The dream began as most dreams did, disjointed, fleeting images forming and dissolving with little coherence. At first, Daedren paid it no mind. He had known battle, and his dreams often replayed the echoes of war, the clang of chainswords against chitin, the deep boom of bolter fire and the sound of hammers hitting glowing metals.

  He stood at the edge of the battlefield, watching himself fight alongside his brothers on Gherash. He recognized every detail with unsettling precision, the way Thran led the charge, how Caldon’s flamer spewed righteous fire, the echoing roars of the Tyranids as they were cut down one by one. His twin shields gleamed under the burning sky, their ceramite surfaces splattered with ichor.

  At first, he thought he was merely reliving the battle. A normal dream, something his mind had crafted from the memories still fresh in his bones. But then... the world shifted.

  It was subtle at first, a flickering in his peripheral vision, like a faulty lumen globe struggling to stay lit. He turned his head, his dream-self unaware of his presence, still locked in battle. Then, suddenly, a Tyranid Warrior blinked out of existence mid-charge. Gone. Just an empty space where it had stood.

  A mili-second later, it reappeared in the exact same spot, but something was different. Its stance had shifted slightly, its talons raised in a slightly different angle. A fraction of a second lost, as if something had rewritten its movement.

  Daedren frowned, stepping closer to the battlefield. He was weightless, drifting across the ground like a specter. As he moved, more flickering caught his eye. It wasn’t just the Tyranids. His brothers, the terrain, even the sky itself, everything around him stuttered, as though the entire battlefield was slipping between layers of reality.

  Then he saw it.

  A haze of color, neither tangible nor truly visible, yet undeniably there. It hovered over the battlefield, bleeding into the edges of the world like ink dissolving in water. A sickly red, a deep purple, and an unnatural blue, swirling together in an indistinct mass. The very air around it wavered, like heat distortion, but colder, unnatural.

  Daedren took another step forward, compelled toward the anomaly. As he did, the flickering increased. More Tyranids appeared and disappeared in fractions of a second. Some looked exactly the same, while others returned slightly altered, an arm bent at a different angle, a wound that had healed or worsened in an instant. His brothers flickered too, the bolter rounds in mid-flight vanishing and reappearing in different trajectories.

  He stared at the battlefield, his mind trying to grasp what he was witnessing.

  Was time shifting? No. It wasn’t time. It was... something else.

  The dream pulsed.

  A ripple of unseen force cascaded over the battlefield, and the haze pulsed in response. The red, purple, and blue hues expanded outward for a moment, overtaking the vision, before collapsing inward, twisting like a living thing.

  Then, for the briefest of moments, Daedren saw something inside the haze.

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  A presence. A form. It was too indistinct to make out, neither man nor beast, neither shadow nor light, but it was there, lurking within the shifting mass.

  But it didn’t notice him.

  Daedren instinctively held his breath, though he had no true form here. He felt no gaze upon him, no recognition. He was a specter, a ghost in his own dream, unobserved. The entity in the haze did not react to his presence—it was focused entirely on the battlefield.

  And then he realized what it was doing.

  The flickering. The strange alterations in the battle. The Tyranids vanishing and reappearing, slightly different. The entity wasn’t watching the fight... it was manipulating it.

  Daedren watched, frozen in place, as the entity’s form twisted and churned. It was reshaping events, adjusting variables like a craftsman molding hot iron. A Tyranid Warrior disappeared for a split second—when it returned, it had repositioned slightly, its attack now perfectly aimed at a Salamander who had been previously safe. A Hive Guard that had been wounded suddenly reappeared without injury, the damage undone.

  His mind reeled. Who, or what, could do this?

  His stomach twisted as he took a step closer. The haze shifted slightly, and for the first time, he saw the briefest flicker of detail within it.

  A shape. A face, or something like it, momentarily coalesced within the swirling chaos. A hundred burning eyes, each layered over the other in a grotesque cascade of vision. A mouth that wasn’t a mouth, shifting between forms, at times a fanged maw, at times a grinning void, at times something entirely inhuman.

  No mere daemon or warp-spawned creature, this was something more. A force of Chaos itself, bending reality to its will.

  A god?

  Daedren felt a deep, gnawing horror settle into his bones. This was beyond anything he had ever faced. The Tyranids, for all their monstrous hunger, were predictable in their intentions. They consumed, they spread, they fought with a mindless, driven hunger. But this thing?

  It was playing. It was experimenting.

  A sudden, terrible thought clawed at the edge of his mind.

  Had it been watching them the entire time? Had it been altering reality before, during their real battle? Had it...

  His mind screamed at him to wake up. It told him this wasn’t a dream.

  A new flicker rippled through the battlefield, and for a brief moment, Daedren saw all the brothers and tyranids change, but not hiimself.

  His face darkened. This was strange...

  The entity continued its work, oblivious to his presence, shaping the battlefield to its unseen design.

  Daedren turned and ran, before it could potentially notice him.

  The dream dissolved around him, the battlefield collapsing into a swirling storm of color. The chime of warping reality rang out once more, a soundless sound that vibrated through his soul. The red, purple, and blue twisted and spun, but he forced himself forward, forcing his mind to break free.

  He had to wake up.

  Daedren’s eyes snapped open, his twin hearts hammering in his chest. His breath came in ragged gasps, his vision blurred by the sudden shift from dream to waking reality. His quarters aboard the Pyre of Vengeance were unchanged, the lumen globe casting dim light across the room, the faint hum of the ship's systems a stark contrast to the overwhelming silence of the void he had just left.

  He sat up, drenched in cold sweat. His hands trembled.

  That was not a dream.

  Or was it?

  It had felt too vivid, too real, to be just a dream. Yet here he was, in his chambers, his body unharmed, the world around him solid and tangible. Had he glimpsed something real? Had his mind touched something it wasn’t meant to?

  Or was this yet another illusion?

  The thought gnawed at him. He wanted to believe it had just been a nightmare. He wanted to push it away, chalk it up to exhaustion, to the strain of battle.

  But the memory lingered. The shifting battlefield. The presence in the haze. The feeling that something had been watching them the entire time.

  His gaze flickered to his desk, where his earlier sketches lay. The drawings of the Tyranids, of Chaos, of something he had tried to put into form but had not fully understood until now.

  He reached for his stylus and, with a deep breath, began a new sketch.

  This time, he drew the eyes.