After another dozen or so minutes of flight, golden light streaked like a comet's tail across Terra's barren, fractured landscape, overdeveloped and then abandoned.
Below lay an endless expanse of scarred earth, utterly reshaped by the Unification Wars and even earlier catastrophes.
Twisted metal skeletons had once been cities. Dry riverbeds lay like wrinkles in the earth, and dust-covered plains stretched as far as the eye could see.
At last, Lorgar slowly descended, hovered, and then landed in a region that seemed especially empty, deathly still, and devoid of life.
This place was barren in a different way from the dried seabed they had visited before. An even layer of gray-white fine sand and dust covered the ground, with scarcely a protruding rock or patch of vegetation in sight. Only scattered, half-buried fragments of metal or composite material remained, their original forms unrecognizable, like the weathered, decaying bones of some enormous beast.
"This is the place." Lorgar's voice rang out with exceptional clarity in the absolute silence.
He looked around, his golden eyes carefully examining every inch of ground and every stretch of the horizon.
"The coordinates match exactly."
Anna stood beside him without speaking immediately.
The fine streams of data glimmering in her eyes seemed to move faster, as though she were repeatedly comparing the barren scene before her with her stored coordinates, calibrating them, and attempting to activate deeper associated memories.
She tilted her head slightly, a rare, almost bewildered look in her eyes.
"Here?"
Lorgar looked at her, seeking confirmation again.
All he saw was boundless desolation. Far away, shattered building remnants stood like gravestones on the horizon. Nearby, there was nothing at all—not even enough to call ruins, only earth worn smooth by windblown sand.
At the precise point indicated by the coordinates, there were no