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gallifreyianrosearkytiorsusan · 6 months ago

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Uriel's subtle revenge

Past =-= Next

Author's note: y'all inspired me to make a Uriel Ventris chapter with the Serf Reader. I hope y'all enjoy!

Warnings: A bit of Bully Cato, let me know if I need to add more.

Tagged: @sleepyfan-blog @bleedingichorhearts @kit-williams @barn-anon @c-u-c-koo-4-40k

Tagged: @i-am-a-dragon34 @egrets-not-regrets , @gra93fruit-blog

‘Sometimes,’ Uriel Thinks to himself as he carefully tracks down one particular Serf that comes from his planet of birth from a farming community near where he'd grown up, “I think Captain Sicarius believes His own hype a little too much.’

While the Captain of the Second company is an exceptional fighter with few who could match him in sword, bolter, and tactics. His personality was something that rubbed others the wrong way, like stroking a cat's fur the wrong way far too roughly.

He spots the Serf dutifully tending to their tasks, their hair pinned up and out of the way as they diligently clean the room. They look up and around, feeling eyes on them. They look into his eyes briefly before they look down and properly Bow to him, pausing their work.

“Greetings, Lord Angel,” They say with very care pronunciation.

Uriel remembers when he had Pasinius were young Aspirants and they’d been with a whole barracks full of boys within the acceptable age range from every planet within Ultramar and the teasing and mockery he and his oldest friend had gotten for their ‘hick planet accent’.

Your particular version of their shared accent is really adorable in his opinion. Even when you are trying to hide it, which is a shame in his opinion.

“Greetings Serf,” he says, allowing his Calthian accent to come through.

Their head shot up and they stared at him wide eyed for a moment. Recognizing their shared accent.

“I hear you come from a place near where I used to live,” Uriel continued. “Have the grox-cheeses in the deep caves aged into the wine-dark musk that I remember?”

“Yes, and the festival of cheese wheels happened a few months before I left, Lord Angel,” you reply, your accent thickening back to what it was before you'd come aboard the space ship.

You knew that The Angels of Ultramar are from all over the planets under the protective Custody of the Imperial Regent. But you hadn't realized that one of the farm boys of Calth had actually managed to become an Angel, from what you can read of his Armor, he's a Captain, which is somewhat high ranking. Although at least as far as you can tell, it is.

Uriel and you talk about the various festivals and celebrations that their towns share, to mark the seasons and other important Holidays and events that are celebrated either for local planetary things, or for more important Imperium wide events.

Uriel is regaling you about one of the times he had done the Space Cooper's-hill cheese rolling and wake, one Of the few that he'd participated in before becoming an Aspirant.

You had started to smile and giggle as Uriel was describing something when a voice called out, haughty, And annoyed, “tch, must you speak in such a low way Ventris?”

Uriel's smile only faded somewhat, but his eyes sharpen at the way that you were slightly edging away from the sharp, sour tones of Captain Sicarius.

Uriel allowed himself to glance towards the older Ultramarine, noticing the way he was fuming and scowling at the pair of them.

Uriel stopped himself from smirking a little bit as he realized just how Annoyed the noble-blooded Ultramarine was.

“Ah, Lassie,” Uriel drawls, thickening his accent further, glancing down at you with an innocuous smile,“th’ Cap is fair steam'd.”

“Speak. Properly,” Cato hisses at his annoying younger brother. “You are the Fourth Captain of the Ultramarines.”

Cato clenches his fists and relaxes them a couple of times. He had been going in this direction for a purpose, but what that way flew out of his head when he had heard and seen Uriel speaking with you.

And realizing one of the things is that had bugged him about you. That deeply annoyed him, throne-Cursed Ventris is also from Calth. And the little snot likes to use that accent, which no one but him and his fellow country Bumpkins can understand.

He is ignoring the fact that part of the reason he's so angry is that Ventris got you to smile and giggle at him. He should go to an Apothecary because one of his hearts had started hurting A little to see you look at a different Space Marine like that. Then the bizarre hurt turned into welcome and familiar rage.

“If you aren't doing anything important,” Cato barks at the pair of Calthians,”stop blocking the hallways and get back to work.”

You started to curl in on yourself As a hot flush of shame has your cheeks turning red. You had continued to work, albeit At a slower pace as you spoke and listened to Captain Sicarius's word.

“I think you need to dislodge your sword from your scrotum,” Ventris snarks at Cato.

Cato feels a vein start to throb in his forehead at the younger Captain’s Words." You and I need to go to the sparring ring. Now.”

“Gladly,” Uriel says, giving you a nod before following after an angrily stomping Cato.

He was glad he was able to speak with you for a little while. There aren't many fellow Calthians that go off planet.

