Kiran and I once spent most of a Thursday evening at my local store arguing about whether Fulgrim was already a daemon at Isstvan V. We’d finished a Kill Team game at about eight. By the time the owner started stacking chairs we’d moved on to the question of whether it even mattered, and Kiran had pulled up a Lexicanum page on his phone that neither of us had actually read, and his Death Guard were still sitting on the board because he refused to pack up while he was losing an argument. I think that was 2019. He still brings it up.
So I laughed a bit when I opened the new Emperor’s Children Black Book extract and found, on page two, the Forge World writers wading into exactly that argument and then shrugging at it. Some accounts, the text says, claim the Primarch was “consumed and replaced by some daemon” at the height of the Dropsite Massacre. There’s “little evidence to support them,” and anyway the truth “remains immaterial to the fall of the Emperor’s Children.” Kiran and I got there too, eventually, around the time the owner turned the back lights off.
The Emperor’s Children Black Book nobody got to buy
Warhammer Community closed out its Pages from the Black Books series this week with In Pursuit of Perfection, and it’s a strange one. Every earlier entry was pulled from a book you could have bought. The Nostramo Sector extract the week before came out of Book Six: Retribution. This one comes from a Black Book that was never released. GW says it would have covered the III Legion’s slide into madness and the rise of the Dark Mechanicum, and that some of the Mechanicum material ended up in the Rise of the Dark Mechanicum supplement for Legions Imperialis instead.
For context, the run of first-edition Forge World books went Betrayal (2012), Massacre, Extermination, Conquest, Tempest, Retribution, Inferno, Malevolence, and finally Crusade in 2020. Then second edition arrived in 2022 and the series just stopped. Whatever was being written for a tenth volume never came out, and as far as I know GW never said why.
It’s a 12-page PDF, free on the Horus Heresy downloads page. Seven pages of history, a spread of vehicle profiles, two armour plates, and a copyright page with a line at the bottom forbidding anyone from using it to train AI, which I’m choosing not to think about too hard.
Narsis, and a fortress that fell because its garrison went hunting
The first half of the extract is about what happened to the Legion after Isstvan, and the argument it builds is a sharp one. The Emperor’s Children kept getting better at fighting while Horus got less and less use out of them, and the book spends a couple of pages showing how.
Right after the Dropsite Massacre they were, in the book’s words, “the backbone of Horus’ army.” They took the Coronid Deeps and the northern sectors world by world, killed the Loyalist garrisons cleanly, and handed the Warmaster intact industrial hubs. Then Fulgrim and his Lord Commanders started disappearing aboard the Pride of the Emperor for months at a time to sample “the finest entertainments and treasures the Imperium could offer,” and the rot spread downward from the command deck. Only the most remote or most stubbornly traditional companies held out.
Two sieges show what that did. At Fortress Stranivar on Epsilon-stranivar IX the Emperor’s Children posted the best kill ratio of any Traitor force in the assault and the most impressive trophies. They also ignored several weak points in the Loyalist lines because their centurions preferred to attack the obvious diversionary forces, where the glory was. The text calls the ignored weak spots “dull points on a map.”
Narsis is worse. The Perfect Fortress there was designed by Fulgrim himself, “with some small aid from his brother Perturabo,” which is a lovely little aside when you know how the Angel Exterminatus business goes later. Fulgrim bragged about it constantly. It fell after a short fight to scattered Raven Guard remnants, because the Emperor’s Children garrison saw off an Imperial Army attack and then left their positions to chase the fleeing troops. While they were out there fighting duels, the Raven Guard walked into an almost empty fortress, killed the handful of legionaries who’d stayed at their posts, and took it.
I love this, honestly. It’s such an Emperor’s Children way to lose a fortress, and I’d bet Perturabo had opinions about it that nobody wrote down.
After that the book has Horus doubt them. He had “killers aplenty” and not enough soldiers, so the Emperor’s Children got used as shock troops and terror weapons and pointed at the edges of things. The Apothecarion under Fabius went to town on volunteers, producing warriors with bone spikes and “grossly distended fanged maws,” along with the first mention here of the Kakophoni. (If you want the 40K end of that particular road, I wrote about Noise Marines ages ago and it holds up okay.) Some of the work of the “apothecary-genetors” was supposedly subtle, just faster reactions and stronger muscles. Most of those volunteers didn’t live long. They signed up anyway to catch Fulgrim’s eye.
There’s a list of heroes in this section too. Lucius the Undefeated, obviously. Grand Captain Solaire the marksman. Consul-Caelum Primus Aeolanus, “the sky-baron,” which is a title I’d like on my business cards. And Lord-Commander Iolaus, who Horus personally honoured and who the text says would have shaped the wars in the southern Imperium if he hadn’t been “ill-swayed by his advisors.” That’s all it says about him, one sentence, and the same line mentions “his demise” without any detail.
The ones who stayed behind
The part I’ve read four times now is a boxed-out story called An Oath Fulfilled, and it happens after the Siege of Terra, during the Scouring.
