Since landing his first short story with the Black Library, 2019’s Blessed Oblivion, Dale Lucas has shown himself to be a voice of uncommon depth. These are no simple hack-and-slash tales, but rather those that examine the human condition in the extraordinary Age of Sigmar.
Blessed Oblivion contemplated the cost of forging for a Stormcast Eternal, and what it meant to lose pieces of yourself bit by bit. Godsbane (2022) considers how small events can spiral out of control and into bloody conflict, while Anvils of the Heldenhammer: The Ancients (2024) asks what happens when your sense of right and duty conflict with your faith.
In his latest release, Ushoran: Mortarch of Delusion, he pits two leaders against one another, both shepherds and stewards of a very different people and examining what it means to rule.
Setting the Table
The story focuses on Kosomir Voranov, Master Patriarch of Rimerock. This is a city knocking on the door of greatness, with the opportunity to be granted Free City of Sigmar status in the coming Spring. Greater might and prosperity are sure to follow; they need only make it through the Winter first.
There are only two things standing in Voranov’s way.
The first is the damnable presence of the flesh-eaters, ghouls who stubbornly seem to resist all efforts at being stamped out once and for good. After all, who would want to come settle lands around Sigmar’s newest city if they remained infested with shambling cannibals?
We’re introduced to Voranov as he leads his forces to cleanse the ruins where the flesh-eaters lair and put an end to their predation. Bolstered by some borrowed Stormcast Eternals, it’s a complete rout. The flesh-eater court is demolished, its survivors few, its leaders slain. Happy days lie ahead…right?
Well, about that… Unfortunately, the fallen leader of the now-destroyed court, Count Fangborn, was dear to Ushoran. So dear, in fact, that Ushoran’s meandering circuit of court visitations soon sees him standing before the still-smoldering pyres left behind of his kin with grief and fury. Collecting the scant handful of surviving abhorrents in the shadows, Ushoran plots a bloody revenge against the “true monsters,” those who killed his friends and subjects.
The structure of the book from there takes on a sort of helical-mirror narrative arc as passages alternate between the point of view of Voranov and Ushoran, and here is where the richness of the tale starts to unfold. You see, the other thing that’s standing in Voranov’s way?
It’s Voranov himself.
A Tale of Two Rulers
One of the book’s emergent themes is the nobility of the monster, and the monstrousness of the noble. Lucas is a disciplined writer here, letting the string out bit by bit rather than all at once. He plays this card early with Ushoran. “Heavy is the head that wears a crown,” the Mortarch muses to himself in an early passage. “When one’s people can never be safe… when the lives of others must always, by necessity, matter more than one’s own.”
Notwithstanding that those “people” are bloodthirsty, cannibalistic ghouls, the tension here is whether or not Ushoran’s regal decency is sincere, or just another facet of his all-consuming delusion.
For his opposite, Voranov, it’s a slow unraveling that more and more calls into question how much ‘regal decency’ he has to begin with. Well-founded caution slowly descends into paranoia, with the Patriarch pushing out the limits of his ruthlessness further and further with every challenge.
Again it’s a testament to Lucas’s skill here that Voranov remains, if not sympathetic, at least an understandable figure. He’s no moustache-twirling villain, but rather a flawed leader who nevertheless tries to ground his decisions in sense and logic. When he slams the city’s gate shut to a swarm of refugees, condemning them to almost certain doom as the flesh-eaters flex their resurgent muscle, we feel both the heartlessness of it, but also recognize that in times of contagion a leader may have to make hard choices for the “greater good.”
The strength of the book is how it joins these two strands of the tale. As Voranov unravels, bit by bit, decision by decision, Ushoran grows stronger as if winding up the loose thread. Voranov is also quite a talker, whether to him aides or the portraits of his ancestors in his study- a device that allows us to gain a close understanding of why he is making the choices he makes.
Each ruler’s vision for their people require the extinguishing of the other’s, and Lucas never loses sight of the pacing that moves the two inexorably towards the tale’s climax.
Into the Author’s Mind
Just as compelling as the story is the tale behind it, and here having the Limited Edition is a delight. Lucas pens an insightful and candid afterword where he talks about his thought process behind crafting the tale as he did.
Centering the tale on a character other than Ushoran was a design choice. Lucas noted that the Summerking’s power and majesty, combined with the nature of his all-encompassing delusion, would make emotional investment a challenge for the reader.
Consequently, he anchored the story on Voronov. “I reasoned [that] the reader and I might best examine the Mortarch of Delusion indirectly by contrasting his world view, his desires, his motives and his methods with a more human- and more relatable- figure. That game plan- to examine one character by contrasting them with the other- seemed ideal.”
That’s what makes Ushoran: Mortarch of Delusion work so well. While Grand Patriarch Voranov was always intended to serve as a foil, Lucas avoids the trap of defining him fully through his primary focus. As noted above, Voranov is no mere caricature, and I found myself invested in the fate of both characters.
Lucas worked hard to make it so. He recounts how in his early drafts Voranov was written as “a sort of clown: a hollow man made of nothing but duplicity, cowardice, and bullying cruelty.” Two guidelines of narrative writing compelled him to reexamine this choice.
First, the interest and engagement in a protagonist will be limited by the same degree of both of the antagonist. Put another way, a dynamic hero facing a dull, middling villain will not a compelling tale make.
Second, a tragedy best succeeds when the greatness of a character is undone by their own fatal flaws.
Taken together, these axioms helped Lucas bring Voranov to life in a much more compelling way, and getting to see that thought process in the afterword was an unexpected treat that made me even more satisfied with spending $65 on a single novel.
Room to Improve
If there was any fault I could find in the book, it was- not unlike Ushoran himself- hidden away until the very end. It was reminiscent of watching a superb gymnastics routine at the Olympics, only for the athlete to make the smallest stumble for the final dismount. Nothing major, no giant deduction, just a little slip in the score. That’s about how this story’s climax felt for me, a narrow miss of sticking the landing in an otherwise outstanding performance.
From the moment where Voranov decides he’s going to through a feast celebration for those remaining loyal to him, you just know that that’s where everything is going to come to a head. The tension mounts as the big confrontation draws nearer page by page, and I could hardly put the book down until it was done.
In hindsight, that may have been part of the problem. Lucas’s pacing throughout the book is terrific. The scene where the flesh-eaters attacked the human settlement for the first time since the opening rout has all the prickling tension of the med-lab scene in Aliens, as the marines’ motion sensor pings faster and faster. You’ve waited for the confrontation between Ushoran and Voranov for the entire book, and it’s almost anticlimactic in its haste.
This is a very minor quibble, however, and did little to diminish my overall enjoyment of the book. This is a gripping story, and requires very little Age of Sigmar lore background to fully enjoy. While the release date for the standard edition hasn’t been announced yet, if the scheduling of Leontus: Lord Solar (similarly launched first in a limited edition) is anything to go by, the tale of the Summerking will be a cracking Summer read.
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