#warhammer 40k #warhammer #adeptus astartes #uriel ventris #cato sicarius #xreader #bullying cato #Bully Cato #blue berry compote au

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leareadsheresy · 3 months ago

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Battle for the Abyss

This post contains spoilers for Battle for the Abyss, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) July 29th, 2008, although sources disagree -- some places I've found assert it was published on August 1st, 2008. Something I've found when trying to date specific works in this series, though, is that a lot of places will say "Published on [Month] 1st" when they actually mean "Published in [Month], we don't know which exact day," so as a general rule when I do this dating thing I assume any source that's specific about it being published on an exact date is accurate unless that date is given as the first of the month, in which case I assume that's filler information and only the month is reliable. I guess it makes sense for a book published two days before the end of the month would be attributed to the next month in some databases. Also I kind of don't care if I'm off by a couple of days about a publication date because I'm tumblr liveblogging a series of, at best, high-school-essay-quality book reports about a media tie-in novel series.

So this book is kind of infamous; I've seen it described as The Worst Horus Heresy novel with the possible exception of some of the Salamanders books that come later. Thing is, I don't hate it. To explain why, I will have to go into some of the events of the Horus Heresy that haven't been covered in these novels yet.

According to the pseudo-history of the Horus Heresy, following the Istvaan III Atrocity but before news of it had reached the larger galaxy, Horus issued orders to the Ultramarine Legion to muster at Calth, a planet in the Veridia System within the realm of Ultramar (the Ultramarines' empire-within-an-empire, conquered by their Primarch prior to his discovery by the Emperor of Mankind). An airless world with massive underground cities and an expansive orbital shipyard, Calth served as one of Ultramar's major military bases, and the order was for the Ultramarines to gather there with the Word Bearers Legion to prepare for a campaign against an ork force who were moving in the direction of Veridia. Unknown to the Ultramarines, the muster at Calth was a trap -- the Word Bearers, upon their arrival, immediately attacked the planet, using the slaughter of the gathered Ultramarines and Calth's human population to fuel a ritual that poisoned Veridia's sun, and ultimately this ritual fueled a massive warp-storm, the Ruinstorm, that both interrupted FTL travel between one half of the galaxy and the other and made it much easier for daemons to manifest in realspace in its vicinity, allowing the traitor forces to summon daemonic reinforcements to aid in their war against Imperial loyalists.

(If you've played Space Marine 2, this is what Chairon is talking about when he says he was born on Calth -- the game takes place ten thousand years after the Horus Heresy but many of the first generation of Primaris Space Marines, of which Chairon and Gadriel both are, were taken by Belisarius Cawl as children during the Heresy for experimentation and spent most of the intervening millennia being brought in and out of stasis as Cawl developed the Primaris aguments.)

Calth is important in the annals of the Heresy. Visions of Darkness, an art book (the second of four, compiling card art from the 2003 Horus Heresy collectible card game; the Visions series also served as the outline for the events of the Heresy as a whole), detailed the Word Bearer assault on Calth in 2005, a year before the publication of Horus Rising. (I would have covered the Visions series on this blog except I didn't realize three of the four were published before Horus Rising until after I'd done my entry on False Gods; the fourth was published between those two novels.) Calth is the subject of future novels and in 2015 got its own boxed game, Betrayal at Calth, which contained the first Horus Heresy plastic miniatures -- Mark IV armor, Cataphractii Terminators, two characters, and the first (truly awful; thank God we're rid of it) plastic Contemptor Dreadnought. Betrayal at Calth also had its own ruleset but hardly anybody ever played it; that boxed set was a way to justify pulling money for development of plastic Horus Heresy figures from the self-contained-boxed-games budget and everybody knows it.

What the pseudo-histories of the Horus Heresy don't say is that the attack on Calth was part of an intended two-pronged attack, meant to occur simultaneously with a sneak attack on Maccrage, the adopted homeworld of the Ultramarine Primarch Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines' primary recruiting world, while most of the Ultramarine forces were on Calth awaiting Word Bearer rendezvous. The other half of this attack would be carried out by a massive battleship of a new class, the Furious Abyss, commissioned by Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum of Mars (and secret Horus ally), with the intent to shatter Maccrage's second moon and then use the debris field to bypass Maccrage's orbital defenses to deliver a payload of life-eater virus to the planet directly in a repeat of the Istvaan III Atrocity. This attack, together with the betrayal at Calth, would have knocked the Ultramarines out of the war and prevented them from rallying and rebuilding later, and without the Ultramarines as a rebuilt force later in the war serving as a counter to the traitors, Horus would have been able to commit forces in greater numbers to the Garmon Sector, allowing him to land more forces on Terra much earlier. This likely would have won the traitors the war.

