An extremely ancient yet feeble consciousness answered Lox's call.
It called itself the administrator of the Blackstone Fortress.
Through the mingling and exchange of consciousness, Lox came to understand the glorious past of this Blackstone Fortress.
The history of the Blackstone Fortresses far exceeded humanity's imagination. When the earliest fortresses were born, the Old Ones were still active throughout the galaxy. Those creators sowed the seeds of life, enlightened countless ignorant species, and constructed the Webway that spanned the galaxy.
To fight the C'tan, great enemies who were nearly omnipotent in the material universe, a group of Aeldari gods born from faith among the Aeldari war races created by the Old Ones built the Blackstone Fortresses.
Though the Blackstone Fortress where Lox now stood was not among the earliest, it was still an ancient entity that had fought the C'tan.
According to the hazy memories he saw, this Blackstone Fortress had once struck a C'tan embodying the concepts of "energy" and "burning" with its psychic vortex cannon.
It had also been gravely damaged by that C'tan's wrath, arriving in the Pacificus Sector amid Warp turbulence before falling into eternal slumber within an Aeldari Crone World.
Later Aeldari had attempted to repair it, but those efforts came to nothing with the destruction and demise of the Crone World.
"Can you break free from your restraints?"
After being worn down by the passage of endless time, this ancient consciousness had already become exceedingly weak. Then it had been corrupted and enslaved by an utterly terrifying force of Chaos.
Chains of Chaos bound the Blackstone Fortress's core consciousness, forcing it to do things it did not wish to do.
The source of that Chaos power was even more horrifying to Lox. Compared to it, Vashtorr seemed as harmless as an innocent white lotus.