Ahriman: Exile

[David Earle]

My pet theory on this one:

The "demon" influencing events is Ahriman's future self, manipulating his past self to ensure that his future self comes into being. And Editors willing we'll get some more books to find that out.

[Tim the Corsair]

Talking to Lilledhe earlier about it, and part of me (jokingly...sort of) wondered if it might be Magnus, perhaps manipulating his favoured son toward a particular outcome?

[Daemon Weapon]

I don't think it would be Magnus, but it is definitely someone Ahriman knows about. (possibly Tzeentch/ a daemon ). although I did wonder why Ahriman didn’t recognise the Sigil of Malcador’s ( i.e. the inquisition Sigil). Possible they could have altered it radically I guess.

I really liked seeing the Warp Talons (could be from another renegade group or legion I know), but I wondered what happened to the other members of the Thousand sons legion (when Ahriman cast his rubric) like apothecaries, Techmarines, jump troops and such.

[Lord of the Night]

I don't think it would be Magnus, but it is definitely someone Ahriman knows about. (possibly Tzeentch/ a daemon ). although I did wonder why Ahriman didn’t recognise the Sigil of Malcador’s ( i.e. the inquisition Sigil). Possible they could have altered it radically I guess.

I really liked seeing the Warp Talons (could be from another renegade group or legion I know), but I wondered what happened to the other members of the Thousand sons legion (when Ahriman cast his rubric) like apothecaries, Techmarines, jump troops and such.

Because this is right after the Heresy and the Inquisition is obviously new. And Ahriman has been on the fence for a while so he hasn't heard of them yet.

I imagine the Warp Talons were mercenaries from another Legion. And if they were strong enough they would have survived, and if not they became Rubricae. Plus they would be fairly superfluous in the Thousand Sons Post-Rubric. Apothecaries wouldn't be needed as the Sorcerers can heal themselves and the Rubricae are self-regenerating, Techmarines are not needed as the Legion doesn't use vehicles anymore and their weapons are magic-based, and Assault/Devastator marines wouldn't be needed as Rubricae can shoot through most armours and Sorcerers can simply cast heavier spells if necessary, or teleport into the enemy.

As for the Mystery Daemon I think it is Kairos Fateweaver or another high-ranking Daemon of Tzeentch, somebody who is trying to manipulate Ahriman into becoming a true servant of the Changer.


LotN

[David Earle]

I don't think it would be Magnus, but it is definitely someone Ahriman knows about. (possibly Tzeentch/ a daemon ). although I did wonder why Ahriman didn’t recognise the Sigil of Malcador’s ( i.e. the inquisition Sigil). Possible they could have altered it radically I guess.

Because this is right after the Heresy and the Inquisition is obviously new. And Ahriman has been on the fence for a while so he hasn't heard of them yet.

I'm not so sure... While it seemed that Ahriman didn't know the Inquisitors, the Inquisitors definitely seemed to know him. It's part of the reason I think the Timey-Wimey Ball is in full effect, Ahriman's not encountering Inquisitors from his timeline, but ones from the distant future where he's known and feared.

As for the specialist troops, how many would the Thousand Sons have actually had? By the time the Rubric kicked in the Legion was down below Chapter strength, and even before their fall they focused more on organizing by psychic discipline than on specialization. I can't even recall mention of a Havoc squad among them, must less jump troops or Techmarines.

[Xisor]

I can't even recall mention of a Havoc squad among them, must less jump troops or Techmarines.

It's probably not appropriate to damn the Thousand Sons to homogeneity and boringness just on this alone. How many techmarines, apothecaries and Havocs show up in the Luna Wolves or Sons of Horus? It's a critical (and in some ways totally damning; the authors should feel bad!) failure of the Heresy series to date: as well as feeling cramped and claustrophobic as a 'galaxy', there's a shocking lack of things you'd expect to see as simple 'background' and 'scenery' - up to and including ancillary and supporting characters... We've got poets and sculptors out the wazoo but exceedingly few technicians. Or dedicated pilots. Or cooks. Or scientists. Or adjutants. Or quartermasters. Or comedians.

As it stands, casting the Rubric simply means: sufficiently psychic retain their existence, mutation free. Insufficiently psychic = rubric. Whilst there might well be rubricae running around with servo-arms and heavy weapons and manning artillery... it's also a hell of an effort in complexity for the sorcerer to 'maximise' that use. Whilst rubricae are physically as competent as Space Marines, they've got next to no initiative, creativity or... 'problem solving' outside of immediate war-like concerns.

