Deep within the warship, the Primarch's private chamber lay steeped in deliberately maintained, almost absolute darkness.
There was no conventional lighting, no starlight through observation windows. Even the faint standby glow of the Cogitator array had been deliberately blocked.
At the center of that pure darkness, Corax sat as still as a mountain.
He still held the posture he had assumed during the battle on the lava planet. His armor remained stained with uncleared beast fluids, cooled to a dark brown, and ash, giving off a faint smell of sulfur and scorching.
But he was utterly unaware of it. All his senses, all his will, his entire being were focused on the open palm of his right hand, encased in its metal gauntlet.
Above his palm, the Eye of Sherron floated silently.
The fist-sized crystal, an irregular polyhedron suffused with a deep, shifting blue sheen, emitted its own cold, tranquil, yet infinitely alluring glimmer in the absolute darkness.
Its light did not illuminate its surroundings. Instead, it seemed to devour what little light remained, forming a deeper, distorted halo of darkness around itself.
Within the crystal, its ever-changing facets slowly opened, closed, and rotated like living pupils. Every minute shift in angle seemed to reflect some distant, indistinct, constantly changing fragment of spacetime: nebulae being born and annihilated, glimpses of civilizations rising and falling, indescribable geometric patterns shattering and reforming.
Corax's ink-black eyes remained fixed, unblinking, on the artifact in his palm, imbued with the powers of "prophecy" and "omniscience."
There was neither appreciation nor curiosity in that gaze, only an almost obsessive scrutiny, the resolve of a gambler facing his final stake, and the trembling blend of desire and fear of someone about to open Pandora's box.
For Bella, he needed this power. He needed to "see."
Slowly, he