“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Antonio Gramsci wrote those words nearly a century ago, rotting in prison in Fascist Italy for the crime of opposing Mussolini.  Less than a decade later he would be dead.  Approximately 28,000 years after that, the Emperor would teleport up to the Vengeful Spirit to confront his wayward son and, well, you know the rest.

It is easy to imagine Gramsci’s great-to-the-nth-power descendent drafting something similar in the bowels of the Blackstone, as Horus’s bombardment first crisped the clouds overhead.  The old was, indeed, dying, the Emperor’s dreams of Unity having been sundered by Magnus’s folly years ago.  And yet the new could not be born.  In the interregnum, the Imperium groaned under the weight of some extremely morbid symptoms: First, the Heresy and Siege that mutilated the species nearly beyond recognition; second, the ten-thousand-year Imperium, a government that Gramsci himself would find familiar (if not comforting).

The Era of Ruin, then, is an etiology of those symptoms.  The book’s purpose, as far as I can define, is to show how Then became Now, and how we got to where we are today (well, 38,000 years from today).

The immediate question, then, is why?  Why is this necessary?  Didn’t we just see how we got here?  Wasn’t that the point of the Horus Heresy series?  And the Siege?  Didn’t we just do this?

In other words, in order to review the Era of Ruin properly, I have to first figure out what this book is for.

Born to Ruin

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that a book has to have a “purpose.”  Books do not exist to fill blank space on Lexicanum pages.  They exist to tell stories, to create an emotional resonance with the reader and to make them think and feel and believe things.  That is what all art is for.  Era of Ruin does not need to prove itself to me on that score.  But, given that we have just wrapped a 52-book series followed by an 8-to-10 (depending on how you characterized TEATD) book sequel series (with three interstitial novellas!), I think a fair question is: what does Era of Ruin add to that?  What is it meant to convey?  Is this the epilogue to the Horus Heresy/Siege of Terra, or is it the prologue to the Imperium’s story?

The book itself seems to incline in the former direction; according to the introduction, it is “the final instalment of the Horus Heresy series.”  The introduction further describes Era of Ruin as “a collection of endings” and “an earnest goodbye to a series we have all come to cherish for differing reasons.”  That’s all well and good, but I am pretty sure we had that too: it was called The End and the Death.  It was pretty enormous – bloated at times, as I have already said – and part of that bloat was the desire to tie off loose ends.  Is this, then, an appendix to TEATD, or even a Part IV?  Or is it something else?  The cynic might believe that Era of Ruin is a collection of cutting-room-floor clippings, dusted off and bulked out so as to sell another red-leather-bound monstrosity to obsessive collectors (such as myself).  Is that a fair criticism?

I will review each story (spoiler-free, never fear) on its merits, but I will also attempt to grapple with the more fundamental question of whether that story really, you know, needs to exist.  That is an attempt to get at what I think is the core issue with Era of Ruin: the sense that it is trying to add to a tale already told.  Do these stories actually add anything to the rich tapestry of the Heresy and Siege, or are they just dangling threads hanging off the edge of it?

Only one way to find out.  Let’s crack this thing and go story by story.

Angels of Another Age, by John French

Our first story picks up with Kystos Gaellon of the Blood Angels, first appearing in TEATD as one of the millions of doomed defenders in Terra’s final hours.  We find him in the ruins of Marmax South as time and space have dislocated, awaiting the arrival of the assault that will see him and his two companions (a Fist and a Scar) overrun and murdered.  And then his father dies.

Sanguinius’s death, and the explosive impact it had on his sons, was one of the most exquisite parts of TEATD, so I am not sorry to revisit the theme here.  French doesn’t have the descriptive chops Abnett has, but fortunately does not (outside of a single, brief paragraph) attempt to imitate the original; instead, he opts for flashback and philosophical musing, as whatever is left of Gaellon’s rational mind tries to make sense of what is happening to him – and what will continue to happen to all Blood Angels, forever.

The story has a nice mix of this kind of musing and brutal combat, and neither portion is long enough to wear out its welcome.  It’s short, but I don’t think the premise could sustain much more than this, and a story is allowed to be short.

As for the larger meta-question, I actually think this is a great theme to build a story around, and I’m glad it was included.  As I said, Abnett’s portrayal of the first-ever Black Rage was incredibly well-done, but it was brief, and the vast majority of it focused on others’ experience of the Blood Angels’ agony (aside from that incredible part right at the beginning, hoo boy).  I enjoyed reading a more in-depth experience of what it felt like to be caught in the Black Rage, and what it meant for the Legion as a whole.  The Blood Angels are smart and introspective enough to understand not just what this means for them now, but what it will mean for them forever.

Fulgurite, by Nick Kyme

Okay, so.  I went into this review promising not to be mean.  I will do my best to keep that promise.

