- The Horus Heresy: The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden
"No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. There is no escape."
- Lorgar Aurelian, probably
Here we finally are, with my legion: the Word Bearers. This is my first Aaron Dembski-Bowden book. He's highly rated by both Horus Heresy tier lists and reddit users, so let's see what we get. There's almost an element of danger here, because I'm kind of looking forward to this one.
**
I'm quite happy to say that The First Heretic more than fulfilled my expectations. Dembski-Bowden writes well, and I think he gets a crucial point: the Horus Heresy is, first and foremost, a tragedy.
So, the book finally stars the Word Bearers. Lorgar's seventeenth Legion, formerly the Imperial Heralds, known for their fanaticism in the Imperial cause and as the inventors of Chaplains, the skull-helmed heralds and confessors of the legions. The problem has been that in the previous novels, the Word Bearers have mostly been pantomime villains.
In The First Heretic, we finally properly see things from their point of view. The Word Bearers thing is that they're very religious, and basically worship the Emperor as a god. When we've encountered the Imperial cult in the previous volumes, their holy text has been the Lectitio Divinitatus, which attests the divinity of the Emperor. Lorgar wrote it.
Emps himself, however, does not approve. He also thinks the Word Bearers are moving far too slowly for the Great Crusade, and to chastize them, he sends the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia that the Word Bearers spent ages building for his glory. The inhabitants of Monarchia get to evacuate and send one distress call, which has the entire legion rush back. Emps himself then forces them to kneel in the ashes of the city, in ritual humiliation.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous success and the Word Bearers immediately mend their ways.
Several of the previous Horus Heresy novels have featured Word Bearers First Chaplain Erbs, always sort of lurking around, doing something villainous and best visualized as Mike Myers's Dr. Evil with his little finger to his lips. We now know where Erbs learned his trade: from Lorgar's adoptive father Kor Phaeron, a fairly ancient augmented human (i.e. not a proper space marine, he was too old for the procedures) who clanks around in Terminator armor like a mechanized Palpatine. The two of them encourage Lorgar to go on a quest to find gods who are willing to be worshipped, and again, those of you who know the lore know how this goes.
At the forefront of Lorgar's quest is captain Argel Tal, a name many people will recognize. He's an excellently written character, and so is Lorgar. The two of them carry the narrative, with Argel Tal as the point-of-view character who has his doubts about whether these are the kind of gods they should be worshipping. The story culminates in the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, where Lorgar duels Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard.
**
This is a very successful book. It's a tragedy for just about everyone involved, from the Emperor on down. It's a successful one because while Erbs and Kor Phaeron are still mostly just being evil, the motivations of the key characters are deeply understandable.
There's some talk in the book that each Primarch embodies some attribute of the Emperor, and passes that on to his legion. It's stated here that Lorgar's attribute is faith, which makes all of his Word Bearers fanatically loyal to him, and at least somewhat explains his deification of the Emperor. Now, because we've read The Last Church, we know that Emps is an angry New Atheist, so we get that this pisses him off. But Lorgar apparently never realizes this until the destruction of Monarchia and the humiliation of his legion.
You really do have to wonder what the Emperor was thinking. If Nicaea and sending the Space Wolves to destroy Prospero were terrible decisions, and Emps not telling Magnus what he was up to seems inexplicable, I think there's a good argument that the ritual humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers is what kicks off the whole Heresy.
Lorgar's greatest personal tragedy is that he's a genetically and sorcerously engineered super-soldier who doesn't want to be a soldier at all. He's a leader but not a warrior, but it's not like the Emperor asked him. He's the Primarch who doesn't want to be a Primarch. Clearly he's happiest doing theology and building cities for the Imperium, so I don't know, why not let him do that?
During the Drop Site Massacre, he charges Corax even though he knows it's a duel he can't win. But he's rather die than watch his legion butchered. That's real heroism. Like I said, how do you not feel for the guy? So far he's a rare Primarch in not being at all a buffoon or a lunatic.
Argel Tal is also very sympathetic. Like I said, he has serious doubts about what they're doing, but his loyalty to his Primarch is such that he doesn't just follow along, but volunteers. Of course, he comes to suspect that he's doing this because of the gene-seed he has from Lorgar, but he does it anyway. The stories of Lorgar and Argel Tal are properly tragic, the setting is very space operatic, and the whole thing is just a satisfying, well-written story.
**
The First Heretic also features a Legio Cybernetica unit attached to the Word Bearers, where some of the battle-automata have been inducted into the legion as honorary members. So I'm very much afraid that's all the justification I'm going to need to paint some Word Bearers robots in Legions.
Finally, I want to point out that Lorgar is consistently described as golden, and after the dramatic events on Khur, he spends quite a long time brooding and smearing himself with ash while wearing only a loincloth.
This, by the way, is where I abandon publication order. Like I said at the start of this project, I absolutely will not read all fifty thousand Horus Heresy books, and even though I've heard good things about Prospero Burns and Abnett's been quite good, I have to be honest and say that I find the whole space viking thing so unbelievably boring that I cannot face the idea of a whole novel of them. Because there will apparently never be another Elder Scrolls game, I have to reserve my viking cliche tolerance for another playthrough of Skyrim. So I will be back next time with something out of sequence.
To sum up, I found The First Heretic grand and intoxicating. It's by miles the best Horus Heresy novel so far, and I'd say that if you're interested in Warhammer and are going to read one book in the whole series, I'd make it this one.
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