"The Shadowseer!" Cawl shouted as his modified mechanical eyes zoomed in on the flickering silhouette atop the distant ridge. "By the Omnissiah, you xenos arrived just in time! What is the meaning of this interference?"
Hyladri, the Veilwalker, remained silent for a moment. Her masked gaze was not fixed on the Archmagos, but on Alexei, who stood like a grim sentinel amidst the carnage. To her psychic senses, the man was a void—an abyss that relentlessly devoured the future destinies of all living beings near him. No information could escape his nature; he was a black hole in the tapestry of fate.
"I have walked a thousand paths of the future, yet I have never seen a variable so bizarre..." Hyladri murmured, only to be jolted back to reality by a violent explosion. This was not the time for metaphysical contemplation. According to the shifting whispers of destiny, the sequence of events was still, however precariously, correct.
She addressed the Archmagos, her voice amplified by psychic resonance and translated directly into his auditory processors. "Follow me, Magos. There is an entrance to the Webway ahead. We cannot linger; we know the sacred purpose of your pilgrimage."
"Do not trust the word of a xenos!" Magos Kran interjected, his vox-grille crackling with static. "Have you forgotten Trazyn's 'assistance'? He played us for fools!"
Cawl hesitated. This was his primary concern. The cargo he guarded—the culmination of ten thousand years of labor—was the literal future of the Imperium. He could not afford to be led into an eldar trap.
"We know of the Armor of Fate," Hyladri spoke again, her tone urgent. "Its success requires our cooperation. This concerns the survival of the galaxy itself. In the face of the Great Rift, we are all prey."
"Trust her, Cawl! We don't have time to argue theology!" Alexei's roar came from the rearguard, punctuating the rhythmic clanging of his power blade. The Black Legion and the daemon host were multiplying by the minute. Though the arrival of the Ynnari had slowed the collapse of their line, they were still being drowned in a sea of filth.
Seeing his allies falling one by one and Alexei and the Living Saint holding the line against the Despoiler, Cawl made his choice. He signaled his Skitarii and began directing the convoy toward the path indicated by the Eldar.
Abaddon watched as the Mechanicus convoy, shielded by the Eldar Death Army, began to slip away. He repelled a combined strike from Alexei and Celestine, then turned to roar at his Chaos Lords. "Ignore these gnats! Force the breach! Do not let them reach the Webway!"
High above, the tattered remains of the Imperial fleet had returned, engaging the Black Fleet in a desperate, last-ditch effort to disrupt orbital targeting. The inability to launch a precise bombardment was driving the Warmaster into a frenzy of impatience. Abaddon lashed out once more, sending the Saint and Alexei tumbling into the snow. He loathed these two for their persistence, but this time, they did not rise to stop him. Instead, they retreated, their silhouettes vanishing into the blinding white of the storm.
The Imperial rearguard contracted, forming a tight ring around Cawl's cargo. Finally, with a deafening howl, a tide of Helbrutes and Daemon Engines breached the outer perimeter. Heldrakes shrieked through the frozen air, diving toward the Mechanicus ranks. Each shot from Cawl's Solar Atomizer melted a dragon instantly, but the sheer numbers were overwhelming. He looked at the approaching daemon horde and muttered a binary curse. "Damn it all!"
Alexei retreated to Cawl's side, his expression conflicted as he watched the roaring abyss of the daemon army. "If it's going to be like this..."
Saint Celestine slashed relentlessly at the leaping Warp-horrors with the purified Drach'nyen in her hand. Her Seraphim were being dragged down, their numbers dwindling with every passing second. They were still far from the Webway gate. Just as it seemed they would be overrun, the blizzard abruptly ceased, and the battlefield was pierced by tens of thousands of brilliant, white pillars of light.
From these beams emerged tall, golden-armored warriors and elegant, lethal war machines. They crashed into the daemon army like a golden reef holding back a tide of shadow. Dark-matter plasma fire formed an impenetrable curtain of light, accompanied by localized psionic storms that pulverized the daemon frontlines. For a heartbeat, both the Imperials and the Eldar stood paralyzed in awe.
Seeing the Black Legion attempting to rally for a second push, Alexei's eyes flashed with a fierce, golden light. "Fine! You want a war? I'll give you one!"
Two massive beams of white energy struck the mountaintop. From the light emerged two golden, four-legged colossi—towering, god-like machines of war that seemed to mock the proportions of reality.
An eerie silence fell as the giants hummed with power. Cawl looked up at the towering machines gleaming against the white peaks, his processors outputting incoherent binary. With a resonant boom, scorching beams of focused thermal energy swept the mountainside. Anything touched by the light—be it traitor, daemon, or the heavy iron of a Lord of Skulls—was instantly reduced to molten slag.
The snow vaporized; the very mountain began to crumble under the heat. The terrifying golden machines began a relentless advance toward the Black Legion. Alexei's face showed a brief flicker of pain—the energy crystals required for such a summons were rare and difficult to charge. "Why are mass-produced Colossi so damn expensive?" he grumbled to himself. He turned to the stunned crowd. "Hurry! While these 'strange aliens' are distracting the Legion, move!"
Cawl snapped out of his trance and urged the servitors forward, but his optical sensors remained locked on the alien walkers. "I have wandered this galaxy for ten millennia and have never seen their like. There is no record in the Great Archive of such a race."
The Living Saint remained silent. She felt a strange, haunting familiarity in those pillars of light. She glanced thoughtfully at Alexei, who was pretending to be as confused as anyone else.
Alexei sensed the scrutiny and quickly shouted, "Maybe Trazyn didn't leave! Maybe he pulled these out of his pocket dimension!"
"The probability is infinitesimal, and the cultural aesthetic is entirely wrong... besides, that abomination has no reason to be this helpful," Cawl muttered, though his servo-skulls were already recording every second of the combat. This was invaluable data on a new xenos power that clearly harbored a scorched-earth hatred for Chaos.
As the pressure lifted, the convoy's speed increased. Near the back of the column, Tarquill, commander of the Scythes of the Emperor, looked at the golden-armored warriors with a complex, unreadable expression. He looked toward Alexei, then lowered his head and hurried toward the gate.
The convoy finally reached the Webway portal. The battle on the slopes below continued to rage with celestial intensity. The three Eldar commanders were as baffled as the humans by the golden host. Hyladri's eyes were clouded with doubt; her ability to see the future was failing her, and she wondered if a being like Alexei was a savior or a harbinger of a different kind of end.
There was no time for questions. One by one, the survivors entered the shimmering rift. After the last warrior of the Ynnari stepped through, Yvraine took one long look at the golden army on the mountainside before sealing the gate.
As the portal vanished, the Protoss warriors began to dissolve into pillars of white light, returning to the void. The next moment, the structural integrity of the mountain failed. Thousands of tons of rock and ice collapsed, burying the screaming remnants of the Black Legion.
The only sound left on the surface of Klyssus was the distant, muffled roar of a Warmaster who had been denied his prize.