The plot, unsurprisingly, follows Barthusa Narek, everyone’s favorite traitor-which-actually-means-loyalist Word Bearer and the galaxy’s #2 fan of patricide (cursed to share a war with the all-time HOF champion).  He has a magic bullet and he wants to shoot Lorgar with it.  Lorgar is not on Terra, of course, but Narek doesn’t know that.  So what does he do?  What’s the plan, guy?

“Find some humans, run into some deranged III Legion monsters, explore a desert for a while and run into a couple of named characters,” it turns out.  The plot of this one kind of rambles, with a wholly unnecessary middle section and a weird little “Narek saves some humans, but he doesn’t really care about them, or does he?” subplot that peters out without going anywhere.  Of course, we know that Narek doesn’t end up shooting his dad with the magic bullet, but how does he end up not-shooting him?  Is that an interesting story?

I don’t really think so.  I think this story could be interesting in different hands (discussed in more detail below), but Kyme doesn’t really have a sense of what story he wants to tell with Narek, so this one sort of meanders until it abruptly ends.  It wasn’t my least favorite story in the book, but it was in the bottom half.

So does this story really need to be told?  Your answer to that will depend on what you think of Barthusa Narek.  This story has probably been set up more than any other in the anthology – Narek was even mentioned briefly in TEATD and pointedly not touched again – but that sort of begs the question, does Narek need to exist?

Maybe I’m a bit of a hater, but I never really saw the point of Narek or the fulgurite subplot.  It felt like an invention to fix a plothole opened by the unnecessary shoehorning of the fulgurite into the story in the first place, like those weird ironic time loops where you end up killing yourself in the past by accident while trying to prevent your murder in the past at your own hands.  We know Narek isn’t going to shoot Lorgar with a magic bullet, and his personality has never really been developed much past “guy who wants to shoot Lorgar with a magic bullet,” so every story he appears in is freighted with the futility and irrelevance of the mission that is his entire raison d’etre.  So, given that Narek scores very low on the need-to-exist-o-meter, I’m going to rate this story low on that same meter.

Fragments (All We Have Left), by Dan Abnett

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone Sister of Silence finds herself stuck fighting among humans, who are inspired by her presence.  Touched by the very first experience of camaraderie in a long life spent isolated, she watches as they find meaning and purpose in stories, and she muses on the power of stories herself.

It’s Abnett, you know what you’re getting.  The prose is fantastic.  The combat is visceral, the philosophical musing is smart enough to sink your teeth into, the character work is effective.  Probably the best-written story in the book, although it does have some competition.  There are some fairly cute nods to other books here, including Saturnine, which is only fair since this story is basically a retread of the same themes and notes that Abnett already hit in Saturnine with Krole.  I also appreciate Abnett subtly throwing shade at the reader as the Sister narrator muses on what kind of sick deviant would actually want to read about the death and horror of the Siege.  Good question, Sister.

Look, the Krole stuff in Saturnine was good.  Very good.  I think it is the best Black Library writing has ever been.  But that’s what this is, again.  The same themes, the same notes; the narrator here, Aphone Ire, is even the acting Vigil Commander, having been field promoted by Jenetia Krole just before Krole had her own dramatic finale.  This doesn’t feel like cut material from TEATD, as some other stories here do; it feels like cut material from Saturnine.

It pains me to do this, because I am a huge Abnett fan, but I would rate this one pretty low on the need-to-exist scale.  I’ve read this one already and I liked it better the first time.

Ex Libris, by John French

Here’s the pitch: Ahriman is trying to escape the Terran archive when the Warp recedes, nearly killing him as he has grown so dependent on its presence.  Now, in TEATD we know that he was talking to the humans in the Archive at the moment that Horus died and the Warp receded, but whatever, time was messy so let’s assume he can experience the same moment twice.  Also, he gets through it by talking to Magister Amon, who has been dead for “decades,” even though Amon dies years later, after the Rubric…

I am not a timeline purist.  I do not care.  This stuff is all made up anyways.  But this story feels unmoored, and not in a cool “time and space are fracturing!” way.  It feels like it was written without really thinking about how it fits into existing narratives.  Maybe the author confused Amon and Ohrmuzd?  Maybe Ahriman was supposed to be confused?  But that’s not really how it reads – it reads like an editorial error.

The story also doesn’t really have much happen in it.  Ahriman is trying to escape a collapse of the nephelosphere (a word French doesn’t use here, but should have).  He hallucinates the Chaos Gods, Amon, gets an exposition dump from the latter, sees a bunch of fragmentary visions of things happening on Terra now and in the past, and then… (in extremely Dennis Reynolds voice) the story sort of ends.

I like French.  I liked his other entry in this anthology much more than this one.