The reason why the pseud-histories of the Heresy doesn't say any of that is the attack by the Furious Abyss failed, because a small group of Astartes from the Ultramarines, Space Wolves, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons legions, none of whom even know that the Heresy was a thing yet, found evidence of the Furious Abyss's weapons test against an Ultramarines battleship and investigated, followed the Abyss's trail, and ultimately destroyed it before it could succeed in its attack on Maccrage, and this battle was so small -- the Furious Abyss itself versus a pursuit force of six much smaller ships -- that it was entirely swallowed up by the chaos of the Heresy's eruption and was ultimately forgotten by later historians.

The early Heresy is so replete with devastating loyalist losses that I kind of love the idea of an early loyalist win, entirely forgotten by later histories, made by a mixed group of members of legions who'd later be on both sides of the conflict, being one of the unknown lynchpins of Horus's ultimate defeat. The Horus Heresy game book series, the Black Books, do not to my knowledge even mention this battle, because their setting sections are written in-character by a post-Heresy historian, and the narrator would have had no way of knowing Calth was intended as part of a two-pronged attack. (Actually I'm not sure it's never mentioned; if I eventually get to the Black Books while doing this readthrough I'll keep an eye out for it.) I just... I love the idea of a small, forgotten event being so important. I think it's genuinely interesting, and this sort of attempt to expand the timeline with new events that make sense (of course the traitors would have had a plan to follow up their Calth attack with an attack on Maccrage to finish the Ultramarines off completely!) is exactly what these Horus Heresy novels ought to have been doing once it became apparent that they sold like gangbusters and were therefore going to be published for a very, very long time. This is, at least in theory, what I am here for. I'm sure not here for Primarch drama! I don't even like the Primarchs! (God, me reading this series is a mistake. Yeah, Lea, read a 64-book-series where you don't care about any of the ostensible main characters; that's a great use of your time.)

Unfortunately, Battle for the Abyss just isn't very good. Fortunately, at least some of the ways it's not very good are themselves of at least some interest.

So. Let's go with a summary.

We open with Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, watching as the Furious Abyss launches from Thule, which we're told has been a moon of Jupiter for six thousand years. Jupiter doesn't have a real moon called Thule but there is an asteroid called 279 Thule, so I think we're meant to assume that this is 279 Thule, having been dragged into orbit of Jupiter six thousand years previously. The ship is described as being impossibly big. Inside, a Word Bearer is giving a speech to a bunch of other Word Bearers about how religion is cool and it's their destiny to overthrow the emperor, and how they'll finally get their revenge on the Ultramarines. (Much like Calth, there is another important pre-established bit of Heresy lore where the Word Bearers insisted on worshipping the Emperor like a god even after he told them not to, because the Word Bearer Primarch, Lorgar, believes firmly that life is only worth living in service to a divine power. The Emperor then sent the Ultramarines to the Word Bearer homeworld to humble them by leveling their biggest temple-city, which Lorgar pretended worked but actually just drove him to hate the Emperor and seek out alternate gods to worship, which lead him to Chaos.) After the ship launches, Thule is rigged to explode so everyone who worked on the Furious Abyss dies, keeping the ship's design secret.

We then cut to some Ultramarines heading towards Vangelis Spaceport (I appreciate the name) on the Fist of Maccrage, but the Furious Abyss comes out of nowhere and attacks it as a weapons test. Judging his ship doomed, the captain of the Fist orders a distress signal sent before they all die.

Then we meet the protagonists. Some Ultramarines on Vangelis Station lead by Captain Cestus are waiting to be picked up by the Fist of Maccrage to be... stationed at Terra, I think? But it's late and they're worried. Cestus meets up with a Space Wolf named Brynngar, who leads a couple of packs of Blood Claws (that's a type of Space Wolf unit in 40k but, importantly, not in 30k; I'll get back to this at the end), in a bar, Brynngar is carousing and fighting and drinking special Space Wolf mead that can get even Space Marines drunk (another 40k thing). Cestus and Brynngar are old battle buddies who saved each others lives a couple of times. Suddenly alarms go off -- there's been an incoming astropathic message, and Cestus thinks it might be from their late ship, so he goes to check it, but it's a bunch of ominous nonsense that kills the astropaths who receive it and then feedback from the astropaths into the station's systems threatens to overload the reactor. Cestus and Brynngar rush off to the reactor room to do an emergency shutdown and in the core of the overloading reactor Cestus gets a psychic vision of Maccrage in flames.

