Sanguinius turned from his brother. He moved to the vault door. He did not open it immediately. Before he saw Azkaellon, before he looked upon any of his sons, he thought about his fate and hope.

He would meet Horus on the Vengeful Spirit. He accepted the inalterability of his fate to that point. But he had learned that destiny could change. Perhaps there was still a choice to come, only it was not his.

Horus was not Curze. What he had been was too magnificent to be lost utterly. Sanguinius would summon it again. He had passed through the Delphos and triumphed. He would save Horus. The spear thrust that had felled the Undivided and pierced the Ruinstorm was not done yet. He would see it unmake the dark to come.

He reached for the vault door, ready to see his Blood Angels. His decisions were clear, his path shining. He would walk this road, and save his sons from the Black Rage.

Metal ground against metal as he opened the door. The sound was high-pitched. Its reverberations sounded oddly down the hall, as if they were the echoes of a scream yet to come.

Afterword

Afterword

When I sat down to write Ruinstorm, I kept thinking about Dan Abnett’s afterword to The Unremembered Empire, and how he found that book to be the most difficult he had written for the series. Dan is a very wise man, and I experienced something very similar on a number of fronts. Every book brings its own challenges. This was true of my first Horus Heresy book, The Damnation of Pythos, as well. But though Pythos took place in the immediate wake of major events (that little fracas on Isstvan V), the plot of the novel was relatively isolated from the main threads of the series (until the volume you hold in your hands, of course). Furthermore, the characters I was dealing with were all new.

Come Ruinstorm, and the situation was rather different. This time, the characters were not only well established, they were primarchs. Four of them. Reaching a turning point in the war. So, no pressure. The immediate challenge that I faced was not only to pick up the threads of the preceding entries and not get them tangled up, but also to do justice to these characters and to the masterful novels that preceded mine. Given where things were going to end for these four, I wanted to give them a good send-off.