‘And you… mine… my brother…’ said Boreas. His eye flashed clear for a moment, his gaze steady as it held Sigismund’s. ‘Always.’

Beyond the stone walls of the room, beyond the hull of the ship lancing through the void, beyond the ships of the fleet that followed it, the Solar System turned on, silent and unceasing.”

The war does not stop for these deaths, but keeps on going on into the future and does not look back.

All the way back to the beginning

“‘So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers,’ rumbled a deep voice.

Loken looked up at the god standing over him.

‘Lupercal…’ he murmured.

The god smiled. ‘Not so formal, please, captain,’ whispered Horus.”

Almost a decade and a half, and over 5,000,000 words have passed since the moment Horus spoke on the page for the first time in Horus Rising. A lot of story has happened since that moment. So, the first thing I chose to do when deciding about writing this book was make its central character the person who, along with Garviel Loken, had started the whole thing going: Mersadie Oliton. She is, almost literally, the spirit of those early stories making a last journey though these pages. In fact, her first section in The Solar War opens with a deliberate repeat of part of her first meeting with Loken in Horus Rising:

“‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face.”

Mersadie holds the threads of The Solar War’s heart, as she did in the first books of the Horus Heresy. She sees the themes of the story and the universe they weave through the book. She is, in a way, us, the reader: a human looking into a vast universe and focusing down to the point where it touches normal people’s lives.

“[…] if there are arch-traitors and saints, then hope is their realm, the realm of cosmic change and slaughter and sorrow. They are the ones who will decide tomorrow, and if there are any tomorrows after that. We are human, Master Vek. Our lives only matter in quantity. We can dream and despair and cling on to what we have, but those things live only in us. Our hope is our own, and if the universe cares, it does so by accident. That is why people pray to the Emperor and call my old friend a saint. Because deep down, they know that they cannot change the great course of events.’

‘You have a very bleak view for someone claiming to be trying to help save the last fortress of humanity.’”