Echo settled into the pool, while the rest of the party filed into the chambers below so he would be free to work. Ahriman was the last down. The Astartes had seemed reluctant to leave, professional curiosity drawing him to witness the results of Echo's attempt, but in the end prudence won out.

The deck shuddered as Echo engaged the ship's systems, priming the warp engines. There was the familiar snap as the gellar field activated, and the increase in pitch as energy built in the reactors. The vox started to go off, inquiries coming in from the rest of the fleet as to why the ship was preparing to translate, especially so close to a planet's gravity well. The shaking of the deck grew more intense, the warp drives working to tear a hole in the fabric of reality. Or what passed for reality, inside the engine. Lights flickered on, the ship's vox grilles piping litanies of faith throughout the vessel, drowning out the demands of the crew. The walls began to rime over, frost spreading downwards from the ceiling as the temperature in the room dropped precipitously.

Spoiler: Echo Only
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Echo found the beacon of the Astronomicon, though it was distant and hard to see, the Emperor's light struggling to pierce the darkness he found himself in. He was in a bubble of calm, the eye at the heart of a great storm, the Empyrean raging all around him, but unable to approach. There was something strange about the whole experience, something he had never encountered before. It felt ethereal, dreamlike, the normal ebb and flow of the warp overlayed onto something else. When the ship translated, he felt a shift, a lurch in his chest that caused his stomach to drop. He turned the ship towards the center of the eye, seeking the darkness at its heart...

and all at once, he saw everything. The threads of a thousand paths through the warp, through possibility, through time itself. The warp was filled with ghosts, ships and souls flickering in and out of his vision more quickly than he could track. The engines of the ship hummed, the deck vibrating beneath him. He felt it, and knew it was not real. The engine was producing possibilities, futures that might have come to pass, tracing back and forth through their paths and finding points of divergence to latch onto.

If he had succeeded at his first voyage, the thread would split, his fate diverging from the Absalom dynasty, and he would never have been here.
If Hannabel had visited Scintilla, and been captured by the Stalker, she would have come back changed when they rescued her, the eyes looking out from behind her mask no longer her own.
If Anika had turned off the ancient ice machine, awakening the Yu'Vath, there were a hundred branching paths all ending with the Manticore's Sting reduced to glittering shards in the void, the last hope of the dynasty snuffed out like a candle.
If, if, if...

It went on and on, thousands of timelines, millions, tearing into shreds and bleeding away into vapour. It threatened to overwhelm him. Yet now he had seen the pattern behind the chaos, the incombrehensibly vast weave of past and future. He understood the purpose that drove the minds responsible for constructing the Engine. He understood what it was capable of, and what it had been reduced to. He felt pressure building behind his eyes as the patterns seared themselves into his mind, the aetheric calculus that drove all of those thousand timelines. A skilled enough user would have been able to gather the strands, build them into a net, and dredge the river of time. To dial in a future, and physically explore the ramifications of decisions before they were made. Collapse the decision tree into a distinct realm.

Perhaps even do it in reverse. Change a decision in the past, change the vision of the future granted by the engine. The energy requirements of such a voyage would be enormous, and Echo knew that the builders of the Engine had never attempted it. They might have observed the past, but they had never gone there, had never turned the great gears of their contraption in reverse. To try now, when the device was damaged, was likely madness.

And yet. It had already done it once, hadn't it? The anomaly that had carried them back to the Astropathic tower before the generators went dead and the installation turned into a tomb, that had been a creation of the Engine. An accident, one born from operation beyond its design parameters, its use and corruption by the malevolent force that had settled at its heart and co-opted its servants. Yet still its creation. The energy was there, he could feel it, the collected psychic emanations of years upon years of stolen potential, building up in cyclopean wraithbone capacitation arrays buried beneath the surface of the world. Once, this had been a mere divination tool, but now... now it was something else.


The ship translated to warp, the engines screeching, a whine that built on the edge of hearing. The walls buckled and shattered, the room vanishing in a maelstrom of light and sound, the fabric of reality melting away around them.

When it cleared, they were in a room similar to the Navigator's chamber, but constructed of arched wraithbone. The mirrors that lined the walls were still there, but their surfaces were dull and nonreflective. The pool was gone, Echo lying in a heap on the floor. The navigator had a splitting headache, but was awake and alive.

There were no doors, and no stair back downwards. Also new were three high lecterns, each occupied by an indistinct shape, a whispy suggestion of peaked helmets and flowing robes. These regarded them selently, burning points of light where their eyes should have been. The center one leaned forwards, hands of smoke forming on the edge of its pulpit. It spoke, its voice strained and hoarse.

"Mon'keigh. Why have you come?"