Daedren had spent years training his body, refining his combat abilities, sharpening his discipline. But now, all of that felt meaningless. The battlefield had changed. It was no longer flesh and steel, no longer bolter fire and burning promethium.

  Now, it was the mind.

  And he was beginning to understand that he had never truly been in control of his own reality.

  He no longer needed sleep to drift. No longer required the stillness of meditation to step beyond the constraints of his body. It had become natural.

  At first, the flickers had been brief, moments where reality wavered, where he caught glimpses of things that should not be. But the more he focused, the longer the visions lasted.

  He honed his mind like a blade.

  At every spare moment, between drills, between maintenance, between battle meditations, he turned his focus inward. He let go of his senses, let go of himself, and sought the edges of the illusion. And each time, the illusion became weaker.

  The walls of the barracks no longer felt solid. The floor beneath his feet no longer seemed anchored to anything. His brothers moved through their routines, but sometimes, only for a moment, they weren’t there at all.

  Sometimes he saw things moving them.

  The more he focused, the less real the world became.

  One day, he was sitting on the edge of his bunk, staring at his hands, watching as his fingers flickered between existence and nonexistence. He could still feel them, but they were like afterimages, as though his body was both there and not there at the same time.

  And then, it happened.

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  Everything broke.

  The walls around him twisted like fabric, tearing at the seams of his vision. The barracks vanished, its rigid structure melting into a shifting, living nightmare. He was no longer in the Pyre of Vengeance. He was not physical at all.

  He stood outside the illusion.

  The "real" world, the ship, his brothers, had never been there.

  Instead, he saw what truly existed.

  A writhing, chaotic landscape of madness. Reality itself a shifting mass of lies, woven together like an intricate web. The illusion had been a carefully crafted thing, a falsehood superimposed over something much, much worse.

  And behind it all, there were creatures.

  They wove reality.

  Daemons, not the brutish monstrosities of Khorne, nor the decayed horrors of Nurgle, but something far more insidious. Architects of deception, their forms fluid and ever-changing, their clawed hands pulling at the very fabric of existence.

  He watched them move through what had once been his world, twisting it, shaping it. His brothers, his ship, his war, they had all been nothing more than crafted illusions, marionettes in a play whose script had been written by hands unseen.

  He saw his fellow Astartes warping under the influence of these creatures, their bodies moving not by their own will but by the tug of unseen strings. The barracks reformed and dissolved at the whims of these beings, as though the very idea of solidity was a joke to them.

  And Daedren should not have been able to see this.

  He forced himself to breathe, to calm his mind.

  His senses had betrayed him before, showing him a world that was never real. But if he could strip away one layer, why not another?

  He emptied his thoughts.

  No fear. No questions. No hesitation.

  Nothingness.

  And as he let go of himself, as he embraced the stillness of absolute void, he felt it, the final step.

  And then he was free.

  He stepped out of the illusion entirely.

  The moment he left the illusion, a gaze fell upon him.

  A gaze that was not mortal. Not even daemon. Something infinitely greater.

  He did not see it with his eyes, nor did he hear it with his ears. But he felt it.

  A thousand eyes turned toward him, each seeing a different version of him, each witnessing a different path his soul might take.

  A presence so vast, so limitless in its complexity, that even his altered mind could barely comprehend it.

  And it was watching him.

  It had always been watching him.

  Daedren stood in the void, his breath caught in his throat. He could feel its curiosity, its amusement, its endless hunger for knowledge.