark moment in the future, the XIV Legion would slide wholesale into Chaos and become a plague army under Nurgle's command.
Viewed from that angle, Calas's death was a welcome loose thread in Fate's tapestry, one that veered toward a "better" outcome.
But it was also, without question, bad news.
A deeper, more unsettling realization followed.
The future was gradually departing from the "script" in his memories, slipping beyond the control he believed his "foreknowledge" gave him.
Lorgar knew perfectly well that, aside from his Primarch's body and power, his greatest and most secret "cheat" was his knowledge of everything that would happen in the future.
He knew about the Horus Heresy, about Horus, about which brothers would fall, which worlds would burn, and the catastrophe and long darkness that awaited the