There is some evidence the astropathic message of doom came from the Fist of Maccrage and Cestus decides to investigate, rallying all the other space marines on the station -- his own Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, some World Eaters lead by an captain named Skraal, and a single Thousand Son, Mhotep. They commandeer a warship called the Wrathful and its escorts, captained by the reasonably cool Admiral Kaminska, who's sort of pissed off she's been drafted into this potential fool's errand, and Mhotep brings along his personal ship as well. They encounter... you know, I don't remember, either they find a debris field or an energy signal or something, they find some evidence that the Fist of Maccrage has been destroyed and are able to follow an energy signature to the Furious Abyss, which they hail, it blows up one of their escorts when the escort gets too close and there's a space battle. Our protagonists kind of freak out when they realize that's a ship full of space marines that just attacked other space marines, which isn't supposed to happen, but mainly they're like "Oh, this is a fight? Cool, I know how fights work" and then they fight. One of the Wraithful's escorts is a fighter carrier but the Abyss use a psychic attack to drive all the fighter pilots insane when they get too close, Mhotep's ship gets blown up but he escapes in a "savior pod" (one of the things 30k/40k does is give slightly off-kilter names to SF staples, so escape pods are savior pods, the teleporter room is called the teleportarium, etc) and gets picked up by the Wrathful, etc. All but one of the escorts are destroyed (the survivor is the Fireblade), so the protagonist's fleet is down down from five ships to two, and Abyss escapes.

During the fight, they damage the Abyss so the protagonists know that if they just follow it, it'll have to get repairs somewhere, and they can attack it then. The Abyss heads towards a warp jump point which serves as a known entry point to a stable warp corridor (to my knowledge this is not how warp travel is described as working elsewhere in the setting; there are stable warp corridors, but there's nothing like Babylon 5 style jump points you have to use to enter them), and the protagonists follow but after entering the corridor the Word Bearers use a psychic bomb to collapse the corridor, so the Wrathful and the Fireblade enter the unstable warp. Both protagonist ships are attacked by daemons in the warp; the space marines aboard the Wrathful fight theirs off but the Fireblade takes significant damage, and the Wrathful moves to bring it into a repair bay, but surprise, the whole ship has been compromised by daemons who've fused the souls of the crew into the ship, and the Fireblade has become a sort of giant anglerfish monster thing that attacks the repair bay as it opens. Mhotep, the Thousand Son, senses that something is off and rushes to the repair bay where he uses warp sorcery to fight the Fireblade off, breaking the Edict of Nikea (when the Emperor declared that any Space Marines who were developing psychic powers had to immediately stop using and developing them, which the Thousand Sons are bitter about because they'd made their psychic talents their whole thing). Everyone else in the repair bay dies in this process and Mhotep lies about using a ruptured fuel line to fight off the Fireblade's incursion but Brynngar the Space Wolf doesn't believe him, because Space Wolves, being viking barbarians, hate witches. (Space Wolf rune priests are not witches, as any Space Wolf will tell you.)

The Wrathful continue following the Abyss until it leaves the warp and stops off at a repair station, and Cestus plans a three-pronged attack involving infiltrating groups of space marines to the station and sneaking into the Abyss to sabotage it. The three groups are Ultramarines lead by another named guy who convinces Cestus to stay behind and command the Wrathful, Skraal and his World Eaters, and Brynngar and his space wolves. The World Eaters ruin everything because unlike the other two groups, they can't resist killing innocent station workers along the way to infiltrating the ship ("A bit of killing will sharpen our senses"), and this results in an alarm going up. One touch I sort of like is that at no point later in the book do our protagonists realize this was what gave the attack away; at one point they speculate that the Word Bearers may have had daemons on the Wrathful passing info back to the Abyss and then it just doesn't come up again. The attack fails, most of the infiltrating Ultramarines are killed, the Space Wolves fall back, but the World Eaters and one Ultramarine get in... and are immediately killed because when like twenty space marines try to just rush into a ship filled with hundreds of space marines on high alert, things go badly. Only Skraal survives, fleeing into the depths of the Furious Abyss.

The Furious Abyss takes off, the Wrathful follows, back into the warp with both of them towards Maccrage. On the Furious Abyss, Skraal, sneaking around in air ducts and behind pillars and things, witnesses a ritual where the Word Bearers use the corpse of the dead Ultramarine lieutenant to appease a daemon named Wsoric, while on the Wrathful, Cestus and Brynngar try to get some info out of a captured Word Bearer that Brynngar and his 40k Blood Claws brought back from his failed assault. Asking nicely doesn't work, torture doesn't work, Cestus finally loops Mhotep in to do a psychic probe and Brynngar freaks out about it. They argue, Mhotep tells them to leave so he can do his interrogation without witnesses, demons attack the ship, Mhotep finishes his interrogation and then heads to the spot of the daemon incursion and uses more sorcery to defeat them, which saves a bunch of Ultramarines but drives Mhotep unconscious. Brynngar witnesses this and decides to kill the unconscious Mhotep for witchcraft before he can wake up and share what he got from the Word Bearer, Cestus refuses, they have an honor duel about it. Cestus barely wins and Brynngar abides by the terms of the duel but makes it clear their friendship is over. Mhotep wakes up and tells Cestus the plans for the attack on Maccrage that I went over many many paragraphs ago at the start of this blog post. Cestus confines Mhotep to an isolation cell because Brynngar made it clear the next time he sees Mhotep he'll kill him, honor duel or no. Also, Mhotep touches Cestus's head and gives him a vision of the future, and confesses that he'd foreseen farseen foreseen all of this years ago and knew his fate was to die on the Wrathful.

