The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

AFTERWORD

The war is over. Humanity has lost. Warhammer 40,000 – in all its Gothic, towering, Cyclopean, decrepit, doomed, rotting Byzantine majesty – has taken its first irrevocable step.

Oh, the Horus Heresy isn’t quite over yet. Horus’s ambitions haven’t dried up and vanished, and the Imperium still has to deal with the Chaos-deluded primarch making his way to Terra, but the malignant forces of the warp have achieved their ultimate aim. Humanity’s chance to free itself of the warp has been lost. No matter what happens from now on, no matter how hard the Imperium fights against itself, against its enemies, the laughter of mad gods will echo behind the veil.

But this isn’t news to you, I’m sure. The central tenet of Warhammer 40,000 has always been the pitting of humankind against itself, the oldest lore hearkening back to that angelic rebellion called the Horus Heresy, where humanity began its long, inevitable decline. Warhammer 40,000 has always been about how the centre cannot hold; about raging against the dying of the light.

The Imperium of the Dark Millennium, ten thousand years after the Heresy, can’t beat its foes. That was never on the cards. Warhammer 40,000 is the kind of setting where your sins risk breeding very real daemons, where so much knowledge has been lost or sealed away as heretical or dangerous, and above all: where humankind devours itself, day by day, feeding thousands of psykers into the soul-engines of the Golden Throne to maintain the last flicker of the Emperor’s divine will. This is a species sacrificing its future for its present, destroying its own evolution into a psychic race because to evolve, to ascend, is to shine like a beacon to the creatures of the underworld.

Almost every xenos threat besieging the dying Imperium of Man would be enough, on its own, to eventually seal the empire’s fate – yet one damnation takes thematic primacy and always has. Predatory alien hordes endlessly eat away at the Imperium’s borders, but it’s the taint of Chaos that holds a blade to the throat of every man, woman, and child.

The Emperor knew this. Freeing humanity from reliance – heck, from as much contact as possible – with the warp was the species only chance at long-term survival. With the death of that dream comes the long, drawn-out death rattle of the species.

What a cheery thought.

Heavy stuff, right? I can’t even begin to frame the context for how many involved discussions and back-and-forths with various loremasters I had during the planning and writing of this book. I’ve read every single word ever published about the Emperor, and talked about it all about, say, eight squillion times. When you’re writing a novel about the greatest figure of unimaginable mystery in the entire setting – in either of its main eras – then of course you’re going to need to treat it with some care.

There were no mandates on what had to be included and what needed to be excluded, but I went into it with a fairly tight focus on the things I wanted to show, and the things I wanted to avoid at all costs.

The former is obvious. Pretty much everything I wanted to show has been shown; unless you started here then you’ve probably just read the book and are now making your way through my rambling thoughts.

The latter is a far trickier deal. I’m sure this novel will divide people in terms of its reception. In many ways it can’t help but do that given its subject matter, and I’m accordingly braced for it.

The fact is (let’s rip this band-aid off right now) I didn’t want to reveal anything about the Emperor as any kind of definitive, objective truth. I don’t think anyone should, either - partly because understanding the Emperor’s nature and origins hasn’t been important for three decades of enjoyment in the supremely popular setting (and it’s never going to be necessary for that), and partly because, well, no answer will ever be satisfying enough or believable enough for everybody. Nothing will match everyone’s massively varied perceptions of the setting, and that’s as it should be. It’s Warhammer 40,000, after all. No one faction is “right” in the setting, it’s all just levels of ignorance and occlusion.

Between you and me? I find the idea of a single, objective truth for any 40K mystery a little tedious. The fun has always been in exploring the possibility and likelihood of various angles. Could the Emperor have been born from the souls of primitive shamans? Is he a Dark Age construct aping human form, left out to enact his will over the now-ignorant species? Was he a manipulative overlord and tyrant who knew everything of Chaos? Was he just a good man whose intellect strained to work alongside the levels of those beneath him, and was he ultimately failed by lesser beings?

All of them might be true. None of them might be true.

