The Primarchs [spoilers in tags]

[Nazguire]

Ok...someone please spoilerise The Serpent Beneath for me pretty please. Would be great if someone could do that?!

[SunTzu]

Ok...someone please spoilerise The Serpent Beneath for me pretty please. Would be great if someone could do that?!

Try here.

Words for the word god.

[Nighthawke]

read the reflection crack'd and feat of iron so far, and they are AWESOME

i do have a question, can anyone help me understand the end of feat of iron?

[Xisor]

I can try, Nighthawke:

My reading of it was this:
- Ferrus 'wills' his way out of the Eldar's puzzle and rejects their advances.
- The daemon somehow intervening from 'Angel Exterminatus' [which we don't know of yet] seems to be interfering too, with some foreknowledge of what will happen between Ferrus & Fulgrim
- Because Ferrus rejects the advances, the Eldar then try to warn someone else - we know they also approach Fulgrim, so I assume Feat of Iron takes place before Eldrad makes his advance in Fulgrim.

Also, the Iron Hands learn the lesson that it's good to share with & be nice to the shoddy humans.

Any help?

[Nighthawke]

how do i do the spoiler thing? as i got that part it was just one thing that didnt really make sence :P

[Son of Sanguinius]

Fit the text in spoiler tags. At the front of your spoiler, put "spoiler" in between two brackets. At the end of your spoiler, put "/spoiler" in between brackets. It's like bolding text, only with spoiler in stead of B.

[Nighthawke]

nevermind its not ( its [ which arnt realy a bracket :Pl

ok so now i can do this, its the last paragraph where they say that if the gorgen does die there is onw who is lost who will listen

just a bit odd as this cant mean fulgrim as he is about and what not and gets talked to just by chance, i dont know if it could be alpharius as it dosnt say if hes been found but i would assume so as the emporer has already gone back to terra i belive in the story? so what does it mean :/

[Wazzahamma]

If you can find a quote saying that, I might believe you

Well, I wasn't saying anything as a certainty or to have someone believe me, I was posing a question in the hope someone else recalled the same thing I did.

So, yeah, an actual quote will be more convincing than "didn't X say Y...?"

Well, obviously...but...uh...again. See above.

If anything I've noticed ADB tends to avoid commenting on discussions of his own work in that way. My guess is that resolving the disputes of random geeks on the internet (no offence intended; I include myself in that category) probably isn't high on his list of life goals, particularly nowadays. But by all means, surprise me.

Personally, I don't think I'd find the term 'geek' offensive, in the same way I wouldn't find the label "gay" offensive. Nothing wrong with it, and people can apply it to me if they ever felt the need, but that doesn't make it any more accurate.

Since you...sort of...seem to be asking me to help you find a quote, I took a look. I couldn't find the exact one I was referencing. From memory, it was along the lines of ADB talking about how the point of the Horus Heresy books was to fill in the blanks and dispel the conspiracy theories of the past, and that included the Lion. Something about how those conspiracies having had their time in the sun and being a result of there not being much "lore" available, and now was the time to shed some light on those things and make them concrete. If anyone else read that post and could clarify it or quote it, that'd be great. I did uncover others that at least go some way to showing ADB's intentions with his work. Feel free to disagree with him of course, postmodernistic 'death of the author' and all that.

Portraying the Lion well (and, I guess, differently to how he's been shown in the past) was a big part of Savage Weapons. I wanted him to come across differently than we've seen him before, and despite him getting a headache at the end of it, I'm dead proud of how he - as a primarch and a detailed character - comes across.

In response to someone saying the DA's contribution during the HH was "not much":

That's always been the lore. This is just the prologue to a war to come. The characters state it implicitly. How can it be them doing nothing when they're set to cleanse a massive swathe of the Imperium from traitors, and confront Guilliman for what looks like setting up a second Imperium? That's... I mean... That's... hardly "not much".

I don't say this to advertise, but because it's actually relevant. The question of the Lion's ultimate loyalty comes up quite significantly, because I'd kinda wanted to settle it for good.
I doubt it will settle it, but every little helps.

However, I don't subscribe to the notion that the Lion was tainted (or a traitor) himself. As he grew up, he was everything the Emperor needed him to be, sure. Of all the primarchs, I think the Lion needs to be credited with an almost unbelievable amount of willpower, even moreso than most of his brothers. He strikes me as one of the ones that Chaos could've dug their talons into very easily, but he apparently never suffered their touch at all.

. Especially with the Heresy being revealed in more detail - and the scope and scale of the galactic civil war being shown to be so much larger than the bare bones we've seen in the past - I'm just as interested in what the Dark Angels and Space Wolves were doing in the several long years of all-out warfare between the Dropsite Massacre and the Siege of Terra. At some point, the Lion has to have either been prevented from reaching Terra for a long, long time, or he decided his Legion was better served in battle elsewhere within the devastated Imperium.

For the record, I actually prefer the idea of the Lion's loyalty being ambiguous and his motives being mixed, but I can't really deny what ADB intended with Savage Weapons whether it's to my taste or not.