For detail purposes, it'd be lovely to see some of that variation in passing.

---

The Inquisition

The Inquisition proper doesn't fully emerge for a very long time. In terms of symbolism, I wonder why Ahriman would be intimately familiar with the sigil of Malcador. Malcador's a particularly odd being - on one hand you'd expect a hyper-psychic terran-born First Captain to be intimately familiar with the Regent of Terra... to some extent, even if just from the 'celebrity gossip and society columns'!

And yet, on the otherhand, what specific distinctions of Malcador's =][= symbol remain which make it unique from every other 'I'-based bit of iconography? The letter 'I' is the Emperor's signature too, if Legacy is to believed. (Which, let's face it, it is. It's so f'n awesome. Though now I've thought on it - it could also indicate that it was Malcador's mark and thus the charter was actually Sigilite-approved, not Emperor-approved! Probably not though.)

Think on the swaztika. Peruse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika Look how little of that has to do with the Nazis. There's a rich and diverse history of the symbol's use (and its variations: as a purely rotationally symmetric symbol, it has a degree of mathematical attractiveness that is absent in 'lesser' symbols like the more massively mundane cross), and across hundreds if not thousands of years use by a secretive organisation who may (or may not) have 'went public' (~M32, I think?) - it's on another hand of no surprise at all that Ahriman would not only be unfamiliar with the iconography and legacy of the Inquisitions, but entirely unaware of their existence.

What would he know of the Grey Knights? The Assassin Temples? Who died in the Scourging? The Temple of the Saviour Emperor?

As brilliant as Ahriman is and has been, the Imperium has moved on in a way that few could have accurately foreseen. It's a nice touch that the Inquisition is 'new' to Ahriman, that he doesn't get the significance of who they are, what they're doing or what they stand in danger of becoming. (Indeed, they don't become the 'burn the witch!' Inquisition until after the Age of Apostasy.)

It's all about the battle for the Emperor's Soul. Ahriman'll figure it out, possibly...

[David Earle]

I can't even recall mention of a Havoc squad among them, must less jump troops or Techmarines.

It's probably not appropriate to damn the Thousand Sons to homogeneity and boringness just on this alone. How many techmarines, apothecaries and Havocs show up in the Luna Wolves or Sons of Horus?

Not homogeneity so much, just... different variations. For example, if you've got the Pyrae running around, why bother with heavy weapons? If you've got high-end telekinetics who can field strip equipment with a thought, why bother sending anyone to Mars? Where people might get ideas.

I'm imagining the Legion started off much like any other, but under Magnus's tutelage they started learning the weird, witchy ways to do things other Legions would employ specialist troops for. Then that weirdness turned off people like the Mechanicum who would be needed to keep any such specialists functional, which in turn caused the Thousand Sons to rely more on their weirdness, in a vicious cycle that ended in flames on Prospero.

With all that said, you would still expect to see a damned Apothecary somewhere.

Actually that brings up another issue I had with the Heresy, which is how the Legions recruit. I imagined at first that the rates of losses prior to and during the Heresy would mean that the "modern" means of recruiting (single world, preserve the gene-seed at all costs) wouldn't apply. The larger Legions would recruit wherever they could, with much lower thresholds to entry, and that "mass-production" creation of Marines would be part of the problem that led to the Heresy. And the technology to do so would be lost or restricted afterward by a paranoid Council of Terra.

As it stands, the methods the Legions use to recruit are barely touched on, and seem pretty much identical to the modern methods, except the Ultramarines operate on a few more worlds. Which doesn't mean I'm wrong... or right.

[Daemon Weapon]

It could also be possible that the Legion had or has a few people in dual roles, like the Iron Fathers of the Iron Hands (chaplain and techmarine), Space Wolf priest (apothecary and Chaplin) or Grey Knights techmarine.

If this was so perhaps it was some members of the cult of the Pavoni that filed the apothecary role, or cult of the Pyrae or Raptora as techmarines repairing stormbirds and other semi-mechanical devices that the legion used. I don’t think the Mechanicus would have minded much given some technology required psykers anyway i.e. navigator star ships and so forth.

