My plans were made, and everything I had to do in the Vallia system was proceeding smoothly. Only checking up on Vallia itself was left on my to-do list. Still, I didn’t think that would be much of an obstacle at all; I had felt the spirit of the planet during my short, sneaky visit there a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t powerful enough to give me trouble. 

Everything was in order and proceeding well. Soon, I could head out and give myself and our new allies some more breathing room. Without any Custodes or the like, that too didn’t seem like all that troublesome. Maybe the Deathwatch would get in the way, maybe the Imperial Navy would resist and flail, but they wouldn’t be a true risk.

Of course, my life couldn’t be that simple. As they say, ‘Man plans, and God laughs’. In this case, I blamed the rotting skeleton, styling himself the God-Emperor of Mankind.

My Shadow in the Warp worked against me. It wasn’t really my Shadow, it was entirely made by the Tyranids I kept bound and spread out across the System, so while it shielded me from the Warp, it also clouded my vision of the deeper Warp. I could see Daemons mucking about near the surface, but the waters were deep, murky and unknowable beyond a point. 

Which is why I only noticed something emerging from the depths of the Warp, bubbling towards the surface, mere moments before I felt the veil separating realspace from the Immaterium ripple. 

I knew that, technically, the Shadow was no foolproof, nor an impregnable shield. Still, I also knew that it made even Greater Daemons unable to pass through the veil, or even just poke through and influence realspace. 

I wrote off the chance of anyone coming through it as extremely unlikely, even if my paranoia urged me otherwise. It wasn’t like I could do anything if someone could brute force it, so all I could have done was worry unnecessarily … but maybe I would have been paying more attention. Maybe I could have caught the intruder before they emerged into real space.

The method they used wasn’t brute force either. Realspace didn’t tremble and quake like it did when voidships emerged from the Warp. The veil merely rippled, like the surface of a still pond after someone threw a pebble into it. 

They weren’t large ripples either, and I doubted anyone besides myself and Valenith felt them. Selene was doing better now, but she was much more suited to the more direct applications of her psychic might. She was a bit of a brute, to be blunt, when it came to psychic talent at least.

Not that I would ever say it to her face.

The only other Psyker currently awake in the system was Zara, and she wasn’t all that powerful. Her senses just weren’t sharp enough. 

Firstly, in maybe a tiny bit of panic, I made sure the invader didn’t emerge near me to ambush me like the Deathwatch kill team. Then I quickly made sure neither Selene and my other friends — were they my friends? Did they count as friends? I wasn’t sure — were under assault.

Only after I was sure everyone of importance was fine, did I launch into investigating this anomaly. Firstly, I peered into the Warp, trying to track traces of the invader’s passing. There was certainly something there, but it felt like it was just out of touch, just a bit beyond the horizon, hiding. 

It faintly reminded me of the way the Webway felt, though cruder and much less adept at hiding from my senses. The Webway was impossible to sense if you weren’t absolutely sure it was there. 

After a minute — which was practically an eternity for me with my processing speed dialled up to the limit — I decided that I wouldn’t find what I suspected to be a hidden void-ship. Not without plunging into the Warp and starting to poke around myself, at least, which I had no intention of doing.

Instead, I decided to track the invaders themselves in realspace. I followed the ripples, faint and uncertain as they were, they led me towards … Vallia. Nothing more concrete than that. 

Not that I needed more than that. A Blink brought me into high orbit about the jungle planet. Vallia was a beautiful planet from this high up, an emerald gem. The whole of it was covered in swathes of thick jungles, even the seas and oceans were teeming with vicious plantlife. So much so that I couldn’t even see any colour other than shades of green when I looked down at it. 

My aura spread out, flowing around and through the planet. Information flooded my mind, more than any human could have parsed, much less comprehended, all at once. 

My mind held vestiges of humanity, but it was much more malleable. Even without subsuming some mind-cores to boost my primary mind’s processing power, I could feel my psyche stretch as needed to accommodate the titanic inflow of information. Bio-energy and soul energy flowed into me, granting me mental boosts as needed.

