Without warning, a blinding light tore through the eternally gray sky of the moon Lycaeus.
It was a searing trail, like a falling meteor, yet its unnaturally straight course suggested deliberate guidance.
At the end of that light, a small drop pod, matte black and entirely unmarked, its design unlike anything made by the Imperium or common xenos, slammed down heavily and precisely into a barren hollow strewn with slag and metal shards, amid the final hoarse blasts of its retrorockets.
The pod embedded itself in the frozen soil, throwing up clouds of dust, then fell utterly silent. Only the dull red heat left on its surface by high-speed atmospheric friction slowly rose into the cold air.
He was Corvus Corax.
The future Raven Lord, master of the XIX Legion, the Raven Guard, a master of shadows and sudden strikes, and one of the Emperor's sons lost among the stars.
Yet now, the figure that stumbled out through the drop pod's impact-warped hatch was only a child.
He was small and thin, looking no older than a young human child.
His skin had the unhealthy pallor of someone long deprived of daylight, stretched tightly over slender bones that had yet to fully develop.
Wet, ink-black hair clung to his forehead, droplets of the pod's life-support fluid still hanging from its short ends.
A simple, nonstandard gray cloth wrapped his body, barely covering him.
Most striking were his eyes, large and pitch-black, like two cold, bottomless pools. Filled now with the pure bewilderment of arriving in an unfamiliar world and a trace of instinctive wariness, they surveyed the lifeless wasteland around him, a landscape of industrial waste, rusted metal, and leaden skies.
He remained silent, neither crying nor calling out, simply standing there like a pale statue that had just been