The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

AFTERWORD

The Horus Heresy. There’s a clue in the name of this series as to who the main man in this story ought to be, whose name will be above the door when all the dust settles. For a while we’d all been guilty of sidelining the Warmaster. The man whose name is on every single book of this series hadn’t done much since the opening trilogy. Sure, he’d made great appearances in plenty of the stories (cutting Erebus’s face off, anyone?) but in most of them he’d been confined to the strategium or Lupercal’s Court aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was an observer in his own story.

And that was just wrong.

Part of that comes from the fact that there’s not much written about what Horus actually does during the Heresy – he orchestrates things, he sends people to carry out his orders, he devises grand plans. And as much as he is so very good at that, it’s also not at the heart of who he is. Horus says as much during the fighting on Murder: ‘That is how I was made. If I had suspected, back at Ullanor, that the rank of Warmaster would require me to relinquish the glories of the field forever, I would not have accepted it. Someone else could have taken the honour.’

So that’s what I decided to do, to take the Warmaster away from the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit and get him back in the field. I wanted to remind everyone that Horus was the War-master, with the supreme mind of a tactician, but the skill of a killer warrior too. To see Horus make war is to bear witness to a god of battle walking the earth, an avatar of slaughter with no equal. Now, I just needed a war for him to fight, a campaign that would tempt him to meet the foe, eye-to-eye and blade-to-blade.

It had to be something personal, and in my search for a big war to involve the Sons of Horus, I came upon an old article Gav Thorpe had written in White Dwarf.

The article was about using Daemon Knights in games of Epic, and the backdrop for their introduction to the game was the war on Molech, a conflict that embodied the Heresy in microcosm: ferocious combat, hideous betrayal, the insidious touch of Chaos and slaughter on an unimaginable scale. With the setting in place, I wanted something more, something that made this particular conflict personal to Horus. That immediately suggested that it had to involve the Emperor. Not in person (steady on, we’re not there yet!) but something to do with the power at the heart of the Master of Mankind. That gave Molech extra significance, and got straight to the heart of the Warmaster too, a reason for him to risk his own life in the field.

As well as the Warmaster, Vengeful Spirit was a chance to get another favourite character back in the pages of a Horus Heresy novel. Garviel Loken had been a fan favourite since he first appeared in the pages of Horus Rising. His story was apparently concluded with the ending of Galaxy in Flames, as having a basilica collapse on your head seems pretty final. But you can’t keep a good hero down, and when he returned in Jim’s excellent audio drama Garro: Legion of One, it was as a shadow of his former self. Loken was back, but was he the same man left buried in the ruins of Isstvan III? Can any man suffer the things that he suffered and still retain any shred of his sanity?

The idea of putting Loken and Horus back in the same room came early in one of our regular meetings, and was borne out of an intense morning’s deliberations concerning the VI Legion and their role when it came to Horus...

Thus the stories of Loken and Horus were always on a collision course, with Molech and its loathsome rulers as the backdrop. I’d written a couple of short stories as preludes to this tale – ‘The Devine Adoratrice’ from The Imperial Truth, and ‘Luna Mendax’, which appeared in The Black Library Anthology 2013/14. One prepared the ground for the Battle of Molech, sowing the seeds for Raeven Devine’s slide into corruption. The other reminded us that Loken may be back, but that his fractured mind hasn’t yet fully recovered from his time as Cerberus. Both stories hopefully whetted your appetite for the book you’ve just read. And if you’ve not had the chance to read them yet, I’d suggest hunting them down.

You may have wondered why, in a book about the Warmaster and the Sons of Horus (both ex- and current) I didn’t go into the head of the Warmaster as much as I did, say, with Perturabo in Angel Exterminatus. The answer is because I wanted Horus’s actions to show what he was thinking. Rather than have him tell the reader what he wanted to do, I figured it was better to actually have him do something that revealed his motivations. In other words, I wanted to make you guys sing for your supper, to read what was happening and fill in the blanks. After all, interacting with a book is a two-way street – you take what I write and you make it your own.

By now you’ll have realised that there’s more to the title of this book than simply the name of the Warmaster’s flagship. Yes, it’s that, as a good portion of the action takes place aboard the Vengeful Spirit, but it could also a reference a number of the characters. It could be Loken, back from the dead and hungry to expunge the stain to his Legion’s honour. It could also be Tormaggedon, a vengeful spirit if ever there was one. Or might it refer to the sad fate of Iacton Qruze?

There’s a lot going on in this book, with plenty of new characters I’d love to come back to. I want to see where Alivia Sureka goes and if things are indeed okay. I want to see the depths of madness into which Albard Devine plummets. What’s going to happen to the Mournival now that it has Tormaggedon as one of its members? Just what did the Warmaster see on the other side of that barrier and what power has he now returned with? Is he now the equal of the Emperor?

Only time will tell. And while I bet you think you know the answers, we’ve still got some killer surprises in store for you.

Graham McNeill

October 2013