The Sons of the Phoenix are begging for Exterminatus

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

Okay, I'm sure almost everyone who is aware of the Sons of the Phoenix is also pretty skeptical of their claim to be descended from Dorn. Everything about their aesthetic and zeal for perfection screams Fulgrim. I'm not saying anything hundreds/thousands of others haven't said before me.

 

But...

 

One thing I noticed in their entry in the 2019 Codex is something I haven't seen anyone mention. And that is...

 

...The Sons of the Phoenix claim that they are currently crusading to reunite their chapter fleet, which was scattered by the opening of the Great Rift.

 

PROBLEM: The Sons are an Ultima Founding chapter. This was the whole impetus behind their creation in the pages of White Dwarf and was confirmed when they appeared in Vigilus Defiant.

 

So how exactly does a chapter that wasn't founded until some time AFTER the opening of the Great Rift manage to have its ships scattered by said opening? Did they catch a bad wave on the way home from Vigilus and somehow manage to transition back to realspace at a point in time before they'd even been founded, only to THEN have their fleet scattered? If so, you'd think maybe instead of putting all their energy into re-gathering their chapter, they'd at least send someone to warn Calgar about Abaddon being headed to Vigilus so he's ready to smack Haarken Worldclaimer back into orbit the second he shows up.

 

It's also possible the whole fleet scattering thing is some weird and transparent lie, in which case they should be Exterminatus'd just for sheer stupidity.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Being very generous, but remember that the Rift didn't open across the galaxy instantly. It started at the fall of Cadia, and the Ultramarines had enough time to travel to Ultramar, wake up Guilliman, then travel through the Maelstrom to reach Terra before the Rift hit there. By the time it reached Baal, Guilliman had done all that, and reached Baal himself. It could be that the Sons of the Phoenix are operating in the galactic south, and so the Rift didn't reach them until after they'd left. 

 

In short, the Rift didn't just split the galaxy, it also pretty much broke time itself. I can fully see the Sons of the Phoenix reaching an area before the Rift does.

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

In the Avenging Son novel, the Rift has already made its way laterally across the galaxy at about the start of the Indomitus Crusade. There was a small spur of it being actively widened in the direction of Terra, but this was intercepted by the first of the Crusade fleets. The Sons woud have had to assemble as a chapter and strike out ahead of that fleet and then somehow blunder into this widening spur despite it being an easy thing to spot and track. Not impossible, but both unlikely and dumb. And it would mean that they had essentially zero experience fighting together as a chapter prior to their fleet being scattered, yet were somehow able to develop this revered reputation despite being reduced to a fraction of their size. I say that because they apparently haven't managed to regroup by the end of the Indomitus Crusade over a hundred years later, so clearly they were not scattered in anything close to near proximity. Some of them would have had to either end up at the ass-end of Imperium Nihilus or just get stuck in the Warp.

 

And Baal is a special case - it's not that it took seventy years for the Rift to reach Baal. Unless I'm remembering wrong, it NEVER reached Baal. But it became visible to them almost immediately from the timeline viewpoint of everywhere else in the galaxy. However, the planet and its immediate surroundings were held in essentially a stasis bubble by the arrival of Ka'Bandha. Thus, from THEIR perspective, it was a very short time between looking up and seeing the Rift and then seeing Roboute's Crusade fleet. But as far as everyone else was concerned, it had been seven decades.

 

Plus that whole thing seems to have only been a plot device to allow the battle for Baal to last only a week or so from their perspective, yet be able to end with the arrival of Guilliman, who was still asleep at the start of the novel, and his fully kitted-out Crusade fleet with oceans of Primaris. It also allows the Vigilus series to take place over twenty-five years, yet not involve Dante turning up or sending troops at any point to help Calgar out despite being the regent of Imperium Nihilus and having been reinforced by Primaris marines.

 

I know other GW products have mentioned that the Warp has caused time discrepancies in the galaxy, but the only occasion where it's actually shown up in a story and had any real impact was The Devastation of Baal (unless I missed something somewhere).

Edited September 3, 2020 by Lord Nord

[Snazzy]

Dorn defeated Fulgrim in the Heresy, and is now raising his kids as his own.  I'm ok with this.

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

Dorn defeated Fulgrim in the Heresy, and is now raising his kids as his own.  I'm ok with this.

 

Like I said, that part's been chewed over quite a bit by other before me. It's not something I'm too concerned about either (unless I thought it likely that GW would have the Sons turn in the fiction any time soon).

 

No, it's the issue with their new (as of the 2019 codex) backstory being an impossibility that has me hovering my hand over the virus-bomb release lever.

[Uberlord Gendo]

The massive disruptions in the warp may be producing waves.  We know the warp has currents and with the drastic shift caused by the rift, we're seeing warp storms on a massive scale.  So the fleet may have been scattered by changes in the warp conditions that were produced earlier when the rift first formed.  It's like how the Ruinstorm was still throwing people off course years after it first started.

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

The massive disruptions in the warp may be producing waves.  We know the warp has currents and with the drastic shift caused by the rift, we're seeing warp storms on a massive scale.  So the fleet may have been scattered by changes in the warp conditions that were produced earlier when the rift first formed.  It's like how the Ruinstorm was still throwing people off course years after it first started.

 

That makes sense, but if they were going for that, they really should have worded it better than saying the fleet was scattered by the OPENING of the Great Rift rather than some subsequent aftershocks well after the Rift opened.

[Fajita Fan]

While I don’t feel the “new” fluff is as well written as older fluff - and therefore haven’t read all of this myself - I can assure you that GW writers are not meeting to make sure 100% of their story elements jive with one another. If a fleet scatters or moves before or after a certain event in different books that can be as simple as a typo between authors dealing with dozens of plot elements and merely skimming each other’s work.

 

My favorite GW break in continuity was a ‘eavy Metal artist painting Dark Angels green for photography despite them being described as black so that their official color was not only retconned but they got their own named paint. It was a complete mistake that got rolled into the fluff.

 

I know, apples and oranges, but this stuff is being written by a staff. It leads to all kinds of lovely plot holes for us to don tin foil hats but hell, isn’t that part of the fun of this wonderful grimdark universe? They sorta covered themselves by saying that time doesn’t move the same way in the warp so that any minor messed ups can be rolled into the eddies of chaos. Smart on their part!

[Lord_Caerolion]

Thus, from THEIR perspective, it was a very short time between looking up and seeing the Rift and then seeing Roboute's Crusade fleet. But as far as everyone else was concerned, it had been seven decades.

 

Except it wasn't seven decades from the point of view of everyone else, that's exactly what I'm saying. Some planets were trapped in the Noctis Aeterna for centuries. Others were trapped for minutes (like Baal, it had nothing to do with Ka'Bandha). Terra was trapped for a month. This is literally the whole reason that the Imperium no longer has standardized time, because the formation of the Rift literally broke it. 

The Rift started opening, lets for simplicity's sake say, on the year M42.000. Now, for Baal, the time when the Ultramarines arrived is M42.001. The time, from the point of view of Guilliman, is M42.010. For the poor souls in a worse-affected area, it's not M42.724.