Terran Crusade - Across the Void: Once the great fleet of the Terran Crusade was assembled in orbit of Macragge, Roboute Guilliman made for Terra. The Warp churned. It roiled and raged. Temporal rip tides and squalls of insanity wrenched and battered at Guilliman's fleet. Whirlpools of arrogance; frenetic storms of anger and lust; becalming straits of misery circled by hungry daemonic entities; all had to be braved as the Terran Crusade pushed on.On the pleas of their Navigators, the starships' captains dared only short jumps through the Warp. These quick and terrifying sprints ended -- more often than not -- in frantic crashdives into realspace as the dangers became too great. Several voidcraft were lost, and many captains beseeched Saint Celestine for her blessings to safeguard their passage. The Pride of Hera suffered a Gellar Field breach that saw the slouching daemons of the Plague God spill like animate pus through its corridors. Inquisitor Greyfax rallied a force of Adepta Sororitas and Praetors of Orpheus Space Marines to fight back against the monstrous creatures. Cleansing flame and sanctifed bolts were used to drive the daemonic infestation back deck by deck, forcing them away from the life support systems that they had sought to befoul with spores and infectious filth. Greyfax herself ended the incursion in a swift duel with the bloated Plague Daemon that led the invasion, leaping from a gantry down onto the thing's Nurgling-borne throne and slaying the abomination with a single blow.Despite many such horrors, and an ever increasing toll of lives lost, none in the Terran Crusade so much as spoke of turning back. They braved the Warp Storms at the behest of a living Primarch, on a mission to Holy Terra itself. Those who quailed in the face of such a momentous calling would surely be damned.Guilliman travelled aboard his Chapter's ancient flagship, Macragge's Honour, a craft that -- unlike so much around him -- provided the Primarch with a welcome haven of familiarity. He had hoped that the Warp Storms around Ultramar were sent to entrap him. As the Crusade fleet travelled ever further from his realm, and the storms continued to rage, the Primarch was disabused of this hopeful notion. Every time the fleet dropped out of Warpspace, Guilliman had his Astropaths comb the darkness of the void, seeking to ensnare every fragment of information he could about the state of the Imperium.With the Immaterium in turmoil, those astropathic communiqués that made it through were jumbled, and nightmarish to interpret. What news the Crusade fleet managed to gather was uniformly dire, and left all who heard them cold with dread.Whole star systems were being ravaged by unnatural phenomena, daemonic incursions and plagues of mutation. Psykers proliferated, bringing with them horrific manifestations and outbursts of terror and madness. Loyal populations rose up as howling mobs of mad-eyed Chaos Cultists. Entire armies of xenos, saturated in the energies of the Warp, fought alongside daemons to bring death to the worlds of the Imperium. Star forts cried out for help, their corridors prowled by unnatural Warp entities that preyed upon their garrisons. Imperial fleets and convoys flung distress calls into the Empyrean as they were dragged light-years off course, or were beset by terrifying empyric predators.Those who knew of such things could not help but draw parallels with the rumoured terrors of Old Night, and with the Age of Strife, but none -- not even Guilliman -- dared air such a thought aloud.Despite the lethal roiling of the Warp, the Terran Crusade forged onward. For the soldiery aboard the ships, the weeks crawled past in an agony of inactivity and agitation. A constant state of high alert was required fleetwide, for at any moment they might come under sudden attack. Yet for all their constant training, drilling, patrolling and waiting, still nothing occurred. Even amongst the superhuman warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, tempers frayed and inaction chafed. For the thousands of helots, naval armsmen and Chapter Serfs who crewed and garrisoned the vast warships, the constant state of readiness inevitably took its toll. The expectation of danger became the norm, to the point that laxness crept in and awareness slipped.When at last the fleet was threatened, it came so suddenly that even the Adeptus Astartes and Cult Mechanicus were caught off guard. The Terran Crusade had reached the trailing edges of the permanent Warp rift known as the Maelstrom, and had found it swollen with fearsome new power. The fleet's Navigators moaned and screamed, describing something akin to an endless, impossibly immense tornado thundering in the Warp. Where safe channels should have existed, the