The Forgebreaker did not need to fall a second time.
The long-building wave of Chaos psychic energy that had been gathering in the ancient hall since before Nolan had arrived dispersed in the moments after the blow, bleeding out of the air like heat from a forge chamber that has been sealed and abruptly opened: not dramatic, not slow, simply gone. The specific oppressive pressure it had carried against walls and floor and the minds of the living receded until what remained was the ordinary silence of a large enclosed space with a great number of bodies in it.
Azariah Kyras died in the battle-barge he had commanded for three decades, aggrieved and reduced, his ambitions unachieved.
Nolan stood over what remained and exhaled.
He thought, briefly, about the full arc of the thing. Even if the ascension had succeeded, even if the accumulated deaths of an entire sector had been sufficient fuel and a Daemon Prince of Khorne had emerged from the ceremony, the result would not have been the triumph Kyras had imagined. A Chief Librarian, a practitioner of psychic arts, pledging himself to the Blood God: that particular contradiction did not go unnoticed by certain interested parties in the warp. There was a planner of considerable influence who kept careful track of such things, and his servants, the great daemons with the wide wings and the layered eyes, had a particular enthusiasm for correcting embarrassments of precisely this variety. Kyras would not have enjoyed the attention. The ambition to become the most powerful Daemon Prince under Khorne would have ended, one way or another, in the attentions of something that found the notion deeply amusing.
The sound of his power armor carried through the hall as he walked to where Orion and Gabriel had come to their feet.
The Chief Librarian's damaged arm was still held carefully, the angle of it telling him what the pain tolerance of an Astartes would not: something displaced, working against compensation rather than freely. His eyes were clear. The psychic reserves that Kyras had been systematically depleting were already beginning to rebuild behind them. Gabriel had not lowered his warhammer. He stood looking at the space where Kyras had been with the particular stillness of a man whose mind was processing faster than his body had yet caught up.
Nolan checked them both directly and briefly. Injuries that could wait, injuries that could not. Both were on the tolerable side of the line.
"There's still work," he said.
There was.
The loyalist teams throughout the battle-barge had been operating continuously throughout the boarding action, and what remained of the corrupted crew and the Chaos-aligned Astartes in the lower decks required finishing. Nolan led Orion and Gabriel back into the ship's operational passages, and in the time that followed, the Omniscient Mystery was cleared from the breached hull sections inward until nothing remained that intended to resist.
When it was done, the survivors assembled in the battle-barge's main bay.
More than two hundred Blood Ravens, between Diomedes's Terminator veterans and the brothers who had boarded from Gabriel's strike cruiser and the frigates of the defecting fleet. They came in by twos and threes, arranging themselves in the formation of a Chapter that had lost most of itself in the space of a single engagement. They were quiet in the way that warriors are quiet when the fighting is finished and the full scope of what has just happened is still assembling itself into a coherent shape.
Nolan stood at the center of the bay and let them find their places.
Then, beginning with Diomedes at the front of his veterans and spreading through the formation behind him, they went to one knee.
The Warp storm over the Aurelia sector dissipated within hours of Kyras's death: the sustained coherent disturbance in the Warp unraveling as the will sustaining it ceased to exist. Long-range auspex across every ship in the fleet came back online as the interference cleared.
What it showed was an Inquisition fleet surrounding them on every approach vector.
The Inquisitor had arrived during the boarding action, drawn by Kyras's invitation, and had found a sector whose Warp storm had vanished, a Blood Ravens fleet in apparent internecine configuration, and a sector-wide broadcast claiming a Primarch was present. The combination had produced what it was designed to produce in a careful and experienced Inquisitor: full tactical deployment, weapons armed, and a clear statement over open channels that any unusual movement by Blood Ravens vessels would be answered with Exterminatus authorization.
Nolan opened the channel himself and identified who he was.
The conversation was brief on his end and required considerable careful listening on the Inquisitor's side. An Inquisitor who had survived long enough to command a fleet had done so by maintaining a finely calibrated skepticism toward claims of authority made from positions of military vulnerability. What persuaded him that the sector-wide broadcast was accurate was not the communication itself but what Nolan asked at the end of it: a meeting in person.
A Primarch who needed to explain himself to an Inquisitor was not the profile of someone fabricating the identity.
The meeting took place aboard the Inquisitor's flagship. Nolan crossed to it in his pale gold power armor, with Orion at his left and Gabriel at his right, and the Inquisitor who had been constructing a framework of skepticism across the approach from his command deck encountered the reality of a Primarch at close quarters and set the framework down. The particular quality of faith that had sustained this man through decades of the most unpleasant work the Imperium produced did not leave him uncertain about what he was seeing. His certainty, once revised, was absolute.
What followed was more complicated than the certainty.
By Imperial law and by the established practice of the Inquisition regarding Chapters found with Chaos corruption in their upper command structures, the Blood Ravens were subject to a two-hundred-year Crusade of Penance, conducted under Inquisition oversight and directed toward campaigns of sufficient difficulty to constitute meaningful atonement. The law was clear. It had been written in the consequences of precedents the Inquisitor had studied.
Nolan told him, as the Primarch present, to set it aside.
The Inquisitor found himself in the specific difficulty of a man who was simultaneously the most committed supporter of Nolan's authority in the sector and constitutionally unable to set aside two centuries of established law on the strength of that authority. The law existed because the alternative had been tried and had produced examples like the situation they were currently standing in the aftermath of. He could not in conscience simply set it aside, regardless of who was asking.
What he could offer was this: the timing of the Crusade's commencement was, in his considered judgment, a matter in which Primarch discretion was entirely appropriate. The Inquisition, in recognition of the authority Nolan represented and the gravity of what had just been accomplished in this sector, would exercise patience regarding when the obligation was discharged. Decades. Centuries, if that was what the Primarch's operational requirements demanded. The debt would remain on the record. The schedule would wait.
