The End and the Death Part I, II, III, ...

[EverythingIsGreat]

Good day,

 

If it may again be pointed out, the notion of time being "flexible" goes back to the beginning of BL fiction, in Watson's Inquisition War trilogy. Even the protagonist's death is a mystery, as it happens in a Webway nexus where time is malleable and can be reversed. The Webway apparently inheriting Warp-related time fluidity, as the Webway is described in partaking of both dimensions (real & warp) while being a reality apart. Another element in Inquisition War is the use of consciousness-transference which may also be relevant in the whole Golden Throne business.

One can convincingly argue that these elements were rather poorly explained in these books, or that the explanations felt terse and rushed. They were groundbreaking stories regardless, that could be enjoyed notwithstanding obvious gaps.

These elements in some form or other have been part of BL fiction ever since, if only in passing and in brief.

As has been pointed out, Abnett dedicates this work to Watson. He may also be bringing these notions of fluid time and fluid consciousness to their obvious logical endpoint. Many pieces are still missing.

[DarkChaplain]

3 hours ago, EverythingIsGreat said:

Many pieces are still missing.

 

Which is a bit of a problem in and of itself, after 7 novels in this particular final series and around, what, 1500 pages in print already for this final volume?

At this point, Abnett would need to wrap up a :cuss: ton of stuff in a satisfying way without stepping on decades of works that came before, in another 600-700 page book which would probably end up making it even more jarring that all these themes and quirks only came into play at the final hour of the series, without even having been seeded in Dan's own predecessor 4 books earlier.

 

"Many pieces are still missing" is precisely the problem with The End and the Death. It's the finale, the climactic event 60+ books in the making, yet it tries to be so very mysterious by adding another convoluted mess on top of it all, right out of left field, and to make it even worse: It doesn't bother focusing on that at all. It throws it at the reader, trying to awe them, and then goes back to telling you about Rann, Zephon, Amit, and a host of other random dudes nobody actually cares about. After TWO volumes and a bunch of stuff to prepare his "arc", we still have no payoff on Fo, for example. He's been created for Abnett's sake, and yet he's so unimportant and his plotline so terribly isolated even now, what gives?

 

At this point I'm really just expecting very little of this stuff to be properly wrapped up in TEATD 3. It's Abnett's increasingly elaborate and out of place setup for another trilogy which he started writing over a decade ago and has been on ice for almost as long.

[EverythingIsGreat]

Fair enough. Can we at least agree that this whole exercise makes waiting for volume 3 somewhat interesting?

[Taliesin]

Its definitely very interesting to think about what the 3rd volume will cover, how it covers thing we expect, and how far it goes timeline wise.

Will it have a long epilogue that covers quite some time into the future, or will it show nothing at all of the aftermath ( unlikely in my opinion).

 

And I think there will be some surprises in the way Abnett covers the Emperor vs Horus Ascended confrontation. Its listed at a comparatively modest 500 pages on Amazon, so perhaps this one will be quite pacy and streamlined.

[wecanhaveallthree]

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will it show nothing at all of the aftermath

 

I expect it to end with the Emperor on the Throne and 'I was there...' - can anyone genuinely not see a Scouring series coming hot on the heels of the Siege, though? I imagine we'll likely see the immediate aftermath in a novel of its own that generates the various Primarch plotlines going their separate ways.

[Taliesin]

I do hope we get that soon but the total absence of any words from BL on a Scouring series ( or even just a trilogy) the last few years has me worried. 

Possible they have been waiting until the Siege is over to announce it....

[Felix Antipodes]

We can only hope that BL has learnt from the mistakes of previous series and makes any prospective Scouring series a setting rather than a timeline.  This would allow the authors the freedom to pick the stories they want to tell.

3 hours ago, Taliesin said:

I do hope we get that soon but the total absence of any words from BL on a Scouring series ( or even just a trilogy) the last few years has me worried. 

Possible they have been waiting until the Siege is over to announce it....

 

[Lord_Caerolion]

9 hours ago, EverythingIsGreat said:

Fair enough. Can we at least agree that this whole exercise makes waiting for volume 3 somewhat interesting?

… Not really? I can guarantee you nobody has finished book one and said “boy golly, I sure am glad I need to wait a year to finish this book the author says works best when read all at once! Time to start waiting with veritable glee and a smile on my face!”

 

If anything it’s made it more frustrating. Not only are the individual books bloated with pointless padding, but they’ve managed to do the impossible and pad the book out across time itself to make the books physically take longer to finish reading fully. The clocks truly have run out. 