Both ships exit the warp at Maccrage and have another space fight. Secretly, Cestus made a plan with the human crew of the ship -- all the Space Marines would enter shuttles and when the Furious Abyss opens its torpedo tubes to fight, they'd launch the shuttles toward it and enter via the torpedo tubes while the Wrathful and the Furious Abyss slug it out. During that fight, the Wrathful's engines are wrecked and it begins plummeting towards Maccrage's moon. Most of the Space Marines make it into the ship. Their plan is to blow up the torpedos the Abyss was going to use to blow up Maccrage's moon, since they entered via torpedo tubes and are therefore right there on the torpedo deck, but the Word Bearers hit them with a psychic attack. All the Ultramarines but Cestus die and Brynngar goes crazy, hallucinates being a wolf and fighting a bunch of other wolves for pack dominance, and then wakes up realizing he's killed all the Space Wolves he arrived with. He flees into the depths of the ship, has another fight with a named Word Bearer he fought and nearly killed earlier (now half-interred in a dreadnought), but nearly loses and is saved by Skraal, who has spent the last several weeks sneaking around learning the interior of the ship. Cestus met up with Skraal off-camera while Brynngar was fighting the dreadnought and he shares his new plan: Attack the plasma reactor at the center of the ship and cause a cascading failure that will blow the whole thing up. Brynngar is like "How do you know the interior of the ship well enough to be confident that will work, Cestus? Is it Mhotep's witchery? I hate witches; I'll help you with your witch's plan, but after that you and I are quits" and Cestus is sad but agrees to those terms.

Back on the Wrathful, Admiral Kaminska does one of those scenes you get in space navy science fiction where she orders all the crew into the savior pods but her bridge crew all refuse to go, preferring to die with her, and she's mad about it but also appreciative... and then her second in command doubles over like she's being played by John Hurt in Alien, and the daemon Wsoric bursts out of her and then kills Kaminska and the rest of the bridge crew, also emanating a chill aura that kills everyone on the ship... except Mhotep, who leaves his cell and heads to the bridge. They fight, Wsoric taunts Mhotep about corrupting Brynngar and using his hatred of witchcraft to turn him against them, and tempts Mhotep with escape and hints at the Thousand Sons siding with Horus, Mhotep resists temptation and stuffs a grenade in Wsoric's chest during a moment of daemonic instability (daemons don't hold together well in realspace). Wsoric blows up and Mhotep lies down on the deck plating just in time for the Wrathful to impact the surface of Maccrage's moon and be destroyed. Mhotep dies triumphant.

Brynngar, Skraal, and Cestus get to the plasma reactor, pursued by Word Bearers, and once there, Skraal charges the Word Bearers to give Cestus and Brynngar some time. He makes it to the head Word Bearer guy and injures him before being killed. Cestus's plan is to sacrifice himself by jumping into the plasma reactor with a bunch of grenades but Brynngar says nope and does it instead, implicitly apologizing for being so hostile earlier. Brynngar jumps into the plasma reactor with a bomb strapped to his chest and dies triumphant. With the ship about to explode, the head Word Bearer runs off to escape, Cestus follows him, they have a duel, and Cestus is wounded but cuts off the Word Bearer's head. He then succumbs to wounds the Word Bearer inflicted on him during the duel and dies triumphant as the Furious Abyss explodes. The end.

It would be theoretically possible to write a good book based on the above outline. I don't think there is intrinsically anything wrong with the idea of a full-length, 416 page novel that is just one extended battle-chase-battle-chase-battle. Fury Road was great.

Battle for the Abyss doesn't manage it. The prose is workmanlike and the characterization is flat. Everyone is a stereotype and plot points keep relying on things working in noncanon ways, like the warp jump point thing. Not only is everyone a stereotype, everyone is a 40k stereotype, most notably the drunken Space Wolf. There is a whole subplot I didn't go into above where the narrative keeps cutting back to the Word Bearers as they speak exposition to each other and they're all plotting against each other for status, like a group of Decepticons comprised entirely of copies of Starscream. (And not the cool version of that from Transformers Animated.)