Nolan accepted this.
The ancient hall of the Omniscient Mystery was still being attended to when they returned: mortal servants carrying debris, Mechanicus personnel addressing the structural damage, the dead of both sides of the chapter's civil war receiving what consideration the current circumstances permitted. The hall had been through worse in its long history. It would hold.
Nolan stood before the assembled Blood Ravens and looked at them for a moment before he spoke.
He announced the elevation of Gabriel Angelos, Captain of the Third Company, to Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens.
The ceremony was brief because the circumstances did not permit elaboration, and because Gabriel was not a man who required elaboration. Nolan spoke the words. Gabriel received them with the expression of someone who had been carrying the weight of this possibility for a long time and recognized its arrival without surprise. Diomedes, standing at the front of the Terminator veterans, watched with the particular stillness of a man who has seen many things and has no objection to this one.
When the ceremony was concluded, Nolan spoke to the assembled Chapter.
The Crusade of Penance obligation remained. The practical way to address it was not to be where the Inquisition expected them to be. He intended to lead the Blood Ravens fleet to a different battlefield, one where the wars were harder and the requirement for capable Astartes was not theoretical. Any brother who was unwilling could say so before departure: the Chapter would leave them gene-seed stocks and enough vessels to maintain a presence. There was no dishonor in it.
He had partially described the nature of what lay ahead: the difficulty was real, and he did not conceal it.
When he finished, there was no objection from anywhere in the formation. Every Blood Ravens Astartes present had survived the civil war of their own Chapter. The prospect of a harder war under a Primarch was not what they were reluctant about.
In the days that followed, the Blood Ravens began readying the fleet for departure. Simultaneously, they worked to stabilize what could be stabilized in the Aurelia sector: civilian supply chains, the orbital stations that would need to function without the Chapter's direct presence, the communication networks that held the outer system together. It was not a complete solution. It was what was possible before the fleet had to move.
In parallel, Gabriel led Nolan through the battle-barge.
The equipment rooms were in the Omniscient Mystery's mid-sections: a series of chambers that had begun as standard secured armories and had expanded, decade by decade, into something considerably more expansive. Weapons and wargear from dozens of separate campaigns lay organized in meticulous inventory. Imperial armaments of every pattern, xenos technology from species the Blood Ravens had encountered across a century of campaigns, items of unclear provenance and still-unclear purpose, all of it documented in the careful and thorough hand of a Chapter that applied to the acquisition of objects the same energy it applied to the acquisition of knowledge.
Then came the sealed chambers.
The contents were documented there too. Nolan moved through the inventory with Gabriel and felt his eyes widening as the scope of it became clear: daemon weapons that the Blood Ravens had recovered across campaign after campaign and catalogued rather than destroyed, forbidden psychic texts and alien knowledge that carried its own specific weight, all of it carefully labeled, responsibly contained, and stored in the same vessel where more than two hundred Blood Ravens Astartes lived, trained, slept, and spent their days.
He stood in the doorway of the largest sealed chamber and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once, exactly how Azariah Kyras had happened.
For a Chapter with a home world, the sealed vaults were distant. The corrupting weight of what they contained was real, but it operated at a remove: in fortress basements and archive chambers far below where the Astartes themselves spent their time. For a fleet-based Chapter, those same vaults were on the same ship. The psychic residue of daemon weapons did not observe sealed doors. The accumulated pressure of forbidden knowledge did not diminish with proximity. That more than two hundred Blood Ravens had not followed Kyras into corruption was, from a certain angle, a considerably more remarkable fact than that their Chapter Master had. The Librarius, in particular, with the sensitivity that came with psychic training, had been operating under conditions that no established Imperium doctrine had been designed to manage.
He turned to Gabriel.
"I won't issue mandatory orders on how the Chapter collects, or on what it keeps," he said. He had his own history with the acquisition of things, and could not in conscience hold it against them as a practice. "But this arrangement changes."
What he proposed was practical rather than punitive. The daemon weapons and the forbidden psychic materials were to be transferred to a dedicated transport vessel and separated from the Omniscient Mystery entirely: sufficient distance to interrupt the passive contamination, sufficient security to keep the contents contained. The battle-barge itself was to receive psychic warding throughout: full seals on every inhabited deck, properly maintained. The ship's living spaces were to carry Emperor shrines and devotional texts in sufficient density to provide an ongoing counterweight.
It would not eliminate the source of the problem. The Blood Ravens were what they were, and they would continue to collect things, because that was as fundamental to their character as anything in their gene-seed. But the separation between the collection and the people who might be affected by it could be managed. And the psychic warding, combined with the devotional environment, would reduce what the distance alone could not address. The Chapter's Librarians, in particular, operating under those conditions over a long enough span, would not be repeating Kyras's trajectory.
Gabriel did not argue. He had walked through these same chambers at an earlier point in his career and was now seeing them differently.
Before the fleet began its final preparations for departure, an entire transport vessel had been loaded with material the Blood Ravens had been living alongside for longer than most of them had been Astartes.
Nolan stood at the viewport of his assigned quarters and watched the transport's running lights move into fleet position.
He found himself turning over the practical question he had not yet had time to properly examine. Moving individuals through a Warp portal of his own summoning was established and tested. Moving significant ground forces and heavy equipment was established and tested. Moving an entire Chapter fleet, with all its attendant mass and the specific complexity of Warp-engine interactions at that scale, was a different category of operation entirely.
He had never had cause to try it.
He did not know if it was within his capability.
He was going to find out.