Still, I actually think there is a kernel of a cool idea here.  The resection of the Warp from Terra is a very cool idea that was only lightly explored in TEATD III.  The effect that had on the Traitors, especially on the Sons, would have been dramatic and worth exploring.  And, it’s worth noting, I went into this book expecting to have some stories on “what the end of the Siege felt like for the people fighting in it,” and this is one of the few stories that really delivers on that premise.  All that said, I don’t think the people were clamoring to know what Ahriman did next after running away from the Library of Leng.  He’s one of the few people for whom we know his next steps.  So I’m split on this one.

System Purge, by Gav Thorpe

The title got me pretty excited.  The Mechanicum was, I think, hard-done-by in the Heresy; outside of the book Mechanicum itself, which was at times distressingly horny and, at other times, merely distressing, Mechanicum characters basically show up to beep and boop about Science and Logic before giving other characters magic technology to solve the problem in front of them.  I would have liked to see more of them, particularly more focus on what was actually happening on Mars during and immediately after the Siege.  The whole situation is fascinating – a Traitor planet blockaded throughout the Heresy, only unleashed during the war’s final days, and then abruptly bereft and retaken by vengeful loyalists.

I would love to read a story about the purge of Mars.  What did the loyalist magi do when they retook the Red Planet?  Where did the Traitors go?  What became of Kelbor-Hal?  How did the traumatic exfiltration of the Warp affect them?  There’s a magnificent short scene near the end of TEATD III touching on this topic, but that’s it.  I would have liked to see a whole story about the retaking of Mars, but this isn’t it.

Instead, we’re returning to Lion’s Gate, to clear out the last of the taint.  Unfortunately, this story commits so many of the cardinal sins of Black Library storytelling that I suspect it has pledged itself to the Traitor cause.  It tells whenever possible, when it could show.  The characters – the magos coming to cleanse Lion’s Gate spaceport of scrapcode corruption, her put-upon junior, their obsequious host magos, the weary White Scars techmarine escorting them – are about as stock as they get.  Characters pass around the Idiot Ball like kids at camp.  The “twist” is visible a mile away, helpfully signposted by a character outright telling the reader he suspects it before choosing to do nothing about said suspicion.  The less said about the dialogue, the better (which also describes the dialogue itself).

The combat, while visceral, is tough to follow, because it’s just a sequence of descriptions of things happening.  The story does not really paint a picture with words, and the scenes are not given enough description to set the stage, so it’s tough to visualize who is where and what they are doing.  The plot is basically paint-by-numbers: some characters investigate a scary place, find an unexpected threat, are almost overcome by it, and then defeat it by drawing on abilities that they had not realized they had.  Cue applause, fog machine, curtains descend, etc.  You have read this before and it was probably better.

There are bits and pieces of a cool idea here: the Iron Warriors are fairly underdiscussed in the Siege, mostly being waves of generic assailants for Sanguinius to mow down, like the Death Guard but without the latter’s biological, uh, flavor (or Mortarion’s ponderous imponderables).  The Obliterators didn’t get much room to breathe after Volk was introduced.  It’s interesting to see how the Loyalists might react to the first hints of the long-term threat the Dark Mechanicum would pose.  But this story doesn’t really do much with those themes, and the potential feels a bit wasted.

After the Dawn, the Darkness, by Guy Haley

Katsuhiro is back!  His presence in the Siege books was inconsistent, but he was a helpful ground-level look at the action, and it’s nice to have that perspective for the aftermath.  He has that kid still, too.  What will become of them in the poisoned new world?

This is one of the longer stories in the book (though not quite novella sized), and it covers a decent amount of ground.  Katsuhiro’s post-Siege experience is pretty much what you’d expect it to be.  If I have to criticize this story – and I do, doctor’s orders, I’m like the bus in Speed except for criticizing licensed tie-in genre fiction – it’s that Katsuhiro’s post-Siege life is basically 100% exactly what you’d expect it to be.  It’s harsh.  There are work gangs.  There are jerks trying to bully you into handing over your ration card.  It sucks.

There are some cool moments here, like when they excavate a dead Son of Horus in the wreckage and have to clear the area like he’s an unexploded bomb, but for the most part it unfolds as you’d expect, with few surprises.  The title led me to believe there would be some spectacularly nihilistic ending, especially given the focus on the child, but that doesn’t come to pass either.

It’s hard to tell what the story’s about, aside from its facts.  Is it a meditation on hope?  Is it about the danger of getting what you want?  Is it about the difficult in maintaining faith?  It makes some gestures in these directions, but nothing firm enough for me to really call a theme.  In the end, I think the story is too interested in giving us Katsuhiro’s fate and not interested enough in making that fate interesting, or meaningful.