It’s the same as when people point to the Dark Foundings and Cursed Foundings and wonder if various Space Marine Chapters are founded on Traitor Legion gene-seed. That’s certainly the implication! The question interests me. The possibility interests me. The evidence and plausibility of questions like that always interest me.

But just saying “Mhm, those fellows are really good guy Death Guard” (et al) rings a bit… hollow.

This is a setting where invention is practically considered heresy punishable by execution, and the most reliable ways to contact other planets are to either dream a mangled message into the mind of another psychic dreamer who may not understand what you’re saying – or to fly there yourself in a ship the size of a small city shielded against the very tides of Hell. And even then, you might arrive three years before you set out, two hundred years after, or never at all. People living in that setting just don’t get to have all the answers. Not even the highest of the High Lords of Terra are aware of even a fraction of the truth – and we’re looking through the eyes of people in the setting, seeing what they see.

The mystery and possibility appeals to me. The craft and realism is in how true several answers could all be. That’s the hard part, and where the depth of the setting lies.

Now… all of that said? If you didn’t skip right here and you read the book first, then you already know I said plenty about the Emperor. Different characters believe different things about him (Him? It?) and different characters see different things when they look at him. Some of it conflicts between character perspectives, but most of it doesn’t. There’s truth here, as honest and plain as it’s likely to ever come.

So what did I specifically want to avoid? Really, not all that much. It just comes down to seeing inside the Emperor’s head. We shouldn’t know his thoughts. We can’t understand most of them. It’s not a veil we mere mortals should ever get to pierce. And if we did, it’d likely be something akin to the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’d understand what was happening on an intellectual level, but… “My God, it’s full of stars.”

On a related note, I wanted to preserve the soulless other-ness of the Sisters of Silence, too. I went into The Master of Mankind not wanting to get into their heads at all, but I felt that might do them an injustice to some degree, so as the storyline evolved I kept jumping back to Kaeria’s POV, just for those brief and hopefully satisfying insights.

It was awesome to be able to write some loyalists in the Horus Heresy for a change – people tend to assume I prefer the red team over the blues but that’s mostly just been a matter of what was free to write about at the time. Getting to delve deep into the psychology of loyalty and the Imperial ideal was a wonderful feeling, with a wealth of new angles to focus upon.

Loyalty to the Imperium still means something different for almost every person in the setting, but I loved getting to cover the angles of characters as varied as Ra, Arkhan Land, Zephon, Kane, Heironyma, Jaya, and even Skoia. Loyalty and the Imperium itself meant something different vastly to each character, defined as they were by completely different experiences and circumstances.

And we’ve not seen the last of some of them. The Siege of Terra is coming, and Zephon, Land, and Jaya will be there on the walls standing ready for Horus (along with Howl of the Hearthworld, if you remember those fine and feral gentlemen from the Death and Defiance anthology).

Probably worth mentioning before I flee and spare you any more droning is the changing nature of the book’s focus. Before I started writing it, I’d envisioned the main characters being Space Marines. Specifically, I was going to use Zephon (a far, far different version of him) and a few others as the protagonists, but after writing them for a while I ended up scrapping everything I’d done and starting over. It felt false; the War in the Webway really wasn’t about Space Marines – it was largely defined by the very fact Space Marines only showed up at the very end, and those are the angry folks on the red team wanting to slaughter their way into the throne room. A completely different incarnation of Zephon showed up again, and I was much happier with him and his role, especially regarding setting him up for later events and getting to show a sliver of how I view the Blood Angels Legion.

I think my abiding memory of planning and writing it all comes down to one moment, though. John French and I spent a weekend in my office, painting minis and discussing the storylines for Praetorian of Dorn and The Master of Mankind, trading plot advice and characterisation suggestions. I have a lot to thank him for on this one, not least of which is the insane story map sketched on my chalkboard in his delirious hand. I like to hope (though I don’t dare pretend) that I was as useful to him as he was to me.

So what’s next? I gather there’s something about a throwdown on the Throneworld? Malice above the Palace?

I don’t know for sure, but I hope to have a few words to write about that, sometime before the last bell rings.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

June 2016