[DukeLeto69]

5 hours ago, Lord_Caerolion said:

… Not really? I can guarantee you nobody has finished book one and said “boy golly, I sure am glad I need to wait a year to finish this book the author says works best when read all at once! Time to start waiting with veritable glee and a smile on my face!”

 

If anything it’s made it more frustrating. Not only are the individual books bloated with pointless padding, but they’ve managed to do the impossible and pad the book out across time itself to make the books physically take longer to finish reading fully. The clocks truly have run out. 

I am really glad I held off reading SoT after Mortis. Started a back-to-back read of Warhawk-EoE-tEatD1&2 and really enjoying it.

 

tEatD is frustrating as definitely bloated and some of the sub plots should have been removed and put into a novella. But so far it is clear (to me) that contained within that bloat is a pretty awesome novel (although that will only be confirmed by vol 3).

[wecanhaveallthree]

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a setting rather than a timeline. 

 

I think it lends itself to that very well, because there are self-contained arcs to follow Your Favourite Dudes. The Restructuring Of Caliban (We Didn't Need The Rest Of The Planet, Stop Asking Questions), the Iron Cage - though it's honestly funny to think that unbreakable, unshakeable Desert!Dorn is then going to make the kind of mistake that leads to that - the Legion Breaking, the Primarchs wandering off, etc.

[Lord_Caerolion]

1 hour ago, DukeLeto69 said:

I am really glad I held off reading SoT after Mortis. Started a back-to-back read of Warhawk-EoE-tEatD1&2 and really enjoying it.

 

tEatD is frustrating as definitely bloated and some of the sub plots should have been removed and put into a novella. But so far it is clear (to me) that contained within that bloat is a pretty awesome novel (although that will only be confirmed by vol 3).

That’s what makes the whole thing the most disappointing to me. There ARE awesome bits, Dan is a good author, there IS a good novel in there. 
It’s just that it’s buried under so much unnecessary bloat and padding, that it makes the books painful to get through. 
 

If there had been more restraint, tighter controls on setting up the Dark King ahead of this instead of popping out of nowhere and seemingly being discarded just as quickly, while simultaneously the Fo arc is dragging on and on and on, etc, this could have been amazing. 

[Dornfist]

7 hours ago, Lord_Caerolion said:

That’s what makes the whole thing the most disappointing to me. There ARE awesome bits, Dan is a good author, there IS a good novel in there. 
It’s just that it’s buried under so much unnecessary bloat and padding, that it makes the books painful to get through. 
 

If there had been more restraint, tighter controls on setting up the Dark King ahead of this instead of popping out of nowhere and seemingly being discarded just as quickly, while simultaneously the Fo arc is dragging on and on and on, etc, this could have been amazing. 

This summarizes most of my gripes perfectly.

 

I hope that the last volume will be shorter which will be more laser-focused in wrapping up: Emperor kills Horus and falls mortally wounded (Leetu and Loken will probably die), Dorn comes too late and takes his father's corpse back to Terra, Fo's arc has an actual pay-off, Emperor entombed, Guilliman arrives with his fleet and kicks the reeling traitors out of the sol system.

[DukeLeto69]

22 minutes ago, Dornfist said:

This summarizes most of my gripes perfectly.

 

I hope that the last volume will be shorter which will be more laser-focused in wrapping up: Emperor kills Horus and falls mortally wounded (Leetu and Loken will probably die), Dorn comes too late and takes his father's corpse back to Terra, Fo's arc has an actual pay-off, Emperor entombed, Guilliman arrives with his fleet and kicks the reeling traitors out of the sol system.

Well if (big IF) Abnett is following a classic three act structure then vol 3 should be similar length to vol 1 and shorter than vol 2.

[cheywood]

3 minutes ago, DukeLeto69 said:

Well if (big IF) Abnett is following a classic three act structure then vol 3 should be similar length to vol 1 and shorter than vol 2.

Volume 2 is very slightly shorter than volume 1 on kindle. The page count is extremely deceiving because of the short chapters, but I think all three books will come out to a similar length in the end.

[Dornfist]

14 minutes ago, cheywood said:

Volume 2 is very slightly shorter than volume 1 on kindle. The page count is extremely deceiving because of the short chapters, but I think all three books will come out to a similar length in the end.

I guess Mr. Abnett was right: time and length did lose their meaning after all. The warp is affecting us thus fraters!

[DukeLeto69]

1 hour ago, cheywood said:

Volume 2 is very slightly shorter than volume 1 on kindle. The page count is extremely deceiving because of the short chapters, but I think all three books will come out to a similar length in the end.

Ah really. I was going by the std HB.

[LemartesTheLost]

On 1/3/2024 at 5:06 PM, Taliesin said:

I do hope we get that soon but the total absence of any words from BL on a Scouring series ( or even just a trilogy) the last few years has me worried. 

