Warhammer has endured as a property in no small part to just how rich the setting is. There’s action and heroism, levity and comedy, nobility and duty, mystery and intrigue all depending on what corners of the universe you choose to look.
There is also, in similarly no small measure, tragedy and drama.
“Warhammer 40,000 is a tragedy on a galactic scale,” writes author Jude Reid in her introduction to Fulgrim: The Perfect Son. “It’s not just that, of course… but grief runs through it like a flaw in a polished crystal – that sense of failure, of loss, the nagging spectre of what-might-have-been.”
Consider the Stormcast Eternals, mighty and heroic immortals in the Age of Sigmar setting who, upon each death in service of righteous cause see their souls ascend heavenward to be reborn and fight again. That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that with each ‘reforging,’ the soul loses a little bit more of its form. Measure by measure, bit by bit, the person they were disappears forever- a sorrow that will be more than a little familiar to anyone who has known a loved one with dementia.
For many, that pathos is the secret in the sauce, the underlayer that provides richness and depth to what might otherwise be tales of a more ordinary telling. Dramatists from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare certainly understood this, and Reid brings that same perspective to her take on the Glorious Third. After all, what is a tale of a legion so obsessed with perfection that they fall farthest from it if not a kind of Greek tragedy?
Their Father’s Children
For Reid, this is truly a fish that rots from the head. “For me, it’s the tragedy of Fulgrim that makes him so compelling,” she noted in an interview on Warhammer Community. “He’s the brilliant, beautiful third son of a great king, sent out to seek his fortune, and in any other story he’d return in victory to claim his birthright and the acclaim of his subjects – but because this is Warhammer he never does. In the Heresy we see his fall from grace, and when we rejoin him in the 41st Millennium he’s been trapped in an eternal cycle of ambition and failure for so long that it’s become who he is as much as what he does.”
“No achievement is ever going to be enough for him – no matter what he conquers, who he proves himself to, or how well he shows off his prowess. He’s never satisfied, never able to enjoy the fruits of his labours, and any victory he wins becomes worthless the moment he has it.”
But no good fruit can come of poisoned soil, and as Fulgrim looks to rebuild his broken legion from the scattered warbands that remain this cycle of ambition and failure must play itself out over and again. To those that would seek glory in the rebuilt, Glorious Third he offers this challenge: take the planet of Crucible and the head of the Emperor’s Champion thereon.
This offer is every bit the golden apple that it sounds, and immediately pits some of the Legion’s best and brightest against one another. As an invasion unexpectedly turns into a siege with victory eluding them, Fulgrim’s sons must contend with the Imperials- and one another- to prove their worth to a Primarch who has forever demanded nothing less than perfection.
Reid centers her tale not on Fulgrim himself, but rather on one of his ambitious captains, Marduk Tamaris. Tamaris is an oathsworn blademaster, knight-commander of the Perfecti- a band of twelve, hand-picked champions. If the name sounds familiar it may be because he was the subject of Reid’s short story Perfection and Pain, one of the digital eShorts released for Heretic Astartes Week last March.
When we meet Tamaris this time it’s in the Maelstrom with his Perfecti, squaring off with a warband of World Eaters and their daemonic allies. The last body has barely hit the ground when he receives a summons from Fulgrim. “When I return to Terra,” he announces to his assembled sons, “it shall be with a conquering army worthy of my glory… And to those of you who would be at my side- prove yourselves.”
Redeeming Characteristics
By their corrupted nature, it can be a measure trickier to write sympathetic heretic characters. After all, you’re deprived of the low-hanging fruit like saving kids from a burning orphanage, getting cats out of trees, or dying for the Emperor. But the big winner of this book is Tamaris himself who shows a number of redeeming characteristics in a Chapter that’s a bit light on heroes.
For one thing, he has a genuinely compassionate nature (albeit one warped by the reality of what he is), with a strong familial connection to other Astartes. “I’m sorry to see you so debased, my kinsman,” he says to his opponent in the book’s opening battle, and it’s not a taunt. Rather, we’ll see it repeated throughout the book as he treats other Space Marines not as hated foes, but rather as simply misguided members of his own family.
And it’s not just fellow Astartes he has a certain warmth of affection for. There’s a moment partway through the book when he reflects on all they’ve accomplished since arriving at Citadel.
“Tamaris marveled at what their conquest had already achieved. Temples to the tyrant god had been shattered, the natives freed from their dismal lives of slavery, but more than this, the world itself was changing around them. With the broken factoria in ruins, the ever-present fog of exhaust had been cleared from the air. The stars were visible for what must have been the first time in centuries, made all the brighter by their long concealment.”
Citadel had been made better by the Emperor’s Children, not worse. “He had not come here as a bringer of death; he was here to enlighten and liberate, to purify and perfect.”
