“Fans of the Dark Coil series will be no stranger to the unsettling depictions of the far future in Cold Covenant.”
That’s Warhammer Community yesterday, announcing three new Astra Militarum novels. The first one is Peter Fehervari’s, and the sentence GW picked to sell it names a series that exists entirely by reader consensus. The Dark Coil is what people started calling Fehervari’s books once it got obvious the books were leaking into each other, and GW has now put it in the advertising.
Fehervari himself, talking to Track of Words: “The Dark Coil is the unofficial name that covers all my stories.” That was October 2019.
Cold Covenant follows the 27th Halgarth Brine Dogs, stationed for months on a remote planet and finally due to ship out. Their new posting is a death world. Four of them decide they aren’t going, and that decision starts what GW’s copy calls a spiral of tragedy and terror on a frozen world with something very old underneath it. A Special Edition adds an author afterword and a short story called Blindsight. I went looking for an earlier appearance of the Brine Dogs or of Halgarth anywhere in his back catalogue and found nothing, so either the regiment is brand new or I’ve missed the thread, and with this author the second one is honestly the safer bet.
The Dark Coil is a thing readers built
Start with Fire Caste, 2013, which puts it about a year before I’d even heard of Warhammer. The Arkan Confederates get dropped into a jungle war on Phaedra against the T’au and a population of human deserters who went over years ago. The rivers there are called the Dolorosa Coil, a labyrinth that leads everywhere and nowhere. Fehervari has since said that jungle was the seed of the whole thing.
Then Cult of the Spiral Dawn, which was originally shoved out as Legends of the Dark Millennium: Genestealer Cults and had to wait years for a title that meant anything. Its protagonist is Captain Templeton. Templeton goes missing in Fire Caste after the first proper engagement and is never confirmed dead. Readers worked out the connection because his hand injury from Phaedra gets mentioned in passing, and that’s the entire signposting for it.
Then Requiem Infernal in 2019, which is Sisters of Battle, and The Reverie in 2020, which is a Space Marine Chapter called the Angels Resplendent who had previously existed as a colour scheme in a codex and nothing else. There were actually two published colour schemes for them, contradicting each other, and rather than pick one Fehervari decided the Chapter was two versions of itself either side of a schism, which he’d already set up in a short story called The Crown of Thorns.
He also keeps putting books inside the books. Iverson keeps a journal in Fire Caste that you read alongside the main narrative, and Requiem Infernal opens its chapters with letters. He’s said that writing in first person brings him closer to a character’s voice while amplifying his own at the same time. And in Requiem Infernal the Chaos gods are never named anywhere in the text, so everything doing the corrupting in that book works without a brand attached to it.
Fehervari calls himself an explorer of the Coil rather than an architect of it. Which is a lovely line, and I’ve quoted it to people, and I do sometimes wonder whether it’s also a very elegant way of describing books that don’t resolve. There’s a real critique here that the interconnection lets him leave threads dangling and call it structure. A review I read when Requiem Infernal came out said the book felt fatty, like he’d had a dozen ideas and used all of them, and I don’t think that’s unfair. I still come down on his side, mostly because the dangling threads are the only part I still think about years later, but I’d rather admit the objection exists than pretend it doesn’t.
The connections aren’t sequential and they aren’t clean. Characters slip between books, occasionally through actual holes in reality. Reading the Coil is like being added to a group chat that’s been running for six years, where you can follow it but half the jokes are load-bearing. One reader on r/40kLore built a spoiler-heavy map of the whole thing to mark Requiem Infernal’s release, and people still link it when somebody new turns up asking where to begin.
Somebody always deserts
One line in the Cold Covenant blurb made me sit up. Four Brine Dogs conspire to desert.
Fire Caste is a book about human deserters. The Imperial Guard on Phaedra are fighting the T’au and also fighting men who used to be Guard, who walked away and joined the other side and are still out there in the jungle. Thirteen years and four novels later, the new one opens on four soldiers deciding they aren’t getting on the ship.