Possible they have been waiting until the Siege is over to announce it....

 

I think that somehow BL will find the only sensible bone in its body and wait a whole year after Vol. 3 before announcing/releasing The Scouring series. One can only hope.

[Felix Antipodes]

6 hours ago, LemartestheLost said:

 

I think that somehow BL will find the only sensible bone in its body and wait a whole year after Vol. 3 before announcing/releasing The Scouring series. One can only hope.

 

I don't think we will see an announcement (if it happens) before the 2025 BL celebration event, which would fit your suggested time scale.  They will want to make a big splashy reveal if it happens.

[wecanhaveallthree]

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They will want to make a big splashy reveal if it happens.

 

'And don't worry, we've learned from our mistakes with the War of the Beast, Horus Heresy, Siege of Terra, Dawn of Fire and this time it won't turn into a horrid inconsistent mess, pinky swear.'

[Karhedron]

Does the Scouring need a whole series? How many engagements of note took place? The only major one I can think of the is the Iron Cage. There may have been the battle of Eskrador but the UMs claim to have no record of that so the entire thing may be Alpha Legion fabrication.

[Felix Antipodes]

23 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

Does the Scouring need a whole series? How many engagements of note took place? The only major one I can think of the is the Iron Cage. There may have been the battle of Eskrador but the UMs claim to have no record of that so the entire thing may be Alpha Legion fabrication.

 

They didn’t have very much to go on for the HH but still managed to stretch it out for over 60 books.  If the first few sell well they will find something to fill it out.  I would like it to just be the hits (retreat to the EoT, Iron Cage, 2nd Founding, fate of the Primarchs, Caliban) and end with the ‘death’ of Guilliman.

[Karhedron]

Detailing the fates of the Primarchs might constrain future storytelling opportunities to bring them back. The status of most loyalist Primarchs is still unconfirmed. My hunch is that they will not nail down the disappearance of each Primarch until they are ready to reintroduced them to 40K. The closest we have come to that so far is probably Corax who was shown hunting Lorgar in the Eye in Shadows of the Past (and even that is set fairly soon after the end of the Heresy).

[Nagashsnee]

There are so so so many important things to explore in the scouring, most of them non marine. 

 

Things like the iron cage, caliban and the like while important for their respective chapters/legions and their fans pale in comparison to the actual big events, the scouring IS the foundation of the imperium and the factual death of the great crusade, the mechanicus, the early years of multi church imperial faith and its prosecution even while it spreads like a cancer. The pull back of the talons into the palace/telepathica and obscurity.  The rise of the administratum as a actual power not subservient to the military,  Nearly every major thing in 40k  will be set up in its early form in this period, from the need to keep feeding the throne, to the high lords actually becoming top of the food chain (with G man being the head high lord), the splitting of the imperial army into its many parts. 

 

Up to know everything is the Imperium has been about 2 things, the great crusade and the Emperors/Malcadors secret projects. The scouring is the realization that the crusade is over, and those projects are dead. Its the need of the survivors, mostly non primarchs (who of course mostly ran out to give chase) that there is no real plan, no real authority, and no real end goal. Unlike 40k the scouring is not about survival, its about vengeance and filling the voids that cannot really be filled. About the various powers in the Imperium being able to ask eachother who put THEM in charge?

 

The reclamation of mars and formal re ordering of the Mechanicum into the Mechanicus on the red planet alone could support multiple books as the binary succession is finally allowed to resolve itself without the threat of constant death keeping all the internal factions working together and the other loyalist forge worlds find out just what was agreed upon. 

 

What do we do with the Vostroyas out there that disobeyed orders but never went traitor? That were semi-neutral? What do we do about the fleets that pop up and have never even heard about the heresy?  The sectors who sided with horus but never went chaos? Or even worse were lied to and had no idea where the arms and munitions were ending up? 

 

You want proper scouring stories? Its not the iron cage, its Vulkan and the Khan trying to expeditionary fleets who come home to report great success but happen have  Iron Warrior armor/thousand marine elements, while Russ and Dorn are pulling out the guillotine. Its a legion tempestus battle force finding out that 70% of the legion joined horus but the 20% on mars went down fighting for the throne and having to decide what THEY are going to do.  

 

And sure marines sell and we are going to get ALL the bolter porn they can pump out. But one of the HH greatest failures and something that its best books did is look and explore the NON marines. To frame the astartes by means of the wider Imperium and not just hyper focus on the power armor.  Plus most of the marines (comparatively speaking) are dead or running. More then ever the majority of the scourings fighting would be done by non marines or fresh youngbloods. 

