Fulgrim

One of the things I thought this book did quite well was creating the feeling of dread. After all, we all know what is going to happen by the end of this book, no one was surprised by the Emperor’s Children falling to Slaanesh, so to capitalise on that certainty was, I think, a good move by the author. There were a lot of ‘oh no’ moment that I loved from this book, such as;

The Emperor’s Children entering the Laer Temple and it’s so clearly a temple to Slaanesh.

Julius Caesoron hearing the Laer Blade speak to him right before Fulgrim takes it.

Serena D’Angelus accidentally mixing her blood with the paint and getting the exact right colour she needs.

There were a lot of things about Serena D’Angelus’ story that I enjoyed. Everything about the creation of her painting of Fulgrim was so creepy and disturbing and just so Slaanesh.

Ostian Delafour’s perspective on the other hand, was not one I really enjoyed. His inarticulacy gets him, and Serena killed. Now there’s nothing wrong with writing a character who’s inarticulate, but I found it particularly frustrating when we’re reading his thoughts, and then watching him fail to put them into words. The biggest example of this, though there are others, is when Fulgrim asks Ostian about his sculptures. The author spells out what Ostian thinks of them in perfect clarity, but Ostian himself can’t really explain it and ends up offending Fulgrim. I think that when Graham McNeill was writing this scene, he should have been less direct with Ostian’s thoughts and shown them as being abit all-over-the-place. Having said that I don’t want to sound like I think I’m a better writer than Graham McNeill. But I do have the benefit of hindsight.

His relationship with Serena seemed very strange. It seems at the start that they both obviously like eachother but Serena doesn’t really realise it and Ostian is too shy to say anything. But what I felt was really unbelievable was the complete lack of effort that Ostian puts into saving Serena. He visits her what? Three times in two years? Keeping in mind that they’re close friends and he is in love with her. And ontop of that, when he does visit her, she says something dismissive about his art and he gets mad and storms out. I guess this can be seen as Ostian just being overcommitted to his work, but I cannot believe that anyone would storm out on their friend after finding them in the state that Serena was in. We’re given such a vivid description of what she looks like when Ostian sees her and there’s no way I can buy him just abandoning her like that.

Anyway, I won’t rant anymore about Ostian. I just didn’t think the character was very well written.

As I said in my Spoiler Free review, I felt Fabius Bile played a small but important role in this story. I’ve heard it said that without the Laer blade, Fulgrim may never have fallen to chaos. I think that’s certainly debatable but, in my opinion, there were two driving forces to the fall of the Emperor’s Children: the Laer Blade, and Fabius Bile.

I only noticed on this, my third listening that Fulgrim decided who to send to Isstvan III based on who had accepted Fabius’ enhancements, showing him to be a key catalyst in the betrayal. He’s clearly insane and I like how, like Typhon and Erebus, he didn’t need his primarch’s help to become corrupted. He really shines in the sequel to this book, ‘Angel Exterminatus’, but I loved the role he played in this book as well.

In terms of the fall of the Emperor’s Children, it seems to be going at a realistic pace until the Maraviglia, and after that everything just goes really whack. It seems unrealistic but I guess it can be explained by the fact that the Maraviglia was clearly some kind of Slaaneshi ritual and all those party to it were obviously deeply affected by it. I just wished there’d been more effort to show that the Maraviglia was what acted as the accelerant for the fall of the Emperor’s Children, as I often hear people complaining that they fell unrealistically fast and unrealistically hard.

As a quick side note, I loved how Marius Vairosean pinned his eyelids open during Isstvan V so he wouldn’t blink and miss anything. Something, I thought this book did really well was show some fundamental truths about Slaanesh.

She-who-thirsts is too often dismissed as the god of sex and I think that’s tragically simplistic. Slaanesh is the god of excess and its followers want to stimulate all of their senses as much as possible. As they do so they become numb to such sensations, so they are forced to seek ever more intense and excessive experiences.

This obviously isn’t limited to sex and I like how artwork was a focus of this book, how they artists use ever brighter and more garish tones and the musicians use ever louder and more screeching notes because nothing else has an impact on them anymore.

I’ll talk about the Iron Hands now as they play a not insignificant part in this book and there’s a few things I want to comment on.

I wasn’t a fan of the way Ferrus was introduced. For those who don’t remember, he’s angry at Captain Balhaan for falling into a trap and tells Santar he’s going to decapitate him to make an example of him. Let’s keep in mind that we’ve just had a segment from Balhaan’s point of view, so we sympathise with him and we know that he made an honest mistake. So, my first impression of Ferrus Mannus becomes, “what a jerk”.

First impressions are very important, especially with Primarchs and especially with Ferrus Mannus because we see so little of him before he dies. Are we supposed to dislike him? Because it does very much feel like it’s going in that direction. I’m personally of the opinion that Shadrak Meduson is much cooler than Ferrus Mannus and I think part of that stems from the way this book introduced us to the Gorgon.

There’s something very compelling about Gabriel Santar that I never really caught onto until I saw artwork of him in terminator plate. When we’re first introduced to him, we’re told about how one of his hands was replaced with a robotic one upon his induction into the legion and since then he’s lost the other arm and a leg. This touches on a truth of the astartes that rarely gets considered. Every time a Space Marine loses a limb in battle, they become less human and more machine. Often dreadnoughts are referred to as dead or fallen, in a sense, because there’s not much human left, it’s just machine.

So, when Julius Caesoron shreds Santar apart, the only way he can survive is with extensive machine augmetics. He was probably this close to becoming a dreadnought himself. So Caesoron did more to Santar than greviously wound him. He took a significant portion of his humanity away from him.

I thought this was a really cool concept and I wish they’d explored it alittle more. But also it makes sense that Santar doesn’t think about it too much because he’s an Astartes and he’s trained not to let this stuff bother him.

There’s a lot of stuff conceptually that I appreciate about this book but sadly, I think the writing really detracts from it.

The Emperor Protects