Had it been anyone else searching for the invader — or invaders — the Death World of Vallia would have been a prime hiding spot. Not only was it a hostile world teeming with murderous wildlife, but the planet’s spirit also acted to somewhat shroud any souls hiding within. 

Alas, I was built different. I didn’t go searching for souls or psychic signatures. What I did was catalogue every last living being on Vallia and check them for their connection to the collective consciousness. 

A single being stood out, a sole existence not connected to the collective. 

Smirking in triumph, I focused on the invader, finally getting eyes on them as the visual feedback reached me … and promptly grimaced. 

“Motherfucker,” I swore, sending a slew of curses towards that stinky golden skeleton on Terra. 

There he was, ten feet tall, covered in the fanciest ceramite power armour I had seen, tearing through a group of carnivorous plants that were trying to make a meal out of him. 

“Just when everything was starting to go so well,” I whined, lamenting the headaches I could foresee in my near future. I had the urge to kill something, but held myself back and took in a deep, calming breath. “Alright. Whatever. I can handle it! Totally.”

Once I was done pitying myself and lamenting my fate, I returned my focus to my invader and rethought my strategy. All my previous plans for dealing with him were thrown out, since they didn’t account for one simple thing.

He was a fucking Primarch. 

“Now then,” I said, the mock-cheer ringing fake in my voice even to myself. “Let’s go and find out what the fuck The Lion is doing on my new planet. This should be fun.”

At least the Tau had fucked off already, so I wouldn’t have to explain this to them. 

*****

**(A few minutes earlier)

**

Lion El’ Jonson, Primarch of the Dark Angels, trudged through the deep, shadowy forest. Before him floated a tiny pinprick of golden light, dancing through the air and illuminating his path. 

This was the longest he had spent in this strange forest realm, the furthest he had walked within. ‘Forestwalking’, as he had come to call his strange, newly discovered ability, was still mysterious to him. 

But one thing he knew was that it had something to do with his Father, that old man in the boat, fishing in a pond while four twisted predatory fishes circled him, was His manifestation.

It had to be. 

And that old man in the boat was the one to conjure this dancing golden light that led him into the depths of the forest, into shadowy corners and dark depths he had never walked before. 

He could cross stretches of space measured in Light Years in minutes while Forestwalking. These ancient forests so reminiscent of his old homeworld, had power beyond his understanding. 

So what did it mean when the light guided him further and further, when the minutes turned into hours? 

He was being led somewhere far away. It worried him, the dark part of the galaxy, the half cut off by the Great Rift, needed him. He had taken it upon himself to protect humanity from those who would prey on them in their hour of weakness, be they corrupt governors, lazy bureaucrats, incompetent military commanders or any of the more insidious horrors dwelling in the shadows. 

His sons needed him. He knew the tensions between the Fallen and the ‘loyalist’ Dark Angels. He hadn’t had the chance to meet with the latter group yet, having spent his time seeking out Fallen, judging whether they needed to be slain, or were worthy of becoming the Risen, with whom he fought against all who plagued the part of the imperium bereft of the Astronomican’s light.

He feared the Dark Angels, or what had become of them, would hunt his Risen while the latter went on with the quest he had been taken away from. He should be there, ready to unify the shattered legion into what it should have been.

Alas, when the Emperor calls, the Lion would always answer.

Wherever his Father needed him was far, and he had little idea how long this mysterious task would take.

Why now? He wondered. Up until now, you only led me to my Fallen sons. What could be so important? Where even-

The surrounding forests grew darker still, the branches curling to obstruct his path, vicious brambles seeking to bar his path. The small wisp of golden light pulsed once, and the obstruction vanished, evaporating into glittering dust. Then the forest shifted, and the Lion had been through this song and dance enough times to know what that

meant. He was back in real space; he had reached his destination.