billowing fringes of the Maelstrom had consumed all. Even the light of the Astronomican became faltering and nigh impossible to see.Fearing for the safety of their brutalised craft, the fleet's captains ordered immediate translation to realspace. One by one, the Imperial warships tore through the meniscus of reality, streamers of glowing ectoplasm trailing from their hulls as they plunged back into the cold darkness of the void. Yet the thunderous shuddering on board each voidcraft continued, intensifying violently as impacts flared upon Void Shields and smashed through armoured hulls.The Hawk Lords frigate Wings of Glory was ripped apart by a string of punishing explosions before its crew even knew who or what was attacking them. The Ultramarines Strike Cruiser, Primarch's Wrath, sustained crippling damage after colliding with the White Consuls Cruiser Hope and Fire as both voidships attempted blind evasive manoeuvres.Frantic orders filled the Vox net and echoed through cavernous ships' bridges as furious captains attempted to establish the nature of the threat. Had the fleet dropped out of the Warp and straight into an asteroid field? Had they, by some horrible chance, emerged into the midst of a hostile foe?As Auspexes awoke and observation decks were unshrouded, the bleak truth became clear. The scattered ships of the Terran Crusade had indeed exited the Immaterium straight into the thundering guns of an enemy armada, but it looked as though this was no accident of chance.Arrayed in perfect ambush formations were dozens of Traitor warships bearing baroque and ancient markings upon their hulls. The Loyalists realised that a vast fleet of the Thousand Sons surrounded them, deployed as though they had known precisely where and when the Imperial forces would emerge from the Warp.At the heart of the enemy hung a strange craft of surpassing immensity. Only Guilliman truly understood its appearance, recognising a vast silver facsimile of the Great Pyramid of Tizca. That cyclopean crystal structure had once stood as the crowning glory in the Thousand Sons Legion's capital city of the same name, upon their lost homeworld of Prospero. Now it was resurrected in this monstrously magnified new form.Vast as a planetoid, bristling with gun decks of baffling shape and function, and boasting an immense red crystal eye upon one flank, the insane structure was clearly both flagship and star fort for the enemy fleet. Guilliman knew his brothers well, and here, in this grandiose war engine, he saw all the hallmarks of the Daemon Primarch Magnus the Red.To the Loyalist fleet's rear loomed the squirming spiral arms of the Maelstrom, a towering wall of unnatural energies and whirling psychic sorcery that promised madness and death. To their fore was the titanic pyramid of Magnus, its attendant warships already pummelling Guilliman's armada.With little choice, the Imperials fought as best they could in their scattered dispersal. Torpedoes fired from launch tubes, streaking through the void to blast ragged holes in Heretic warships. Fighter squadrons scrambled, jetting out into the darkness like swarming insects. Lance arrays spat ruby light, and gun decks thundered as the Imperial ships frantically attempted to fight free of their ambushing foes.Yet the Imperial craft were taking a terrible hammering, void shields collapsing and ruptured decks venting screaming crewmen into space. Engines flared out and died under volley after volley of macro shells, while rune-inscribed torpedoes swept in to fill Loyalist bridges and magazines with Warpflame.Guilliman issued a steady stream of orders to his captains, doing everything in his power to gather his ships and fight back. Inwardly he raged, both at his fallen brother's deviousness and his own failure to foresee the ambush. By comparison, Magnus watched with amused satisfaction from the grand observation gallery aboard his pyramidal flagship.He had fashioned the vast voidcraft, named Tizca's Revenge, using the plundered resources of an Imperial world and the nameless energies of the Warp. Now he conjured those empyric powers again, for an altogether different purpose. A cabal of powerful Chaos Sorcerers stood around Magnus, chanting ominous words as he raised his arms high and cried out in stentorian tones.The Crimson King called and the Warp answered, coiling tendrils of power coalescing to surround Guilliman's battered fleet. Magnus judged the damage done to be sufficient. He had no desire to kill his resurrected brother. Not yet, anyway. Thus, with a final booming incantation, Magnus completed his spell. The empyric tendrils clamped tight around the starships of the Terran Crusade and, with a vast convulsive wrench, dragged them deep into the raging heart of the Maelstrom.