I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Heralds of the Siege , book 52 in the series. Heralds of the Siege is an anthology, consisting of several short stories, and I'm going to review each one. Valerius is the third short story in the book, written by Gav Thorpe, and it's supposed to be about a battle during the Battle of Beta-Garmon. What it's actually about is legacy.
The story's direct, and it's mostly just a fight scene. As with the previous story in this book, and really for a lot of Warhammer, the fighting is part of the scenery. The real story is about Marcus Valerius, and he tells us readers two tales at once. One is Warhammer lore, and the other is a life lesson that has nothing to do with Warhammer.
The most intriguing thing about the Horus Heresy for me is the struggle between its initial state-mandated atheism and its gradual evolution to state-mandated theocracy. Marcus Valerius is one of those upstarts who has come to see the Emperor as a literal god. He's no Euphrati Keeler, but he's definitely an apostle figure. He's a heretic in his own time, but one of those transitional heretics who are destined to become saints of the next big religion.
If you want to spend a little time with the early religious fanatics who helped establish the fascist theocracy that the Imperium became, this short story gives you several very brief but very strong examples of that lore.
A lot of the really good zombie films, right from the start with Romero's Night of the Living Dead, aren't really about zombies. Zombies are the setting. They're the snowstorm that keeps the characters inside so they can deal with their relationship problems, or the principle in Breakfast Club that makes characters become unlikely friends.
That's what war is in Warhammer. It's not the plot, it's whatever it needs to be to serve the plot. Sometimes it's a snowstorm, or an overbearing principle handing out detention, or a hoard of zombies forcing characters to move from location A to location B, or just an actual war so some exciting action can happen every once and a while.
In Valerius, the fighting is exciting, but it's a losing battle. It's not actually a fight scene, but a burning building or a closing trash compactor. The heroes are doomed, and they kind of know they're doomed. Valerius has his faith. At one point, he stops fighting and just kneels and prays, because he's that sure they're doomed. His driving force, besides religious fanaticism, is the belief that the actions he takes here will live on. It's not quite martyrdom, but belief that his actions mean something.
That's something most of us humans grapple with eventually. Many of us understand that most of what we do on a day to day basis is ephemeral. You stock the pantry, the pantry is depleted, and then you have to stock them again. You go to work and fill out paperwork and stuff, you go home, and then you go back to work to fill out more paperwork and stuff. It's all the same, and there are billions of us on the planet, most of whom are destined to last less than a century and then to be forgotten.
If that's too existential, scale it back to the span of just one year. I can barely remember what I did last week, much less what I did a year ago. And things that seem vital to me one week feel pretty meaningless, in retrospect, when you can't even remember that you did them.
Valerius is going to die in this story. That's how meaningless his life is. And yet he presses on. And in the end, his legacy does live on. Maybe it's a miracle granted to him by the Emperor, or maybe it's luck, but sometimes the things we do for others actually does make a difference. It might not change the world, it might not change the trajectory of a battle much less a life, but for a day it gives somebody somewhere comfort.
I enjoyed this story for all two or three (objectively, there is an actual story about a battle here, even though I ignore it is this post) of its narratives. It's a little sad to me when people during the Horus Heresy start turning to religious fanaticism. It feels like in a way, that's the real battle being lost throughout this series. But it's all history. You can't change it. We already know the 41st Millennium is a dystopia with full of theocracy, hubris, narcissism, and xenophobia. We have to get there somehow, and in the finest of Warhammer traditions, the main avenue to a successful ending is by losing the battle.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.