Lorgar stared at the ornate Wooden Box in his hands, its emptiness painfully glaring. The clear impression of a spear in its velvet lining resembled a mouth silently mocking him.
The anticipation and excitement that had boiled within him seconds earlier now felt as though a bucket of ice water had been dumped over his head.
"Uh..."
In the end, all his churning emotions became a short, almost meaningless syllable squeezed through his tightly pressed lips.
He raised his head and looked at Anna beside him, his golden eyes full of questions.
Anna, however, seemed exceptionally calm, as though she had expected the box to be empty, or at least was not surprised.
Her blue eyes swept over the empty indentation, then turned to Lorgar's speechless face. In her distinctive, calm voice with its metallic timbre, she said:
"Across such a long, chaotic history, filled with plunder and forgetting, it's perfectly normal for a 'thing' like the Spear of Longinus, whose legendary and practical value are both beyond measure, to be lost, stolen, hidden away, or simply crumble to dust in some unknown corner."
She spread her hands, her gesture carrying the indifference of someone who had seen through the fickleness of time.
"Think about it. From the 'age of myth,' when it might have existed, through the Dark Age of Technology, then the Unification Wars, all the way to the founding of the Imperium... how many civilizations rose and fell? How many powers fought for supremacy and collapsed? How many secrets were deliberately buried or accidentally lost?"
"It was like a jewel too dazzling for its own good, destined to attract endless greed, fear, and possessiveness, rising and sinking in history's hidden currents until it finally vanished into some whirlpool that wasn't even recorded. Having the box and coordinates