"Return to Terra."
The command was brief and clear, traveling across the vast Sea of Stars through the Imperium's most highly encrypted astropathic channels to reach the ears of every Primarch.
There was no explanation, no embellishment, only the unquestionable will those words carried.
Like a stone cast into a still lake, it sent ripples through the sprawling domains of the Imperium of Man, heralding some momentous turning point.
Responses surged like the tide, yet differed from one man to the next.
Except for two.
Corax, lord of the XIX Legion, and his Raven Guard sons, who moved like shadows, were effectively only intermittently in contact.
Their fleet signals flickered along the edges of the star charts, their movements as elusive as ghosts.
Deliverance's agonizing past and his self-imposed exile remained heavy chains binding the soul of this lord of shadows.
Though some unknown influence and the passage of time were very slowly healing his deepest wounds, the self-punishing solitude and covert operations in which both he and his entire Legion immersed themselves kept their connection to the wider Imperium tenuous.
To the vast mind of the Emperor, the Master of Mankind, the condition of Corax and his Legion was more like a complex psychological and strategic equation that had yet to be fully solved.
He neither compelled them nor showed excessive concern, as though tacitly permitting this peculiar "free rein," leaving the Raven Guard to continue undertaking those shadowy "missions" that only they could fully understand.
Perhaps, in the Emperor's plans, the Raven's "loss of contact" was itself part of his value.
The other absentee, the Khan of the White Scars, was absent for an entirely different reason.
A searing guilt that threatened to burn him alive.
The setback at Ullanor, the breach in the defensive line that had