[Xisor]

Yeah, given the era, I'm not inclined to think the Mechanicum would have a significant say in whether or not the Thousand Sons can't be trained. Look at Mechanicum. If Koriel Zeth's Magma City had happened to be one of the Legionary apprentice places (reading suggested it was more within Fabricator Locum Kane's purview?), I've no doubt a Thousand Son would've popped up in Mechanicum.

Hell, given half a chance, if you were to have Graham McNeill to rewrite his whole Heresy contributions, I've a sneaking suspicion that Atharva would've only been imprisoned on Earth after the Imperial Fists arrive at Mars. (Though thinking of it that way, had Atharva been permitted to be involved in some of the tests of the Akashic Reader, I'd have had a whole lot less problem with his use in TOD: the Throne is, afterall, pretty much a Mary-Sue creation device! )

I digress.

Whilst esoteric, sorcerous learning is obviously highly valuable to the Thousand Sons, I think Amon's (and Ahriman's, actually) care for his 'brothers' (the Rubricae) surely indicates that though they perhaps weren't held in quite the same esteem as fully fledged psykers, they may in fact have been heard in a much more respected position thanks to their lack of gifts. E.g. you hold the 'psychic acolytes' in contempt, only the magisters and high-ranked ones really get cut any slack. The weaker ones are 'eternal pupils' and might be treated more sternly. The topmost/protege students and the underprivileged (humans!) might get some slack or favouritism, but broadly speaking you have to earn the high esteem of the Legion. (Look how sad and sorry the state of affairs was for Magnus's remnants in Battle of the Fang - they'd lost all of the good, surviving magisters and acolytes and were left with the faintly-rubbish and lacklustre jobsworths!)

But the individual, 'simple' Marines might well be looked down upon, but perhaps the prejudice was mitigated by allowance and, indeed, encouragement to excel in other fields. So where individual non-psychics are concerned, it may have been much more informal/ultra-formal/esoteric in their training, nothing so mundane as Chaplains, Techmarines and such, but each individual Marine being a highly specialised student of some specific 'aspect' of learning.

Any Heavy Weapons trooper might have also been a galaxy-leading starship plasma-conduit & generator specialist in his 'spare time', any given pilot an exceedingly enthusiastic if amateur roboticist, any given <that Rad-grenade toting extermination unit> trooper might also be a fairly competent geneticist or botanist. Or any such permutation.

You get the idea, that would add something doubly to the tragedy of the Rubricae. Though they weren't psychics, the prized flowers of the legions, they were nevertheless still unique & strange vortices amongst the individuals that made up the Space Marine legions: highly trained scholar-soldiers.

---

As nothing's been made of that, so far, I'm inclined to think it might not be quite as prolific or poignant as I'm suggesting. Nevertheless: it should be!

[Maestitia]

Sorry folks but I really need your help.
I read half of the ebook and I enjoyed a lot, I love French's style BUT, I can't understand why and how the scenes take place...

I mean, first Harry was with the Harrowing, then leave towards the Titan Child, I get it.
1. But after that, he went on a moon, then Warp Talons comes, from WHERE???
2. Then, the Gunship and the Cavern but OMG how and where???

English isn't my native language but I read a lot of BL novels and it's the first time I can't understand the "movement of characters" during the story... I understand why they move but not how and where...

Thanks for you coming answers

[Daemon Weapon]

Warp Talons use their reality cutting claws to travel directly out of the warp. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp_Talon

[Maestitia]

Warp Talons use their reality cutting claws to travel directly out of the warp. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp_Talon

Ok thanks mate!
But sorry if I can't remember the quote in the book... I think there are a lot of "evenements" which happen a little randomly...

[Rob P]

Necroing like a boss.

Maestitia has a point. There were a few events that seemed to have massive dark spots where the transition fro A to B was far from clear. A couple of them revolved around Ahriman blacking out or forgetting stuff.

I assumed some of it was someone (not necessarily Amon) messing with Ahriman so that certain facts would not be revealed to him.

I've probably missed something really big too, but people commenting above seem to keep making a point about 'Ahriman's future self' and 'the Inquisitor's in the future knowing who he is'. There underlying point being that it's a pre-40k novel. Where is this vibe coming from? I thought it was fairly close to the end of the current timeline.

[David Earle]

For me it was the fact that Ahriman is much closer to his Horus Heresy self than the Ahriman we met in Atlas Infernal. Granted, unreliable narrator comes into play, but this Ahriman has practically no resources and hasn't even heard of the Black Library. I assumed it was post-Scouring, but not by much.