The Plague War

Guy Haley's follow-up to the book that launched the new era of Warhammer 40,000, Dark Imperium, entitled Plague War, is out, and I have finished it.

It is definitely the middle part of a trilogy. While Guilliman has a face-off with his fallen brother Mortarion at the end of the book, and interesting barbs are traded, they are prevented from coming to blows, with the promise of a meeting on the planet Iax to come in the final book. Elsewhere a Primaris marine comes to finally feel at home in his new chapter, the Novamarines, who lose their chapter master in single combat with Typhus aboard the star fort Galatan. The Death Guard aboard are routed, though, allowing the massive space bastion to fire down on the remaining forces of Nurgle on the surface of Parmenio, and forcing a retreat and handing victory to the forces of the Imperium.

Here we also see Guilliman railing against the Imperial Cult as he has before, but eventually deciding that dismissing it out of hand again would be repeating his worst mistake from the age before the Horus Heresy, and resolving to read his wayard brother Lorgar's earlier work, the Lectitio Divinitatus.

I am very excited to see where the story goes from here, and how the Primarch and Imperial Regent manages to synthesize the warring ideologies of the secular Imperium and the cult of the God-Emperor.