That said... I still think the characterization is better than in False Gods. Everyone is a flat stereotype but almost nobody is ever holding the idiot ball. (Exception: Whoever designed Vangelis Station so that bad astropathic feedback, something that people in 30k already consider extremely dangerous, can trivially jump to the power grid and overload the reactor. Like, come on, guys, the Emperor considers psychic stuff so dangerous he's busy forcefully reorganizing every human civilization in the galaxy to weaken it; don't plug it directly into the mains. More to the point, if your story outline requires a crisis where your space station is going to blow up so the heroes can save it, please have the crisis unfold in a way that doesn't leave me wondering why the space station was designed so as to be improbably, plot-conveniently vulnerable.) In False Gods everyone made infuriatingly stupid decisions and failed to see through laughably obvious manipulation constantly for the sake of clumsily driving the central tragedy through; here, people make reasonable decisions and are just sort of boring about it. There is a type of reader who considers the latter worse but I'm not him.

Furthermore... when this book was written, what 30k Space Wolves were like hadn't been established yet. Horus Rising has mention of Devastator Squads, which are a 40k generic space marine thing that aren't in 30k, so I can't be super mad about this book giving the Space Wolves a couple of Blood Claws squads, a 40k Space Wolf thing that aren't in 30k. Later writers would develop 30k setting elements in new directions, and I can criticize Ben Counter for failing to see he had an opportunity to do that here (maybe if he'd done something more interesting with Brynngar it'd have stuck and we'd have gotten an entirely different version of 30k Space Wolves than we did, because later writers might have followed his lead), but I can't criticize him for failing to guess what later writers would eventually do with them.

Ultimately it's bolter porn. It's just okay bolter porn; it's not even especially bad bolter porn, and it's about what is at least in theory an interesting forgotten early loyalist victory. Next to the violence False Gods did to the plot setup and characterization in Horus Rising, it looks okay.

I can't recommend reading it, though. There are better ways to spend your time.

#horus heresy #Battle for the Abyss #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #Battle for the Abyss spoilers

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flunkyofmalcador · 3 months ago

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In response to my post about Chairon being a Heresy era Primaris, I’ll finally start reading Mark of Calth. I read Battle for the Abyss once already and don’t want to do it again. Are there any facts I should know from that book?

#warhammer 40k #space marine 2 #ultramarines #chairon

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regina-bithyniae · 1 year ago

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"No problem... I mean, 'No; problem'"

Far left are my Honour Guard, center left is my Ultramarine test model, far right is my Terminator command squad. Center is the 3D printed "truescale" MKIV marine.

He is supposed to be a slightly bigger version of center-left guy. He's actually a much bigger version, taller than anyone else even without being based. Not usable.

GW has MKIV marines:

But they're smaller, at a space marine scale that is being gradually superceded, and feels too small.

They also have (slightly bigger) MKIIIs, who are rumored to get their own upscaling in a few months:

And the MKVIs of Age of Darkness fame, who are upscaled but not to a ridiculous level like the 3D print.

Pros and cons of each:

MKIII: very nice models, but update rumored soon

MKIV: nice models, favorite armor mark, and fluff-suitable for Ultramarines at the Battle of Calth, but small

MKVI: upscaled and pasasble with MKIV heads, but I've already painted 50 of the fuckers and doing more might kill me

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stealthclaw1 · 1 year ago

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I was tagged in a tag game by @sasukes-left-tit , so I’ll try my best to play this.

Currently listening to: video game soundtracks that I love, more specifically I find myself frequently listening to tracts from Fallout 76, such “Out There in Appalachia”, and “You Must Rebuild.” I know 76 is far from everyone’s favorite Fallout, but it was my first Fallout game and was the one my partner got me into with the franchise, so it holds a special place in my heart. I also just really enjoy the game’s feel.

Current show watching: None, for the most part? I don’t really watch tv as i can’t really focus on it when I do want to pay attention to it, but can’t focus on other tasks when I just leave it in the background. The one exception to that is I’ll try and watch paranormal shows like “Ghost Adventures” with my partner, or “These Woods are Haunted” when I’m laying in bed and need a distraction. Otherwise, I really like watching documentaries on topics like Ancient Rome, or the natural history of the Earth. I’ve probably subscribed to like 3 different history focused channels on YouTube that just have recordings of documentaries this past month.

Currently reading: the only thing I’ve been really reading has been cookbooks and my Warhammer 40K and Horus Heresy rule books/source books. Pretty much cover to cover multiple times to make sure I’m understanding rules and mechanics, but also reading the fun bits and pieces in them all. I’m embarrassed to admit it’s been a very long time since I’ve sat down to read a novel. I’m thinking I should get some audio books of the Horus Heresy to listen to while I work, but Idk…

Current obsession: besides my usual work of painting models, I’ve been getting really obsessed with wanting to make really good tabletop gaming terrain. Like I’m talking fully modular boards of things like roads, grassy hills, castle walls, medieval streets and cities, and fantasy terrain. I watched the Mark of Calth campaign that one YouTube channel called Zorpazorp was doing on his channel (seemed to have puttered out thanks to youtube algorithm fucking him ofer on that, which is a damn shame…) and seeing all the neat stuff built for that game led me to look into his Middle Earth building videos, and other channels that also make terrain, such as RParchive, and it’s all been living in my head rent free. I would try making some myself, but alas tools and materials cost money so I cannot easily do that without significant financial cost and statin in myself 😔.