His thought lingered on what he had witnessed, at the sight of something trying to bar his path. He knew the woods his Forestwalking took him into weren’t a real place, but a manifestation of the Warp. 

In that place, thoughts were as real and solid as walls and fortresses were built out of emotions. That wall of brambles was a representation of something, a barrier, most likely, trying to keep people out.

That all flashed through his mind in a blink, and he prepared himself for a less-than-warm welcome. He had never experienced his Forestwalking being obstructed, and he suspected he would not have been able to pass through the brambles without the golden light of his Father. 

He raised his alertness to the limit, his mighty shield, once wielded by his Father, the Emperor, held at the ready while the other grasped the hilt of his hissing Power Sword tightly. 

Not a full second after his re-emergence into realspace, his alertness paid off already. A creature lashed out at him from above, a thick vine covered in thorns snapped at him, aiming to wrap around his neck and saw through his armour.

His blade hissed through the air in a blink, blue arcs of energy dancing across its surface as it cut through the vine like a hot knife through butter. 

The Lion didn’t relax, he couldn’t, as a dozen more vines from all around snapped at him with a viciousness that indicated a need for vengeance. 

But plants never had a chance against the man who had once been called the Emperor’s Exterminator. He had fought the most wicked and powerful of mankind’s enemies. The Rangda and the ascended Khrave, and many others that could have contested Mankind’s claim for the stars. While his brothers fought the weaklings, the disparate human nations and the primitive Xenos, he had fought only the worst of the worst. 

He didn’t even break a sweat as he slaughtered the overgrown houseplant, taking some satisfaction in the fact that not a single thorn managed to so much as touch his armour. 

Of course, that was not the last of his foes. His Forestwalking has apparently dumped him in the middle of a thick jungle, overflowing with hostile flora and fauna. 

They had nothing on the Great Beasts of Caliban, his homeworld. And he had been slaughtering those mutated monstrosities since he could walk. These plants and animals were nothing.

Man-eating plants the size of tanks, vicious felines with scorpion-like tails, beasts the size of houses covered in rock-like hides. His shield broke their charge, reflecting the impact upon his enemies and his blade sliced through their mighty bodies without effort. It wasn’t his favoured blade, the one he had used during the Great Crusade and the Heresy, but it was the best one he could find within The Rock’s vaults.

He must have spent minutes lost in the frenzy of battle, relying on instinct and centuries of experience to slaughter these lesser beasts. They came at him with an eerie cohesion, almost reminding him of the relentless tides of tyranids, if only faintly. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because he was a stranger in this world, but they fought him, and not each other.

Predators and herbivores faced him together, beasts that should have been natural enemies now charging the alien among them, as if under the understanding that until he was killed, the natural order of things would be suspended. 

But even if they had a cohesion vaguely reminiscent of the Tyranids, these animals and bloodthirsty plants lacked the ability to truly harm him. They didn’t have the wicked scythes or boneswords of Hive Tyrants, they didn’t have bio-plasma that could melt through steel.

Even when a strike slipped through the Lion’s guard, when a jaw closed around his ankle, when a charge caught him across the shoulder, he remained unharmed. His armour held and protected him, and there was nothing that could so much as slow his relentlessly swinging blade. 

He fell into a practised rhythm, the slaughter almost turning into a chore as he began to wonder what could have been so important on this inhospitable Death World — because what else would a planet with a jungle this vicious be? — that he had been led here?

It couldn’t be another of his Fallen sons in need of redemption — or elimination, in the case of those who had truly fallen — there had to be one closer, and his Father never took much of an interest in that specific self-appointed mission of his. 

No, this had to be something more. Something more important, something that was worth leaving behind Imperium Nihilus. Every day he spent away, the people of the many worlds were beset by horrors. 

Yet, he still trusted his Father not to waste his time with chores and errands. 

What could it be then? 

He hoped to find out soon, because the clock was ticking. He didn’t have the luxury to take his sweet time. The people needed him.