[Kiro]

So....these are the only Primarchs covered?

[Havarel]

So....these are the only Primarchs covered?

Yep. The four stories cover: Fulgrim, Ferrus Manus, The Lion and Alpharius/Omegan. Kurze was supposed to be covered by ADB (instead of the Alpha Legion story) but I think I remember him mentioning he missed his deadline!

[shadowhawk2008]

Alpharius and Omegon were in the anthology from the get-go. But some scheduling stuff meant Kurze was going to be in. But some more scheduling happened and the twins were back in.

[[SD]Daenyathos]

I think the Kurze story is going to be in the Shadows of Treachery novel.

[shadowhawk2008]

Yep it will be. There will be two novellas in that - Aaron's Prince of Crows and John French's Crimson Fists. The latter features Alexis Polux, their first chapter master, and also Sigismund.

[Kiro]

Urgh, I was kinda hoping for something on Magnus and the TS

[Londinium]

Urgh, I was kinda hoping for something on Magnus and the TS

A Thousand Sons and Rebirth per chance?

[shadowhawk2008]

I believe he meant a Thousand Sons novella in the anthology.

[Kiro]

I believe he meant a Thousand Sons novella in the anthology.

Exactly, thank you.

[ChrisMurray]

This has now gone up for pre-order on the BL website and has a new trailer to watch for it too.

http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-prod...primarchs.html

[DarthMcBob]

If you can find a quote saying that, I might believe you... though to be honest, even if you do find such a quote, and Savage Weapons (against all the implication that I can find in the text) was intended to show the Lion was trying to get back to Terra... he (the Lion) has now said (in The Lion) that he very specifically was not trying to get back to Terra... even though the last two pages seemed to contradict that (or at least, his motivations) again! So, yeah, an actual quote will be more convincing than "didn't X say Y...?"

If anything I've noticed ADB tends to avoid commenting on discussions of his own work in that way. My guess is that resolving the disputes of random geeks on the internet (no offence intended; I include myself in that category) probably isn't high on his list of life goals, particularly nowadays. But by all means, surprise me.

Here:

Curze shrugged, the barest rise of one shoulder guard. "You will never reach Terra in time to defend it, brother. The warp will not let you. This crusade will not let you. I will not let you. Do you think the archives of future generations will look kindly on you for your absence?"

Curze paused in his diatribe, wiping away a fresh trickle of blood. "Or will the human descendants of this Imperium look to your legend and whsiper of doubt? Will they ask why you were not present to defend the Throneworld, and speak likely lies that perhaps the Lion was not as loyal and true as the mighty, perfect Rogal Dorn? Perhaps the Lion and his Dark Angels waited in the deepest reaches of space, watching, listening, and deciding to fight only when an obvious victor emerged."

The Night Lord's eyes glinted again, with both amusement and sorrow. "That is your fate, Lion. That is your future."

"Forgive me, brother."

Curze tilted his head. "For what?"

Corswain was watching both primarchs yet still never saw what happened, such was the speed of the Lion's movements. One moment the two brothers were speaking - the Lion's features cast down in contemplation, Curze's eyes fever-bright as he promised an ignoble fate. The next, Curze's features twisted into a taut rictus of pain, blood running between his clenched teeth. The Lion held tight to the grip of his blade, buried to the hilt in his brother's stomach. More than a meter of shining, bloodstained steel thrust from the back of Curze's armor.

"For such a dishonorable blow," the Lion whispered into Curze's pale, bleeding face. "I do not care who knows the truth now, tomorrow, or in ten thousand years. Loyalty is its own reward."

So yeah, I don't understand how anyone could possibly read that story and fail to conclude that the Lion was loyal.

[SunTzu]

I'm not sure you quite grasped what I was asking, which was a direct response to someone else saying this:

Didn't ADB himself say several times that Savage Weapons was intended to make the Lion's loyalty to the Emperor clear and dispel the conspiracy theory?

So I asked for such a quote from ADB to that effect (since that's what was claimed) - not a few paragraphs leading up to a one-liner from the story, in which the Lion professes lip-service to "loyalty", but claims of which weren't ever the point of the "conspiracy theory"; which were simply that he was not making any attempt to get back to Terra, which two short stories have now proven to be true, and that he was not fighting for the same cause as his "loyalist" brothers except by anything more than a matter of convenience, which again two short stories have shown to be the case.

I don't think anybody's ever outright said "the Lion was a traitor in the same sense as Horus!" but there's been a massive question mark all along over how hard he was really trying to get back to Terra (answer: barely at all), what trust and support he had for his brothers (answer: very little, especially Guilliman), and how heartbroken he'd really have been if the Emperor had lost (answer: probably very, actually, but with all the other Legions destroying each other and his own almost untouched, he'd have been in a good position to inherit if it came to that, and get over it).

So, yeah. The Lion can say "I'm loyal!" as often as he likes, but the question is, just what does that really mean? Not what people have hitherto insisted, that's for sure.