Terran Crusade - Into the Maelstrom: Pandemonium seized the voidships of the Terran Crusade. Crushing tendrils of empyric energy wound about the craft like the tentacles of some leviathan beast. Bulkheads crumpled. Shields blew out. Raging fires and punishing gravity fluctuations tore through decks. Powerless to resist, the warships were plucked from reality and dragged into the Warp. Desperate Tech-adepts stumbled over their rituals as they strove madly to raise their ships' Gellar Fields. Some succeeded, but other craft were inundated with howling masses of daemons as they were dragged, unwarded, into the Warp. Madness and slaughter ran rife, and only the staunch determination of the Imperial armies aboard each ship prevented the Terran Crusade from being utterly annihilated.By the time Magnus' spell ran its course, the starships of the Terran Crusade had been cast deep into the Maelstrom. Guilliman's fleet had, at least, been spat from the maw of the Warp once more, but the region they now found themselves in was a cursed one. Within the Maelstrom, reality and the Immaterium melted together in a strange morass. The stars were lost behind drifting veils of unnatural energy, and twisted worlds hung amidst the shimmering gloom.While Belisarius Cawl coordinated emergency repair crews to shore up mauled ships and save the worst damaged voidcraft from destruction, Guilliman and his captains tallied the cost of the ambush. Their losses were sobering. From a vast fleet of one hundred and twelve Space Marine, Imperial Navy and Adeptus Mechanicus warships, barely half remained. Some had been lost during the Thousand Sons ambush, blown apart by blistering firepower. More had vanished during the subsequent mayhem, cast far adrift upon the tides of the Immaterium. Some, doubtless, would have made it to realspace, scattered distant from the main body of the fleet. Others were surely lost or worse.All of the fighter craft launched during the brief battle were gone, their crews doomed to a cold and lonely death in the void of space. Hundreds upon hundreds of Chapter Serfs, human crewmen and Servitors were injured, insane or dead, and even the Space Marines had taken substantial casualties.The Terran Crusade had been reduced to a shadow of its former military strength. Not one warship had survived the ambush unscathed, and many were sorely damaged. Crushing though the sudden losses were, they were still not Roboute Guilliman's greatest worry.Meeting in his strategium with the assembled Imperial and Space Marine leaders, Guilliman expressed his belief that the Thousand Sons must have known, by some infernal means, where and when the Crusade would break from the Warp. Guilliman's fleet had been surrounded. Why not strike the killing blow? The Primarch knew all too well that Magnus did nothing without a plan, so why had he allowed his erstwhile brother to survive? It was a question that returned to torture the leaders of the Terran Crusade again and again in the dark days that followed.Stranded deep in the Maelstrom, with no sight of the Emperor's Astronomican to guide them, the surviving warriors of the Terran Crusade required some means by which they could determine their location, and find their way back into realspace. Seizing upon the faint transmissions emanating from a nearby moon, the Crusade made for the dark planetoid in the hope of either capturing a Traitor who could act as their unwilling guide, or else gaining access to Heretic astrogation instruments hardened against the roiling energies of the Warp.Landing parties mounted gunships and Drop Pods, streaking down through thin, pale skies onto a dark and glassy world. The Loyalists found vitrified continents, barren of life and tormented by powerful, screaming winds. An unnatural light glowed deep within the world's glass heart, and left all who glimpsed it with an ominous sense of dread.The Crusade strike force located an armoured fortification amongst a range of mountains, clinging limpet-like amidst glinting peaks. Guilliman himself led the attack that breached the defences, finding to his disgust that a ragged band of Renegade Space Marines garrisoned the fortress. Crosses daubed over these warriors' Chapter iconography identifed them as Red Corsairs, and the Primarch vented his pent up anger and frustration upon the luckless Traitors. The battle was brief, Guilliman and a trio of Aldrik Voldus' Dreadknights slaughtering the Renegades' leaders. However, when Guilliman successfully seized the last Traitor alive in the fortress' Vox array, a diabolical manifestation occurred. The air crackled and rime crawled across the metal walls of the chamber as a menacing daemonic presence spoke through the captive's mouth. In two mocking voices, the presence told Guilliman that, even now, Ultramar burned. The evil thing cackled that the Primarch had abandoned his people to wander the Maelstrom forever. Then, it twisted the head of the captive around with a sickening crack. Guilliman cursed as his only lead expired amidst the sizzle and bang of overloading Vox banks. He vowed to locate the daemon, and wring the truth from it no matter what he had to endure.After their encounter on the glass moon, the Crusade fleet wandered aimless. With no indication of the course that would take them to Terra, Guilliman picked a direction based upon his best guess, and instructed his captains to turn to that heading. For the moment, hoping to reach the Maelstrom's edge seemed the only available plan.How long they journeyed, none could say, for time did not pass normally in that sanity-defying place. The Primarch was tormented by the words of the daemon, and sought any opportunity to discover what might be occurring outside the Maelstrom. His opportunity came when scout ships reported Heretic voidcraft patrolling a twisted, fleshy planet that hung amidst a cloud of huge crystalline skulls. Ordering an immediate attack, Guilliman commanded that the gathering of intelligence should be treated as priority. Maps, charts, cartographic hymnals, Traitor Navigators or whatever passed for Astropaths in this hellish place, were all to be seized.The fleet swept down upon the fleshworld, only for the planet to fight back. The Renegade starships belonged to a warband of Emperor's Children, who began a thunderous empyric resonance that caused devastating sonic shock waves to burst from the mouths of the crystal skulls. At the same time, the planet itself unfurled augmetic tentacles, sutured onto its living surface. These monstrous appendages snatched several Mechanicus starships from the void and stuffed them into a continent-sized maw that unpuckered at the planet's northern pole.Sustained torpedo bombardment finally severed the world's ironclad tentacles, while Lance fire shattered dozens of the crystalline skulls and crippled several of the Emperor's Children warships. The remaining Traitor craft turned tail, leaving their comrades to be boarded. Yet Guilliman's sense of triumph was once again short-lived. Though dozens of star charts and maps were recovered, all were blank save for the daemon's mocking words to Guilliman in the Red Corsair fortress, repeated over and over again. Whatever this entity was, it clearly sought to torment the Primarch personally.