GW has been putting out an extract from the old Forge World Black Books every Thursday since the summer, and I’ve read every one of them despite not owning a single 30K model and never having played a game of it. Last week was the Sisters of Silence. This week’s is called Eye of the Storm, it comes out of The Horus Heresy: Book Six – Retribution, and it covers a sector called the Pale Stars that I could not have found on a map on Wednesday.
I’ve read it three times now. I keep getting stuck on Larsa V.
Thirty cohorts into a radioactive dune sea
Transport barques out of the sector capital dropped thirty cohorts of planetary militia onto Larsa V, into what Retribution calls the rhodium dune seas. The cohorts spread out across the ergs, established a chain of fortified strongpoints, and settled in to hold the ground against the Blackshield warband that was supposed to come for them. The warband declined. Within a solar month the entire army of occupation was dead of exposure to the radiation. Nobody attacked them at any point. The Dark Brotherhood was somewhere else the whole time, doing something the book doesn’t record.
At Mirdath, three Dark Brotherhood ships slipped past the quasi-sentient defence monitors guarding a Dark Mechanicum forge-fane in the outer system, went straight for its provender chambers, and got out with hundreds of tonnes of supplies. On the way clear they ran into something made of whipping mechadendrites that killed half the boarding force. The book says the thing came out of the fane’s inner foundry, where machine blasphemies had lain dormant for a long time, and then it moves on to the next paragraph without telling you what it was.
At the outlying system of Dissolution, the Alpha Legion envoy in charge recalled a garrison that had spent solar decades suppressing a native xenos strain. The garrison mustered in orbit. The xenos rose the same day, achieved in twenty-four hours what the garrison had been holding back for decades, and the settlers were sacrificed to their fire-gods while the militia watched from the troop decks. Then the Dark Brotherhood came in to hit the fleet, and it turned out the recall order had been bait the whole time. Both sides took losses. The book gives the settler dead as tens of thousands and doesn’t return to it.
That’s three worlds. There were a dozen or so in the sector and the fighting reached most of them.
Ijax split his command so nobody could compare notes
The Alpha Legion force in the region was under a Strike Master named Ijax, a veteran of the Drop Site Massacre. His brief was Dark Compliance: get the planetary rulers of the Pale Stars to declare for the Warmaster.
He didn’t sail into Phargos Rex and make a speech about it. He broke his command into pieces and sent individual lieutenants to individual planetary lords, one legionary standing in front of one governor, and every single one of them was told the same thing: your neighbours are hearing this offer right now, at this exact moment, and you cannot ask them what they said. If you’ve ever been through a redundancy round where they take people into the side rooms one at a time and everyone comes out looking at the floor, you already know the shape of it.
The thing that stopped it landing straight away was the Dark Brotherhood. There was already a Blackshield warband operating out of the void here, running a pocket empire off the trade routes, and nobody was going to sign a compact with Horus while a fleet of black-hulled reavers had the run of the Warp lanes. So Ijax made the Blackshields the offer instead. Give me your planetary musters, help me clear these reavers out of your sector, and the Warmaster will bless your house accordingly. The rulers, per the book, saw no choice.
He never actually beat the Dark Brotherhood. He only ever needed to keep them dangerous. Every militia army he fed into the void made the governors more frightened, every frightened governor handed him more of their own defence forces, and by the time the Ruinstorm out of Calth reached the region and the populations started tearing down their own governments, the Alpha Legion was directly commanding the PDF of a dozen worlds and was the only protection any ruling house had from either the reavers outside or the mob in the street. Retribution puts the end state plainly enough: Ijax could bring down any planetary government in the sector by pulling his warriors out and letting the crowds get on with it. The book calls the result Dark Compliance, achieved, and as far as I can tell nobody stormed a planetary capital to get there.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s as clever as it reads. Part of me thinks you could drop any competent officer with a Legion behind him into a frontier sector during a galaxy-wide collapse and he’d end up running the place by default, because who else is there. Then I remember he arranged the collapse. The Warp storms over Phargos Rex and Mirdath and Larsa fed on the blood being spilled, the blood being spilled was almost entirely militia he’d raised and spent on purpose, and later Imperial studies concluded the whole thing had been done deliberately. So no, I’ll keep the Alpha Legion credit where it is.
The Nemean
The Nemean Reaver is the other reason I’ve read this thing three times.
The Dark Brotherhood formed around him, and Retribution is careful to say the name probably comes from either his artificer plate or a reputation for being impossible to kill. Some accounts have him as a Terran officer of the First Legion and a survivor of the Third Rangdan Xenocide, which the book supports with nothing firmer than a few scraps of personal heraldry and the scarring on his face. There’s no name in it, no confirmed Legion, and no dates.
