Last October, I cracked into a brand-new Black Library novel with high hopes. While not specifically a fan of the Emperor’s Children, Heretic Astartes are high on my list and I fully expected to enjoy the ride.
As it turned out, I didn’t. The pacing in particularly didn’t work for me, particularly with the interspacing between action sequences and the more introspective or expository ones. I was really intrigued by the supporting cast as well, but they didn’t get as much page time as I’d hoped. All in all it wasn’t a bad book by any stretch, I concluded, but it just wasn’t one for me (an approach I credit Magic: the Gathering Head Designer Mark Rosewater for1).
That conclusion was reaffirmed the following March when the book, Eidolon, the Auroc Hammer by Marc Collins, took runner-up behind The Siege of Vraks as the Black Library Book of the Year for 2024. “Incredibly grateful to everyone who voted,” gushed a clearly stunned Collins. “Never in a million years expected to be *second.* Makes it all worth it. Knowing there’s people out there enjoying what I do and responding to it positively.”
I had a similar realization when reading Chris Thursten’s Abraxia, Spear of the Everchosen– albeit for very different reasons.
A Tale of Ambition
As with many Black Library novels, the book’s namesake takes on something of a supporting role in the story. Front and center is Urnous Dransz, a priest of sorts who charts his path to greatness by swinging from warlord to warlord, each one getting him a little further along his Path to Glory. “In my hand I hold a knife,” he tells them. “Upon thy brow I behold a crown. The gods have sent me forth. I am laden with knowledge.”
Dransz suffers no illusions about the sort of individuals whose company he finds himself in. Each believe they are something special, something worthy of the attentions of the Ruinous Powers. And maybe for a little while- at least until they’ve outlived their usefulness- they are. But there’s a sense that the purpose they’re serving isn’t their own ascension to power, but rather his.
Eventually this game of power-proximate paperclip sees Dransz wind up at Blackpyre, the nascent Chaos city building up on the ruins of the sacked Phoenicium. There, Chaos is consolidating its forces under Abraxia, Lieutenant of the mighty Archaon the Everchosen. He quite cleverly manages to insert himself into Abraxia’s orbit, and makes his pitch to her.
The crown for her head? That of the Everchosen himself. For Dransz- and Abraxia- it’s all or nothing on the Path to Glory.
It’s a terrific setup, one that could easily have added been mined for another hundred pages to Abraxia, Spear of the Everchosen’s relatively economical 217. But to Thursten’s credit he crafts the tale tightly, making full use of the page count; the story rarely feels rushed. If anything, I would have liked to have seen more of Urnous Dransz, of which far more is seen of what he does rather than who he is.
Sights Unseen
So if it’s not the story or the writing, what’s the problem? I suspect that the degree of appreciation you have for this book will at least in part correlate to the degree of enfranchisement you have in the Age of Sigmar setting.
Consider me, for example. I’m a longtime 40K reader who only picked up my first Age of Sigmar novel last year with Gary Kloster’s Skaventide. While it was a ripping action story, I found it rather difficult going due to lack of knowledge of the lore and setting. When you have to resort to using Google to get through a story, it’s a good indicator that you’re probably not the intended audience.
As a result of that experience, the Age of Sigmar section of my library now has one shelf that looks like so:
Even still, I’d very much consider myself on the newer end of the Age of Sigmar engagement spectrum.
Now, for the perspective of someone who’s on the other end of it, I’ll need to phone a friend (hi Graeme!).
One of my personal top-ten, all-time books is Wilson and Shea’s 1975 work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. It was madcap, zany, and brilliant, as if every page held a secret or obscure reference and you’d consider yourself lucky to catch one in ten of them.
Obviously Abraxia, Spear of the Everchosen isn’t so gleefully obtuse, but it’s clear that Graeme was picking up a lot more of what Thursten was laying down than I was. Consider the following three samples.
One: The knight drew his sword and swung at the Plaguebearer.
Two: The knight drew his sword and swung at the Plaguebearer, the daemon of Nurgle.
Three: The knight drew his sword and swung at the Plaguebearer, daemonic footsoldier of Nurgle’s pestilential legions.
They’re all effectively the same sentence, differing only in the level of detail afforded the Plaguebearer. Devotees of the setting will get little from the third sentence that they wouldn’t from the first, while a novice will get much more out of the third than the first.
Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, but rather it serves to illustrate that “degree of foreknowledge” is a consideration for each author as they write their story in this shared universe. There’s a range of sweet spots somewhere in the middle, between “assuming perfect foreknowledge” and “having to explain the context of every proper noun.” Thursten’s Abraxia just happens to be on the higher end of it.
Final Thoughts
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. Abraxia, Spear of the Everchosen was still largely an enjoyable read even if by the midway mark I knew I wasn’t engaging with the story as much as I could have been. Taking it back to my original point, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, but rather than it simply isn’t a book for me. It was clearly a book for Graeme.
Those more on my end of the engagement scale are still in for a treat, particularly in how Thursten treats the warriors and champions of Chaos. He did a terrific job portraying them as independent war bands with charismatic leaders, all seeing in themselves the call of the champion, all believing that they were meant to walk the Path to Glory, too confident and arrogant in their conviction that they were touched by destiny to realize that they were simply fated to become a cobblestone on the Path of another.
It reminded me more than once of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Vader meets with a collection of bounty hunters. Those bounty hunters were some of the most mysterious and intriguing characters to my young self when I saw the film- you just knew that each of them had a story4, even if you only caught the merest glimpse of it.
So if AoS is your jam, take it from Graeme. Those newer to this wonderfully rich setting might want to go for something a little more new-reader friendly5 and save this one as a treat for later.
Footnotes
- Way back in 2002, Magic: the Gathering designer2 Mark Rosewater penned a seminal column for Wizards of the Coast entitled When Cards Go Bad. In it, he addressed a common player concern: “why do you intentionally make bad cards?” Turns out there are a number of reasons3, but perhaps the one with the greatest staying power was the one that evolved into the axiom, “if you don’t like a card, then it probably wasn’t made for you.”I think of that often when I find a piece of creative content that doesn’t resonate with me, and it’s a far preferable (and healthier) position to take than “I didn’t like thing, so thing is bad.”
- He wouldn’t become Head Designer for another year.
- If you fancy a deeper dive, here’s the 2002 piece, and then his follow-up a decade later.
- And not in the Glup Shitto kinda way.
- Noah Van Nguyen’s Godeater’s Son comes right to mind here, if you’re wanting to stay within the general subject matter.
