I remember my delight, while reading the first novels of the Horus Heresy, to experience the complexity of the corruption of Horus, and to see that the Emperor’s dream was always hubristic, always doomed to fail. The blindness and the darkness were already there. But here another question arises, one that I have tried to grapple with in these pages too. What is the role of free will in this grand tragedy of the Imperium? Is fate truly unalterable? This is a big part of the paradoxes of Sanguinius and Curze. It is one thing for us, as readers, to know how things turn out. We are not the players on the stage. But what of these players who do know some of what is coming? Foreknowledge certainly didn’t help Oedipus avoid his fate, and Curze would seem to revel darkly in the inevitability of his doom. But perhaps Sanguinius is part of an unfortunate lineage, from Oedipus to Macbeth to Jake Gittes of Chinatown and beyond. These characters know just enough about the future that their efforts to forestall disaster only ensure its arrival. Furthermore, how responsible is each primarch for his own downfall? With these questions in mind, I wanted to explore, through Sanguinius (and much to the horror of Curze), the potential mutability of fate.

So that was a lot of fun. And there was a special enjoyment, too, in bringing Madail and the Veritas Ferrum into the heart of the war. The daemon ship has been a Chekhov’s gun waiting to be fired until now, and it was deeply satisfying to pull the trigger. This was also a chance for me to explore the nature of Madail a bit further. The caption of his illustration in Visions of Heresy, describing this being as a ‘daemonic priest,’ fascinated me from the moment Laurie first suggested Madail as the villain in The Damnation of Pythos. Taking the description at its most literal, what would it mean for a daemon to be a priest? What is the role of faith when the faithful is itself of (dark) divine essence? Madail has always struck me as a pure servant of Chaos, bowing to all the Gods, somehow squaring the circle of maintaining allegiance to them all. And if you should see, in what is intended for Sanguinius, echoes of the Everchosen, I can assure you that no, that is not a coincidence.