What he built is the part I find genuinely appealing. He took his warband to a trinary star system called the Eridayn Cataract, which is wrapped in an asteroid shroud dense enough that only a very good void master gets through it, and he had very good void masters. Set up inside the rocks. Claimed all three stars and everything orbiting them. Inside a few months he was out clearing his own Warp routes of pirates and Imperial patrol craft alike, and when he found a nest of human-xenos hybrid clans that had been preying on the region since Old Night, he purged them and executed their master personally so the message would be unambiguous.
The accounts settle on survival. A safe place to keep his brothers while the galaxy came apart, and nothing beyond that. The people of the Pale Stars who looked at the Nemean and hoped he’d come and save them got nothing. Retribution says the Dark Brotherhood were unheeding of their suffering, which is a polite way of putting it.
Blackshields are the part of the Heresy I find most interesting, and this is why. Visions of Heresy has a whole section on them, and the line I keep coming back to is that they “acknowledged no master but those they chose from among their own number.” Some were traitors who’d lost faith in Horus, some were loyalists who’d lost faith in Terra, and plenty just went pirate and enjoyed themselves. Endryd Haar’s warband, the ones who hit Xana, spent the war doing Malcador’s dirty work at terrible odds. The Nemean’s cause was property values.
I stripped six of them twice
So, black armour. Black armour is a nightmare. I say that as someone who has failed at it twice.
Couple of years back I got it in my head to do a small Blackshield warband as a break from my Rubricae, mostly because I liked the idea of a squad with no faction, no colour and no obligation to be consistent about anything. Bought a box of Mk IV off a mate at my local store who’d given up on his Sons of Horus. Shaved the eyes off the pauldrons. Went at them with Abaddon Black, which came out flat and dead, so I stripped them. Second attempt I went Corvus with a grey edge highlight and they came out looking like tired Raven Guard, so I stripped them again. Third attempt is still in the box, unprimed, three years on. My Thousand Sons have been fully painted since 8th. The Mk IV are behind them on the same shelf.
I also spent a solid ten minutes telling Kiran the Nemean was definitively a Dark Angel, with total confidence, having read one wiki paragraph. He isn’t definitively anything. Kiran let me finish the whole thing before he looked it up.
Optera
Lorn Orpheus, a minor scion of a Rogue Trader dynasty, got sent out from Terra to find out what was happening in the Pale Stars, arrived at Phargos Rex with less than half his flotilla intact, and found a planet where the funeral pyres were the size of cities and the population had started eating each other. He sent a message packet home. In it he named the Nemean.
That name was why the packet got routed to Malcador. The Nemean was already on a list of twenty Astartes that a former Luna Wolf called Severian had identified for the Sigillite, the men Malcador wanted for his Knights-Errant. So Nathaniel Garro came out on a Saturn-built Warp-sprinter called the Eusebeian Herald, with Callion Zaven and Tylos Rubio aboard, and put out an astropathic call in a cipher only a Legion-bound astropath could hear.
Twenty solar days later they met on a plateau above the cratered wastes of Optera IV, in the ruins of something megalithic. Ijax broke the cipher, because of course he did, and hit both fleets in orbit during the parley. The Dark Brotherhood came apart on the spot. Warband against warband, a close-range firefight in a ruin, most of them screaming at Garro.
And then the Nemean turned around and left with him.
He handed the warband to his lieutenants, walked away from the Eridayn Cataract and the three stars and the whole sovereign thing he’d spent years building, and went to Terra to serve Malcador. He is believed to have died on the walls of the Imperial Palace during the Siege, anonymous, in the last days of a war he’d spent five years staying out of. Retribution doesn’t say what Garro said to him at Optera. I’ve been assuming for a week that there’s a version of that conversation written down somewhere and I just haven’t found it…
White Dwarf #470’s timeline entry for 008.M31, Blood Among the Pale Stars, is the one that gives you the scale of what men like him cost. It says splinter reaver forces like the Dark Brotherhood caused “great disruptions to Horus’ war effort throughout the Age of Darkness, forcing the Warmaster to divert forces from the advance to Terra to pursue their destruction.” Ships that never made it to the Solar War, because of people fighting for nobody.
The Dark Brotherhood kept going without him. They cut their way across the region after Optera and then went back into the Eridayn Cataract and weren’t seen again for an age.
The same stars, nine thousand years later
Small thing I only noticed reading around this. The Pale Stars sit in the Maelstrom Zone in the Ultima Segmentum, southwest of the rift itself, and they never stopped being a warzone. That’s the same region that hosts the Badab War from 901 to 913.M41, twelve years of it, which is longer than I’ve been in this hobby. The Astral Claws, the Tyrant of Badab, all of that, in the stars the Nemean walked away from.
If you want a 30K force with an excuse to be anything at all, the Blackshield lists in Retribution let you field Marauder squads carrying whatever their leader felt like, field-modified in ways no parent Legion would sign off on, plus a Reaver Lord and a thing called a Dark Herald. No two squads alike. Which would be the most permissive army list I’ve ever read if the Black Books weren’t out of print and going for silly money on eBay.
