On the first day of Christmas Black Library gave to us…a Horus Heresy short story by Guy Haley. The Final Compliance of Sixty-Three Fourteen takes a look at how a compliant world might react to Horus as he returns to to demand its fealty, claiming the Imperial Truth to be a lie. As the Sons of Horus fleet hangs in orbit as a blunt threat, and their emissaries wait impatiently, the Imperial governor must choose whether to turn away from The Emperor or defy Horus.
As has become tradition in the run up to Christmas, Black Library have provided us, their devoted readers, with an advent calendar full of fictional fun. This year we it’s Warhammer 40k and Horus Heresy only, but according to today’s New@BL blog post we’re actually going to get ‘over 30 new stories’. Not only that but anyone who pays in advance for the ‘subscription’ will receive each day’s story/stories as well as a ‘free’ novel on Christmas Day. The advent calendar page on the Black Library website is showing an icon for each day, presumably representing the focus of each day’s story/stories.
In a relatively short space of time David Annandale has amassed a sizeable body of work for the Black Library, writing for the Imperial Guard, Black Dragons, Iron Hands and Grey Knights amongst others. One of his earliest contributions was a limited-edition Blood Angels novella in the Lords of the Space Marines series; soon to be re-released in non-limited format, Mephiston : Lord of Death takes a detailed look at the Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels, the only one of their number ever to overcome the Red Thirst. Following on directly from the short story Eclipse of Hope, this finds Mephiston accompanying 4th Company as they battle Chaos Space Marines, daemons and their very nature, drawn ever onwards towards the Pallevon system and whatever lies waiting for them there.
Helsreach, Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s novel set during the Third War for Armageddon, was the second ever Space Marine Battles book. A couple of years after its release it was repackaged in a new edition entitled Armageddon along with a companion novella, Blood and Fire. That novella is now available as a standalone volume for those who already have Helsreach, and it picks up just days after the events that concluded the previous story. Reclusiarch Grimaldus is once again front and centre, this time investigating claims by the Celestial Lions, a fellow successor chapter of the Imperial Fists, that the Inquisition is deliberately driving them to destruction. Only a handful of the chapter remain, and Grimaldus is faced with the difficult decision of whether to support them in a last, glorious charge or find a way to help them rebuild their shattered forces.
Black Library tend to release a short story anthology to coincide with each of their events. The 2014 Weekender was no different, with Honour of the Space Marines available, a six-story anthology featuring everyone’s favourite 41st-millennium super soldiers. As with the other ‘…of the Space Marines’ collections (except perhaps ‘Treacheries of…’) the title is a bit misleading, as this only loosely a themed anthology. It’s more about showing the next steps in story arcs that the authors are already known for, from long-established characters to newer, less familiar faces.
From humble beginnings back in the 1990s, there are now eighteen books set within the Sabbat Worlds, a region of space originally invented by Dan Abnett to provide a suitable setting for a story about a Commissar who was also a Colonel, and the ragtag bunch of soldiers he commanded. Look how it’s grown! With anticipation as high as ever for Warmaster, the long-awaited next novel in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, Black Library are whetting our appetite with Sabbat Crusade, the second anthology of stories set within the wider crusade. Edited once again by Abnett and including stories from eight authors (Abnett included) along with previously out of print background on the crusade, it covers both sides of the story, not only the Ghosts and their Imperial allies but also the forces of the Archenemy at play in the region.
2014 was a bumper year for the Horus Heresy. We saw the 29th and 30th books in the series released, Vengeful Spirit and Damnation of Pythos respectively, as well as a goodly number of novellas, anthologies, audio dramas and short stories. Now, on the one hand many Black Library fans are the kind of people who in the interests of completion will buy any new story as soon as it’s made available, while on the other hand many fans are unwilling or unable to fork out vast sums of money for limited edition releases, or just can’t get their head around audio dramas. If you’re Black Library, what do you do? How do you cater to both sets of fans? Well, with Legacies of Betrayal sneaking in just before the end of the year to make it 31 in the series, it looks like you release as much as you can in as many different formats as you can, then bring out an anthology that collects a bunch of those stories together in one place.
Before Aaron Dembski-Bowden got his hands on them, the Night Lords were essentially the most basic of character archetypes; they were baddies by virtue of being evil, as simple as that. Nowadays though they tend to be painted in a different light; far from being just plain old evil and monstrous, in their current incarnation they are portrayed as selfish, nihilistic and massively flawed but in their own way still sort of principled, and bizarrely likeable. From a Heresy perspective, even more than their primarch Konrad Curze, the character who best embodies this conflicted nature is without a doubt Sevatar, First Captain of the Night Lords, mass murderer, liar, cheat and a very dangerous man to be around. Picking up from where we last saw him at the end of the Prince of Crows novella, The Long Night, a 40-minute audio drama from Aaron Dembski-Bowden, sees Sevatar imprisoned by the Dark Angels, talking to the ghosts in his head.
While the Horus Heresy series has been rolling on quite contentedly, reaching 31 books and countless other stories, it’s been a while since we’ve heard much from Caliban and those members of the Dark Angels sent home by their primarch, Lion El’Johnson. What has been happening back on the home world while the rest of the galaxy falls apart, and the Lion has been out chasing Konrad Kurze? Fear not, Gav Thorpe is on hand with a new audio drama, Master of the First, to shed a little light on the situation. This is a 35-minute audio drama available as a standalone MP3 download prior to a future release in a combined package with The Long Night by Aaron Dembski-Bowden.
Chris Wraight’s Brotherhood of the Storm is a Horus Heresy novella which gave us our first proper look at the Heresy-era White Scars. It was originally released as a standalone novella, first a posh limited edition version but now available on the Black Library website in print, ebook and audio formats, but it also comprises the first story within Legacies of Betrayal, the 31st full book in the Horus Heresy series. That does mean that completists may well end up owning it twice, but it also means that fans who don’t want to fork out for the hardback novellas can now get their hands on it in a more palatable format.