The war is mostly over, everyone left outside the Eternity Gate when it was sealed knows they've been left to die and group themselves into haphazard units and formations. Volume two of The End and the Death is coming later this year, but as we revealed last week in an interview with Dan Abnett , there is a third volume coming – and today we can unveil the cover. I really dont mind that much that they split it into two books, so they could milk us for more money but i REALLY hate that we now have to wait for it, possibly months. But as is ever the case, when you’re writing a character, you bond with them in a weird way and they become a favourite. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers.

Focusing in on one character pulls us up and out of a morass of tiny stories, and that’s best done with the big man himself. Dan set the Great Work of the Black Library – guided, of course, by publishers and editors – in progress. It’s the final hours of the Siege, the confrontation between the Emperor and Horus, which is immense. He’s on his way to becoming something even more dreadful yet, but he almost alone among the Traitor forces is aware of what they’re sacrificing and he hates it! It’s in a thousand different tabletop skirmishes, a mass collective creation of expectation, built by untold millions of tumbling dice.There will be other books, from the Black Library and from Dan – this is only part one after all – and there will be other series.

By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. But this is a moment of being there at ground zero and seeing these things as they actually play out from numerous perspectives… it almost tells you too many versions! Horus has completely lost his mind, he believes he's still conducting an interview for remembrances, he thinks dead sons like Maloghurst and Sejanus are still alive, he hears his serfs whispering when they aren't. To be fair, even after echoes of eternity there’s a lot of plot points on Terra that need sorting before they can get to the fight between Sanguinius and Horus. Our shared experience amounts to an incomprehensible tangle of stories and hopes, and now, somehow, Dan Abnett has to bring it to an end.Also included are four internal illustrations, a map depicting The Vengeful Spirit , and full-colour artwork of the standard cover art. The Legions – Emperor, Custodian and Astartes are directly linked to a variety of figures of classical myth and history and god they don’t half talk about it. When that happens, it’s rarely in the way you expect and Abnett subverts, expands, surprises with foreshadowing or provides new – and better – explanations of exactly what’s going on as the final gambits play out. We’re taken through the final dying days of the Siege of Terra, where the Loyalist forces are either locked behind the Eternity Gate or they’re ending their lives in blood and pain out in the ruins of the Palace. I want this to be an appropriate end to a long-running and successful series, and I’m dying for people to get out there and read the whole thing as one piece, and go ‘Now I get why that mattered in book one!

Typhus and the Death Guard attack the Dark Angels and Zahariel takes up the mask of Cypher to fight them.Here, Abnett gets the chance to play with the manifestations and effects of chaos through the eyes of both loyalists and traitors, generating some seriously spine-chilling horror, action and the mental and physical degreation of chaos. With the war at this critical juncture, Sanguinius, primarch of the loyalist Blood Angels, braves the horrors of the Warmaster’s flagship, The Vengeful Spirit, with a single purpose in mind – to slay his brother Horus, decapitate the Heresy once and for all, and stop the forces of Chaos from taking Terra. Horus as he presents himself to Mersadie Oliton gives us the man himself in his own eyes, in stark contrast to the second person sections where we as the reader are chained to a broken, demon-haunted husk of arrogance, hubris and madness. Elements of the story that are 30 years old, or came out of the Collected Visions and the rest of the Heresy are brought to life, fleshed out – given context and shape and sense that they’ve always lacked. And weirdly, I found an enormous sympathy with Abaddon and the situation he finds himself in – where he’s obviously completely committed to doing terrible things.