I think I’m supposed to tag others, but I don’t want to cause too much of an interruption so I’m just going to tag some close friends for this game (you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to!): @holyknuckled @theineffableamberjae @lamethulhu (I know sasukes-left-tit tagged you earlier but o want to cause problems so I’m tagging you too.)

#tag game

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tertiusdecimusfilius · 10 months ago

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His head was pounding with another near blinding pain, just like the kind from those first visions Aurelius had given him. But this time it was concentrated at the front of his head. It made him dizzy and his vision swirl. Suddenly it snapped into focus and he was on Iskaare III again.

"No... Mother-" he rasped softly. His hand reached out for her as his heart broke at the sight of her lying there. The pain in his head was getting worse as sorrow filled him. He wanted to cry out to her, but that burning in his throat continued.

And then another pain.

This time in his chest. Looking down he saw a familiar weapon piercing into him. His eyes slowly rose to stare into the face of Leman. There was a glee in the eyes of his brother that unsettled him. The Primarch of the Space Wolves had earned his title of executioner, and a ruthless one at that. He opened his mouth to speak, unable to use his voice. Leman howled with laughter.

A blink.

His outstretched hand is being held tenderly. The scenery has changed. It's a calm, quiet day on his home world. Macragge was still and serene once again. He's no longer looking at Leman. There stands Aurelius, their foreheads touching lightly.

Roboute quickly pulled his brother into a tight hug, his hand cupping the back of Aurelius's helm.

"I-I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't-" he sobs, his voice broken and strained. It hurt to speak even here in his mind. "I never meant for any of this to happen. I never wanted any of this for you. I begged father not to send you away. He wouldn't listen. And Dorn. He only suggested the erasure because of how much it weighed on me and those that cared so deeply for you. I didn't know you would suffer so much. I'm so sorry. I-"

Suddenly he's back in reality. He collapses again, held up by his elbows and knees. Pain lanced through them, shooting up his arms and thighs. They felt like fire. He couldn't feel his hands and feet. For a moment of panic he thought they had really been ripped from his body. Then he noticed his forearms and hands seemed to be firmly attached, pressed against the metal floor of the engine room.

"Techpriest! What are you-?!" Marcus demanded, though his focus suddenly snapped to his primarch. Before he could give the order. Amabilis was already in motion, running to Roboute's side, using his hand to press the cloth tightly to the wound but not enough to strangle his gene-father.

And with the incidental distraction, Brutus wasn't focused on Nirisch. The round shattered one of the red lenses of his helmet. There was an eruption of blood as his body fell to the floor with a heavy thud. Something fell from his hand. A blade covered in their Lord-Commander's blood.

"That bastard!" Marcus shouted as he kicked the now dead body of Brutus. He grabbed the blade off the ground, examining it for anything harmful.

Roboute wheezed as he put his own hand over his apothecary's, finally able to feel it again. It was still somewhat numb, prickling with pins and needles as his nerves slowly restored themselves. He was staring at his own blood pooling on the floor as it started to seep between the fingers of his gauntlet as well as continue to drip down his forehead.

Even without Aurelius forcing him to see visions of the past, something else was flashing images in his mind.

Lorgar. Calth. A blade slicing through his neck. Surviving. Fulgrim. A tainted blade through his throat. Dying. The sensation of dying. He was dying. Stuck in a stasis. Never truly dying. Suffering. Agony.

"My Lord!" Amabilis called to him, trying to get the Primarch to calm down. He was breathing too erratically and had a far off look on his face. Something was still going on in his head that he couldn't stop.

Bonfante moved over to Aurelius, removing his helmet to get a better look at him. There was a sense of recognition now. The star chart like marks on his skin moved just a touch. He realized now, after everything he'd seen; he was never an Ultramarine. He was a Stars Penitent space marine. And the tortured figure of the second legion primarch, his true gene-father, lay before him.

"My father, can you hear me?" his voice soft and calming.

With ease, Aurelius was shoved away due to his limbless state-- he fell back with a thud at first, but had scrambled like a creature from the depths of the Warp to try to slam his helmed head back against Guilliman's again. He scuttled, seeming to grimace from pressure put on his stumps, trying to make his way past Marcus.... and he could feel it.