 

On the traitor side the amount of rage/depression would be hard to process. You are thousand son tactical marine #2546. You dad is a daemon, your homeworld is dust, everything you ever believed in is dead, your STILL not sure why any of it happened and you finally have a chance to breathe, catch your breath and look around you and the final cherry on the mountain despite giving up all your ideals and hopes and dreams, to side with the lost and the damned, you failed.  Its not a happy day.  And then you start to find out JUST how much wrong Magnus actually did.  

Same goes for most traitors legions, its easy to go along with things when everything is constantly in motion and you need to react now now now. But this is the period where they can look back and actually judge how it was all handled. And start to become very very bitter, and very very angry.  Only the marines are the smallest %. Its the forge worlds who went for Kelbor and now have to deal with fact that they lost and angry angry people are coming. About entire systems who won their local wars under the banner of the eye of horus. About the HUGE amounts of support personal/fleets/planets the marines will leave behind as they run run run. 

 

Try telling post siege Dorn that maybe its best if we pardon some of them? But logically speaking once they vent for a decade or so they probably do take in huge areas of traitor space back into the fold. 

 

I have rambled on allot, but for me the scouring has so so so much potential, and I am terrified BL will just rush headlong into it, with no plan, no goals, and no clear idea of WHAT they want to achieve creatively (business side =$) and how they mean to do it. 

 

Final edit: The heresy lasted less then two decades, at best guess the great scouring took between 1-2 centuries. There is ALLOT of meat on them bones. Not even touching the Xenos aspects. 

 

Edited January 5, 2024 by Nagashsnee

[darkhorse0607]

I guess my biggest worry about the Scouring is that it's going to do exactly what the Heresy ended up doing in terms of shifting focus away from the marines towards primarchs

 

I'm here for non-marine stories. Give me political stories as well. But we all know that probably won't be the focus.

 

I want to know about random marine #2546 as @Nagashsnee has stated. Tell me about that. Tell me about how they're watching the Imperium change and are trying to deal mentally with the fallout of the Heresy, and the splitting of them and their brothers into chapters. Tell me about the traitor marines that are having to deal with falling that far from once a position of pre-eminent power to scrounging for ammo and equipment as they're being chased across the stars. Or how loyalists are dealing with the fact that the Imperium they fought for during the Crusade and what it stood for is essentially gone in favor of worshipping the Emperor as a religious figure during the post-Siege era.

 

GIVE ME A BOOK ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF THE GREY KNIGHTS YOU COWARDS. I want to know how they're dealing with that as well. Dealing with the fact that the fate of humanity is being decided during the Siege/post Siege and they're on Titan isolated and potentially not knowing what's going on

 

What I don't want is another 20 books about the Primarchs. A few about their transitions to where they are in the current timeline, are fine. But I don't want the rest of the Imperium to be sidelined again in favor of Primarch fight number 603. We got enough of that during the Heresy series as it became mostly about that, and are getting enough of that in the current 40k time period.

[DarkChaplain]

I just don't see why any of that needs to be covered in a "Scouring" series at all. We've had books covering events from that timeframe, including some very direct tie-ins for the Blood Angels / Flesh Tearers as they find their new home world and talking about the aftermath of Sanguinius' death. The Wolves had Parting of the Ways (which was excellent) and Battle of the Fang, which already illustrate the changing nature.

 

And then we have The Beast Arises, which shows us the Imperium around 1.5 millennia later, after the first Black Crusade (which we may or may not see in ADB's Black Legion series yet, if it ever continues). We see what has become of institutions, what has been established, and a break from the Heresy era into complacency.

 

I would definitely like to see some individual novels, including, yes, a Grey Knights founding novel (I'd take a trilogy, really), dealing with the Damnation Cache on Pythos - which we know is a big deal, has been set up both outside the Heresy and inside the series - and some lingering questions surrounding it all. The Iron Cage I could envision better as part of an informal John French Imperial Fists vs Iron Warriors "saga" too, as a standalone, with no need to label it as a scouring series novel.

 

But I really am not interested in a formal Scouring series or subsetting to be opened up. There's been enough in the way of flashbacks all around to illustrate the era where it matters.

 

Lastly, we have enough taglines and subseries already, most of which were sparsely populated and either neglected and dropped or not popular enough to even tickle much activity on here. I'd rather BL put out noticeably more Characters novels, Crime and Horror after getting freed of the Heresy as a must-do, than shackle their authors to another subsetting right away, soaking up attention from readers and authors both.

 

It's like codifying that does not need it. Slapping a label on something that should at best be loosely connected by virtue of a similar era - one that lasted quite a long time, if we talk about Primarch disappearances.

Edited January 5, 2024 by DarkChaplain