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This review will mostly focus on the characters of the trilogy because they’re pretty much the main focus of the story.
As I mentioned in my spoiler free review, some of the Astartes named in the trilogy don’t really end up being important until much later and probably didn’t need to be included in these books. Some examples are: Kalus Ekaddon, Kenor Argonis, and Falkus Kibre. Yes, I know that they become important later and the author probably didn’t want it to seem like they came out of nowhere, but honestly, mentioning their name once doesn’t really help. I remember hearing about The Widowmaker a year after listening to this trilogy and thinking, “Who the heck is that?” On the flip side, Grael Noctua is, if memory serves, not mentioned once in this trilogy, but he still fits perfectly well into the story when he’s introduced in ‘Vengeful Spirit’.
I also think that Luc Sedirae and Serghar Targost didn’t need to be two separate characters. I feel as though Targost didn’t really do anything important other than simply being Lodge Master and that role could have been fulfilled by Luc, who’s established as having a personality, unlike Targost in my opinion. Merging them into one character would have meant that more time could have been spent on them and they may have been more memorable. And it’s also one less name to remember.
I don’t want to complain about the names too much at the risk of sounding like I’m one of those people who always forgets characters names. But come on, there are a lot of names in this trilogy.
On the flip side, the human characters were quite well done in my opinion, every named human is paid off. One of the best examples of this, in my opinion, was Ing Mae Sing. When I first read her name, I remember thinking to myself, “Horus’ Astropath, surely I don’t need to remember her name.” But no, she shows up and holds the daemon in place while Euphrati banishes it and then later, Horus is going to sacrifice her, and it’s revealed that she was the one who sent Kyril the warning to save Euphrati’s life. Someone who seemed really insignificant and who’s name can’t have been mentioned more than ten times in the trilogy, still ended up moving the story forward in a memorable way.
Maggard is another cool one. I like how we start off feeling sorry for him but then it turns out he’s a real sadist. And that scene where he fights off the pox walkers was epic and obviously Horus thought so too.
Jonah Aruken was another personal favourite from the trilogy and I loved the scene when he and Titus are protecting Euphrati from Maggard. I didn’t really expect them to be good fighters outside of their titans, but it was pretty cool seeing how they worked as a team. I have the Titan Crew kit from Forgeworld and I love to imagine that it’s the crew of the Dies Irae.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in the human characters though, I could spend all day talking about them.
On a less positive note, I found that Ignace Karkasy felt a bit unrealistic at times. He wasn’t a jerk all of the time, but he was enough of a jerk to make me wonder why anyone was friends with him. I also feel as though he should have known that there would be serious consequences for his poetry. Maybe if he’d been written as someone obsessed with telling the truth, it would have been more believable but as things were, a lot of his actions didn’t make sense to me.
I, like most people, loved Torgaddon on my first listening, but on my second listening, I found he could be a bit tiresome. I suppose that’s kind of the point. He’s always making jokes, even when he really shouldn’t be, but I got bored of it after a while. I mean honestly, do five push-ups every time he calls Loken a “starch-arse” and you’ll be ready to wrestle Angron in no time.
Speaking of Angron, the battle against the Auretian Technocracy was a standout in the trilogy for me and I thought the scene when Loken tried to give a dying soldier his water was really poignant. The war on Auretia says a lot about the Great Crusade as a whole. The question of, “Did we really need to fight them?” seems to get asked a lot in this trilogy. And the bit when Angron emerges from the rubble and kills the surrendering party made me want to laugh and cry. It was comical, but also so tragic.
One of the big questions this trilogy raises is, “Did Horus die on Davin?” That is, is the person we see after Davin, really Horus, or is he just a meat puppet of the Chaos gods? The trilogy seems unable to make up its mind about this. Evil Horus feels so different to good Horus that it made me wonder what the point was in getting to know good Horus. There are elements of good Horus visible in evil Horus, but they’re so tiny that they seem insignificant. In contrast, Horus argued vehemently that the Interex should be spared. But when they make contact with the Auretian Technocracy, Horus throws away any chance they had at peace after six minutes. In my opinion, evil Horus is just too different to good Horus. The change doesn’t feel believable unless he really is nothing more than a puppet, which the books seem to suggest that he’s not.
Having said that; I think the only time we actually see into Horus’ head is while he’s dead in the Serpent Lodge and then we see that he gets really jealous that his brothers are being celebrated but he isn’t. It’s obviously a big contrast to the Horus everyone else sees who’s all like: “Oh no, please don’t bow, I hate celebrations, blah blah blah.” Maloghurst still bows before Horus even after he’s injured and bowing becomes a very painful thing for him, but Horus never says, “You don’t have to bow, a nod will do.” I guess we see that Horus’ humility is all an act and maybe the evil Horus was beneath the surface all along. So, I thought that scene was good, but it probably needed more to go with it to make Horus’ change feel believable.
The three civilisations we see, the Interex, the Auretian technocracy and the Warsingers of Isstvan are all well fleshed out and interesting. They’re one part of the story where I think that having three different authors helped as I think it kept the civilisations from being too similar. My favourite was the Auretian Technocracy.
I also noticed that each of the Chaos gods got some representation. Samus is implied to be a daemon of Khorne, the daemon that Kyril Synderman accidentally summons is probably a Pink Horror of Tzeentch, Eugen Temba and his men have clearly been corrupted by Nurgle, and the Warsingers worship Slaanesh.
The climax of this story is ofcourse, the Isstvan atrocity and I just love the big heroic last stand that they do. I love how they slowly accept that the Emperor isn’t coming for them and their mission changes from ‘wait for rescue’ to ‘delay Horus as much as we can’. Saul Tarvitz really shone in this time and he became my second favourite space marine. When he realised Isstvan was going to be bombed and he’d narrowly escaped, he stole a thunder hawk and went down there to warn the others. What a hero. I don’t want to spend too much time on Saul Tarvitz but I couldn’t go through this whole review without even mentioning him. He’s one of the best things about this trilogy in my opinion. The fallen shall be forever remembered as The Emperor’s Finest.
The Emperor Protects