Rage-- but it wasn't just his own anymore. It was someone else's, and it felt like he was being strangled. Whispers had intensified in his head, it felt like hands were digging into his throat even if Brutus were doing no such thing. He felt like he was drowning. He was slipping further and further into the grasp of Chaos.

A croaking gasp escaped the second Primarch's lips, head craning back like he was desperate to bring his head above some watery depths to the surface, arms somewhat flailing and making a helpless gesture at 'clawing' at his very own neck, though he couldn't reach whatsoever... his head was still 'pushed' back by Brutus's hand, almost looking like he could have broken Aurelius's neck if he went just a bit further. So then, as if to try to free himself, the moment Marcus and Brutus had pulled themselves back to figure out what was going on, Aurelius moved to throw himself onto Guilliman again. His helmet slammed into the other's forehead again... and again... and again. And again. Like he hoped to break his very skull open.

Limbs torn apart-- flashes of Space Wolves upon the surface of Iskaarre III as the world burned around them. Figures lied in bloodstained snow, gaze focused upon a single older woman in a pile of bodies. Miss Astraea-- no-- Tarasha?-- was dead. Mjalnar pierced his chest, digging into the ribcage in an attempt to pierce the heart like he was a daemon risen from the Warp.

... But there was an odd thing-- for a moment, the vision broke-- a gauntlet-wearing hand grasped Guilliman's, holding him with a sense of gentleness, familiar and warm. " Brother-- I-I don't mean to do this to you-- forgive me, the Warp...! " A desperate plea, and instead of the feeling of a helmet smashing against his very skull, it was like a gentle press, of icy eyes looking into Guilliman's as a helmet pressed to his own. Macragge-- Iskaarre-- no... No, Macragge-- it wasn't in flames. It was calm. For just this once, it was calm.

Yet while Aurelius struggled with himself and attempted to either smash their heads together or try to gently press his forehead to Roboute's, Nirisch had fled backward to grasp something from the shadows. His optic was focusing, scanning for traces of Chaos in an attempt to assess the situation. This had to be it-- the blackened blood, he could see traces of it from Aurelius's neck... but he settled his gaze on Aurelius's helmet. Then to Roboute. Nirisch's brow furrowed. Calculations... calculations... within the chaos of... well, Chaos...-- he thought he saw Roboute being grasped by Brutus. Then, Brutus's hand had shoved against Aurelius's helm...

... HAH! So that was how it was done! Clever!... heshouldn'tbepraisingatraitor, so scratch that...-- wait. OH, BY THE OMNISSIAH, HE WAS BLEEDING FROM THE THROAT? Karking-- Grox ass! Omnissiah forgive him for such language!

Nirisch grabbed at one of his old weapons from the dark-- a bolter-- and now he scrambled like a horrified child to intervene while Brutus and Captain Marcus stepped back-- especially when Marcus started to reach for his bolter. That was when Nirisch reached the second Primarch.

" F-FORGIVE ME, LORD--!! " The techpriest cried as he then went and SLAMMED the back of the bolter against Aurelius's helmet, right at the temple, and sent him tumbling along onto his side. He slammed his metal foot against Aurelius's helmet one more time for good measure, leaving him rolling forward onto his stomach with an audible croaking groan. But Nirisch wasn't done.

His servo arm had frantically grabbed at a part of his crimson robes, pulling at the cleanest bit of fabric to rip it from the rest of his robes. Where Nirisch shakily gripped at his gun and ran to the thirteenth Primarch's side, his servo arm now began to apply pressure to his throat, keeping the fabric to his neck. He still... he still needed to deal with...

Nirisch kept his gaze on the bolter like he was silently praying to the very machine spirit within, begging for its guidance as his metal fingers ran along the grooves and carefully-cut insignia of the Imperium. He lifted his head, looking between the Space Marines... they all would have had superior reflexes, he was certain-- he wouldn't be able to stand a chance, but he couldn't just let a traitor keep roaming around! May the Omnissiah guide his hand...!

He pressed the bolter's back to his shoulder to steady it, aiming upwards for Brutus's head, and pulled the trigger without much hesitation. The recoil was still rather intense for Nirisch and his small frame-- it sent his shoulder back with an audible crack and pop, falling off his feet and dropping it, but he was lucky he could steady his servo arm enough for Roboute's sake. " AUHHA--!! " ... It dislocated his shoulder.

That, however, had been the least of his concerns. Nirisch turned his head back to Aurelius, wanting to rush to his side... but some part of him was already preparing for the concept of death taking him. After all, what if he hadn't managed to kill him?

... at least he tried. He hoped he killed Brutus.

#the avenging son || self #the forgotten second of iskaarre iii || aurelius augustus #the future of mankind || 40k main verse #tw ptsd #tw flashbacks

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