“[…] a figure of iron and blades with coal-furnace eyes is looking back at Him from a throne of chrome. Then it is gone, and the reflection is a blur of images falling one atop another: a golden warrior standing with drawn sword before the gates of a towering fortress, a figure before the mouth of a mountain cave, a boy with a stick and fear in his eyes, a queen with a spear atop a cliff, an eagle with ten wings beating against a thunder-threaded sky – on and on, images tumbling over each other like the faces of cards tossed through the air.”

The Emperor has put himself in the place of all humanity – alone, strong, defiant, arrogant, and facing an overwhelming foe. Horus and the forces of Chaos take the form of a wolf, an image that is repeated through The Solar War in the scenes in the warp, dreams and moments when the cosmic conflict spills into reality.

“He pushes himself up.

At his back he hears the cry of wolves. He stops, turns. The light of the burning torch in his hand ripples out in the gusting wind.”

“‘Son.’ He turned. His mother was there, standing in an open door. Behind her, he could see white snow, and a black sky. Shapes like the stretched shadows of pylons grasped at the silver circle of a moon. Were those trees? Was that what a forest looked like?”

“A laugh now, a full, high laugh that might have been Nilus, or Keeler, or Loken, or the howl of wolves in a winter-shrouded forest.”

These are old ideas and symbols that key into very primal ideas of threat and survival: cold, hunger, darkness, isolation and a knowledge that there is something out there that wants the flesh off our bones, something that we can’t see. The forest at night, the howl of wolves crops up again and again in myths, fairy stories, art and fiction. It’s about fear. The oldest fears that stalked people before we had the knowledge to be able to dismiss the shadows as just shadows. In Warhammer 40,000, the Chaos gods are supposed to have grown out of the fears and desires of sentient creatures. They exist because people look into the dark and believe in nightmares. They are our fears at the cry on the cold air.

I explored this imagery in each of the three interludes in the warp; the forest, the darkness and the wolves return each time, but each time the light keeping them back gets smaller, gets weaker. That fire is, hopefully obviously, the Emperor’s psychic strength. His soul is literally keeping the Chaos gods back, but bit by bit it is being squeezed, it is becoming smaller and the darkness is pressing closer.