So how does this story fit into the Siege?  A bit loosely, to be honest.  Katsuhiro gets his story tied up in a satisfying way, for those Katsuheads out there who couldn’t bear not knowing about how things turn out for him, but aside from that?  This story doesn’t really show us anything new, or anything we couldn’t guess.  The themes, as discussed above, are thinly sketched.  It’s not a bad story, but it doesn’t really fill a hole for me.  But I didn’t go to Katsucon ’24, so maybe I’m not the target audience.

Homebound, by Chris Wraight

Ok, now we’re cooking with promethium.  Ilya Ravallion has completed her service to the White Scars and wants to go home, to her city in the steppes of Central Asia.  Sojuk Khan escorts her there.  There’s a little bit with the Khagan (alive, but severely Fucked Up), just long enough to give you a taste of what’s going on with him, and the rest is the Ilya show.

This story is great.  Ilya has always been a wonderful character, and the story uses her to explore a topic barely touched on at all: what was going on on the other 99% (or whatever) of Earth’s surface during the Siege?  Nothing good, as it turns out, but nothing like the wholesale devastation of the Palace.

There are moments of peace here, moments of humor, moments of bittersweet, and in the end, a proper and fitting sendoff to one of the most badass mortals of the Heresy.  Wraight has the chops for a story like this, shifting between melancholy and action and horror and back to melancholy with fluency.  He uses symbolism deftly – the plants Ilya reverentially tends in her home garden, the emptiness of her city, the dagger she finally draws and uses just once.  This story is great and well worth a read.

It also, more than any other story in this book, really carves a place for itself.  For one thing, Ilya is great, and deserves a proper goodbye.  For another, “what’s going on everywhere else” is an actually meaningful question that creates space for good storytelling.  The themes this story explores are all distinctly post-Heresy themes: rebuilding, nostalgia, making one’s peace with death.  They are themes that were squeezed out during the frantic violence of the Heresy and Siege, but have room to breathe now.

The Carrion Lord of the Imperium, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The Emperor is dead.  What are the Emperor’s companions to do?

We follow Diocletian Coros, the Asshole Custodian from Master of Mankind, for this one.  We got a taste of Valdor’s sorrow – and the anger that accompanied it – in TEATD III, and ADB lets both of those emotions breathe in this story.  Coros is pissed, and not just at the traitors.  A Space Marine is a Space Marine, and as far as Coros is concerned, they’re all guilty.

That’s not what this story is about, though.  It’s about dreams, and nightmares, and what to do when the purpose of your life ends before your life does.  It happened to the Emperor, when Magnus breached the webway.  Then it happened to his companions, the Custodian Guard.

Coros is a jerk, but he’s wounded by the Custodes’ failure in their one mission, so it’s understandable.  He is also clinging, in this moment, to the one thing he has left: his sense of superiority.  ADB is subtle with it, never telling us that Coros is right or wrong in his judgment of the Astartes and the Primarchs, giving us a good argument in his favor while also showing all the ways that his perspective and arrogance have blinded him.

We also get a resurrection of the “helmet and loincloth” thing that led to the Pillar Men Custodes the Internet loves so much, so that’s cool, too.

I am not sure that this story explores new themes not already covered in Master of Mankind and Magisterium (especially the latter, a criminally underrated short story), but I am glad it exists nonetheless.  The Custodes, perhaps more than any other faction, have suffered in lore from the demands of the tabletop game.  For decades, they existed in the setting but not in the game, and so they were built up as powerful plot devices and pieces of set dressing but not expected to participate in Warhammer’s many melodramas.  Then, with the Heresy, we finally saw them in action, and then – more than a decade later – they stepped onto the 40k tabletop at last.  At each turn their role has been defined, sharpened, and added to, with all the retcons and suturing of existing lore that implies.

The Custodes are the living link between 40k and 30k.  How they got to be the way they are is not mysterious – it’s readily ascertainable simply from the known facts.  But that’s not what this story is exploring.  It’s not asking why the Custodes reacted the way they did to the death of their liege lord; it’s exploring what their relationship was like with him, and with his Imperium, during his life.

End of an Era

So, where does that leave the book overall?  It has its moments, like all anthologies.  To be honest, when I sit down and think about the stories I’d like to read about the immediate aftermath of the Siege, there is a long, long list that’s not covered here.  To that end, I’d call this a miss.  But I try to enjoy it for what it is.  If you followed some of these story threads throughout the Heresy and Siege, you probably want to know where they end up, and – for those few who get a focus here – the Era of Ruin is a fine sendoff.  It leaves me wanting more, not less, which is usually a good thing, but as this is supposed to be the final FINAL we really mean it LAST book in the series, I’m not sure if that’s true this time.  But then again, it may not be final after all.  We’ll see.

And hey, there’s always the Scouring series.  We all know it’s coming.

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