Terran Crusade - On Darker Paths: Amidst fluctuating time streams and reality-warping energy storms, the damaged ships of the Terran Crusade struggled on. Within the Maelstrom lurked countless foes, for this was a region that had long harboured the warring minions of Chaos.More than once, the Imperial ships were forced to fight off opportunist raids by sleek hunting packs of Traitor warships. Amidst a thousand-mile-wide cloud of corrosive spores, the Crusade ships found themselves beset by swarms of vast plague flies as large as frigates. The monstrous insects took a savage toll upon the smaller ships of the Crusade, until Saint Celestine took to the Navigator's observation blister of the Macragge's Honour. Unleashing her holy light in a blazing psychic shockwave, the Living Saint purged the hideous daemon beasts from the void.In another uncharted reach, the Crusade craft found ghostly phantasms whirling around their hulls. Howling Warp ghosts screamed through the corridors of the Space Marine craft, swarming around the ancient relics and honoured banners of their Reclusiam shrines. The Adeptus Astartes realised, to their horror, that these aetheric leeches were draining the holy energies from their treasured relics, dragging faint, screaming ghosts from the enshrined helms, blades and scrolls. In this fight, the Grey Knights came to the fore, Aldrik Voldus swiftly splitting his brotherhood and deploying them by rapid teleport strike into his allies' shrines. Fighting alongside the outraged Chaplains who guarded the relics, the daemon-hunting warriors drove the Warp leeches back and banished them to the void.So it went on for an indeterminate and bewildering span of time that felt like impossible centuries. As the Terran Crusade fleet forged on, their supplies running low and their crews exhausted by constant battle, Roboute Guilliman became ever angrier and more distracted. Unbeknownst to all, the Primarch was bedevilled by horrific visions.Guilliman saw the Realm of Ultramar in flames, and the bastions of Mankind blowing away as ash upon the blood-wet winds of change. He was tormented by images of Mars, shattered into hundreds of pieces and raining down as flaming meteors upon the once-proud ruin of Terra. He saw the Golden Throne as a sparking, fire-wreathed wreck, the Emperor's blackened corpse burning within it.Daemonic voices whispered into Guilliman's mind, day and night. If they had told him the scenes he saw had already come to pass, that would have been cruel enough. But this torment was more cunning yet, for instead the voices told Guilliman that the visions were flashes of foresight.They were glimpses of a singularly dark fate that would transpire only should he escape the Maelstrom and complete his journey to Terra. Relent in his attempt to escape, accept his Warp-tainted prison for all eternity, give in to madness and despair, and he would spare the Imperium from coming to this terrible end.Guilliman wrestled internally with each passing solar day, yet he showed no sign of his struggle to those who looked to him for leadership and hope. The Primarch maintained his veneer of strength and continued to pursue his goal of escape, determined that he would not believe the lies of any entity that inhabited that hellish place. Still, the Primarch's resolve eroded slowly, as a cliff washed away by the endless ocean waves.Long had the Crusade fleet sailed the Maelstrom’s corrupted tides when they came to Bathamor. In the solar hours before they hove into orbit, the name of this cursed world leapt into the mind of every psyker in the fleet, repeating over and over in a malicious whisper until those that heard them cried the planet's name aloud. Auspex scans revealed an infernal world of kaleidoscopic crystal jungles, laced through by glimmering rivers of fire. They also showed Vox signatures and energy readouts commensurate with a sizeable Renegade presence, and so Guilliman ordered the captains of the Terran Crusade fleet to prepare their forces for an immediate combat drop. Once more, intelligence gathering would be paramount -- with their sanity and resolve weakening by the solar day, the Crusade's members knew they must escape the Maelstrom soon or perish within this seemingly endless expanse of tainted space.Sweeping down from on high, the Imperial armies slammed into the crystal jungles amidst explosions of jagged shards. Advancing upon the greatest concentration of energy signatures, the Loyalist forces cursed in anger and bewilderment as their Auspex readings winked out like will-o'-the-wisps. The next moment, Tzeentchian daemons attacked from all sides.Barrages of sorcerous flame and mutating energies clawed at the Ultramarines and their allies. Crystal trees detonated like huge fragmentation bombs, lacerating all who fought around them. In the midst of the madness, Roboute Guilliman found himself face to face with the architect of the devious ambush. A croaking, two-headed nightmare clad in shimmering robes and wielding a potent staff of temporal power, Kairos Fateweaver coalesced from amidst a glittering storm of crystal shards. Confronting Guilliman, one of the hideous Greater Daemon's avian heads mocked the Primarch's continued efforts to escape, sneering that he had scried every possible strand of the future and every last one ended in his failure. Kairos' other head crowed that Guilliman had always been the most unremarkable of the Emperor's sons, and was as incapable of saving the Imperium now as he was when he fell to his superior brother. Guilliman bellowed in fury and drove Kairos back with swings of his burning blade, before leading his stricken forces in a fighting retreat. The Terran Crusade and its leader would not fall to the Oracle's manipulation so easily...Anxious as to the fate of the wider Imperium, and with several ships now left scuttled in their wake due to accumulated battle damage, the Crusade fleet came upon a world of black marble and bloody seas. They struck hard and fast against several Red Corsairs strongholds, eliminating outlying enclaves before finally laying siege to a fortified palace upon a claw-shaped headland above booming, gory waves. While Archmagos Cawl coordinated the siege, Greyfax and Captain Cato Sicarius led a daring raiding party that threw open the palace's main gates and sealed the Heretics' doom.Guilliman knew that this victory offered a brief respite at best. The screaming of the bloody ocean was eroding his followers' sanity, and amongst the ashen skies overhead, huge, dark shapes stirred with the promise of terrible danger. Yet the logistics of stripping the Corsairs' fortress would take time, even with the Primarch's meticulously efficient plans. Thus, as Mechanicus bulk haulers rumbled back and forth through the planet's atmosphere, Guilliman found himself wandering alone through the twisted citadel's corridors. It was as he entered a chamber of crystal statues that a shimmering mist rose before the Primarch's eyes. Amidst the swirling patterns of light and shadow, a slender figure flickered into being. Guilliman caught the suggestion of willowy limbs and billowing cloth, a curving alien helm and a long stave, before the figure spoke. Like its image, the manifestation's voice swam in and out of Guilliman's perception. Yet the Lord of Ultramar was able to decipher instructions from the figure's words.Guilliman was wary of further trickery, suspicious and plagued by echoes of the daemonic whispers that Kairos Fateweaver had projected into his mind. Yet he sensed no taint of Chaos in this manifestation; the energies given off by the shimmering vision were more akin to those of the Eldar who had aided his resurrection. At last, after repeating its message several times, the figure vanished, leaving the Primarch with a new sense of purpose and, perhaps, even a sliver of hope. Here, at last, was a heading, and Guilliman meant to follow it.