I think that’s why the Genestealer Cults book works as well as it does, incidentally. A cult is just desertion with a theology attached. The Spiralytes think they’re loyal. They’re on pilgrimage. They’ve got sanctioned status. Their faith is entirely sincere, and it’s pointed at something that got into the bloodline generations back.
Fehervari also told Track of Words that he prefers working in an obscure niche of the setting where he won’t disrupt other authors or the wider framework. He works around the Heresy and around the advancing timeline, inventing a regiment or picking a Chapter nobody has touched and going to work in the corner. Four novels into that corner, desertion is the thing he keeps coming back to.
So yeah. Fire Caste. I bought it off eBay for something like thirty quid because it’s been out of print for years and I’d got it into my head that I needed a physical copy, not the ebook, a proper one. Battered. Cracked spine. And then it sat on the shelf. For ages. Meanwhile I’m telling Kiran he has to read it, absolutely has to, best thing Black Library have published, and he goes and buys it, reads it in about a week, and then asks me a fairly basic question about the ending. Which I could not answer. Because I hadn’t read it. I’d recommended a book I hadn’t opened, on the strength of a blog post and general vibes, and I got caught inside a fortnight. I did read it eventually, painting Rubrics, my lovely slow stupid boys, with the audiobook going. It’s very good. Kiran has never let it go.
Where the omnibus came from
In 2019 there’s a thread on Bolter and Chainsword where a reader says he emailed Black Library asking whether a Fehervari omnibus was in the works. The answer was no, it wasn’t being planned. He emailed again later to plead. Others in the thread had done the same. This was the state of play: a genuinely beloved set of books, one of them out of print, the novella only available buried in a T’au anthology alongside a Phil Kelly novel, and no plan to collect any of it. Compare that to the print run a Dan Abnett release gets.
There are now two omnibuses, The Dark Coil: Damnation and The Dark Coil: Ascension.
That’s a commercial decision, obviously. Black Library collect things when the numbers say collect them. But somebody at some point had to make the decision to print a phrase that no editor coined, and that phrase came off forums and out of reviews and Reddit spreadsheets, and it’s now the thing GW reaches for when it wants you to know what kind of book you’re buying. My local store’s Warhammer Horror paperbacks live on a bottom shelf under the Heresy stack, and the same four spines have been there since at least last autumn, so I’m not pretending this stuff moves like a Space Marine codex. It just means the label had to come from somewhere, and it came from the readers…
There’s an interview people keep quoting where Fehervari says his editor was baffled by a Warhammer manuscript in which the first shot doesn’t get fired until the halfway mark. That’s The Reverie, the Warhammer Horror one, out on Halloween 2020, set on a world where the Angels Resplendent run their fortress-monastery as an artists’ colony, full of muses and servants and workshops. The thing they’re guarding is a stretch of snow-swept glades where nothing natural grows. Six years on, that’s still the most recent Fehervari novel, which makes Cold Covenant the first new one since.
Anyway, the entry point question. Fehervari’s own answer, which surprised me, is Requiem Infernal. He reckons it’s his most accomplished and the best introduction, including for people who don’t know 40K at all. He thinks Fire Caste will hit harder for existing fans but calls it denser and busier, and he’s least fond of Cult of the Spiral Dawn because of its length. There’s no correct order. Time doesn’t run straight in these books anyway, though he did say the Phaedra strand is best read in sequence.
Cold Covenant is up for pre-order soon and there’s no date on it yet. If you want to be ready, Requiem Infernal is the easiest one to actually get hold of right now, and it’s the one he’d point you at. If you’d rather do it the stubborn way and start where the Coil started, find a copy of Fire Caste and be prepared to pay silly money for a paperback with a cracked spine. That’s what I did, and I’d do it again, and I’d probably still not read it for two years.
