Vandros became aware of water before anything else.

Not the Warp-sea—there was no pressure of unreality here, no chorus of distant minds moving in disciplined shoals beside him. This water was quiet. Heavy. Real. It pressed against his scales with a weight that belonged to gravity, not madness.

He did not thrash. He has fought on land, in the air, and in the seas on Planets that have needed the aid of The Emperor's Angels. So he recognizes this pressure and feeling. Ocean water, the taste he knows.

He let awareness come in layers, the way he had been taught.

Breath was unnecessary, but instinct still catalogued the sensation: cool currents moving past his gills, mineral-rich, threaded with something unfamiliar. Not promethium residue. Not void-salt. Planet's ocean water, he decided, and stored the thought away.

His eyes opened.

Light filtered down in fractured columns, sunlight broken by the surface far above. Kelp forests swayed gently around him, leaves whispering against ceramite greaves. His armor was intact. That came first—his mind immediately swept through alignment checks.

Chestplate sealed. Pauldrons steady. Gauntlets locked.

He flexed his clawed fingers, feeling the familiar resistance of water around them, the reassuring drag along his scaled forearms and powerful tail. He ran a hand briefly along the edge of his breastplate, confirming fit and orientation. The ritual grounded him.

Only then did he look around.

This was not the Warp.

The Warp-sea was never this… orderly.

Here, fish scattered in glittering schools as he shifted position, not dissolving into color or screaming into impossible geometries. The seabed beneath him was stone and sand, marked by the slow patience of tides rather than the scars of war.

He notices that there are some ruins lay half-buried nearby—columns worn smooth, etched with symbols that were not Imperial, nor xenos, but something older.

Vandros rotated slowly in the water, tail movements controlled and economical. His squad was not with him. How curious, he tilts his head as he swims closer trying to see what it is. See if he can read it.

That absence registered like a cold ache beneath his breastbone.

He paused, allowing the ache, cataloguing it rather than fighting it. Panic wasted energy. Captain Darros had taught them that—fear acknowledged became fuel.

Last memory: the shoal moving through the Warp-sea together, bodies streamlined, armor blessed and sealed. A rupture. A pull that was not hostile, but insistent. Then—

Here. Where ever Here is.

His mind supplied quietly. The water itself seemed to hum with memory, with layered histories pressing gently against his senses.

He rose.

With a few powerful strokes of his tail, Vandros ascended, breaking the surface in a controlled surge. Sunlight struck his visor, refracting across the black-green ceramite of a Salamander Primaris. He paused there, half-submerged, scanning the shoreline.

Forests. Stone cliffs. Smoke curling faintly from somewhere inland.

No hive-spires. No orbital debris. No void traffic screaming overhead.

Instead, he heard birds.

Real ones.

Vandros lingered at the water’s edge, listening. His gaze traced the movement of waves against rock, the way foam clung and retreated. He noted the absence of pollution, the clarity of the shallows. Even the air tasted different when he finally allowed himself to breathe it in—salt, pine, something faintly sweet.

Magic, he realized.

Not with fear, but with careful certainty.

His armor’s auspex returned readings that made no sense. Energy signatures without known origin. Traces of power that responded when he shifted his weight, when his tail disturbed the shallows.

He reached down and let his fingers brush the water’s surface.

It reacted.

Not violently. Not aggressively. The ripples widened, deepened, as if acknowledging him. Vandros watched, fascinated despite himself, and felt a quiet, surprised smile tug at his mouth.

“Well,” he murmured, voice low and unused in the open air, “that is… new.”

He straightened, water streaming from armor and scales alike. Whatever this place was, it was not hostile—not yet. And until his brothers were found, until he understood the rules of this world, he would do what he always did.

Observe.

Adapt.

Protect.