733.947.M30 – Eremus Gate
When we recovered the orders from the dead fingers of Keeper Andropolous, it was no longer a matter for debate. By writ of the 11th Legion, I am the ranking officer of this expedition. Sergeant Kallin of the Imperial Fists accepted it without protest; that is his way. The others followed suit. The Imperium does not run on consent but on obedience, and the chain of command is sacred.
Still, I find myself wondering what the Dragon would think—his youngest son, barely into his Black Carapace, now commanding a flotilla on the edge of the known galaxy. But it is as the Dragon wills it; I am what I am by design, not accident. He put me here because this is where I am needed.
The return to Eremus Gate took only eight days of ship-time—three weeks sidereal. A smoother journey than any before. The warp itself seemed… acquiescent. It bent to our course rather than fought it, as if our passage had been prewritten. I do not like that thought.
The Ashen Promise led the way, with Iskandra at the helm. The Ashen Daughter followed, now my flagship, its new navigator—a dour woman pressed into service at Port Helikos—grappling with her unfamiliar station. The Black Comet took the rear. Three ships, one purpose. A fleet in name, if not yet in function.
The voyage was spent in relentless drilling. Less than a third of the men were true voidsmen; the rest were recruits, conscripts, or whatever the press gangs had dragged from the stations of Helikos. We lacked servitors, specialists, everything but muscle. Our only abundance was in ground troops—three regiments of Auxilia, one of them armored. The decks rang with shouted orders and clanging boots. The men are raw, but the sound of discipline is beginning to take hold.
When we reached Eremus Gate, I called a council of war in the strategium. Every Astartes sergeant, every shipmaster, every regimental colonel, every navigator, and the Magos himself attended. It lasted for hours. I said little at first. It is better to listen, to take the measure of the men who would follow me.
Some saw only doom ahead: a reckless thrust into the dark that could swallow us as it had the fleets before. Others saw destiny—a chance to carve out a new Imperium among the lost stars. All agreed that the Cindral Expanse was no longer a rumor but a fact, and that duty compelled us to press forward.
Then Sergeant Pheron of the Alpha Legion, ever the serpent, turned his gaze upon the Magos. “Tell us, Rhadamanthine,” he said, “is there something you wish to share with your comrades? Or must we guess at the purpose of this crusade?”
The room chilled. I had wondered the same, but Pheron had the temerity to say it aloud.
The Magos’ vox-grille clicked. His voice came out like steam from a furnace. “You wish to know the truth? Very well. The Cindral Reach has been under observation by Mars for many long years. The Fabricator-General himself commanded it. All previous attempts to breach the Reach have failed—Imperial and Mechanicum alike. Until now.”
He paused, letting the murmurs settle. “What lies within,” he continued, “is of the Dark Age of Technology. Perhaps older. Krypteria, the lost world, lies at its heart—a place of impossible design. Every trace we have found suggests that it once held secrets capable of unmaking worlds or remaking them.”
He looked at me then. “You have seen the signs, Brother Tyndarios. You know of the entity the locals call the Patron. You have witnessed what it can do—corrupt men, speak across the void, drive ships to madness. The eight silver vessels that appeared at Droskael may be its servants… or its hunters. We do not know. What we do know is this: we can no longer turn away.”
His augmetic eye flared. “We are not conquerors alone. We are explorers. We must not simply burn what we do not understand.”
The council ended with that. No one dared contradict the Magos when he spoke with the authority of Mars. But as we filed out, I saw in the eyes of many the glint of unease. Knowledge is power, yes—but power of what kind?
805.947.M30 – Eremus Gate
Weeks passed in disciplined routine. The fleet learned to breathe together. Gunnery drills, boarding exercises, convoy formations. We hunted down two of the three ork raiders that had fled when the Rok was destroyed. One was impaled by the Ashen Daughter’s lances, its green fire guttering out into black. The other we cornered with the Promise and Comet, driving it into a fragment field and shredding it until the void swallowed the debris. The third vanished, perhaps destroyed, perhaps hiding. Orks do not hide. Fran Kel tells me it is gone. Does he, too, gaze into the flames, or is his manner of his fortelling different?
It was near the end of that campaign that I received an invitation from Iskandra to dine aboard the Daughter. A curious luxury in the midst of war, but not unwelcome. She had been invaluable, and I owed her the courtesy.
The evening was well-prepared: soft illumination, chamber music played by servitors, fine wine that tasted faintly of nostalgia. She spoke of the warp as a living sea, of how it had grown calm, almost… listening. I told her she should not mistake silence for peace. She smiled at that—sadly, as though she knew it to be true.
Then her majordomo arrived.
Severin Klay, ever the polite ghost of the Societas Solis, bowed and asked for a word. His manner was grave. Iskandra excused herself with a knowing look; I suspect she had arranged the meeting.
Klay began with a confession: he was not merely her steward. He was, he said, a helot of the 11th Legion, placed aboard by design. And more than that—a servant of the Ordo Chronos.
The name meant nothing to me. He explained.
The Ordo was not of this age, nor perhaps of any age. Its purpose was to guard the continuity of time itself. Time, he said, was not immutable but fragile, easily warped by the tides of the Immaterium. Travel through it was possible—barely—but each incursion rippled outward, threatening to unravel causality itself. The Primarch of the 11th had helped found the Order, alongside others whose names Klay did not speak. Their task: to correct disturbances before they spread, to ensure that history remained intact.
Had I not already journeyed through time, I might have laughed. Then he produced the device—a silver cylinder etched with sigils that burned the eyes to look upon. The Chronomatograph, he called it. A tool that could measure a thing’s “inconstance”—its degree of deviation from the prime timeline. Its level of reality.
He demonstrated. The readings for my own ship, the Promise, were steady and strong. The crew, real. Then he tested a servitor taken from the Daughter. The readings fluttered and dimmed, as though the machine were half a ghost. The Daughter itself—less real still. A shadow of a ship from another time.
According to Klay, when the Ashen Daughter traveled backward through the warp to Port Helikos, it had not truly returned to the past, but created a reflection of it—a splinter of the universe where events diverged. The Port Helikos we had visited, the new recruits we had taken on, even much of the fleet’s crew—were all from that reflection. Real enough to touch, but not of the prime strand of reality.
His conclusion was grim: if the Daughter or those “echoed” souls ever tried to leave the Reach, they would tear open a temporal wound large enough to unmake the boundary between materium and immaterium.
He looked to me, eyes steady. “We must go deeper, Lord Tyndarios. To the source. To Krypteria. Destroy the Patron, and perhaps time itself will heal.”
I studied him for a long moment. His words rang like madness, yet there was the same cold conviction in his gaze that I have seen in my brothers before a doomed charge. I believed him.
I told him that if the Primarch himself had deemed time worth guarding, then the 11th would see the duty done.
Klay inclined his head, as if he had expected no less. “Then,” he said, “our true work begins. But first, I would ask that you accept this.” He held out an ornate syringe, filled with a pale blue liquid that danced like dark flame. "Your reality readings are impeccable, My Lord, but this will ground you even further. Do you accept?"
I held out my hand.
The warp is calm. The fleets are ready.
Beyond the Eremus Gate, the Reach awaits.
And somewhere within its burning heart, Krypteria calls our names.
Draco vult.
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