A squadron of Imperial Fists cruisers, led by the Sempiterna, drops out of the warp at the very edge of the old Imperium, at a cold world called Terunir IV. It’s one of the last planets brought into Compliance before the Heresy. It’s still flying the Eye of Horus and the Emperor’s Children’s taloned wing. It’s got defence lasers and orbit-capable atomics, and the text is clear it could have hurt the Fists badly before it fell.
Instead it hails them for parley. The Fists expect one of the grotesque things that fought on Terra. The Praetor who meets them is a Terran veteran in the old, sombre, elegant Emperor’s Children colours. He won’t surrender. He offers a deal. His warriors will hold a single fortress, the Fists will come and fight them there in open battle, and afterwards the Fists will bury them with honour and spare the population from Exterminatus.
They’d betrayed the Emperor once, out of loyalty to Fulgrim. They meant to keep that oath to the end, from one fortress at the edge of the galaxy, and leave “the corpse Horus had made of the Imperium” as it was.
Nothing about the battle appears in Imperial Fists records, because no officer of the Terran court would sign off on a bargain with Traitors. But the 95th Chapter of the Imperial Fists kept an honour guard of four legionaries at a facility under a lone fortress in Terunir IV’s southern polar region, and barred everyone else from entering. The last line says the facility “still endures.”
So yeah. That one got me. I play Thousand Sons, I’ve spent ten years hearing Imperial Fists players go on about honour, and here’s a story where the Fists actually earn it, quietly, off the books, for a bunch of traitors. And nobody was ever going to read it because the book got binned. I kind of want to know who wrote it. Probably never will.
The vehicle spread picks up the same thread from a different angle, in a sidebar called The Traitors Sundered. In the last days on Terra, some of the Traitor host pulled together into a corps that was distinctly “old Legion” in outlook: Great Crusade veterans who backed Horus’s plan but wanted to win it the old way, without the “frequently dubious ‘gifts’” of his gods. The Emperor’s Children had gone too far down the other road to split cleanly, it says, but some traditionalists held out, fighting Loyalists and their own zealots both. Both groups ended up in the Eye of Terror anyway, the traditionalists chased in by Loyalist fleets.
I should be honest about how much sympathy these people deserve, though. Terunir IV was still flying Horus’s flag. The traditionalists fought at Terra. Every one of them was at Isstvan or was fine with it, and “we’d like a nice clean death please” is a pretty big ask from people who helped burn half the galaxy. I went back and forth on this for a while last night.
But there’s a reason the Terunir IV story works, and I think it’s that the Fists said yes. Four men of the 95th Chapter standing guard over that tomb for however long “still endures” means, off the record and uncredited, is the part I didn’t expect from a Forge World book. It’s the most human thing I’ve read in one of them. (I’ll admit my sample is small. The Black Books were well beyond my budget when they were in print, and I spent that money on a Harridan I still haven’t finished. Most of what I know about them came secondhand from Lexicanum, like an animal.)
Chemos, and a typo
The last spread is the Death of Chemos. The Lion turns up in 012.M31 without warning and takes the III Legion’s home system apart station by station. At Paragon Station, right at the edge of the system, a single company of Emperor’s Children gets hit by three full Chapters, and when the survivors seal themselves into the command decks the Dark Angels just back off and shoot the station to pieces. Fewer than five thousand Emperor’s Children are left on the surface, outnumbered six to one. They split into small groups and make the Dark Angels storm every fortress one after another, which drags the campaign out for weeks.
The final fight is at Zenith Capitas, under Chemos’s biggest city, where a full brotherhood of the Palatine Blades ambushes the Lion and his Companions. The Blades stop defending altogether just so they can reach him. It takes five hours and a relief force to get the Lion out, and he leaves with three wounds he never talks about and goes off to brood in his flagship. With no orders coming from him, the Dark Angels skip the Eskaton Protocols and leave Chemos broken and still inhabited. Given how touchy GW is about the Lion right now, I’d have liked a page more on those three wounds.
The extract ends with Fulgrim coming back and summoning everyone to Ullanor, and it dates his return to “013.M41.”
That’s a typo for M31, surely. It’s in the final PDF, and I think the reason nobody caught it is that nobody ever got to the proofreading stage. It also doesn’t line up with the novels. Lexicanum’s version, from the Black Library side, has Fulgrim still missing when Horus calls the Ullanor muster and the Legion leaderless until Zardu Layak gets him out. The Black Book version has Fulgrim back at Horus’s right hand, sending out the summons himself after “Lorgar cast out.” I’d guess reconciling that was one of a hundred reasons the book was hard to finish, but I’m guessing. The Forge World team never said, and this week’s WarCom post doesn’t either.
If you want everything leading up to all this, there’s the Emperor’s Children 101 on here. Or you could just read the PDF, it’s twelve pages.
The one thing I keep coming back to is the Oberon Hyth plate on page ten. It’s a plain legionary in MkV armour, and the caption says his helmet is “an otherwise unused offshoot of the Indomitus Terminator development programme,” his backpack and pauldrons are early MkVI designs, and his greaves have a knee joint that looks forward to MkVII. Mixed-heritage plate like that is basically a kitbash with an in-universe permission slip. I’ve got a sprue of MkVI arms and half a box of MkIII legs in a drawer, and I’m already trying to work out which Tyranid project gets pushed back for them.