Make no mistake, Tamaris is no sheep in wolf’s clothing, but rather a sadistic killer who takes exquisite pleasure in practicing his craft. This duality is perhaps best expressed in a sequence where he silently takes out a sentry.
“The man’s death had taken less than a second; Tamaris could have done the same in half of that, but the additional speed would have robbed the moment of all its savour. The dawning realization in the Cadian’s eyes, the slow blossoming of fear into panic, obliterated in a single instant. That had been exquisite, that perfect transition from innocence to knowing. There had been mercy in the death, too. A second longer and the panic would have turned to despair. Tamaris had spared the solider that.”
Still, his honor and integrity make him especially compelling, and a character I hope we’ll get to see again.
The Redshirt Chorus
Where the book misses a step is in Tamaris’s supporting cast, as Reid allows her leading man to suck all of the oxygen out of the room. Seemingly his handpicked elite in name only, they have all the survivability and depth of character as security personnel on a Star Trek away team. Only one of them- his right-hand man and Apothecary, Venakhar- has any real personality, and in several cases you only even learn their names once they’re dead.
As a result, there’s little reason to care about any of them, a similar issue I encountered with Leontus: Lord Solar (reviewed here). If anything, the Perfecti are even less developed than Lord Solar’s ragtag group of Imperial Guardsmen. I don’t know if this was a deliberate writing choice to keep the focus more on Tamaris, but it felt like an opportunity missed and left the book a feeling a little flat.
Another concern I had was that the book did start to feel a bit rushed at the end, which gave it an uneven feel. For most of the book the pacing matched the narrative, where you could feel the frustration as Tamaris worked though different approaches for squeezing the Imperials out of their turtling: disrupt their promethium manufacture, starve them of water, bait them with a challenge. Once we arrive at the final act, however, it feels like we’ve skipped ahead to the big climax scene rather than being the natural culmination of the book’s events.
But perhaps the largest concern with the book- and not everyone will see this as one- is what I call the “portrayal problem.” Putting it simply, this is supposed to be a book about Fulgrim, and yet there’s actually very little of Fulgrim within it.
Reid tackles this head-on in her introduction.
“In the ten millennia since the Heresy, Fulgrim has become something more than mortal: a living embodiment of vanity, of ambition, of insatiable hunger for unattainable goals. It’s for this reason we don’t see this story from his perspective- after all, how do you give voice to a force of nature without robbing it of all its mystery? Instead, the plot unfolds through the eyes of others.”
To Reid, Fulgrim is so larger-than-life that a story with him in it is better told through the effect he has on others, like a black hole whose gravitational pull warps everything around it.
Author Dale Lucas confronted this exact issue in Ushoran: Mortarch of Delusion.
“How, then, could I encourage emotional investment in a being like Ushoran? Ushoran, who has unimaginable power, is fearsome to behold, and whose raw influence makes him as much a force of nature as any sentient character? I realized the answer lay in not making Ushoran the direct subject of the story. Like the sun itself, he is simply too massive, too unwieldily; unfathomable. Instead, I reasoned, the reader and I might best examine the Mortarch of Delusion indirectly…”
As I wrote in my review, the conceit worked superbly perhaps because Lucas framed it as a study in contrast between the obviously monstrous Ushoran and the less-obviously-monstrous human ruler he was up against.
In Fulgrim, there’s no real anti-Fulgrim foil to serve as a direct contrast. Nevertheless, we get to see Fulgrim in the negative space, the sins of the father as evidenced by the sons. This ultimately cements the book’s most enduring theme: the soul of the Third is betrayal.
Et tu, Brute?
There is no honor amongst thieves, as the saying goes, and seeing Heretic Astartes knife each other in the back is fairly routine stuff (a true friend, quipped Oscar Wilde, stabs you in the front). Where Reid shines here is in making that betrayal something essential to the legion, and it is no better put than when Tamaris exacts his bloody revenge for one such act saying, “we fight our brothers, for who but our brothers are worthy of the honour?”
In sports we often hear that you’ll only improve by playing against better opposition. If the Emperor’s Children are the Legion most in pursuit of perfection, does it not perhaps stand to reason that the finest stone they could be whetted upon would be their own? It certainly does to Fulgrim; the entire story is an exercise in him throwing his rabble together and seeing who will rise to the top.
Your mileage may vary, but personally I really enjoyed this approach. But then, I’m one who often finds depictions of Primarchs squabbling like teenagers at the dinner table to be a bit too unrealistic to enjoy. This method too was not without risk, for had she anchored the tale to a less compelling character than Marduk Tamaris it may not have worked quite as well.
Ultimately, those wanting a story centered on Fulgrim could well be a little disappointed with The Perfect Son, just as those wanting more centering of Ushoran were left wanting this time around.
But if you’re keen for a tale that showcases the essence of Fulgrim through the soul of his Children, there’s a lot to like here.
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